Life in the Court of Matane (12 page)

Forks clattered down onto plates. The graphic image of a drowned man flashed before my eyes. In that instant, I resolved to do two things: First, to go to Russia one day. And second, to never eat another winkle.

The ceremony was held for our solemn confirmation. We formed two neat lines and waited for the Holy Spirit, which had taken the form of the archbishop of Rimouski. It was my one and only encounter with the Holy Spirit. I haven't seen it since. Or the Laotians. I don't know which I miss most. The strange thing is that the miracle of Pentecost, with its tongues of fire imparting wisdom and knowledge, had only the slightest of effects on the children in my class. The day I started grade four in Saint-Ulric, at the age of ten, there were fourteen boys in the class. Four years later, in grade eight, there were only two of us left. The others had dropped out of school, much to the despair of Madame Nordet, who had given her all.

O
n certain misty may evenings
, a stray mongrel dog can be seen wandering around the port in Matane. She has haunted the wharves since 1981, when hulking Soviet ships would cast anchor there, come to stock up on wood from our forests to take back to Russia. No one knows where the dog came from. One day, she must have left one of the ships to go for a walk and been late getting back. She has wandered there ever since, exposed to the raging winds. At twilight, she comes barking out of the fog, walks over to you, and sits up and begs, waiting for a treat. She does everything she can to show off just how intelligent she is, just how many tricks she has learned. If, one evening in May, you should happen to find yourself shivering on the wharf after some sad event or other has left you doubting all possibility of a future, simply wait a while, and the little dog will come trotting out of the fog. She'll come straight up to you; she's not shy. You'll have planned ahead and brought meatballs to give her as a treat when she stands up on her hind legs and turns around three times, barking all the while. She's just adorable. You can't help but love her.

But the dog hasn't always lived on the Gaspé Peninsula. There was a time, back in the 1950s, when she roamed the freezing streets of Moscow with her mother and brothers and sisters. Even though she's clearly a mongrel, you might be able to guess at her pedigree. There's surely some husky, a little spitz, and a lot of terrier in her. And, as is usually the case for mongrels, you'd have a hard time finding her mother. She won't talk about her either. She wasn't trained to think of her mother; she was trained for much greater missions. So, at first, you'll say to yourself, “Oh look, a little dog on this dreary Gaspé wharf. How cute! How reassuring! I'll play with her a while and put the fright behind me. This place gives me the creeps!” And how right you'll be.

She'll disappear by dawn, the way she came, back into the mist. You'll still hear her barking on the wharf at sunrise. Like a cry for help. I once told a Toronto psychiatrist the story of the little ghost dog in the port of Matane. Since he enjoyed the story and took lots of notes on his pad as he listened, let me tell it again so you, too, can enjoy it.

You can take out your notepads.

If, one Saturday afternoon in summer, after your trip to Matane, you happen to find yourself at the national archives and you take the time to read the microfilm for the local newspaper,
La Voix gaspésienne
, you'll see that January 1981 was “Soviet Month” in our little port. It was also in 1981 that, thanks to a Romanian stamp, I almost became the first cosmonaut from Canada. Or Quebec. I wasn't entirely sure because in the spring of 1980, there had been a referendum campaign in Quebec. Quebecers were asked a very long and very complicated question to which they were to answer yes or no. If I remember correctly, they wanted to know if, possibly, and in consideration of certain conditions—all somewhat uncertain and enigmatic—Quebecers felt vaguely inclined to envisage talks on the beginning of negotiations leading to the drawing-up of a plan (or process) with a view to national affirmation. All completely out of context, naturally. The answer to the question was short and laconic. Quebecers, women especially, rejected the proposal. I had known, ever since the vote on the name for
The Ulricois
, that the whole thing was doomed to fail. People rarely answer the question they're asked. They tend to still be considering the last one. Or else they say what they're told to or what the figure skater said. That way they can always blame her when the time of reckoning rolls around.

The adjective that best describes the king and queen's state of mind throughout this period would perhaps be “frenetic.” There was no mystery about how they felt, as witnessed by the two Félix Leclerc records that played in the Saint-Ulric home until the walls themselves began to sing along to the sad songs of our national poet. A clear tendency emerged from their remarks on the situation: opponents of Quebec sovereignty were lacking in intelligence.
The Nos Don't Know. Yes is Best
. That just about summed up all we needed to wrap our heads around in May 1980. The challenge was explaining it to those who just didn't get it. The queen had decided to opt for visual aids to achieve this pedagogical objective, returning from Matane one day with little badges sporting the Parti québécois logo in her bag. There were three types. The first was a simple round photograph of a smiling René Lévesque. René Lévesque was, they explained, an intelligent and cultured man who wanted all Quebecers to one day become equally intelligent and cultured. The second was a simple white YES on a blue background with a little fleur-de-lys (so that it was clear what you were saying yes to). The third required a certain appreciation of stylistic device. Against a white background, there was an oval-shaped Canadian flag cracked in half. A little blue bird, more or less shaped like the fleur-de-lys, was flying out of the egg. This liberating image appealed to me right away. My sister and I decided we would wear the badges to school. This seemed to please the queen. The things we agree to in return for a smile! To dispel any doubts as to where his political allegiances lay, Henry VIII managed to find a three-metre by four-metre poster somewhere. A huge YES on a blue background. He nailed it to the house. I think it could be seen from the moon.

