“Let’s go smoke a cigarette, boys, we’ll let your grandmother sleep.”
Outside, Hélène and Lise explained that our grandmother would have forgotten them as well, had they not been at her bedside for two weeks. She only remembered the names of her children because they had been dictated to her. She remembered the Beauport of her youth, of her own beauty, and of her fiancé Georges-Émile. She talked about her sisters Marielle, Nicole, Georgette, and Monique, and of her sisters-in-law, Nyna, Mabel, Maude, and Gemma, who had become her good friends. She remembered her childhood and adolescence and her whole life up to her marriage, but she’d forgotten Arvida.
At that point, I should have understood that in fact there was nothing more Arvidian than to forget Arvida itself. I should have understood that I was myself free to leave it forever, because in any case I was incapable of forgetting anything at all. But I was too young. And my brother and I were devastated.
Lise told us that our grandmother remembered the time when her life was her own, before in Arvida it became that of others. In Arvida her life had been that of her children, then of the priests who came to eat with the family on Sunday, then of the little hockey players, atom, peewee, and bantam, then of her sick son and her sick husband, then of David and me when our parents had divorced.
We shouldn’t be upset that she’d forgotten us, she said. She no longer remembered anything of her life with us in Arvida because that life, she’d already given us.
I looked at my brother. The only intelligent thing I found to say, which was not really intelligent when I think of it, came right out of the language of sports, those rough recreations in which the Arvidians of the entire world batter their bodies, while in their heads make short work of everything they can’t forget.
I said, in English:
“Nice try, but no cigar.”
She died the next day, my grandmother, mother of my father.
Her body lay in repose during all of the month of January. After, when the ground had thawed in the Saguenay, they brought her back to Arvida to bury her beside my grandfather.
1 It has to be said, however, that there’s something a bit overblown in this picture. In the city’s original plan, before the parishes were founded and the lots fully occupied, the “English” town and the “workers’” town were built a good distance from each other.
2 Another Arvidian myth may be similarly discredited: for a long time it was bruited about that the original design for the town had been conceived with the idea of tracing on its very ground the letters A-R-V–I-D-A, visible from the sky. Such a project, which would imply inscribing a bit of the world’s map onto the world itself, would have been unthinkable in the watchful minds of urbanists between the wars.
3 My favourite anecdote, when it comes to my father’s sporting fame, is also the earliest. One day, when he was six, my grandfather took him to the neighbourhood skating rink. My father was assigned to the blue team, and he scored eight goals. The other parents were angry and laughing at the same time, and after half an hour it was decided that he would switch teams. After a pause, my father pulled on a red sweater, glided onto the ice, and went on scoring goals as if it was the simplest thing in the world. There were eleven other boys on the ice, four who sent him awkward passes, five who tried to stop him from scoring, one bored goalie, and another who’d developed a gut feeling for what a partridge feels on the first day of hunting season. There were eleven other boys on the ice, on which a beautiful winter sun was shining, and it was as if my father were there all alone, at nightfall, practising his skating and his shots on goal.
My grandfather was bursting with pride. He said to everyone, “That’s my son.” He blushed and stammered when other fathers congratulated him, he had the same expression as on the spring night he went to knock at my grandmother’s door in Beauport, my grandmother who lived with her parents, and he who knocked, bearing his insignificant bouquet of daisies. He had the same expression as when she said, “Yes, that would be nice, let’s take a walk.” Exactly the same, except that he’d aged.
After a while, the other boys began to have had enough, and to the chagrin of their fathers, they started to behave like children. A little blonde boy began to sob like a sissy because my father had made him trip as he stole the puck from him for the fourth time. Another threw a tantrum because he could never get to touch that damn puck. Yet he was on the same team as my father, and from the stands you couldn’t see what he was complaining about. He tried unsuccessfully to shatter his stick by hitting it against the boards, then threw it as far as he could, left the rink, teetering on his skates, and refused to go back on the ice.
When the reds had scored eight goals, it was decided that enough was enough. All the fathers had enjoyed themselves, while all the children left in bad humour. My father included.
He sulked on the way home with his father and big brother, he sulked some more at home sitting at the dining room table, while my grandfather and uncle recounted his exploits to the rest of the family, describing his sixteen goals one by one, with the verve and precision of the voices on the radio. He sat tight-lipped, with his arms crossed. My grandmother set a steaming plate in front of him, full to the brim, which smelled good, but that he glared at as though it were full of gravel. When my grandmother, who’d pretended not to notice his behaviour for a good quarter of an hour, returned to the table with two more plates, she asked him:
“Dougie, will you please tell me what’s wrong with you? You scored sixteen goals this afternoon. How many do you need to make you smile?”
“Yes, I know, mama. I scored sixteen goals. But I didn’t win.”
In our family ever since, you will find a marked tendency to prefer even catastrophic defeats to tied games.
4 Only that’s not what he said in French. He said “Héros de ma queue,” which means “Heroes my… prick? cock?” Whatever. Had he said “Heroes my ass,” it would have come out “Héros de mon cul.” It was common in Arvida, in the somewhat coarse milieu of my father, in any case, to replace the traditional “de mon cul” by “de ma queue.” Implicit in the expression is the awareness that the appendage in question is both the only thing a man possesses of which he is the sole owner, and the wellspring of all his misfortunes. An interesting variant consists in replacing the possessive “my” (ma) with a “your” (ta), while tacking an ending onto someone else’s sentence, usually to cut short any hint of boastfulness.
“Things going well at work, Jean Guy?”
“Oh yes, very well. They’ve just named me manager.”
“De ta queue.”
The Last-Born
God knows how he could get it into his head that two thousand dollars would be enough for him to kill somebody. What does it mean, after all, a sum like that? He could easily have worked it out, Raisin, he always spent in multiples of twenty. Two thousand dollars was never more than two hundred cases of beer / a hundred nights at the movies if you counted the popcorn, the Pepsi and the bus / thirty or so half-hours in the little room with the girls from the topless bar who never charged him like the others when they did consent to take his money. They arrived from everywhere those girls, on the three a.m. bus that left them off in front of the gas station, mostly on Wednesdays. From time to time Raisin stayed up late and hung around to watch the new ones disembark. There were three or four per week. Lots of Blacks for the last two years. The clients weren’t too happy about that, people didn’t go much for Blacks around here. But he liked them a lot. The girls had beautiful fat asses, little breasts with big black nipples, they sprayed themselves with a revolting scent, part pine oil, part bubble gum, but Raisin dreamed that it smelled of the far away, the not here. For him this was the aroma of Africa and Haiti, and the smell was good. A lot better in any case than the odour of the pulp and paper mill that lingered in the air in the heat of summer, and that the faintest breeze wafted abroad, pristine and potent, for kilometres round about. The locals were used to it, but not him, the smell lodged in his nostrils, stuck to his palate, a ghastly stench of rotten eggs.