I finally dip into the sandy water like a spoon in the sun.
–3–
I harvest the frenzied sounds at a country pace.
I cultivate trembling like pearls.
I live candid expectations about to tip.
Heavy weight that the crushing freshness of my
echo, like a shattering plate.
Promising free thought in fragile china.
The tablecloth offers me its corner laid out with fruit.
I spread my fingers like lace.
The brush of the gallop makes me drop my leaves.
Caressing depth, so white.
Suzanne Meloche
from Les Aurores Fulminantes
The small room is ugly and poorly lit. The pieces have been hung with care, but there are so many of them that they practically overlap.
You are happy to see Marcelle, still just as well put together and talkative. She tells you about her love life and her intrigues. She lays it on thick, and you like it. She tells you your daughter looks like you, and you like it. Claude is there too, with Muriel draped on him like a fur coat. He stands in her light, walks in her footsteps, orbits in her halo. He is happy to see you, and he takes you in his arms and strokes your belly.
Your poems appear alongside his. Your words find each other again, like they did in your adolescence.
The sculpture of a nude towers over them, all length, practically liquid.
The evening goes on, and visitors stream in. You hang back, watching the few curious people who are waiting to read what you’ve written. Those who make it to the end spend some time looking at the paper, searching for meaning, amused by the bold words.
It makes you smile.
You catch Borduas watching you. Kindly.
It’s the first time you feel like you belong.
The door opens and five policemen enter and, with no explanation, take a quick look around the exhibition. They have received reports of an indecent work.
After a brief, decisive consultation, they head toward the naked sculpture and, working in pairs at either end of the undesired body, lift it up and cart it away.
Roussil’s statue will spend a few days in jail, under strict orders from Duplessis.
Marcel is invited to show his work in Ottawa. He carefully wraps up his paintings. You don’t help him. You want him to stay. Mousse watches him from the corner of the room. He stops for a moment to kiss her. He shuts his suitcase, leaves you a bit of money, kisses his daughter again, asks you not to use the remaining canvases, and leaves.
You hate the void he leaves behind, and you decide to do whatever it takes to ignore it.
That evening, you paint on a huge piece of canvas that you spread out in the kitchen. You paint, your knees on the cold floor and your back hunched. You paint with your claws, foaming at the mouth, your stroke wild. You leave a red scream on the wet canvas.
You fall asleep on it.
Mousse wakes you up, her bare little feet standing on the scarlet canvas, which she looks at, impressed. She has to go. The chamber pot is full. You pick up your daughter, balance her on the sink and roll up the huge canvas. You toss it in the corner.
The pipe is frozen. There is no water. You mash the fresh shit with a fork until it goes down the drain.
The icy morning infiltrates the house. Drops bead and freeze on the ceiling, roll down the windows. Mousse is thirsty: she licks them, drinks them, then huddles up against you, her forehead pressed against yours. Her warm, vaporous breath caresses your face. You close your eyes. Your daughter’s tiny fingers roam your cheeks, climb your forehead and get lost in your hair. She tells you a story in her own language, an epic story in which her fingers are the brave explorers of a secret world. You fall asleep, rocked by this new caress, wrapped in your tiny daughter’s massive presence.
On May 9, 1951, you give birth to a boy. Black, sharp, intelligent eyes. Marcel is detained in Ottawa where, it seems, ‘things are going well for him.’
The wording is ugly and conventional. You don’t know what that means, ‘things are going well for him.’ You know that you are in the hospital, with his son on your chest and his daughter sleeping at your feet. You know the soup they serve you smells acrid. You know that you would like to be able to wash the blood from your thighs while Marcel watches his children.
You know that you do not want to go home alone to your hovel.
You want your man. Your nervous, tormented man. You need his arms around you.
Borduas comes to pick you up at the door of the hospital. He glances at your children, but his eyes don’t linger. The sight of children hurts him since his have been gone. He tries his best to deny their existence. He holds the door for you, helps you sit down, and covers you with a coat. Your newborn nestled against your chest, Mousse settled in against you. You would like to drive for days, years.
Your little boy is named François, and he has a soft belly. You put your cheeks on it and rub them over it, then your lips, then your whole face. This body becomes your home, this fragrance your oxygen, all the little crevices – the belly button, dimple, fold – become your refuges, your trenches. You liquefy and spread yourself in a sweet deposit over the warm body of your baby, who lets himself be colonized.
Marcel comes home. You introduce him to François. His son. He takes him in his long hands.
Pride courses through his body, pure, raw joy in the face of a life he has made. He is happy. You prowl around him like a cat, you prod him and smell him.
He grabs you and kisses you. You taste his tongue, which you missed. You melt into him.
Marcel repairs the cupboards, weather-strips the windows, empties the chamber pots.
Then he leaves for New York.
The house is well heated. The children sleep with their hands clenched in fists. You put your hair up, undo a button on your blouse.
You go to them but don’t kiss them so as not to wake them.
You leave.
