You cook, something you have never really done. You chop vegetables with the precision of an assassin. You leave under your nails the earth that you used to hold in contempt and that now keeps you connected to life.
You don’t talk to anyone, but you pour out fragments of your daily life to your spiritual master. You write to him that you want to devote the rest of your life to Buddhism.
And you are pleased with your tofu-stuffed peppers.
And in a postscript that reveals the extent of your solitude, you say, ‘My little pepper plant is doing well.’
You water your plant and watch it grow slowly in front of your curtainless window.
The little plant growing in the sun connects you to the living.
You work not to dry up. You survive.
One morning, all the way downstairs, an old woman runs around the building. You see her pass under your balcony then disappear, then reappear, always running.
This ungainly break in the stillness makes you burst out laughing, and you abandon yourself to it for a moment.
In the Borduas archives, an old, moth-eaten manuscript is belatedly found. Les Aurores Fulminantes, by Suzanne Meloche.
Your poems are submitted to the publisher Les Herbes Rouges, where twenty-nine years after they were born, they are finally published.
You don’t go to the launch. You are busy meditating, surrounded by your plants which barely grow.
But you clip the few reviews anyway, which you keep between the pages of a book, in your bookcase.
Les Herbes Rouges occasionally publishes older texts that time has forgotten or that were never published, like those of Suzanne Meloche, whose poems, collected under the title Les Aurores Fulminantes in issue 78 of the magazine, date back to 1949. They have not aged in those thirty years, and in reading them one regrets that their author did not publish them at the time and follow them up with at least a half dozen more. Suzanne Meloche is part of a generation of water diviners and sorcerers that made our right to free speech possible, often paying dearly for it.
Review of Aurores Fulminantes in
Le livre d’ici, vol. 5, no. 41, July 16, 1980.
Les Aurores Fulminantes (no. 78), written in 1949, highly syntactic verse, fantasies of cracks, crevices, dents, steep slopes, a restraint that makes it all spill over; a piece of work that should not fear posterity. A surreal code, but one that hasn’t aged. ‘Here is the back of my hand/like a liqueur.’
Review of Aurores Fulminantes, Joseph Bonenfant,
Le Devoir, July 30, 1980.
One morning, the phone rings. That never happens anymore, or at least rarely. You have burned all your bridges.
It’s Mousse. She wanted to know if you were still alive.
Your mouth is dry. You tell her that you would rather not talk to her. You hang up.
That night, you don’t sleep.
You get up and kneel before Buddha. You close your eyes. Deep in the You that you want to purify, there is a black hole. It is sucking you in.
The next morning, you take the train to Montreal.
You walk along Rue Champagneur, hands jammed in the pockets of your long coat.
A little girl climbs the mountain of snow in front of her house. She is solidly built and plants her feet in the ice on the way to the summit, which she is proud to reach.
‘I did it!’
Her mother joins her, doing her best to pull a sled with a baby bundled up in it.
For a brief moment, you are thrust back into the past. It is like seeing yourself. Walking through the hard winter, your children making you feel like you’re dressed in your Sunday best, like a crown too heavy to bear.
Mousse applauds the little queen of the hill, who slides down to her. The three of them go up the few steps that separate them from their home, from the man who is heating it, from the family they have managed to build, despite it all, despite you. The door closes behind them, without them noticing you.
Your feet are frozen and your stomach is in a knot. You slowly cross the street to put a small booklet from Les Herbes Rouges in your daughter’s mailbox: your Aurores Fulminantes, what remains of you.
You hastily scratched out on the very first page, ‘To Mousse. We went too far, too fast.’
You leave, believing this to be goodbye.
But upstairs, in the third-floor window, the little girl watches you head off into the distance. You catch her eye. Lift a hesitant hand toward her.
I stare at you without responding. You hurt my mother, and I don’t like you.
That year, my mother makes a film about the children of the signatories of the Refus Global. It is a personal quest that leads her to the children of Riopelle, Ferron, and Borduas. All of them missing their parents.
It will be a difficult year for her, and one that will transform her.
That same year, she will be reunited with her little brother again.
He lives in a residence in Quebec City. A psychiatric facility where he has his room, where one hundred baptised stuffed animals lay on his bed, where he chain smokes, looking out the window as time passes slowly on the majestic river.
He didn’t take care of his smile, which is of no use to anyone. His teeth are black, and his beard is long.
He is a music lover. And very cultivated. He speaks in a voice softer than the first snow and has the tender, deep eyes of someone special.
He spends Christmas with his sister. In the country house with the red roof, where, later, your ashes will lend substance to the wind.
François still believes in Santa Claus. He enjoys preparing the snack that will be left under the tree for him. Dates and a glass of red wine. He teams up with the children, a guest in their world, the one he missed and that now sweeps over him like an illness.
François makes holes in the snow, all around the house, into which he sets candles, sheltered from the wind. Mousse follows him and lights a ribbon of lights in the middle of the country. Santa Claus won’t forget her little brother.