One morning in the spring of 1980, we were waiting for the school bus. My sister was wearing René Lévesque's face, while I proudly sported the cracked egg. This wasn't the first time we had indulged in such eccentric behaviour. The bus arrived and we got on. Usually I was greeted with an affectionate “homo!” or “faggot!” but that morning no one looked at me. All eyes were on our house and the gigantic YES. A deathly silence fell over the bus for several seconds, then the murmuring started. The bus driver, a crusty old man, roared at us to sit down. He had a small maple leaf pinned to his cap. I began to suspect our behaviour might not be entirely appropriate.

At school I realized that our political initiative left no one indifferent. The teachers gave us funny looks. Some of them whispered to each other when I walked by. The next day, dozens of children came to school wearing NO badges. Some poor little girl had been given a photo of Pierre Elliott Trudeau to wear. The children formed a circle around her, asking who the scrawny old man was. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was, she explained, an intelligent and cultured man who wanted Quebecers to remain Canadian. The little girl noted with pride that he was the prime minister of Canada. “How can he be intelligent if he's voting no?” I reasoned. She had no answer. Then she went to complain to Madame Nordet, who told me to say I was sorry for questioning the prime minister's intelligence. “I'm sorry he's stupid,” I replied, thinking myself very spiritual. There ensued a lecture on the respect due to the prime minister of Canada and the virtues of federalism. By way of punishment, Madame Nordet set me three pages of math for the following day. Adding fractions as punishment for the crime of
lèse-majesté
.

René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, by virtue of their age and the way they behaved, seemed to belong to another species altogether, if you asked us. They were part of the tribe of grey, wrinkled people who were never at a loss for words. A little like Madame Nordet. Although Madame Nordet was fond of Mr. Trudeau. I had figured that out after the pillowcase incident. In the spring of 1980, she had decided to teach us embroidery. For our first exercise, we had to embroider a pattern along the edge of a white pillowcase. We were to trace the pattern with a lead pencil and get Madame Nordet's approval before we started embroidering. I found the whole thing immensely tiresome. And the queen was on my side. “Embroidery? What use is that? Can't she teach you more math instead?” Anne Boleyn liked math. She liked it as much as Madame Nordet sometimes hated it. Madame Nordet liked embroidery, catechism, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. As for me, I had traced three little fleurs-de-lys in pencil and was getting ready to embroider them in blue thread. I showed my design to Madame Nordet, who reacted as though I had showed her an erect penis.

“You're going to embroider
that
?”

“Yes.”

She took the blue thread out of her drawer and slammed it down on her desk.

“Here!”

Little Julie Santerre, witness to the scene, hurriedly erased her work and drew a bunch of maple leaves on her pillowcase instead. She had no problems getting her hands on the red thread and all the help from Madame Nordet she needed. I got by as best I could in my corner with my fleurs-de-lys. I was almost happy for Julie Santerre. One day, a teacher had asked her to point to Canada on a map of the world. She had been unable to find the huge pink stain covering almost a quarter of the northern hemisphere. She had stood there, stunned, in front of the map, swaying back and forth before the dumbfounded teacher like a little idiot. Julie had let slip a shrill little laugh. The teacher had smiled and sent her back to her desk.

There was something reassuring in the way Julie Santerre was so fond of something she didn't know the first thing about. I think it's called “faith.” Madame Nordet taught us our country was so big that a train leaving Halifax would take five days to reach Vancouver. One of the children asked her if she'd ever been to Halifax. She said no. Then he asked if she had ever been to Vancouver. She hadn't either, but just knowing that Pierre Elliott Trudeau had been was enough for her to like the place.

In the schoolyard, the badge war was raging. The reds on one side, the blues on the other. Believe it or not, a few kids even improvised comedy sketches using the faces of René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. They came up with all kinds of hilarious conversations, turning the badges into puppets. Come to think of it, I think their little dramas were more worthwhile and more intelligent than anything else said about the political situation back then. I was pleased to see the clash, in a way. I did well out of it. Before the referendum campaign, I didn't understand why I would be thrown to the asphalt, threatened with death, and showered with abuse. I suffered for naught. My pain served no cause. My sister explained to me that it was because of the king. And it was true that, fairly regularly, Henry VIII would arrest petty thieves and dole out fines to my classmates' parents. My school could boast of being home to an effective, if modest, mafia. It goes without saying that I paid dearly for the king's overzealousness, but the sovereignty referendum gave a political dimension to my martyrdom. For once, I was being hit for an idea, a dream. The very worst insults slid off my separatist shell like water off a duck's back. Thanks to the Parti québécois, my suffering had meaning at last.

