I didn’t find much.
My mother said that my godmother had once lived in a house in Saint-Mathias where there had been a suicide, and left after a few months, refusing ever to talk about it.
In a house on Rue Faraday, on the second floor, behind a high narrow window giving onto the church, you could see at sundown, in the summer, and when the night sky turned opaque in winter, a woman gazing out distractedly, humming a lullaby to her child. In the bed, the baby was dead. It was a ghost, of course, but the ghost of a dead baby. It wasn’t its own ghost, it was part of what was left behind by its dead mother. The baby cried no more, breathed no more, neither in this world nor the next. It was the ghost of something else, something deathly pale, black around the eyes and black at the lips, which the mother was trying to put to sleep. I didn’t know if the baby changed. Someone had told me that the baby in the bed was dead. I promised not to say who. Me, on the sidewalk, I just saw the mother bent over the cradle. I’m not even sure she was dead.
On Rue Oersted, a former tenant talked to me about something strange. There were no ghosts at that address. It was just that in a big empty house, you heard, two or three times a year, an echo of ancient conversations. The tenant, alone, intrigued, got up in the middle of the night to check out all the rooms, one by one, in the dark. He had to conclude that those voices came from nowhere.
In the woods stretching from the water purification factory road to the golf course, there lived a monster. When we took that road to get a Pepsi and chips paid for by friends of my father who drank at the clubhouse there, we often heard it, enormous, moving among the branches. We fled, screaming, until we were out of breath and the thick greenery opened out onto the golf course parking lot. I always thought it was a Tyrannosaurus. My brother said it was a werewolf. Stéphane Blais said it was a bear, Jean-Nicolas Frigon a flying shark, and my Bergeron cousins a dragon. Much later, after I’d forgotten the absolute terror and the imagined silhouette that rustled in the leaves, a friend told me that there really was a monster living on the golf course, she’d seen it, and it had told her things.
It was a man.
I tried to write a whole story, once, about our house at the end of Rue Gay-Lussac. It was a huge white wooden house with black shutters, an annex, a double garage, and an inground swimming pool, the dream house my parents had bought when they were rich.
My story was that of a man who as an adult bought back a house he’d lived in as a child. He moved into it with his wife and child, and realized that the house was haunted by himself. The man had been clinically dead at the age of twelve, drowned in the pool. I never managed to finish it, because I didn’t know if it was a sad story or a horror story. We’d had to vacate the house in 1987. At the end my parents each slept in their own room at either end of the hall, and the damaged swimming pool had become a real swamp. Frogs swam in its stagnant water, and every week we found dead animals there.
She’d had a good idea, sitting me down in front of the Underwood, my grandmother, mother of my father. Unfortunately for her, and above all for me, there are always times when I get attached to stories that aren’t stories really, that begin without ending and never get anywhere. Possibilities, dreams, and missed rendezvous. Phantoms and absences.
My favourite story happened to a friend of my brother, whom I’ll just call D.
D. lived alone with his brother and his mother. He talked about how, when he was seven years old, he’d been told his father had died from cancer. This was false, we knew, as D. himself learned later on.
His father had killed himself, jumping from the Shipshaw Bridge.
An engineering jewel financed by Arthur Vining Davis, completed in 1950, opened by Maurice Duplessis, and still today the only aluminum bridge in the world, the Shipshaw Bridge, built in an arc, rises over an arm of the Saguenay River almost forty metres above a dizzying gorge, a rough current, and sharp rocks. I forget how many people actually killed themselves there, but in my father’s unfettered imagination, they’re legion.
That’s also his way of telling me that his morale is low. Sometimes I call, I ask him how he is, and he replies:
“They’re serving number 6 on the Shipshaw Bridge. I’m 72.”
Many or not, D.’s father was one of them. After D.’s mother had left Arvida for a neighbouring town, she preferred the expurgated story of a cancer to that of suicide.
At the age of sixteen, D. began to go out with a young woman whose family had just resettled in the area, after the father, who worked for Hydro Quebec, had been for two decades posted in various parts of the province. Through his girlfriend, D. learned that his new father-in-law had once been a close friend of his own father.
There came the day when she introduced him to her parents. The usual conversation, silences, unease and forced laughter, until D. finished the beer he’d been offered, and began to feel more at ease. The father was left alone with him, and inquired about his mother, his brother, and himself. After a while, feeling more at ease himself, he asked:
“Do you have news from your father from time to time?”
D. replied, troubled:
“Sir, my father has been dead for ten years.”
The father-in-law choked on his beer, and apologized for his unpardonable lapse. They went to the table, but D. had clearly seen how the father had gone pale in pronouncing those words, and how he’d avoided his gaze afterwards. He didn’t do anything in front of his girlfriend, and waited for the next day to go and pursue the subject at the man’s workplace.
“Sir, yesterday you asked me if I’d had news of my father, and you nearly passed out when I told you he was dead. I’d like to know why. I’d like you to tell me the truth, and not try to make me believe that it was nothing, because I saw in your face that it isn’t nothing.
His father-in-law sighed.
“As you wish, my boy. I didn’t know your father was dead, because I was far from here at that time. I thought your parents were divorced. But I think you should make your own inquiries, because I ran into your father in the street in Rouyn last year.”
Even if I still, today, have a lot of sympathy for D., I’m even more enamoured of the abyss opened up by that reply.
Was it possible that D.’s father wasn’t dead?
Had they actually found his body under the Shipshaw Bridge?
I left for Montreal before my brother could tell me the rest, if there was any more to tell. I often, from afar, thought about this mystery, like a fat detective in the pages of a yellowed crime novel.
The most plausible solution I found was that there had been a case of mistaken identity before the meal. D. was not an extremely common family name in the Saguenay, like Tremblay, Girard, or Bouchard, but it wasn’t rare either. It was perfectly possible that what with the rumour mill and distant memories, his father-in-law had imagined that D. was the son of a D. who was not his father.
That explained the reappearance. It also explained how a man who claimed to be an old friend, and who had maintained close ties in the region so as to eventually return there, could have utterly failed to hear about the death notice.
Of course, that dispensed with the misunderstanding at the expense of the story. On the other hand, you could invent hundreds of stories and as many different fathers for D., to compound the problem. You could invent for him a fraudster father on the run, a gangster father turned Crown witness, a spy father, an amnesiac father, a father abducted by extraterrestrials, a father in the Foreign Legion, a homosexual father prey to a blackmailer, a serial killer father, an alcoholic or drug addict father, or, my favourite, an amateur existentialist who had vanished from view and founded elsewhere a new family just like his old one, to put his personal freedom to the test.