Borduas is waiting for you in the car. He looks at you questioningly. You reassure him. Convince him it will be fine.
You head to the city, to the party. You don’t care anymore. You feel like letting loose. Your head leads and the rest of you follows.
The party is in a small apartment downtown. You soak up the smell of cars. You wrap yourself in the sounds, the lights, the movement.
You miss the city life, and it makes you a little dizzy.
You see Claude, Muriel, and Marcelle. Jean-Paul, who has returned from France, and Françoise. Conversations interweave in a smoky living room. Words bore you. You have nothing to say.
You drink and dance into the night. You take your place, relaxed and alone. You don’t really like anyone here. You keep to yourself and tire yourself out dancing.
A scream tears through the party.
Muriel has hanged herself in the bathroom.
Claude’s fingers search frantically for a pulse, like a divining rod searching for a source.
Muriel is dead. She is twenty-nine.
You help Borduas take the rope from around her neck. You never noticed how long it was. The neck of a swan in flight.
Claude doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry, doesn’t shake. He is stock still, frozen in horror. He has just lost his ocean. The one that was stopping him from being dashed against the rocks.
The sun is coming up when Borduas brings you home. Your children’s steady breathing is a knife in the chest. You run to them while Borduas puts wood in the stove. They are sleeping, huddled against one another.
You get undressed and slip in against them. With a barely perceptible gesture, you invite Borduas to join you. You make room for him. He hesitates. Then he walks softly toward you, not knowing where to put his feet, fearing a chasm, a crevasse, a sudden precipice.
He settles against your cold body, his back to you. His large neck with so many cracks. You hide in it until waking.
Marcel is in the hospital. He melted down in New York. Too much p
ressure for his fragile shell.
You visit him. He is skin and bone. You would like to fill your hands with his scraps of flesh and wrap them around you like a scarf. He should have stayed with you.
Someone with good intentions left a few newspaper clippings on his bedside table, short paragraphs on an Automatist painter’s stay in the American city.
You scan them, throw them out.
You want to know when he is getting out. No one can tell you.
You move in closer to him. You try to draw out his eyes. You blow on the embers. You pull your skirt down to your thighs, take his hand and run it over your sex. His fingers slowly spread in your public hair. Return to their nest. Settle in.
You go back home alone, his imprint on your body.
You are twenty-six today. Rain is coming into the house. The mud from the floor oozes up through the plastic tarps, which have holes in spots.
You buy a pig’s leg in the village. You take out a flowered tablecloth that you spread on the kitchen floor. You get the children dressed in their best clothes.
You open a bottle of wine, and you sit there, the three of you. Mousse is almost three years old, her face round like a beaming moon, her eyes gentle. She sits up straight like you have taught her. François will be a year old soon and is stuck to you. If he could, he would melt into you.
You carve thin slices of ham, which you cut into little pieces and hand to them. Mousse is happy to be eating on the floor. She likes picnics.
Your bums are wet, and it makes you laugh.
Mousse sings the song about the snail who sticks its head out when it’s raining. Her voice spins out of control, and it’s pretty.
You finish the bottle of wine.
You put music on. You dance, François in your arms. Mousse is a minor satellite spinning around you. Their laughter in your wake; you bathe in warm joy and sprinkle it over them.
They collapse on you, asleep, sticky little love leeches.
You put them to bed fully dressed.
You cross over to Borduas’s house, where a light is on.
You knock on the door. He opens it. You set foot in his house and decide you will spend the night. You swallow his mouth. You pillage his forsaken body. You water him, you spread yourself on him, you fan out and offer yourself to him, and he finally receives you.
You are twenty-six, and you are parched.
When morning comes, you open your eyes and close them right away. You are where you want to be. You want to go back in time and choose a different path.
It is warm in this man’s bed, this older man, his arms like strong roots around your body, which has become a woman’s again.
The house smells like paint. What was once the exciting odour of fresh paintings, sudden and still savage newborns. The smell sickens you now.
You drag yourself out of bed. In a small room at the back of the house, they are almost dry. You run a finger along them out of pleasure. The thick, lacquered black collects under your nail.
In the chaotic bounty of the small studio, you spot a copy of the manifesto. Dusty and bloated with mildew, it leaves you cold.
You flip through it at random, riffling the pages between your hands.
Within the foreseeable future, we expect to see people freed from their useless chains and turning, in the unexpected manner that is necessary for spontaneity, to glorious anarchy to make the most of their individual gifts.
Meanwhile we must work without respite, united in spirit with those who long for a better life, without fear of long delays, regardless of praise or persecution, toward the joyful fulfilment of our fierce desire for freedom.
That morning, you could have written that.
As strange as it seemed to you then, now it sticks to your skin.
You go home, and your foot sinks into the floor. It smells like urine and clay. The ceilings seem too low and the walls too close.
The children are awake. François is crying. You wipe his nose on your sleeve.
Mousse is naked, kneeling in the sink. She looks at you hesitantly.
You help her.
