Suzanne Read online

  But Claudia had her first child and never again sat down at the piano.

  When Achilles asked her to play, she would smile inside. An evasive smile.

  One day, she simply told him she no longer knew how.

  Achilles stayed, waiting for her to go on, and she couldn’t get away from him, so she said that she didn’t know how to touch the keys, because she had nothing more to give.

  That she felt as though the notes would crash into the walls and the ceiling, then fall to the ground.

  Achilles was calm and quietly told her that all they had to do was open the windows.

  Claudia loved him and cried a little. But she never played the piano again.

  The piano still sits enthroned in the middle of the living room. It gathers dust and that annoys her.

  One night, you saw her clean it. She rubbed it furiously with a rag. As if it were one big stain.

  On Saturdays, you used to go with your mother to the hairdresser’s. It was your outing. While she was having her hair curled, lightening up in a way she rarely did, you would line up for the telex. A small, seemingly ordinary machine, but one that helped the poor get rich. People would read stock prices, current up to the minute. The small machine sitting between two permed ladies was wired to Wall Street.

  That impressed you.

  Your father speculated like everyone else. After carefully noting the numbers on the palm of your hand, you called home and gave them to him.

  Often, a few days later, a new oven, fridge, or set of dishes, bought on credit, would find their way into the house.

  You deserved to be rich. Like everyone else.

  Before, you had your bedroom, which you shared with your sisters. You had your rituals, your secrets, your lair.

  You liked to sleep naked, your body in the form of a star, arms and legs open wide on the bed, while on the other side of the wall, the boys fought and snored.

  Before, every new year, your father would buy you a pair of new shoes. You would spend a week looking down at them, your neck bent, eyes glued to your shiny new feet.

  Then, the crisis.

  Your mother went to the hairdresser’s once or twice more. But she wouldn’t let you check the telex. The stock market didn’t seem to interest anyone anymore, and the impatient line had suddenly dispersed.

  You had nothing more to do at the salon; you didn’t have a mission anymore, and your mother’s reflection in the mirror, under the hairdresser’s hands, had gone dark.

  You had to drag your mattress into the boys’ room.

  Now you slept crammed together, no more secrets, odours intermingling.

  A stranger moved into your room, ‘the lodger.’ It was by order of the government: a room had to be freed up to make a place for the indigent. The lodger had lost his home. He was soaking up your space, your light, your memories. You didn’t like him. He was poor, and he had taken your place.

  And then you didn’t get new shoes. At the beginning of the year, your mother cleaned a pair that had belonged to your older sister. And they were handed down to you.

  That’s when you lifted your head. That’s when you started to look to the horizon.

  Claudia is finishing up ironing your skirt. Sitting in your underwear on a chair, you are focused on the rumbling in your stomach. The hunger comes in waves. Nothing, and then an empty tunnel that opens up between your belly button and your throat.

  ‘Put this on. Let’s go.’

  You grab your blue skirt. Your mother ironed the pleats, made it look like a fan. It’s pretty. You put it on and twirl. You are the wind.

  Tables have been set up in the parish hall.

  The neighbourhood families are seated, waiting patiently for their soup.

  You feel like you’re at a restaurant. You try to sit up straight, to be worthy of your outfit.

  You can’t wait. You like to eat.

  You recognize almost all the families around you. They all look dressed up. More than usual. Not to hide their hunger. No, to greet it with dignity. To put it on notice that they aren’t afraid of it.

  And yet the sound of hungry bodies finally being fed betrays the precariousness of the moment. Under their pristine fabrics, they are all hanging by a thread.

  There are no jobs. The stores are deserted; the banks are closed.

  The park benches and the libraries are filled. They are the two hotspots for the newly unemployed.

  While getting an encyclopedia for a school project, you walk by some twenty men taking refuge in their reading. Your eyes linger on one of them. His five-o’clock shadow, his blue eyes glued to the page. Nothing can come between him and what he is reading. He seizes the words like a wolf seizes its prey. They are practically bleeding. They are no longer a refuge; they are a lifebuoy.

  Your eyes move down the man’s long legs, which lead to his feet, which are bare, wrapped in newspaper. You’re sure he read it with the same intensity before using it as protection. He knows the words he is walking in.

  We believe that the main causes of the crisis are moral and that we will cure them through a return to the Christian spirit.

  Introduction to the Programme de restauration sociale (1933)

  Father Bisson has one eyebrow, and you have always wanted to touch it. It looks soft.

  It’s so hot in the church that his eyebrow is beaded with drops that would make a pretty necklace.

  You look at your mother’s dry neck, and you imagine her wearing it. The two fine bones of her clavicle as a coat rack. Her neck stiff from being bent. From looking at what has to be washed rather than what is taking to the skies.

  You squirm on the bench, which creaks. Up front, the priest is addressing the crowd with conviction.

  ‘Our economic recovery must bring jobs to all of our labourers and the unemployed. If the fervour of prayer, patience with the heat and fatigue, could bring about change, our wishes would come true, but we also need to change our lives so that they are more consistently generous and so that mortal sin, often repeated and rarely regretted, does not destroy most of the kind acts of a given day.’

