Suzanne Read online

  Hours pass but you don’t get tired, your body calmed by the forward movement.

  Anything is possible now.

  You stand, sovereign. And you walk slowly down the aisle of the rocking train. You are rooted, enduring.

  You take a look around. As you walk, you come across a man on his own, dozing.

  You sit next to him. Your thigh brushes his. You watch him sleep. His head bobs in time with the train. You gently take his jaw and move it toward the hollow of your shoulder, which you offer to him.

  He stays there for a while and then surfaces. You bore your eyes into him. You don’t need to smile at him. You introduce yourself: ‘I’m Suzanne.’

  He takes you in all at once, all of you, too much woman on offer to him. He stammers his name, which you don’t remember, because you don’t care. Finally you smile at him before getting up and moving on to another solitary man.

  The Salle du Gesù is full. It surprises you. All these young people spending an evening listening to others speak.

  The audience is facing an empty, plainly lit stage, onto which the speakers are already filing.

  Each speaker will make a speech, arguing an issue of their choice for ten minutes. What counts is style and rigour.

  A tall young man is already standing on the stage. He is wearing a black jacket that makes him look like he has broad shoulders, which he squares before the crowd, his torso on display.

  His thighs also seem slightly spread, giving the fleeting impression of a body in freefall. The audience is instinctively attentive, trying to catch him in mid-flight.

  The words flow from his mouth, slow and expansive, reaching audience members like smooth, viscous lava from a volcano.

  There is no escape.

  At the end of his speech, there is a moment of silence before the applause, the bodies stunned by the impact of the encounter.

  Leaning against a wall, you are moved. You can’t sum up what was said. It was something about systems of thought and worlds to invent.

  But the man, with his controlled freefall, has captivated you.

  It’s your turn. You walk the distance that separates you from the stage, and already you feel like you are foundering a little. You know your speech and you know you can deliver it.

  But suddenly the crowd seems alien to you. You don’t know if they like you. You haven’t had time to make sure.

  You climb the three steps and find yourself higher than all of them.

  At the back of the room, you see the man who, a few minutes before, controlled his fall so well. He is studying you. Yet his strength has an aura with a clear crack. Which you feed from.

  And you dive in. You are talking about the end of the war. Of the freedom it has brought women, who are finally out of the house. You know that this sounds shocking: a woman’s place is in the home.

  The words are formed round in your chest and grow moist in your mouth. You magnanimously send them out into the room; you offer them up. Here, come have a taste.

  People are listening to you, at first tentatively.

  You spontaneously stop for a moment. Something is missing. You pull out your red lipstick and excuse yourself as you paint your mouth crimson. You get a few laughs, just a few. You accept them. The lipstick is the elegance your words were missing. You change from a girl to a woman, and you pick up where you left off. The workers at your plant become more elegant, their gestures become more graceful, almost mesmerizing. A page of history has just turned. They can be women and factory workers.

  Everything about you speaks of a new era. You stand tall, and despite your diaphanous skin, it seems as though you have just invented the world. You talk about possibility, and it is moving that something huge and invisible is growing from such a slight presence.

  You finish. You get a standing ovation.

  You win the public speaking competition.

  The young man of the cleverly controlled fall comes to congratulate you. Even up close, he looks like he is falling. He introduces himself. His name is Claude Gauvreau.

  He invites you to spend the evening at his friends’ place. Delighted, you accept.

  In the living room of a small apartment on Rue de Mentana, a few young people are smoking and talking. Drawings are scattered on the floor.

  You immediately want to stay. To make this cloud of smoke, this circle of words, yours.

  There are around ten people, mainly boys, but you look at the girls first. There are three of them. They exude elegant simplicity. Claude introduces them. Marcelle Ferron, Françoise Sullivan, and Muriel Guilbault. They glance at you; they don’t feign warmth, but they invite you to sit down.

  The men are engaged in a lively discussion about the ink drawings strewn on the floor. They don’t look like anything you recognize. You could lose yourself in them. You understand that, beyond these walls, they would be considered offensive. You feel privileged to be spending time with the offenders.

  What is being discussed seems important, but the drawings are just tossed on the floor as fodder for discussion. You like this disconnect between the idea and the object.

  Claude, who seems to come down to the ground in this place, stops falling for a moment and introduces you to his brother, Pierre, and then Jean-Paul Riopelle and Marcel Barbeau. They are all around your age.

  Marcel asks about the public speaking competition. Claude shrugs and points at you.

  ‘I lost,’ he says.

  You know you should smile, but you tend to forget how in this sort of situation. So you just stay in the moment and let a brief silence of acknowledgement settle around you.

  Mr. Borduas, who you are told is the host, and who until now has kept to himself, approaches and offers you a glass of wine.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he says.

  He is about twenty years older than the others. He is short, with a prominent forehead and the sad eyes of the overly intelligent, which are tucked under bushy black eyebrows. You understand right away that he is the leader.

