For Sure (13 page)

“And if I say
j(e)
?”

“Black.”

“And
j(i)
?”

Étienne immediately saw the red of the
i
attenuate the black of the
j
.

“It's still a bit black, but wid some red.”

Zablonski noted the result for the sake of form, but he had already drawn his conclusion.

“And
p(e)
. . .”

. . .

“
P(e)
. . .”

Le Petit Étienne shrugged. Was he beginning to tire of the game?

“Black.”

Zablonski picked up the pace:

“
P(u)
?”

The boy shot back without hesitation:

“Black an' blue.”

Zablonski was satisfied. More than satisfied.

“That's very good. Very, very good. Are you hungry?”

Faure's
History of Art
rubbed elbows with Klee's
Journal
and André Malraux's
Voices of Silence
. Present also were Matisse and Rodin, and an eighteenth-century Chinese work entitled
Thoughts on the Paintings of the Bitter Gourd Monk.

Anyone who so desires can find the complete works of Voltaire on the web in French. Here then, without explicit permission, is an excerpt from his
Philosophical Dictionary
, as translated by Robert Majzels:

“
Tapestry (Tapisserie, s.f.)
, work done on a loom or needlework to cover the walls of a room. Loom tapestries are either high- or low-warp weaving: to make a high-warp weaving, the weaver copies the painted design placed next to him or her; but for low-warp weaving, the design is beneath the loom, and the artisan unrolls the painting as needed: both techniques employ a shuttle. Needlework tapestries are called needlepoint, because needle stitches are used. Large-stitch tapestry contains the widest spaces between stitches, and is cruder; tent-stitch or petitpoint tapestry is the opposite to large stitch. Gobelins, Flanders, and Beauvais tapestries are all high-warp weaving. In the past, gold and silk threads were used; but gold turns white, and silk becomes lusterless. Colours last longer on wool.

Needlepoint tapestries from Hungary are made of long, loose stitches of various colours; they are quite common and inexpensive. Nature tapestries may contain some small-scale figures and still be called “Verdure.” Oudri initiated the fashion of animal figures in tapestries, and these are highly prized. Gobelins tapestries are copies of masterpieces by the greatest painters. Tapestries are classified as pieces, and are sold by the piece; they are measured according to their width in ells. Several pieces draped in a room are called a wall covering. They can be hung and unhung, fixed by nails, or the nails may be removed. Today, small selvages are more valued than large ones. All manner of fabrics can be used for tapestry: damask, satin, velvet, and serge (twill). Work on golden leather is also called
tapestry
. There are beautiful tapestry armchairs, splendid tapestry sofas woven in petitpoint, made either through high- or low-warp weaving.

Tapissier
: m.n., is the craftsman (the tapestry weaver); he or she is known by no other name in Flanders. The appelation also refers to the worker who hangs tapestries in a residence, or upholsters furniture. There are also manservants who are
tapissiers
.”

The two Étiennes sat by the large window, eating cookies and drinking milk. They were quiet, each resting and reflecting on his discoveries. Le Grand Étienne, lost in thoughts of colours and letters, ate almost automatically. The boy took the time to pry the thin wafers apart and lick the cream between the layers.

Three and four are the numbers that appear most often as the first word in the 2,401 titles of
La Bibliothèque idéale
. Three and its derivatives (trilogy, trinity, tripod, thirteen) appear in 20 titles, while four and its derivatives (forty, quartet, quatuor,
quatre-vingt,
or eighty) entitle 10. Five and six each appear in 5 titles, and two and eight in 1 each. No titles begin with the numbers seven or nine. The numeral 1, by definition indefinite, was not included in the above compilation.

“Doesn't means de same ting, seems to me.”

“Wot's dat?”

Pomme had just joined Zed and Terry at the Babar.

“Proverb I heard dat stuck in me head.”

Pomme enjoyed anything that offered a bit of resistance.

“Go on den, shoot.”

“De dogs howl, de caravan passes.”

Pomme thought hard. Terry added:

“Some folks say de dogs howl, de caravan advances.”

“Well, right der, dat don't mean de same ting, now does it? Passes, dat means goes off someplace way over der.”

Zed jumped in:

“Or could be it passes right on troo.”

“Well, in a way. And advances, well, dat means it's comin' right at us, now don't it?”

Something else occurred to Zed:

“Unless yer de one sittin' up on de camel.”

But Terry was in a hurry to get to the punch line of his story:

“Well, in de beginning, I can tell ya, I tawt it meant dat while some folks go about whining over der lot in life, udders just go on der way and dey ends up right where dey wanted to get. In udder words, dey does what needs doin' and udder folks can tink or say wot dey please, tanks very much.”

Pomme having agreed with his interpretation, Terry added:

“Well, now I's wonderin' if it mightn't mean that dose dogs barking, means dey don't bite. So der's no danger passin'. Or advancin' eider, fer dat matter. Passin' or advancin' don't make no difference no how.”