  You are seven years old. According to canon law, you have reached the age of reason, and you have to confess at least once a year.

  It’s dark in the box. It smells like damp wood. It’s comfortable. You sit down. For years you have watched the long queue for the confessional, the bodies lined up, looking stiff.

  You always thought that the bodies told a different story while they were waiting. As if they were already being scrutinized, spied on.

  You try to think of something to talk about. It’s your first time. It’s important that he remember you. That he look forward to seeing you again.

  You go into the box. You close your eyes, gulp down the warm air around you. You gulp down the vices of those who have been here before you. A fix of weakness.

  It’s your turn. There are small openings in front of you through which thin shafts of light pass, through which you can make out the man you will be speaking to.

  He tells you he is listening.

  You want it to last.

  He repeats that he is listening. He calls you his child.

  You can’t find the words you had prepared. So you stand up.

  And you want him to remember you.

  You’re hot. You lean into the screen, study it, look for the man on the other side.

  And you stick out your tongue. You drag it slowly over the holes. You look for a path that will take you closer to him. You leave trails of saliva on the varnished wood. You slowly slide your tongue into each slot, and on the other side, he has fallen silent.

  You leave the confessional, a splinter between your teeth.

  You feel light. He won’t forget you.

  There is no gas left to fuel the cars.

  Achilles attaches his to two horses. They will be his motor.

  The idea is not his; it is spreading across the country, ironically called the Bennett buggy, after Canadian prime minister
Robert Bedford Bennett, who is one of the people running the country into the ground.

  Your father comes home late at night in his Bennett buggy.

  You sleep between Monique and Claire. Claire talks in her sleep. A foreign language that sounds like Latin. You shove the end of the sheet in her mouth to shut her up.

  Claire is five years old. At age eighteen, she will enter the convent, bound to God for the rest of her life.

  The sound of horseshoes downstairs: your father, Achilles, is coming home. The crisis has taken his job. Now he has a make-work job, invented by the government to deal with unemployment, something to keep men from weeping or sleeping at the library. To keep them from overdosing on free time.

  Achilles comes home more tired than before. He liked being useful, and make-work jobs change every day but are all in vain.

  Today, he picked dandelions. They’re a weed; there are a lot of them, everywhere. Enough to keep the men busy for a few weeks.

  Achilles must have uprooted five thousand of them. He roamed the city, eyes peeled, looking for yellow flowers. Enough to make a person go mad. Golden streaks everywhere. Achilles has blisters on his hands. He was paid eight cents for his work. He is not unemployed. He earned a living today.

  Achilles liked being a teacher.

  You love Achilles.

  You hear him unhitch the horses from the car; you tear down the stairs and throw yourself at him.

  He tells you to go to bed, but you don’t obey right away. You know that you still have two chances. You help him feed the horses.

  He tells you again to go to bed.

  You bring him a damp towel, which he wipes his face with.

  You ask him whether you can go with him tomorrow.

  He tells you to go to bed.

  You know you have to obey this time.

  You go upstairs.

  Achilles goes into his bedroom and lies down next to Claudia. He lifts her nightgown and touches her thighs. He turns his wife over and seeks brutal refuge in her. Where he is a man. Where he is proud.

  Claudia doesn’t want to but doesn’t say so.

  Claudia is thirty-three years old and has five children.

  Claudia is a distant cousin of Émile Nelligan.

  Claudia has black eyes that arch downward. Waning moons.

  Claudia has long fingers that have played Chopin.

  Claudia has short nails with dirt under them from the potatoes she peels.

  Claudia doesn’t sleep anymore.

  Claudia knows that she has to have six more children to get the two hundred acres of dirt the government has promised.

  Claudia thinks that she already has dirt under her fingernails and doesn’t want any more.

  Claudia doesn’t talk anymore.

  Claudia is being smothered by Nocturnes.

  Claudia doesn’t know where to love her children because there is no room left.

  Claudia is filled with emptiness.

  Claudia is a desert.

  Claudia wakes the oldest ones.

  Asks them to help set up a pallet in the hallway.

  Claudia will sleep next to the piano now.

  Away from Achilles’s penis.

  You’ve been in line for two hours. The ration card in your clammy hand. You close your fist over it so as not to drop it, or else everyone will go hungry, because of you. You’ve pictured the scene at least twenty times: the card falling, the wind kicking up and carrying it off. You running after it. The card flying off to the river and throwing itself into it. You hesitating and diving in. The river swallowing you up. You floating with the dead in the cemetery.

  You tighten your grip.

  Take a few steps forward.

  Seven ounces of sugar, seven ounces of butter, one and one-third ounces of tea, five and one-third ounces of coffee. The weekly food ration.

  The lady in front of you smells like burnt caramel. Her skirt brushes your face and you like it. You want to sleep under it. Your little head pressed against her fat thighs. Her damp, sweet skin. You would slip your tattered card into her sock for safekeeping. And you would rest a while in the shade of her bottom.