  And you want leaders to like you. You watch him. He withdraws, a little removed from the group of young people, where the conversation has resumed. They are discussing Jean-Paul’s latest ink drawings. Their explosive subjectivity. You understand nothing, but you could swim in these ideas for the rest of your life. They are exhilarating.

  Marcel reticently places a sketch on the floor. It’s his turn.

  There is a barrage of comments. No one says whether they like it or not. They are trying to get a word in about the abstraction. What is its source? Should it survive?

  You think it’s incredible. There is a rough sensuality you would happily stretch out in.

  Borduas approaches the circle. He glances at Marcel’s drawing; Marcel is on the edge of his seat waiting for him to speak. Then he looks at you. You have captured his attention.

  You say it’s beautiful. That you want to lie down and be swallowed up in it.

  Borduas laughs. A spontaneous, subdued laugh. It seems to happen rarely, because at first everyone is shocked, and then they all do the same.

  It’s midnight, and everyone seems to know it’s time to leave.

  The wine has brought you all closer together. Marcelle, who is feeling jovial, has taken you under her wing. She gives you a warm hug.

  Borduas retreated to his quarters after offering you Marcel’s drawing and saying good night. Marcel, curled up like a snail in its shell, hides behind the smoke. You ask him whether he wants you to have his drawing, which you like. He grumbles a hollow yes.

  Claude offers to walk you back to the station.

  On the platform, in the middle of the night, you agree to write to each other. It will change the course of your life.

  On the train back to Ottawa, you feel as though you are the only one moving and that everything else is standing still. The night outside is deep and radiant. You have Marcel’s hypnotic drawing tucked in your pocket. You have a geyser in your stomach and there is nothing around you to stop its gushing.<
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  You knew nothing about Montreal. Aside from Hilda Strike and snippets about Duplessis.

  You still don’t know much more than that. Except that a door has opened onto bodies in motion, bellowing in a cloud of smoke, sipping and sharing wine, reflecting on arcane, appealing shapes.

  These people have rekindled your interest in others.

  You were an island, and now you feel like you might have a country.

  You return home ecstatic. Things go back to normal, but you navigate them differently. Swimming with the current. Now you know that there is somewhere else out there for you.

  What you don’t know is that there will always be somewhere else, and never the same place. That will be your undoing.

  You receive a letter from Claude. He kept his promise. With a friendly, uncompromising pen, he rails against the repressive climate that surrounds him. He rants against the Padlock Law, passed to fight communism, which holds his artistic pursuits in contempt. He seems to enjoy being an agitator.

  In a passionate postscript, he encourages you to read Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Maldoror being the devil’s alter ego. Excited by the idea of reading everything ever written by an author banned by Duplessis, Claude has taken him for his hero and proudly admits that he has managed to get his hands on a copy.

  He includes a few excerpts for you. It’s repulsive and modern. You don’t like it. And you tell yourself that you would have banned it too.

  All the same, the daring speaks to you. But what wins you over is Claude’s mischievous enthusiasm. He is quenching your thirst.

  It was a spring day. Birds spilled out their warbling canticles, and humans, having answered their various calls of duty, were bathing in the sanctity of fatigue. Everything was working out its destiny: trees, planets, sharks. All except the Creator!

  He was stretched out on the highway, his clothing torn. His lower lip hung down like a soporific cable. His teeth were unbrushed, and dust clogged the blond waves of his hair. Numbed by torpid drowsiness, crushed against the pebbles, his body was making futile efforts to get up again. His strength had left him, and he lay there weak as an earthworm, impassive as treebark.

  [...]A passing man stopped in front of the unappreciated Creator and, to applause from crab-louse and viper, crapped three days upon that august countenance!

  You learn that thousands of bodies have been incinerated. That they left on trains, alive, with their families. That they didn’t come back.

  People are hinting about it behind closed doors. It seems that a fine rain of white ashes fell on neighbouring cities.

  The huge gulf that separated you from the horror gets wider in your chest.

  Did people get out their umbrellas? Or stick out their curious tongues, letting the metallic taste of the fate of those people settle on them?

  For the past few days, people have been singing and hugging in the streets. The war is over. Mothers are being reunited with their sons and women with their lovers.

  At first, you applied yourself when you wrote to him. You polished your syntax and narrative. You wanted him to know that it mattered.

  Then, inspired by his writing, you slowly let loose. Strange words started coming together, ideas melting into one another and becoming blurred, even your penmanship grew untamed.

  He read your letters and enjoyed them. An invisible drawbridge now connected you.

  May 10, 1945

  Dear Claude,

  Your letter was such a treat, torrential and mad.

  You inspire me to take risks and I plunge.

  My cold hand like an earthquake.

  Torment contained.

  The victories stillborn in the gloom hum an uncontrollable smile.

  A finger trembles on the verge.

  I want to touch the wound like a down cushion.

  Here is the back of my hand,

  Like a liqueur.