For a number of years, Manuel, my brother, keeps calling you. He has a keen sense of connection, as if he had grown up the reverse of you. And even though every time he runs headlong into your cold, distant voice and you refuse to meet him, he calls back. And in his child’s voice, then his young man’s voice, he repeats that he wants to meet the person who brought his mother into the world.
You stand up straight in front of the wall of little mailboxes. You don’t want to be one of those old people with the sad, stooped backs waiting for the mail.
As your eyes distractedly travel across the other boxes, they hit upon a name, scribbled by hand: STRIKE, HILDA. #405.
You freeze, stunned. Hilda Strike? On the floor above yours?
You open your mailbox. You find a parcel in it, which you pick up like a burning ember that’s about to send the building, the city, and the country up in flames.
You can’t imagine where it comes from. Nothing and no one has made it into your den in years. You live on incense and vodka. You read, and you talk to Buddha.
You rush into the elevator, holding the parcel away from your body. It scares you.
On the fourth floor, the elevator door opens, and there she is. Hilda. A cane in hand, running shoes on her feet.
‘Going down?’
You are speechless. Her black, keen eyes. The eyes of a fox. Her delicate eyebrows, shaped into a triangle, her wide, wrinkled forehead, her grey hair pulled back elegantly in a bun that will soon be undone by the wind. And a large necklace that weighs down her chest.
She gets in. The elevator continues its journey, rising toward the top floor.
She sighs: she wanted to go down. You apologize. She interrupts you by turning her sharp eyes on you and leaning heavily into each word as she utters it.
‘Don’t be sorry.’
You smile.
Going back to your apartment, you tell yourself that for the first time in a long time, you may have found a friend.
You drop
the package on the coffee table and wait until evening to open it. A sudden rift in the evening: it’s a white dressing gown. Immaculate.
Accompanied by a note from Mousse, carefully drafted.
She dreamed of you. That she gave you a white dress as a gift.
You undress. The reflection of your tired body makes you smile. It has been desired and thoroughly explored. But no one ever possessed it. Except, once, your children.
You shake out the dressing gown, and it unfurls in front of you.
You drape it over your shoulders and slip your arms in, casually wrapping it around you. Knot it at the waist to seal it tight. You are trapped in a gift that came too abruptly, that is too white, that burns your skin.
You rip the page from a notebook and jot down the words you need.
‘Thank you, Mousse. The dressing gown fits me; it’s just the right length. Very pretty. Don’t send anything else. Suzanne – Mom.’
It’s the first and last time you write that word.
2006. There are three knocks at your door. You don’t answer.
You settle in to your well-honed immobility.
Three more insistent knocks.
You put on your dressing gown. You take the time to line your eyes with black kohl. And you open the door.
At first you don’t understand the human forms taking shape in front of you. You need time to make out the features of your daughter, and the similar ones of your granddaughter. It’s like looking in a mirror with no mercy.
You adjust the knot on your dressing gown. You hesitate between closing and opening the door you are holding on to.
You swallow a wisp of air, which they have brought in from the outside. You ask them how they got in. Normally you have to ring the buzzer downstairs and announce yourself.
They snuck in. Knowing perfectly well that you wouldn’t open the door for them. They took advantage of the fact that a woman went running out the door.
They have pairs of skates slung around their neck and just stopped by.
You don’t decide to open the door, but you do. My mother and I go in. We sit on your sofa. Facing you.
And you decide to soak up the scene, which will not be repeated. First timidly, then more and more hungrily, you take us in with your eyes. Your eyes roam over our features, like over forgotten drawings you have done.
You ask us what brings us to Ottawa. We each have a different reason. It is pure coincidence that we were going there at the same time. You don’t really listen to what we are saying, but rather to the music of our voices.
You abandon yourself to the pleasure of our refreshing singsong.
Your eyes wander over the prominent foreheads and the streamlined mouths. And the long fingers made for the piano. Your mother’s fingers.
You offer us a cup of tea, which you calmly prepare, aware of the magnitude of the moment. You are a grandmother making tea for her daughter and granddaughter.
We drink and you watch us.
You try to tell us about your dull, indistinguishable days. You seem almost normal.
Then Mousse asks you why. Why did you leave?
You disconnect and try to hang on to the stubby shadow of your plant that is trying to take the sky by storm.
You have nothing to say about that.
We are trapped in the silence.
We decide to leave.
You close the door behind us. You lock it with the key.
On your sofa, the imprints of our bodies gradually disappear. You lie down on them.
You swallow the void that rushes into your chest, like the ocean rushing into the drowned.
You pick up the phone and call Mousse. She is skating on the frozen canal that runs alongside your control tower.
‘Never do that again.’
In spring 2009, you receive an invitation from Les Herbes Rouges. As part of the tenth poetry market and the fortieth anniversary of their publishing house, a reading has been organized in a tent, in front of Mont Royal metro.