Shit and black paint merge under your nails.
Then you hear a car. Marcel gets out of it.
You wonder how his feet can touch the ground, his body is so long. You open the door for him, thinking that otherwise he might walk right through it. There is a thin smile on his face. He greets you politely, as if he were walking into his mother’s in the middle of the night. You pull a chair out for him. You’re afraid he will fall down. He heads toward the children, looks at Mousse, delighted, then François, astonished that he is so big.
A bitter thought hits you. You are that woman. The one who waits, alone.
You have the overwhelming urge to heave. It rises from your stomach, shooting like lightning into your acid throat, which contracts.
You exhale and step outside, just for a minute.
You slip away.
You walk. First with your head bent over the rhythm of your feet. The air stays compressed at the bottom of your chest. Then, slowly, you look up.
You are trying to catch your breath.
You open your mouth. You walk with your mouth open. You cling to the horizon, and you let the air flow in, all the fresh air there is.
When you come back, Marcel is sitting on the steps with the kids. You smile at them, step around them, and go inside.
That evening, you let him go through the unfamiliar ritual. You watch him look for pyjamas, forget to wash faces; they’re so happy to see their father. You watch him slip the children under the covers and, with tentative gestures, tuck them in tight, as if he were sculpting clay.
You don’t move as you watch the ritual, as if you were at the theatre.
You intentionally withdraw from the scene.
You remove yourself.
That evening, you tell Marcel you’re leaving.
August 1, 1952
You wake up the children before sunrise. Marcel trembles as he makes a black coffee.
Using just your fingertips, you pile the clothes in a little suitcase. You have washed and ironed them. A flowery dress, overalls, tiny white panties. Green pyjamas, yellow pyjamas, blue pyjamas. Diapers.
An organized suitcase.
Before closing it, you put Mousse’s little straw hat in it. The one that protects her forehead from the sun. Her prominent little forehead where buds of ideas lie dormant. You will never see them bloom.
She is sitting beside you, watching you. She could ask you why. She could ask you where she is going. But she doesn’t. Because she loves you. You turn your back on her, but her eyes bore through you. So you slam the suitcase shut, grab it and leave.
You don’t take Mousse’s hand. Her palm is a mist-filled chasm you don’t want to sink into.
Marcel carries François, and you all leave the family home.
The day outside is lavender.
It’s a beautiful day; they had called for rain.
You stand at the roadside. In front of nothing. You are waiting for the bus.
And when you see it coming, you are terrified.
The fake leather of the seat sticks to your bare thighs under your skirt. The bus lurches, and every hole in the dirt road digs your grave. You dry up. You will not cry.
François is asleep. His smooth, rested face, his round, soft cheeks, his raw smell of new flesh, of new sweat. François is a baby. Marcel holds him curled against him. His fine hands dig into the folds of his son’s skin. He hides in them for a while, a clandestine immigrant. He wants to lose himself in them and never come back out.
Mousse keeps her head turned toward the window. She watches the scenery roll by, long and flat. The countryside is calming if you breathe it in. She senses danger. She knows without knowing. Mousse is a big girl. Her long, straight neck reassures you. Mousse is strong and has no cracks. Mousse will not falter. Mousse will save her skin, she will wear it as a shield for François, your baby.
The bus slows down. Sto
ps in front of a garage in a little village, where two old people are waiting. They board, excusing themselves. They have the faded presence of existences that leave no clear trace.
They made it through life without making a sound, holding each other’s hands. They smiled when they had to. They cried little and never shouted. They sit side by side like they always do. Their smells intermingle, and they think in unison about things that bother no one.
You don’t want to die like them. Ordinary.
You finally take Mousse’s hand in yours and brand it with the promise of your escape. Hoping that, one day, she will nourish herself from it.
But Mousse is three, and she exists in your skirts and your songs. In the reassuring scent of your neck and the burrow of your arms wrapped around her, she finds her breath.
That morning, on the endless dirt road, you put her heart in a noose; you sever what connects her to the world.
The bus brakes in front of a cornfield. Sainte Marguerite. You’re here. You know it, but you don’t move.
Mousse stares at you with her jet black eyes. She knows.
‘Need to go pee … ’
A sentence like a lifeline. A sentence like a lifebuoy you cling to, eyes filled with tears. But you won’t cry.
‘There’s a house over there. Come on.’
Marcel follows you, François still slumbering in his arms.
And you get off the bus that pulls out, filled with ordinary lives, when yours are going to come crashing down in places unknown.
It’s a daycare. With lots of toys. The smell of vegetable soup and even a small television, child height.
A mild woman comes out of the kitchen. Her massive husband is in the shadows. A gentle giant. Who eats little girls. But you will never know that.
You head straight for the woman who has agreed to look after your children. Her smile is tender and her apron is flowery. She places a gentle hand on Mousse’s round head. Her hands are huge and her nails are painted. She talks to Mousse, but she is looking at you, trying to be reassuring.
Suzanne Page 9