  Suzanne

  You get a letter from Montreal. Not from Claude, but from Collège Marguerite-Bourgeoys, where you have been accepted. You will study classics.

  You know that you will never come home. And you don’t hide it. Everything about you is saying goodbye. The way you look at your sisters, and then your brothers, lingering too long. Your half-smile to your motionless mother, who won’t meet your eyes, who is constantly trying to hold back tears. Your subtle, awkward gesture to smooth her wrinkled apron rather than hugging her. Then, the coldness you slowly let settle in between you and them. It emanates from you, from an arctic, glacial, brittle source. The ties freeze and crystallize: you find the power inside you to make a clean break.

  Your stony eyes bore into those of Achilles, with his tousled hair and scratchy beard. This time, he would like to keep you close by. But he nods his head, a feeble protest against the oppressive stillness of goodbyes. And with a heavy, loving gesture, he points to the door. He is letting you go, with the regret of a fisherman throwing back his best catch. This one was too wild for him.

  Steeped in pride, you walk through the door without tripping.

  Then, you turn gracefully and head back toward the piano. You play a scale on it, standing, as you and your mother avoid looking at each other one last time. You play a legato scale, holding down the pedal to make it resonate.

  Not so much as a challenge. More as an invitation.

  1946–1952

  There is something about Montreal that is like you. Maybe the language in part. With your love of words, you feel at home here.

  Unlike on your side of the river, French is praised and appreciated here. It is celebrated at conferences; societies are founded to defend it, preserve it, purify it …

  Your father would be proud to see you immersed in a place where your language is thought of as special.

  You explore the city on Claude’s arm. He takes you everywhere. He has the long stride of the men who cleared the land. It’s as if he is stepping over a river or a ditch with each stride. You do your best to follow him, your arm hooked through his.

  He cleaves the air, his head down. He explodes, in torrents, against everything, against everyone, and mostly against himself.

  It makes you laugh, but he doesn’t notice, he is so consumed by his passionate flights of oratory. When he stops to catch his breath, you step into his line of sight, wanting to remind him you are there. And when you manage to get him to see you, when his focus is finally on you, you don’t know what to do with yourself. You look for something to do. You look for something to say. You are intimidated not so much by him, but by this new life of yours, which you still know nothing about. You feel like a child who has bitten off more than she can chew. It excites you and scares you.

  You travel the city by streetcar, with no particular destination in mind. Claude is your guide, unwrapping the city for you as he talks, like an endless gift.

  You jump from one streetcar to another. You slip between the strange bodies. You wrap yourself in their nameless presence. You lean against the travellers, pressing your neck or the curve of your back against a shoulder or a hip.

  You like feeling the weight of other people on you. You leave your imprint on them. Leave it on stranger after stranger. It’s your way of making your mark on the new landscape.

  You get off the streetcar at random, go into a stationery store and try all the pencils by writing verses in four hands, take a detour down an alley where time stands still while a withered woman slowly trims her eggplant blossoms with the care of a lacemaker, then you climb up to the roofs to see the city into night, sharing a Du Maurier between you.

  One evening, Claude takes you to La Hutte, a little bar downtown. His friends are waiting there for him.

  You are nervous about being in front of all these strangers. You feel as though you are trailing sludge behind you. As if everything about you has nothing to say.

  La Hutte is a warm place. You are reassured as you walk in. Long tables are lined up, with groups of young people sitting at them, sharing a single warm beer that
makes the rounds for hours.

  It’s a place for poor people to enjoy themselves. A place where they are left alone. You are entitled to be there.

  You hide behind Claude, who is striding across oceans to reach the table.

  You are surrounded by beautiful faces. Some of them are familiar.

  Abandoning you to your fate, Claude sits beside Muriel, whom you recognize from Borduas’s studio. You feel lost. You hesitate between doing an about-face and taking off your sweater to flash your breasts.

  Marcelle turns toward you, and, with an animated gesture, invites you to sit down. The beer has landed in front of you, and she offers you a sip.

  ‘Hurry, before it gets passed on!’

  You sit down. Your legs are nice and warm under the table. Marcelle’s slender, fidgety body is a counterpoint to yours. And, slowly, you put down roots.

  There is a bluish sandwich in the centre of the table. In a stream of words that collide between Marcelle’s thin lips, she explains that it’s a Duplessis sandwich.

  You have to eat to drink here. So the same baloney sandwich on white bread has been sitting as a foil in the middle of the table. For days, maybe weeks. It’s become the bar mascot.

  Marcelle makes your head spin with happy chatter that warms you and that, gently, helps you settle in.

  Marcel is across from you, still brooding. He is not looking at you. He is concentrating on the serious arguments being made by Jean-Paul, who is tall, reaching to the sky, with an angular face and dark eyes that seem to be looking beyond the walls.

  Marcelle elbows you, amused.

  ‘So, which one do you want?’ she asks, looking mischievous.

  You like this girl already.