I never told anyone and I’ll always deny it. My wife and my daughter have brought up the subject a lot, but each time I’ve said “The dog fell in the hole, give me a break with that.” You may think I’m making a confession by telling this story, but it’s not true. I’ve changed it just enough that no one will know me, and if by some stroke of bad luck my daughter recognizes me anyway, I’ll say, “Are you crazy?”
I’ll always deny having done it, and I’d give the same advice to any man who perpetrates a similar abomination. Deny it to your dying day. Swear on the head of your parents, swear on the head of your wife, swear on the head of anyone except your children, and swear on their heads too if you have no choice. Invent a story, tell a pack of lies, put a curse on your eternal soul, but for the love of God keep your mouth shut.
*
Something odd happened yesterday. Julie slept in the house, and in the morning, she found nothing strange. Her eldest had woken in the night after a nightmare, and she’d made a big commotion, and her father had had to put her back to sleep, but this morning my daughter didn’t say it was the fault of the house, or of Thibeau and Vallaire, or I don’t know what. We ate breakfast together outside, it was a lovely morning. Roxanne and I are leaving on vacation the day after tomorrow, so just like that I said, “Hey, if you want you can take the house for the week with the girls. Our pleasure.”
I waited for Julie to burst out laughing. But she and her guy looked at each other, normally, and then she said:
“We’ll think about it, papa. It’s true this would make a super place for us to stay when we’re in the Saguenay.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was really happy. Just in case, in the afternoon, I showed my son-in-law how to put the solar blanket on the swimming pool, how to work the heat pump and the retractable awning on the terrace, and the outside sound system if they wanted to put some music on. I showed him my wine cellar and my meat freezer in the basement, saying “Don’t be shy, eh, it’s our pleasure.”
Then I added:
“In any case, if you can convince my daughter to sleep here for a week, I’ll tip my hat to you. Even now, she’s still thinks there are supernatural things going on in the house.”
He looked at me, my son-in-law, then he said with an odd little smile, a bit mysterious:
“Oh, I think that you too, you saw some strange things back then.”
He brought me up short, I confess. I didn’t stick my neck out, or anything. I just said, to shut him up:
“Yes, it’s true. I’ve seen things. But they had nothing to do with the house.”
I almost added something else, but I decided to leave things there. We looked at each other in silence, and we understood each other. And I gave him the last word, even if that’s not like me.
“Don’t worry, everything’s cool now. Julie’s a lot calmer. And anyway, with houses like yours, you get what you put in.”
I like him fine, that boy. I think my daughter’s good with him, and their children are well brought up. I think he’s got his head screwed on right, and that what he said is probably the smartest thing you can say about my house, and lots of other things.
You get back what you put in.
Madeleines
ARVIDA III
Once, only once, my grandmother, mother of my father, said:
“There are no thieves in Arvida, Georges. It has to be somewhere.”
I was nine or ten years old, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. Next to the TV room, in the basement, there was a storage room with an old jumble of things and an oil furnace that leaked, a work bench, and a toilet my brother and I were scared stiff of using for our needs. Doubtless to take pre-emptive action against any impending adolescent onanism, my grandmother said that if you sat there for too long, the odour of young flesh and excrement could lure a voracious rat into the pipe.
Georges had been rooting around in there for two days when he finally cried out, “Eureka!” He and my grandmother called me alone into the middle of the clutter. On a table as small as a sewing machine stand, Georges had placed a different kind of machine: black, with a keyboard in front, a white page slipped in over a roller and up through a kind of target in the middle of the sheet, held in place by a metal rod mounted on a mechanism set between the two extremities of a red and black ribbon. Above the keyboard, below the machine’s big opening where the type bars were all lined up like organ pipes, was inscribed in big letters:
UNDERWOOD
My grandfather had bought the typewriter just after the war, at a time when, with the European economy only slowly getting back on its feet, Quebec had become Underwood’s best market for, at a discount, unloading its backlog of machines with French keyboards.
To make ends meet, my grandfather and grandmother had used it to write articles for Progrès-Dimanche and later for La Source. On this machine, all my aunts and uncles had worn out their fingernails and joints in the course of their studies. On this machine my grandfather had written, all his life long, scouting reports for the Chicago Blackhawks, the New York Rangers, and at the Junior level, the Quebec Remparts. What is more, on this machine he’d said for the first time that Michel Goulet, a young left-winger from Péribonka, would be a gold mine for any club that got its hands on him.
Georges had oiled and greased it, and it was like new.
This was in 1988 or 1989, however, and I didn’t quite know what they wanted me to do with their antique. My grandmother explained:
“It’s for your stories.”
“What stories?”
“The ones you’re telling all the time. And the ones you make up.”
It’s true that at that age I was a bit of a liar. In fact, since I was very young, I’d tended to exasperate my brother and his friends by forcing on our little toys (G.I. Joe, He-Man, and the Playmobil characters) lengthy melodramas, before letting them throw a single punch.
“Those stories, exactly. You could write them on this, and they wouldn’t bother anybody. Besides, you’d practise your French. And maybe one day they’d be good enough for you to read them to your mother, your father, or me.”
I thought that was a good idea. So I quickly familiarized myself with the keys and the mechanics and the gummy letters that sometimes got stuck to the page. I began to recount any old thing on it, especially stories stolen from Will Eisner (whose Spirit we had in translation in my uncles’ old Pilote magazines which my grandmother had saved), and from Stephen King, the world’s coolest writer at the time. I wrote awful stories set in an Arvida that wasn’t entirely fictional, where the sheriff was called Jim, his wife Deborah, and their son Timothy.
(It’s also then that I became an insomniac for good. The child starts to write by resisting sleep. In his room, between the sheets, he wards off what will soon escape him forever, when his whole life he’ll be chasing after sleep and feeling it slip through his fingers. But that’s where it begins: a child in his bed, in flight from it. Not to sleep, not to dream, never to close his eyes. Darting them everywhere in the darkness, remembering the day, imprinting in his mind everything about it that was ugly and everything that was beautiful.)
Later, I wanted to write my own stuff.
In a little notebook, I jotted things down that I afterwards transcribed onto the machine. I looked into things that had really happened in Arvida, and I tried to put together a kind of working-class mythology. Strange happenings were few and far between, because the town was young and its occult underside pretty tenuous. I listened for stories told by older brothers and sisters that were not silly tales off a Ouija Board or yarns about a demented baby-sitter who roasted babies in an oven like turkey.