You finish wrapping the package and place it on the doorstep, ready to go. Under the plastic, under Marcel’s explosive painting, you know that your bird is still flying. It is on its way to the museum.
April 10, 1949. It’s your birthday. You are twenty-three years old.
Marcel has plastered the walls of your apartment with his latest pieces.
You enjoy greeting guests at the door. You take their coats; you offer them drinks.
You like playing hostess. You have a round belly, an apartment, a husband who is an artist and friends who have come to wish you happy birthday.
You have a life. You wear it like a thin disguise.
Marcel has brought home meat, again. Claude is barbecuing in the living room. The house smells like grilled fat. The boisterous sound of boozy laughter rings out, and you fall asleep on a pile of coats on your bed.
Marcel is strutting about, decked out in a heavy mask of chain mail he has made.
Tomorrow is the premiere of Françoise Sullivan’s dance piece. Marcel spent many nights on the costume, scouring garages and scrap yards to find the materials he needed for the dancer’s hair. She will look like she is moving under a heavy claw, trying in vain to dislodge it, with her wild, sweeping movements.
Meanwhile, you’re the one struck by a surge from the wild. You have your first contraction. You won’t be going to the show.
The wall of your room crumbles in silence as Hilda Strike runs through the celebration.
Your stomach is being torn apart. You crouch underneath your breath, you try to catch on to it again, you look for purchase, moorings; you want to leave your body, but you are holding yourself captive.
Meanwhile, at the theatre, Françoise enters, the lights bathe her, and the metal claw seems to be pulling her offstage. Marcel watches her.
You won’t make it, you want it dark, they turn off the lights for you. You look for a hole, earth, a cave.
The door opens, a silhouette approaches on a beam of light. It seems to float. It’s Claire. Your little sister. You grab on to her.
She presses her forehead against yours. Puts her arms around your waist. Standing, body to body, you rock back and forth, a slow, rusted metronome. She holds you. You can lift off. Dive in. She tells you to go to that place. So you swallow the contractions. You swallow them whole. For hours, voices mingle with your sweat.
Dawn comes, and the child is born. You hold her warm against you. She smells like moss from the woods. You bury yourself in her. You are survivors.
Claire is gone. You wonder if you dreamed her. The nurses file through, all nuns, all bathed in softness. They show you how to wash your daughter. Your feverish hands find their way. They lather soap on her skin. They direct the stream of the water, sparing a spot on her neck so as not to wash away the smell of damp forest. Your hands quell the burgeoning shivers. They are more alive than ever. They wrap around your daughter, your forest moss, they press her to your body, which is overflowing with sap. Now you have shelter.
Marcel finally arrives at the hospital. He finds you both asleep. You don’t see, but he cries a little.
When you wake up, you hold your moss, Mousse, out to him, and he takes her in his arms, trembling.
Everywhere you go, you trail your second dimension with you. You wrap it up in a scarf on your back or your stomach. A direct extension of you.
You go into a church on a winter evening with Mousse under your coat. It’s empty and damp. The pews creak in the cold.
You follow the stations of the cross. You know them by heart. But you have a new perspective on them tonight. You stop to study the features: expressions of fear, worry, sorrow, anger.
You are captivated by the story of Christ carrying the cross. You don’t want him to die. You catch yourself hoping someone will come and save him. At the thirteenth station, you choke back a sob. Jesus is taken down from the cross and returned to his mother. You whisper, just like when you were ten years old: We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you. Because by your holy cross, You have redeemed the world.
Something creaks.
You spin around, afraid someone has heard you.
But the big church is empty.
You head toward the door.
Perhaps to make up for it, you snatch ten votive candles on your way out, which you stuff in your bag.
They will heat the room that is your home.
You drift between the drawings in ink and the photos of performances, your daughter pressed against you.
A few journalists have come out for the occasion at the Tranquille bookstore. It’s the first time the group’s work is being exhibited since the manifesto was published. You slipped your poems among the pieces. You have nothing to lose. But it’s too late, which you realize that day.
You have no status; you are anonymous. You are a satellite to the insurgents. No one is interested in you. You are no one.
You stand tall in this truth, welcoming the critics who deign to introduce themselves to you. You offer them a glass of wine, self-consciously served in the stolen votive candle holders, which the group has carefully cleaned the wax out of. Some people are offended and refuse to drink from them. Others smile uncertainly.
Borduas joins you. You offer him a votive holder of alcohol, proud of this irreverent touch.
He glares at you, a look verging on distaste.
He makes his way quickly through the small exhibition room, glances at the pieces, doesn’t say hello to anyone in the group or the guests.
He leaves.
The next day, all the papers can talk about is the infantile insult to the Church, the wine served in hollowed-out votive candle holders. Nothing about the work. Everything about the puerility.
Borduas is furious. None of you are worthy of the ideas you defend. You are still wet behind the ears.
