The woman is my mother.
She is throwing your ashes in the ground.
A handful of you gets away from her and flies into the wind. She works faster. You won’t get away from her.
Your daughter is planting you behind her house, in a huge field that she knows by heart, in the space where she takes her morning constitutionals and her evening walks.
The black sky above swallows you both up.
She works furiously in the rain. She mixes you with the soil.
Where she knows she will be able to find you.
It’s over.
You can’t run anymore.
Present day
It’s five in the morning. The sun is rising over the countryside, an ardent green. My newborn daughter wakes up at that mysterious hour, in the in-between part of the day.
I take her for a walk along the dirt road. Nestled in my arms, she takes in the morning air like a huge surprise. Her entire body opens up at the slightest breeze. This moving encounter with the world marks our humble procession; we are coming to see you.
At the end of the field, a long flat stone sits among the pines. The names of my ancestors are engraved on it. Under those of my father’s loving parents, my mother engraved yours. Your name, its letters carved into the grey stone.
My mother, broken-hearted. The shards of glass left forever under her skin, traces of the abandonment she carries like a coat of arms.
My mother who doesn’t believe she can be loved. To hug her, to pull her into your arms, you have to hone your technique.
She is a grandmother four times over. She still lives with my father.
Together they are resistance fighters, builders, alchemists.
I cross the damp morning field. We stand before you.
The names written above yours have counted in my life. So why you? Why do I seek you out to tell my stories to?
At my feet is a circle of flattened grass, preserved by the dew. A deer came by in the night and curled up in the shadow of your grave. I sit on its bed, my daughter tucked in my arms.
The sun comes up, licking the horizon.
Because I am made partly from your desertion. Your absence is part of me, and it shaped me. You are the one to whom I owe the murky water that feeds my roots, which run deep.
So you continue to exist.
In my unquenchable thirst to love.
And in my need to be free, like an absolute necessity.
But free with them.
I am free together, me.
My daughter has fallen asleep at my breast.
The two of us as one before the majestic forest, under the immense sky, where the wild clouds appear, we are together and we salute you, Suze.
I remember you.
We will remember you.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
The following notes provide context to some of the documents, laws, and movements that were shaping Quebec toward the mid-20th century and that are mentioned in this novel.
Programme de restauration sociale: A program for social recovery published in Quebec in 1933 by a group of priests and laypeople that focused on nationalism and corporatism and formed the basis for future radical electoral platforms by Quebec political parties. It combined traditional values with more progressive measures, such as assistance for the unemployed and nationalized financial and utility monopolies.
Refus global: A manifesto published in 1948 by members of the Automatist movement. The main essay was written by artist Paul-Émile Borduas, criticizing Quebec’s traditional, religious-based values and calling for liberation, an international outlook, and hope.
Les Automatistes: A group of dissident artists based in Montreal in the 1940s, engaging in visual arts, theatre, poetry, and dance. Founded by painter Paul-Émile Borduas, the group was influenced by Surrealism’s theory of automatism, which involves suppressing conscious control of the creative process.
L’Action catholique: A rural daily paper published between 1915 and 1962, to give the faithful guidance in everyday life.
The Padlock Law: Enacted in 1937, a statute that allowed buildings deemed used for propagating communism to be closed for one year.
The excerpt from Maldoror on page 65 is from:
Comte de Lautréamont. Lautréamont’s Maldoror. Translated by Alexis Lykiard. New York: Allison & Busby, 1970, pp. 98-99.
The excerpt from Bien-être on pages 87-88 is from:
Claude Gauvreau. The Good Life. Translated by Ray Ellenwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1981, p. 42.
The excerpt from Refus Global/Total Refusal on pages 108 and 151 is from:
The Canadian Encyclopedia online, consulted April 2017.
THE AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my grandfather, Marcel, for giving me permission.
Thank you to my mother for doing the same. And for reliving all of this for me.
Thank you to Louise-Marie Lacombe, private detective and prospector, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to find Suzanne and invent her to my liking.
Thank you to art historian François-Marc Gagnon. His beautifully written Chroniques du movement automatiste québécois nourished me, from the beginning to the end.
Thank you to Peter Byrne, found in an Italian oasis, for all of his stories, driven by a profound love for my grandmother.
Thank you to François Barbeau, Ninon Gauthier, Guy Meloche, Marielle Brisebois Meloche, Claire Meloche, Madeleine Meloche, Brigitte Meloche, Anne-Marie Rainville, Andrée Pion, Suzanne Hamel, Pâquerette Villeneuve, and the family and friends of Gary Adams.
Thank you to everyone who remembered Suzanne for me.
Thank you to Maj, for the elegance.
Thank you to Jean-Marc Dalpé, Daniel Poliquin, and Raymond Cloutier for their advice.
And a big thanks to Émile, my man, for every part of you, sharing every part of my whole life. To Philippe and Manon, my parents. And to Danielle, Dounia, Maryse, Jules, Marie-T, Monique, who allowed me to be both a mother and a writer.
Born in 1979, and named an Artist for Peace in 2012, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette has directed several award-winning documentary features. She has also directed two fiction features: Le Ring (2008), Inch’allah (2012, which received the Fipresci Prize in Berlin). She is the author of the travelogue Embrasser Yasser Arafat (2011) and the novels Je voudrais qu’on m’efface (2010) and La femme qui fuit (Prix des libraires du Québec, Prix France-Québec, Prix de la ville de Montréal), garnering both critical and popular success.
Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator living in Montreal. She won the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. And the Birds Rained Down, her translation of Saucier’s Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was a cbc Canada Reads Selection for 2015. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, as were her translations of Louis Carmain’s Guano, Élise Turcotte’s Guyana and Hervé Fischer’s The Decline of the Hollywood Empire.
Typeset in Jenson.
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Translated by Rhonda Mullins
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Photo of Rhonda Mullins by Owen Egan
Coach House Books
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Suzanne Page 16