Collected Later Novels Read online

  All the precautions seem to have been taken: shutters and curtains carefully closed, key turned twice in the lock and left conspicuously inside the room. Only the night light on the bedside table casts its little yellow glow into the darkness. The room’s four corners are filled with softly moving shadows.

  Safe from both the dead and the living, Julien stretches out on his bed. The French money seems real to him now that he thinks he has lost a banknote. His meagre savings are shrinking before his very eyes and soon he’ll have to go home, poorer than a church mouse.

  Julien flings aside the bolster that makes his neck ache. Lying perfectly flat on the bed, arms crossed above his head, he goes over the state of his finances which strike him as catastrophic. Even though he grasps at concrete problems, when sleep comes to blunt his vigilance, images submerge him.

  A tall girl with long black hair appears briefly, calls him by name, “Dear little Julien,” laughs and laughs, then flies into the shadows of the room, only to reappear with the features of the woman from Les Billettes. While his mother, huge and sacred and surrounded by clouds of smoke, takes up all the space next to his bed, leans forward and sends spirals of Virginia tobacco smoke out her nose and mouth. She maintains that Lydie is cursed and that he must avoid her like the plague — and any other creature who resembles her.

  He is an old adolescent falling asleep in a strange city. Soon, in his sleep, he turns towards his early childhood, that blessed time before Lydie first appeared. He wraps himself in his sheet and hides his face. Already he can hear quite clearly, from the other side of the world, the sound of the evening angelus in the church at Duchesnay.

  II

  It is the hour for bringing the cows in from the fields for milking. Whole herds are ambling down the sandy roads in single file, while barefoot children with sticks and with long green poles covered with leaves follow behind the cows, crying:

  “Ke-bossy, ke . . .”

  Julien is eight years old. He is holding the hand of his little sister, who is six. Here they are on this road, as they are every evening, charged by their mother with fetching the mail from the post office in the railway station. Both are very frightened by this procession of ruminants, pure white or russet or spotted rust and white, that pour onto the road, herd upon herd, with a stirring of bells. At the risk of ruining their white sandals, the two children stand by the side of the road, their feet in the stream, waiting for the herds to pass. They particularly fear cows that jump fences and those with yokes around their necks that may at any moment charge like bulls, amid a savage lowing and a cloud of dust.

  They have spied her in the distance, walking briskly down the road to meet them, her long navy cape unfurled around her, and their panicky hearts are calmed at once.

  She leads them away at a run, turning her back on the station, pulling them firmly by the hand without slowing her pace. They can hear her powerful breathing, feel the warmth of her kindled by running; the woolen cape brushes their cheeks and they inhale its smell.

  Pauline, winded, says once again that those piggish farmers are bringing their cows in later and later, that now they’ll have to wait and fetch the mail long after six o’clock.

  She is travelling so fast they have trouble following her. Her only thought is to make herself and her children safe once and for all from these cattle that stream through the countryside night after night, on the stroke of six.

  From the ground where his mother let it fall, Julien has picked up the navy wool cape with its big collar of grey angora. It’s a habit he has developed — to pick up whatever she drops anywhere in the house. He hangs the cape behind the bedroom door among the masses of garments and linen flung onto nails in the wall. There are no closets or cupboards in the house. This was at the blessed time when Pauline still wore dresses, skirts, petticoats.

  The little boy takes an inventory of the clothes behind the door. Both hands press the calico faded from washing and the sun. He recognizes the skirts and blouses and buries his face in their folds and gathers. With eyes closed as if he was sleeping, he savours the smell of his mother’s soap and perfume. He can vaguely hear Pauline in the kitchen, working the pump and grumbling because the water won’t come at her bidding.

  Behind the bedroom door, piles of sundry objects are strewn across the floor. Usually this disorder is hidden because Pauline keeps the door firmly shut. Sometimes you have to push quite hard to squeeze everything inside. Open it too fast and everything comes tumbling out, as if a dam has given way.

  She has no control over the things around her. Anything that can be touched, taken, moved, washed, put away gradually escapes her, like stubborn weeds that spring up where they will. Clumsy hands. Her heart is elsewhere. She breaks things, is impatient and awkward. Her relationships with objects are marked by suspicion and testiness. Only her two children seem to guarantee her a certain hold over the hostile and elusive earth. Not until Julien’s birth did she begin to wield some power, not over the rebellious objects in her house or her runaway husband, but over a human being who was well and truly hers, who had emerged from her womb.

  Two years later, Hélène was born. Pauline, confirmed in grace, now held in her arms a second creature, warm with her own heat. Breaking free of the vague and misty universe that had been hers since childhood, she was suddenly like a pauper who moves from utter destitution to the undivided wealth of the world.

  Pauline, her two children huddled in her skirts, declared quite freely to anyone who would listen:

  “I cram them with affection, they can’t defend themselves.”

  She says “Julien,” she says “Hélène,” with something like childish arrogance. The pleasure she derives from naming her two children brings a gleam to her small grey eyes, between pale lashes. But the rest of the world, herself included, remains for Pauline a kind of formless magma to be designated by a vague “somebody.” She says:

  “There’s somebody who came and barked under my window this morning . . . There’s somebody who took off for who knows where and left their wallet on the chest of drawers . . . There’s somebody who backed the wrong party — as usual.”