Pomme found Terry's alternate interpretation made sense, too, but suddenly he had a doubt:

“An' how does you know dogs dat bark doesn't bite?”

Terry had to admit:

“Anudder proverb.”

In fact, the number should be 2,405 titles rather than 2,401, because 2 of the 49 categories in
La Bibliothèque idéale
list 51 instead of 49 books. In the category of “Politics,” not one but three of Jean-François Revel's books are included just as three of Molière's comedies are listed in the category “Laughter.”

“Little Rock! Like de Denis Richard song!”

And the girl sang the end of the famous chorus
at the foot of a rock in Little Rock
over Johnny Haliday's hit single “Black is Black
.”

“What did ya say yer name was, girl?”

“Melanie Frenette!”

“And wot is it you do fer a livin'?”

“I was a social worker! I've only been in Moncton for eight months now, and I lived half my life in Edmunston. Great music, eh?”

Now the crowd was cheering a song by Moncton's Idea of North that DJ Bones usually held back until the hall was good and warmed up. After dancing:

“I was president of the August 15 Committee in Edmunston the year they decided to hold the Acadian Tintamarre parade. I spent half my time arguing you do the Tintamarre on foot, not in cars. We ended up doing it on foot. There were forty-seven of us.”

. . .

“Year after that, they did it in cars. There were twenty of them.”

At some point, it would be useful to know that
c/s
means “cans per second.”

In Acadian, words ending in
o-i-r
are more often pronounced “
ouère
” or “ware” rather than “
oué
” or “way.” The word
miroir
, for example, is occasionally pronounced as “
miroué
” or “meerway,” but more often “
mirouère
” or “meerware.” In this context, the
w
(double
u
) could easily replace the sound “
ou.
” Many Acadian pronunciations follow neither the spelling nor the sound dictated by what is commonly referred to as standard French.

“At first, when I read
mirwère
, I 'ad no clue wot dey was talkin' about.”

One last inference deduced from the pourpre.com site: the 13 first letters of the French alphabet introduce into language an army of colours twice as large as the entire second half of the alphabet, that is 189 versus 92.

“Are you one of dose dat read all de Scrabble words, den?”

“Are you daft?”

leeks and parsley cleave

the furrows of November

winter marches nie

As he munched on his cookies, Le Grand Étienne eventually found himself thinking about something other than colours. He was imagining what it might have been like for him to have a child. He thought of it as he'd never thought of it before. In other words, he was thinking about it as though he were thinking about a new colour, a new texture.

Of Lacan's works,
La Bibliothèque idéale
suggests
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar – Book XI).

“Fer example, we might be sayin' sometin' like de pot's found its cover.”

“I remembers me mudder sayin' sometin' like dat.”

“Well, some folks even say dat different. Over in France, dey says ‘to each his cover,' wot's pretty close to the same ting.”

“I suppose, only seems to me dat would be more like de cover on a mason jar.”

“Dat's wot I sees, as well.”

Terry had given up on using the standard French word
couvercle
for cover when he was talking with Zed and Pomme, even though he sometimes used it in front of the children.

“Well, in Turkey, dey says like de pot, like de cover, wot sounds mighty close to like fawder like son, right?”

Zed and Pomme were waiting for what Terry would come up with next.

“Den, der's de Arabs, dey says that every beard has its comb.”

“Hahaha!”

“An' de Greeks, dey says that de pot finds its cover when she's rolling, wot conjures up de dish ran away wit de spoon.”

. . .

. . .

“I ain't boring youse, am I? ”

Two simple equations illustrate the flexibility and constance of the number 12:

a)

b)

Inevitably, as they went to and fro among the customers, the waitresses and waiters picked up snippets of conversation they could not resist sharing with their colleagues. This complicity was part of the social benefits of the Babar.

“He didn't!”

“I swears to God!”

“Poor ting!”

“I'm tellin' you, she looked like she'd been hauled troo a knot hole . . .”

“Well, I'm goin' straight home after work and warn me boyfriend right der, if ever ee's a mind to ditch me, ee better not be doin' it in a bar.”

Letters as we know them are essentially what remains of figurative lines that survived the images that were rejected, forgotten or repressed. Whereas words — groupings of letters — recover, silence, dissimulate what we humans are incapable of admitting.

Browsing
La Bibliothèque idéale
took Élizabeth's breath away. Where did this strange and marvellous upheaval she felt come from? How did these signs laid down across the page manage to implode the void and explode everything around her?

To pay her way through school and to provide for her child, a young mother had come up with the idea of tinkering with a cigarette making machine to produce a short filtered cigarette. She sold these discretely in restaurants and bars, in packages of six for two dollars, the way other women sold roses. At that price, smokers were quick to snap them up, others bought them as local artisanal products, souvenirs, oddities, or to eventually offer them as gifts.