For Sure (24 page)

“Saint Theresa, she's de one lyin' down. She was sick a lot.”

Indeed, Étienne had noticed a second woman dressed in white and carrying a bowl that resembled the one Carmen would take out when someone looked like they might vomit.

“Did she have a bellyache, den?”

“She coughed a lot and spit up blood.”

Then Granny Thibodeau added, as though by virtue of this detail, the saint had managed to have her sickness pardoned:

“But she loved roses.”

Yes, Étienne had also noticed the beautiful purple roses in several of the stainglass windows. Granny Thibodeau concluded:

“Dat's de reason dey puts a wooden rosetta on all de benches.”

Étienne had often let his fingers run along the edges of the rosettas without making the link between these and the roses in the windows.

“Eighth station: Jesus meets de women of Jerusalem in tears.

Étienne thought that must be the name of those long dresses they were wearing.

Agony = no end in sight. In Terry's notebook.

“Mom, are you scared of crows, den?”

Étienne and Carmen were gathering stones along the shore when a screeching crow alighted on the edge of the cliff.

“No. I don't much like 'em, but dey don't frighten me.”

“You don't like de way dey croak?”

“No, I don't like wot dey eat.”

Étienne was almost blown over:

“You doesn't like French fries, Mom?!”

The question took Carmen by surprise, but rather than dwelling on it, she answered quickly, hoping to cut short the unpleasant image:

“No, I don't like dead animals on de side of de road.”

After that, in Étienne's eyes, crows took on a more human aspect, as meat and potato eaters.

In his
Glossaire acadien
(
Acadian Glossary
), Pascal Poirier explains that it was graphists who preferred the word
seau
to
siau (bucket)
. Many words ending in
-eau
were pronounced
-iau
in the sixteenth century. Rabelais was somewhere in between, with
seillau
. The
Grand Robert
dictionary has conserved
seille
and its derivatives
seillée
and
seilleau
, a
seille
being a wooden bucket with ears through which to pass a rope, similar to Évangéline's bucket at the Acadian Memorial in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia.

Even as she waited on tables, Lisa-M. took the time to chat with friends.

“Is dat Patrick over der wid Jeannine? I tot ee was seein' someone else?”

Chantal replied bluntly:

“Dey must've changed 'is medication.”

When Lisa-M. took this as a joke, Chantal insisted:

“I's serious, girl. Ee was goin' wid Jeannine last year, when dey put 'im on Zoloft. Well, after a while, the boy starts self-mutilatin' — ee's tearin' at de skin under 'is feet 'til it bleeds. — yoye! gross! — so dey switches 'im onto Effexor. Two weeks after dat, ee breaks it off with Jeannine an' starts goin' wid Nadine. But seems Effexor wasn't doin' de trick, so dey puts 'im on Paxil. Two weeks after dat, ee breaks up wid Nadine an' starts seein' Charline, off an' on like. But den, maybe two munts goes by an' ee just about freaks out on de Paxil, so dey takes 'im back to de psychiatric ward where dey cleans out 'is system an puts 'im right back on Zoloft, only tree times de dose dis time. Ee told me, 'twas a lucky ting ee was sleepin', on account of ee never would 'ave let dem. Well, turns out dat worked. So, 'ere ee is back wid Jeannine, wot makes sense.”

“Poor boy!”

“Poor girls!”

“Poor doctors!”

Compassion, the virtue most associated with Buddhism, comes in eighth place in Comte-Sponville's scale.

Terry was also granted a tour of his collection of watches frozen in time, with or without bracelets.

“An' where does ee get all dis stuff?”

“Don't know. Might be some folks finds 'em for 'im.”

Carmen wasn't sure what to think. Was the man a little bit nuts?

“Naw, I don't tink so.”

“Might be, he's just bored.”

Terry didn't think so.

To the 14 works that turn out to be la
crème de la crème
of
La Biblioth
è
que idé
a
le
and of the “Ideal Library of the Social Sciences” one can add 44 other highly regarded titles:
The Opium of the Intellectuals
and
Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations
by Raymond Aron;
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
by Gaston Bachelard;
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
by
Gregory Bateson;
The System of Objects
by Jean Baudrillard;
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir;
Creative Evolution
by Henri Bergson;
The Empty Fortress
by
Bruno Bettelheim;
The Inheritors
by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron;
The Making of Late Antiquity
by Peter Brown;
The Normal and the Pathological
by Georges Canguilhem;
Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind
by Jean-Pierre Changeux;
Society Against the State
by Pierre Clastres;
La Peur en Occident
(
Fear in the West
) by Jean Delumeau;
The Flower of Chivalry
by Georges Duby;
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
by Emile Durkheim;
Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage
by Jeanne Favret-Saada;
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century
by Lucien Febvre;
Against Method
by Paul Feyerabend;
The Order of Things
and
The History of Madness
by Michel Foucault;
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
by Erwing Goffman;
The Hidden God
by Lucien Goldmann;
The Horse of Pride
by Pierre-Jakez Hélias;
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy
by Edmund Husserl;
Pragmatism
by William James;
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
by Lord John Maynard Keynes;
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
by Alexandre Koyré;
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas Kuhn;
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis;
Carnival in Romans
by Émmanuel Le Roy Ladurie;
Studies in Animal and Human Behavior
by Konrad Lorenz;
One-Dimensional Man
by Herbert Marcuse;
Understanding Media
by Marshall McLuhan;
Chance and Necessity
by Jacques Monod;
La Science chinoise et l'Occident
(1977 French edition of
Science and Civilisation in China
) by Joseph Needham;
Vichy France
by Robert O. Paxton;
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
by
Karl R. Popper;
A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls;
Course in General Linguistics
by Ferdinand de Saussure;
History of Economic Analysis
by Joseph A. Schumpeter;
The Decline of the West
by Oswald Spengler;
La Droite révolutionnaire en France (1885–1914): les origines françaises du fascism
(
The Revolutionary Right in France (1885–1914): The French Origins of Fascism
)
by Zeev Sternhell; and
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Around eleven o'clock, seeing that the celebration was far from waning, Josse phoned Carmen:

“Wot're are you at, girl?”

“Not a whole lot. We're watchin'
Sleepless in Seattle
fer de tird time an' eatin' nachos. On account of?”

“On account of I's thinkin' you wouldn't want to miss out on de goings on over 'ere!”

“Sounds like der's a whole lot of folks, anyway!”

“A whole lot?! We's overflowin' into de street! Dey're celebratin' Hektor Haché-Haché . . .”

And with that Josse hung up, because her bar order was ready.

Among the scholars, are included the ethnologist, also versed in biology, anthropology and Daoism, Gregory Bateson (
Naven
,
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
) and Margaret Mead (
Coming of Age in Samoa
,
Male and Female
), who were in fact husband and wife. Their familial genograms indicate that they came from complementary situations: Margaret being the eldest of her siblings, and Gregory the youngest of his, which ought to indicate they would have a complementary relationship, one supporting the other. However, as it happens, quite the contrary was true: their conjugal life was rife with conflict and disillusion, mainly due to the difference in the way each of them tackled problems. Margaret, being the eldest of her siblings and having experienced early success, lacked neither the imagination nor the energy to overcome any problem; Gregory, on the other hand, tended to retreat when an effort was required to resolve a difficulty, seeking instead, an understanding.

“Seems dat humans started sketchin' animals on de walls of der caves even before dey decided dat, from now on, dis or dat drawing would mean dis or dat sound. Sound, pronunciation an' de like, all dat came after.”

“Not around dese parts it didn't!”

“Wot about de folks dat says, first you learns to talk, den to write? You only have to look at a baby, it's pretty obvious.”

. . .

“So, de real question is dis: should we be talkin' like we write, or writin' like we talk?”

“Here's de problem: everybody knows how to talk, but not everybody can write.”

“Right on!”

“Well, folks doesn't talk all dat well all de time, neither.”

“Is dat right? An' who, pray tell, decides dat?”

“Ya! Wot's dat supposed to mean?”

. . .

“Hard to believe just twenty-six letters an' a couple o' accents can make such a terrible lot of trouble.”

Leave Peace River to end one's days in Rough Waters.

Le Grand Étienne and Ludmilla also joined in the celebration.

“It reminds me of our first Christmas here. Do you remember?”

Le Grand Étienne nodded, while everyone around the table made room for Zed, who had just arrived.

“Who started all dis wrangle-gangle, den?”

“It started hours ago!”

“We're celebrating Hektor Haché-Haché! He's a hundred years old today!”

Zed did not pursue the matter, turning instead to talk to Ludmilla.

Gregory Bateson was, actually, a pioneer of the genogram, a practice that reached its zenith during the 1970s, along with family therapies and the Palo Alto school, of which Bateson remains one of the best-known founders.

As a rule, folks kept quiet about the Babar's smoking policy, not to mention the source of the
Doucettes
that Jacky rolled, so as to keep this small commercial venture in the private sector and out of the hands of some anonymous corporation or the law.

“Who is doing this?” an anglophone tourist wanted to know.

His interlocutor lied:

“Some girl down in Saint-Antouène, I doesn't know her.”

“It is a very fine idea!”

A genogram is a genealogical tree deployed over two or three generations that identifies biomedical, psychological, or social particularlities of an individual's family. For example, Henry Fonda's genogram reveals a reoccurrence of suicide and attempted suicide in his family. The word genogram does not appear in the 2002 edition of the
Grand Robert
dictionary. On the other hand, under the letter
g
, we do find the English words
gadget
,
gag
,
gagman
(from which is derived
gaguesque
),
gay
,
gang
,
gangster
(from which
gangstérisme
),
gap
,
garden-party
,
gasoil
(or
gas-oil
, from which
gazole
),
gentleman
,
gentleman-farmer
,
gentleman's agreement
,
géomarketing
,
G.I.
, GIFT (acronym of
Gametes Intra-Fallopian Transfer
),
gimmick
, gin-rummy, girl, glamour (from which
glamoureux
,
glamoureuse
),
glass
,
globe-trotter
,
G.M.T.
(acronym of
Greenwich Mean
— or Middle or Meridian —
Time
),
goal
,
goal-average
,
golden
,
gold
point
,
golf
(and its derivatives
bunker
,
fairway
,
green
,
rough
,
drive
,
putt
and
swing
),
gore
,
Gore-Tex
,
gospel
, GPS (
Global Positionning System
),
gramophone
,
Granny
S
mith
,
grapefruit
,
grill
,
grill-room
,
groggy
,
groom
,
groove
,
groupie
, and
guiderope
.