  Whether she is talking about the neighbour’s dog, her own husband, or a well-known political figure, the only identification she needs is that one word. One day she cut her finger on a broken bottle and the blood ran onto her dress. She said in her muted voice, barely audible:

  “Somebody’s cut their finger.”

  ✦✦✦

  From the very beginning, Julien was loved more than anyone in the world. He experienced that overwhelming happiness from his first breath.

  One day he was the child taken from the mother’s darkness who cries for the first time. It happened in a little village called Duchesnay, on the shore of a river of the same name. His mother’s name was Pauline Lacoste and she had been married one year before to Henri Vallières, a minor official at the city hall in Quebec.

  The child had been born by the glow of an oil lamp, in a tiny frame house at the edge of a sandy road, just next to the bakery. Tall poplars, their silver leaves in constant motion, isolated the house and provided it with a kind of rustling shelter filled with the aroma of fresh-baked bread. An Irishman named Pat Karl rented his little house to Julien’s parents. Penny by penny, Pauline had saved twenty-five dollars — the rental fee for the summer months.

  The young woman wanted to provide her firstborn with pure country air from his very first breath. She who knew only the city was terrified of mosquitoes, ants, wasps, spiders, caterpillars, potato beetles, and all the insects the country is teeming with. At that time, though, when the threat of tuberculosis made mothers tremble, she thought it was the best way to offer her child a good start in life. The first air he breathed should protect him from all the germs to come.

  However, despite her vain attempts to “get a grip on herself,” as she put it, the leas
t moth sputtering above the lamp before it dropped into the fire filled her with disgust and terror. The utter lack of comfort, the cold water, the absence of electricity or a bathroom, the pump in the kitchen, the wood stove, the stench of the outhouse hidden in the trees behind the house, tempted her sorely, every day, to return to Quebec City with her child in her arms, wanting to share a tranquil urban life with him until the end of her days.

  There was no doctor serving the village. But Pauline’s doctor had promised to come from Quebec as soon as they phoned him from the general store.

  The road from Quebec City to Duchesnay was long and arduous in those days, covered with sand and pebbles and often flooded when the river overflowed its banks. Not knowing if he should be more concerned about the sand and pebbles or the river in spate, Doctor Fortin listened closely to the engine of his highly polished black Ford as if he was sounding a human heart in great danger of sudden death. All the way there he grumbled at that stubborn little bourgeois, Pauline Vallières, and her ludicrous insistence on giving birth in the middle of nowhere, like some poor farmer’s wife.

  “It’s a boy!”

  She looks at him and despite her weakness and her broken body she has never looked so intensely at anything or anyone. It’s a tiny creature, red and creased, that the doctor holds out to her, yet Pauline recognizes at once her most precious possession, flesh of her flesh, delivered and brought into the world at last. The confused feeling that swells her eyelids and makes her cry seems like an odd mixture of love and dread.

  That night she had a dream. A blind kitten, still sticky from its birth, was lying in her hand, no bigger than a mouse. She alone had the power to drown it or to let it live.

  Two years later, amid the same pain and sorrow, Pauline gave birth to a second child in Pat Karl’s little house that she’d rented for the summer.

  While the doctor still held the howling, naked little Hélène in his arms, against his white smock, Pauline knew that she now possessed her full share of life and the plenitude of her heart. Of what importance to her now were the inadequacies of the poor pale man who stood with arms dangling, planted like a fence post on the little wooden stoop, ears pricked up and waiting patiently until the noises of birth had abated so he could finally learn the sex and the weight of his child?

  Bending over Julien’s cradle and Hélène’s in turn, Pauline watches at the bedside of her own childhood. Everything between her and her children takes place as if the goal was to right the wrong done in another life to a little girl named Pauline Lacoste. That little girl has been shunted from town to town, from one boarding school to another, summer and winter, school holidays or not, her parents having little time between moves for more than a stormy tête-à-tête and a brief reconciliation between the sheets.

  If Henri sometimes tries to approach his son or his daughter, Pauline shoos him away like a troublesome fly. It’s never the right time and besides, she tells herself, he doesn’t know how to go about it.

  Summer faithfully brings the Vallières family back to the river. They have already moved several times, Pat Karl’s house having proven too small. The children are growing so quickly. But Pauline seems not to notice. She cannot see her son and her daughter being gradually transformed before her eyes. All of Pauline’s efforts are aimed at maintaining the utmost transparency between her children and herself.

  “Tell me always where you are going, what you are doing, what you are thinking, and I’ll listen to you and ask you questions till the sun comes up, if need be. I must know what interests you, what bothers you. I’m there to listen and to hear whatever goes through your minds.”

  For her part, she would tell them about the father who got on her nerves till she could kill him, the pink crétonne fabric she’d just bought in the village, the jam she would make tomorrow, and the small cyst that had appeared on her left breast.

  They in return had no peace until they’d opened their hearts to her satisfaction; having no real secrets yet, they willingly went along with the apparently innocuous game. It only made her love them more and she was grateful to them.