The referendum passed. The badges disappeared. The huge white YES on our house was taken to the basement and perhaps even burned. The list of hammer words grew longer. Now it included “sovereignty,” “referendum,” “Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” and “the Yvettes.” Of the latter, I still have a vague memory of French-Canadian women dressed in long peasant skirts and singing
Un Canadien errant
. They were proud to serve their families, their husbands, their land. They had voted no. They gave themselves the name “Yvette” and fought the new ideas that were shaking kitchen walls across Quebec. The Yvettes had managed to guarantee that every last child would experience the Canadian childhoods they had known. The Yvettes were the polar opposite of Anne Boleyn, who had also had a Canadian childhood. People say the referendum was lost because of the Yvettes—or that it was won thanks to them, depending on your point of view. I don't know anymore. One thing I do know, because you have to know some things, after all, is that Anne Boleyn was a math whiz.

But maybe math isn't your thing. Since you're still reading this, you're probably more into mysterious, exotic stories. Out of curiosity, you'll go back down to the wharf in Matane for a second evening to wait for the adorable little dog you took such a liking to. She'll be over the moon to see you again. She'll show you everything she's learned all over again. Then, she'll sit by the edge of the wharf, a little tired from the effort. You'll sit down beside her. She'll look out to sea—a sea as black as the cosmos—then up at the stars through the fog. She'll bark three times at the light blinking on a Boeing, and begin to whine softly. You'll stroke her head to calm her. Her fur will be a little curly to the touch. Tenderly, you'll think out loud, “Hey, I'm going to call you Little Curly. It suits you.” Then something extraordinary will happen. The little dog will begin to talk, in a Russian accent. A talking dog is surprising enough. But a dog that talks in a Russian accent is astonishing. She'll roll her r's. Once you get over your astonishment, you'll gather your wits and find her accent perfectly charming. “It's funny you say that,” she'll say. “Little Curly was my first name. Before that, I didn't have one. Oleg gave me my first name.
Kudryavka
. It means “little curls” or “a little curly” in Russian. When he found me, I was running around the streets of Moscow in the middle of October. The nights were freezing already. A little like here, only over there I was with my mom. We combed the streets for something to eat. That's all we knew how to do. Beg. We weren't the sharpest tools in the shed. It's strange. I miss all that tonight.” You'll stare out at the shadowy Gulf of St. Lawrence with her, thinking that this little dog, which seemed so cheerful ten minutes ago, is actually rather sad.

You won't dare say a word.

The royal edicts of 1977 banned stupidity from the royal court. You had to have your wits about you. And so the queen came up with an admirable program for training grey matter. “You need to be able to count,” she said. So we played cards and Monopoly. “You also need to be able to write.” Long games of Scrabble and other word games were organized. I enjoyed them all. They filled the gulf that the little earthquakes had opened up between me and the queen. But prudence was key: board games were not beyond censure, and the list of hammer words was strictly enforced. If, for instance, I wound up with all the letters spelling D-I-V-O-R-C-E on my little wooden rack, letting me use up all my tiles at once for fifty bonus points, I would have to decide against it and opt for a shorter word instead. This rule made the games more interesting. It was when she was turning something over in her mind, counting, or thinking that the queen seemed to be happiest. I never saw her more satisfied than when one of us spelled out a tricky word on the table. She reacted admirably well to signs of intelligence. The sullen look she wore whenever the king was drinking would lift for a few minutes, giving way to an expression that was full of admiration. One day, two years after the referendum, she gave me a Rubik's cube as a present and an article cut out of a science magazine that explained how to solve the puzzle. The article was incredibly complicated. I had to, for example, memorize dozens of formulas like GHD'HGHDG'. But I made such an effort that I was soon able to complete the cube in just one minute and nine seconds. She also gave me a short novel called
Wargames
, which she asked me to translate into French. My awkward translation of the title was
La guerre est un jeu
(War is a game), which seemed plausible at the time. I tripped over every other word, not making it beyond the third page. It was a story about spies and Russian missiles. The world was going to be wiped out by Soviet nuclear bombs. It gave me nightmares. Every time I met one of the queen's challenges, I got the otherwise improbable in return: a sign of affection in the form of a compliment. For
Wargames
, she let me know that I had disappointed her, that she had thought me more intelligent than that. Translation can sometimes be the way to a lady's heart.