At the same time he tells you that the jury for the next spring salon has decided not to include the Automatist works in their selection.
It’s the first time none of the group’s paintings will be displayed at this major exhibition.
Sitting at a table at La Hutte, you hold your daughter in one arm and a marker in one hand. Pieces of cardboard are spread on the floor and the tables.
Armed with a stapler, a beaming Claude attaches the panels to each person’s clothes.
There is an adolescent frenzy around you. You are glad of it. You need some fun.
The beer and the slogans make their way around the table at the same time: ‘Shame on the pathetic jury!’ ‘We need a jury in step with the times!’ Let art live!’ ‘A jury of windbags!’
You burst out laughing. Mousse is eating chips, surrounded by the wisps of smoke generated by your excited friends. Claude holds her while you slip between two pieces of cardboard.
He cuts a hole right between the words ‘art’ and ‘live.’ That way you can carry your daughter, who can slip her head in the middle of your protest.
You are a political woman sandwich, with an activist child as punctuation.
With everyone sandwiched between your messages, you head, full of confidence, to the museum, where the opening for the sixty-seventh spring salon is taking place, filled with habitués.
You go in one by one. You have decided to stay silent. Your adolescent signs are loud enough.
Your arrival interrupts the opening speeches. Two agents head toward you and ask in English, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ They tell you to leave.
Mousse, strapped to you and already in the shadow of your demands, seems amused as she takes in the scene.
You circle the room twice, meeting the curious looks from the juries and honoured guests.
Some of them recognize you and seem annoyed by the sudden intrusion on their evening, looking down their noses at you. Others seem somewhat amused by the harmless spectacle.
Mousse gradually falls asleep against you, lulled by your silent walk, wrapped in a cardboard demand that is keeping her warm.
The police step i
n, grab you, and hustle you to the exit.
You all seem small standing in front of the tall museum doors, which are closed again.
Impotent victors. A faint aura of daring surrounds you.
You scatter into the night, each in a different direction. You are children uncertain of their place, refusing to be excluded from their country’s cultural heritage.
And you wonder what makes you think you have a place in it.
Your poems lie dormant, shoved deep in your pockets. Mousse drools on your neck. You absorb the lives of others and don’t know how to build your own.
There is no one left in the group to envy. Everyone is struggling to survive. Some of them, the ones who can, go home to live with their parents. Others go into exile, in the hopes of getting a chance to paint again, somewhere else.
Everyone is blacklisted virtually everywhere. Banished, undesirable.
It’s no laughing matter anymore.
Borduas leaves the city and moves to the country, where he finds a little house on the shores of the Richelieu. He gets occasional news from his broken family.
He is shrouded in sadness.
You get an eviction notice. You haven’t paid the rent in two months.
The work at the butcher’s isn’t enough. Marcel’s uncle suggests you come live with him. The summer kitchen can function as a bedroom.
But Marcel doesn’t want to. He is too proud.
Friends move to Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville. They can live on an old farm. The soil is rich for beets, and it will be good for Mousse.
So you gather a few canvases, two or three sheets, some books.
And you head off to grow sugar beets in the country.
This is serious business. Six adults and two young children. All city dwellers, all artists.
You have ten acres of beets to cultivate.
You make an appointment with an agriculturalist. He reassures you: sugar beets are easy to grow.
They are best picked when it’s raining. The beets come out of the ground easily and intact.
There is a factory at the edge of the village. Employees come by regularly to get bags by the kilo, and the price is right.
The dirt field reminds you of your mother’s ragged nails. You prefer the city to the country.
But your daughter has plenty of people to take care of her, and Marcel is by your side. That makes you happy. You want it to work.
You hoe the earth and start a garden.
Two handsome men, the country in their bones, their step fuelled by the sun, call out to you. They are selling hens. You’ll have eggs.
You buy ten and plunge your hands into the soil.
The slender and intense Dyne Mousseau has abandoned her city ambitions as an artist. She has given up being an actress and washes up alongside you on this new continent. She has a daughter too, Catherine, who is growing up alongside yours.
One night, you steal furniture from the village church. A few chairs, a bench you can use as a table.
You sleep on the floor, pressed up against each other. The summer is hot and humid.
Your daughter’s skin smells good. You created her. Sometimes when you think about it, you feel stronger than you ever have.
You cultivate your garden to feed her. Soon it is growing.
You drive the tractor to the village to sell vegetables. Mousse clings to you, the little koala. You are getting used to the country. You like being naked under the same T-shirt, and you mend your worn skirts.
You grow proud of the heartiness of your carrots, and you admire the shape of your beans, which you hawk to villagers who know you now.
In the evenings, you collect the scraps of canvas left by Marcel, which you are still writing on. The country has inspired grassroots poetry in you. Fewer flights of lyricism, more bite.
Marcel works all day long in the field. His arms grow round and his face grows angled. In the evening, he eats in silence, and it suits him. He paints on what is left of the canvas, sometimes painting over old ones, the colours accidentally merging.