Fashionable authors will read surreal poems from the past and present. Including yours, which will be read for the first time.
You are eighty-three.
You carefully place the invitation between the pages of a book, and you open a bottle of vodka.
Two glasses in hand, you leave your apartment.
Apartment 405. You knock. Hilda opens the door. You don’t say anything; she invites you to sit down.
Settled into a purple velvet armchair, you scan the walls while she is busy in the kitchen.
There are pictures of her everywhere, running. Young, with short, wavy hair, Bermuda shorts hiked up above her belly button.
She joins you in the living room, hands you a plate of spaghetti and meat sauce. You fill the glasses with vodka again. You toast, your old hands wrapped around the slender glasses.
You don’t talk much, comfortable in this quiet new association. You feel special being able to see her motionless. She eats and drinks with long, slow gestures, sometimes lifting her eyes to you, which you meet, delighted, mollified.
That evening, you learn that the necklace she wears around her neck, which hangs down to her chest, weighs exactly four hundred and twelve grams. The weight of a gold medal.
She tells you what you already know, and you are careful not to interrupt her, enjoying hearing the tale from her own mouth.
Her event was the women’s hundred-metre dash.
‘They used to call me the ostrich,’ she says, a flash of pride in her eyes.
In 1932, competing at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, she won the silver, beaten by Stella Walsh. She makes a face when she says her name.
And for you, she reminisces about the splendour of the race, her smooth start, her phenomenal propulsion, the powerful conviction that she would get the gold, and the second that relegated her to the sidelines of history.
She takes a last mouthful of spaghetti, and she seems to have a hard time swallowing.
Then, in a few words, still bitter, the reversal of destiny, years later: Stella Walsh, who won by a few centimetres, wasn’t a woman.
‘Hermaphrodite. They found out when she died.’
Hilda downs her vodka in one.
‘Still waiting for my medal.’
She mechanically adjusts the necklace around her neck. And then you see. Her bent neck, her swollen ankles. The apartment of a lonely old woman who ran all of her life. And yet no one remembers her today.
And you are overcome.
That night, you write your will by hand, on a blank sheet of paper.
You put the names of your children on it. Then mine, and my brother’s.
On that evening in particular, you want us to remember you.
In front of the Mont Royal metro, I am listening to your poems bursting with vitality, while you put on your makeup. A thick line of kohl under your still alert pupils. Naked facing the mirror, you take in your round, barren body. Slowly, you run your tired hand over your lifeless sex. You close your eyes and settle into the waves of your breath. You rock as pleasure rises to your stomach.
You come, eyes open, staring at your reflection. You grant yourself a pardon.
And you let yourself slide along the cold bathroom floor.
December 23, 2009, wrapped in your white dressing gown.
We are your sole heirs. So, finally, you are inviting us over. We have to go empty your little apartment.
We set out into winter to meet you. Through the snow. Archaeologists of a murky life.
At your apartment, we are on our hands and knees, searching.
Your closet. Hats. Dresses. Lots of black clothes.
I can’t help but plunge my nose into the fabric. Smells are usually so revealing. But even they are furtive. Subtle, faint, hard to pin down. An accidental blend of incense, the sweat of days spent not moving. A subtle note of alcohol, perhaps?
In a shoebox there are pictures of us: me and my brother, at every age. You kept them. And my mother kept sending them
to you year after year. Our ages are written on the back, traces of time lost, wasted, slipped away. It’s your loss.
My mother is sitting in your rocking chair. Gently, she touches you. Rests her hands where you rested yours. Rocks to the rhythm of a lullaby, the one she never heard.
I find your red red lipstick in the small bathroom. And short sticks of kohl, which you lined your eyes with, giving them power. I draw a line under mine.
My mother finds a piece of furniture, made by her father a long time ago. We take it down to the car. She takes the rocking chair too, carrying it on her back, and my father lashes it securely to the roof.
We’re leaving soon. I’m in your room. There is a small green plant in the window. It is leaning against the pane, drawn to the day.
Books are piled by the foot of your bed. I read a few passages at random, suddenly greedy for clues about you.
I find a yellowed cardboard folder between two books on Buddhist zazen.
It contains letters. Poems. Newspaper articles.
A gold mine, which I stuff into my bag like a thief.
We’re leaving. I slip a worn copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into my pocket.
We close your door behind us, forever.
We drive slowly through the storm. On the roof, the rocking chair cuts through the wind, heroically. I don’t know it yet, but I will rock my children in it.
I flip through Nietzsche, yellowed with age. There is a laminated newspaper article stuck between two pages.
The picture of a burning bus.
1961, Alabama.
In bold type: Freedom riders: political protest against segregation.
Around the bus are young Black people and White people, in shock, refugees from the flames. A young woman is on her knees. She looks like me.
A huge field, under a stormy sky. A woman is standing. She is taking root.
It’s painful.
She makes a hole. She wants it to be deep.
Suzanne Page 15