  The world that the three of them lived in, with the father increasingly in the background, more and more interested in cards and dice, kept them isolated from the world at large. It might have seemed that real life was just that — an endless childhood, a kind of hanging garden, suspended between earth and sky, where mother and children played, safe from pain and sorrow and from death.

  It was Pauline, however, who committed the first transgression against the customs of childhood. Giving up skirts and petticoats, she now only wore men’s trousers, somewhat shapeless after her husband’s long use. These coarse cotton garments, Henri’s castoffs softened by frequent washings, now clothed her all summer, supposedly to protect her from mosquitoes and blackflies. If by any chance her husband wrapped a tired arm around her waist and looked longingly at her, she would offer as excuse that it was a nuisance having to unfasten the firmly buckled belt.

  To the horror of the local farmers, she travelled down roads and across fields dressed snugly in her husband’s trousers, the two children dogging her footsteps, and she was growing fatter by the day. For some time now she had been smoking Players, inhaling greedily, and she reeked of tobacco.

  At night before going to sleep, after one last cigarette, it seemed to her that the smell of tobacco wrapped her in a soft shroud, a kind of diaphanous armour that protected her from her husband’s advances. Had he not told her one day, turning away in disgust:

  “You stink of tobacco like a man!”

  After that, Pauline had her hair shorn like a little boy who drives the cattle out to pasture, and her husband realized that he’d made a bad marriage to this woman who went out of her way to displease him.

  Henri Vallières consoles himself with beer and cards. In the dark, noisy tavern he knows he’s alive, half dissolved in an alcoholic haze, but alive: he can feel his arms and legs and tells himself again and again, I can walk wherever I want, go where I want, I can put my arms around whatever unknown woman I want.

  When he had been so hopelessly offended that he had to leave his wife and children, Henri saddled himself with suitcases and a big wicker basket in which he transported the family cat. He left a note for Pauline. She didn’t seem surprised. Perhaps she’d even been expecting this farewell message since the early days of her marriage.

  Wife, I’m leaving you. You probably won’t even notice, you’ve got so good at managing without me except when it comes time to do the accounts. Send me the bills as they come in, I’ll deal with them. Be happy. I’m going away. You can live your life now as if I didn’t exist. I’m taking the cat.

  Love,

  Henri

  She sent him the bills and she waited for payments. The wait grew longer and longer until, three years later, there was no longer any answer from Henri at all. Pauline’s letters were returned, marked “Unknown at this address.” Then she got the idea of baking cakes and selling them. But she ruined half of them and wasted quantities of eggs and flour. She’d just been considering hiring herself out body and soul to scrub floors and scour sinks, to get rid of other people’s grime, when she came into a small inheritance. A forgotten aunt who had died in St. Bridgid’s Home had bequeathed her the meagre fortune of a stingy old maid.

  At night it sometimes happened, in the solitude of her double bed, that she had a dream, always the same one, which she’d forget by the time she wakened. All that remained was a sensation of infinite pity, for herself and for the poor man who had left her.

  ✦✦✦

  One day Hélène and Julien were fourteen and sixteen years old. It was the year of the big polio epidemic.

  When the opening of school in Quebec City was postponed because of the epidemic, Pauline kept the children in the country as long as possible, so great was her fear.

  Every day after s
chool the teacher came to the house to give Hélène and Julien private lessons.

  Pauline boiled the water and the milk and she forbade her children to eat any high-bush cranberries, bitter berries that thicken the mouth and tongue. Rumour had it that the disease could be spread by the little wild fruits that grow at summer’s end in the hedges lining the fields.

  At first it was as if the holidays would go on forever. The air you breathed was still clear, but every now and then some mist crept into it. Soon she would have to light the oil lamp above the supper table.

  Hélène and Julien were well aware that in spite of the violent brilliance of sunlight on trees that sometimes made them light up like fires, a new season was insidiously establishing its reign all around them. Some mornings were cottony with mist, with frost as white as sugar on the flattened grass and the dark ploughed fields.

  It was at the time of year when the earth was damp that fresh hoof prints were discovered one morning in the fields around the village and all the way to the little cemetery by the river, close to the church. Great amazement, then superstitious fear clutched at the throats of farmers who lived on the back roads, when some of them discovered at dawn that their horse was in his stall as usual, but exhausted and covered with foam as if after a long run.

  The curé began to bless the stables and the horses, accompanying his benedictions with the appropriate prayers. The mayor recommended that stables be barricaded for the night. The men stood watch, relieving one another in the black autumn night. But there were no more strange occurrences, and it was as if the entire matter of the horses had been only a dream by the inhabitants of Duchesnay.

  ✦✦✦

  It was in full daylight that she was seen for the first time, astride a dappled horse that belonged to Zoël Ouellet, at whose house she’d been staying for a while now. The weather was splendid, with a hard blue sky of the kind you sometimes see during Indian summer, and lots of little fleecy white clouds that chased each other in the blue air. The horse was trotting along the street that led to the church, and the bare legs of the girl riding it bareback were spread far apart over the plough-horse’s tremendous girth.