  The line moves forward a few steps, and you collide with her feet, apologizing.

  As you put the food away, the radio is broadcasting the commentary on the French-Canadian Hilda Strike’s one hundred-metre dash at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

  At the whistle, Hilda is off like an arrow, a projectile; she splits the air, shaking off her adversaries, leaving them in her wake. In just two strides, she is already one metre ahead of her competitors.

  You freeze, a bag of sugar in your hands, suspended, caught up in Hilda’s flight.

  The Meteor from Montreal. The Canadian Comet.

  ‘Suzanne?’

  Your mother, annoyed that you’re just standing there.

  Hilda shatters the world record, she pulverizes her adversaries, she gulps in air as the astonished crowd looks on. ‘Hilda! Hilda! Hilda!’

  But barely fifteen metres from the finish line, Walsh, the Polish champion, catches up.

  The two women are neck and neck!

  Walsh gives it the rest of what she’s got and beats the French Canadian, barely two strides, just a few inches.

  Claudia turns off the radio and suggests you put the rest of the groceries away.

  Your eyes are watering. You could picture Hilda sprinting; you imagined her taking flight. She loses and suddenly, here you are, stuck in an ordinary living room, putting away your meagre provisions, with your mother avoiding your eyes.

  She doesn’t like displays of emotions. She is afraid of getting dragged along in their wake. She never looks a tear in the eye.

  To put an end to it, she opens the bag of sugar and holds it out to you, inviting you to dip your finger in. A rare dip you take advantage of. The sugar mixes with the saltiness of the few tears you shed.

  You ask your mother where Quebec is.

  Your mother points to the living room wall.

  ‘That way, I think.’

  You stare at the floral wallpaper.

  Which you imagine suddenly split open, torn apart by Hilda Strike’s meteoric entrance. In shorts and a tank top, muscular, gleaming with sweat.

  A trace of a smile on your face.

  One day you’ll go to Quebec, where the women run fast.

  Learn to express yourself properly and you will never be truly poor.

  Achilles Meloche

  This morning, you accompany your father, who is getting his hands dirty. He is in the second stage of dandelion picking. They have emptied the downtown of dandelions; now they are going to the edges of the country, where the city spills over.

  Sitting beside him in the Bennett buggy, you set your shoulders square with the sky. Achilles likes things straight. When you hunch, his large hand whacks you on the lower back.

  He says that Ontario French Canadians are people who stand tall. That’s what helps them survive.

  Sometimes you purposely hunch so he will touch you.

  The car moves forward, pulled by the horses, as rusty as the car itself.

  You like driving with Achilles because he talks to you. No: he makes you talk. It’s not so much what you say that interests him. But how you say it.

  He asks you to describe what you see. He makes you start over until the sentence is perfect. The best words, the best order, the best diction. Polished till it shines.

  Even if you’re describing something dirty.

  Today, Achilles stops the Bennett buggy in front of the Hole, a pile of mouldy, makeshift shelters. The smell of sardines and dried piss hangs in what is left of the air. Music – the Boswell Sisters? – crackles in the distance. A few scattered clotheslines stand watch over the rags of families in survival mode.

  The Hole looks like it’s a thousand years old, but it’s new. The Hole is one of the country’s first slums.

  Achilles parks his Bennett there and won’t let you avert your eyes. He wants you to l
ook at it.

  He wants you to find words you don’t know to describe it.

  You say: wood, scrap iron, horror. You say: rat, laughter, music. And then: sad, wet, end of the world.

  A child is walking barefoot through the mud.

  You say: ‘Daddy, I want to leave.’

  Achilles asks you what you’re afraid of.

  He won’t budge until you figure it out. Your six-year-old mind tries to put your finger on what is scaring you.

  The little boy holds out his hand to you. He wants money. You look down at your lap.

  You say you don’t know where to look, that everywhere you look you make the misery worse, you make it more real.

  The little boy is still holding out his dirty hand to you.

  You grab on to your father, beg for his help. Which he denies you.

  So you take the little’s boys hand in yours. And you introduce yourself using your school voice: ‘My name is Suzanne.’

  The little boy pulls away from you, running off into the meanderings of the Hole.

  Your father hails his old team of horses, which sets off again.

  He is satisfied.

  You have dipped your tongue in dirt.

  You leave the Hole and those rotting in it behind you. But there is an aftertaste of shit and lives with pieces missing.

  That’s what he wanted.

  He wanted you to taste it, to feel sick to your stomach, so that you would do anything to not end up there.

  A field of dandelions. Twenty or so men already hard at work. You hike up your skirt and get out of the car. You follow your father, who says hello in English to his brothers in misfortune.

  And you get down to work. You have to uproot the flower, attack it by the root. You want to be good; you work with both hands.

  Around you, the men are talking about this and that. English mixes with French. The vacant lot is soon rid of dandelions.

  A man watches you work. His eyes on your skin. A refuge for his virility. A space to be male in.