You make love in the woods because there are so many people in the house. You like it when he is tired. You like draining the remaining life from him, and he likes giving it up to you.
The summer draws to an end over Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville, and you are surprised to find yourself quietly content.
The hens haven’t laid any eggs. The hens turn out to be roosters. Ten roosters. You’ve been had.
You break their necks one by one. You cook them down to the bones, which you boil for hours, filling the air in the house that September is settling into.
In the field, beet stems brave the grey, their bright green breaking up the monochrome.
Soon it rains, and everyone heads out to help with the harvest. Ten acres of beets to pull from the ground, in the cold rain.
You plunge your red hands into the mud, eager to feel the bulb of the vegetable, which you loosen before pulling on the leaves, in a clean jerk. The memory of the dandelion fields comes back to you, the rage that you harnessed to pull up thousands of them. You gulp it down. You remember your shamefaced father, defeated, shoulders sagging and heavy. You remember the Hole and the dirty child who may well still be there, stooped and grimy. You remember your fragile mother and her hands tired from rocking her children, the river that unearths the dead and the jam-packed church. You move from furrow to furrow, as in war. You uproot the vegetables that will feed your children.
One day is not enough, and you spend entire weeks outside; you become a field of mud.
Bags of beets are piling up in the house. You sleep with the smell of sweet earth, which turns your stomach now.
Fall creeps between the walls, settles into your bones.
Finally one morning, delivery men from the plant come by. They collect the hundred-odd bags picked by the young people from the city, whom they mock behind their backs.
They weigh them in the back of their truck, and give you a price. You don’t haggle. This isn’t your world.
You find out later that they paid you half of what they should have for the harvest. No one has the energy to fight. The house is cold. Winter’s cruel incursion has started.
You announce to Marcel that you’re pregnant.
You take a jar of pickled beets to Borduas, who is still living like a hermit in his little house in Saint-Hilaire.
You tell him about the roosters and the ten acres of beets. It makes him laugh. He seems happy to see you, although he doesn’t really show it.
Marcel joins you with Mousse. She is tugging him by the hand, rather than the other way around. He looks lost. A dark, virile silence settles over the two men. It takes up so much space you could touch it. Borduas seeks out Marcel’s eyes. Manages to find them. Tells him he will help.
A few days later, you set your suitcase down in a little wooden house, next door to Borduas. Built directly on the ground. Borduas has put up plastic tarps as insulation for the winter.
Mousse shares your mattress. Borduas cuts wood that you take to heat your home.
The next day he finds Marcel a job finishing furniture at Montreal Office Equipment. Marcel leaves early in the morning and comes home late at night.
Your belly grows in the harsh winter. You breathe on the frost on the window and draw three-legged cats with big bums to make Mousse laugh.
You teach her how to use the outhouse. She yells ‘Poo!’ and you wrap her in a blanket, telling her over and over to hold it in. You whip out into the snow and cross the yard; you open the wooden door with a swift kick, lift your shivering daughter’s dress and watch her, full of hope. You shed a tear when she looks at you triumphant, her lips trembling. You are proud of both of you.
You go back in the house, shivering, to warm yourselves by the fire. You boil water, which you share. You tell her stories that you divine in the embers. She listens, entranced, and fights the urge to fall asleep against you.
At the start of the coveted spring salon, Bordua
s organizes a small exhibition in protest. Everyone who is no longer welcome at the museum, everyone who was overlooked by the noble jurists can, for a few days, foster the illusion that they still exist.
For the occasion, Marcel has painted two large black oil paintings that draw you in. Borduas complimented him, a rare occurrence.
You cord wood orderly and efficiently. Borduas watches you from the window. Your fingers are cracked and frozen. You go into his house to warm up.
He serves you hot coffee.
You soothe your hands on the steaming mug.
He places a stack of papers in front of you, warped with the humidity. You recognize your writing on them. Your poems. You want to tear them from his hands. He senses it.
He pulls out three pages from the pile. He holds them out to you. And tells you that if you still like them, you should exhibit them in Montreal this spring.
– 1 –
Tender farandole under the leaves.
Sweet erosive dance.
Capture cut with the ring on my hand.
Sleep the evening wound.
Silence on the star the eye gives rebirth to.
Dead words like grieving warhead.
Wonderful slaughter to the note sung by a fluted tooth in the mirror.
Floral thrust between the breasts like a damp sponge.
I burn with the fresh secret hollow.
– 2 –
Oh, daunting lake of supreme tenderness, like velvet eyes.
Morning too close to the heart.
Nascent wing taking magnificent flight.
I await the crowns, reward for solitary escapes.
Incandescent halo, standing blackbird with a fluttering song,
Like a stream trickling white columns.
So close to hours of contentment.
Excitement, sensitive grip of my palms between things offered up by my dreams.
Suzanne Page 8