Life in the Court of Matane (3 page)

To track the progress of the twenty illiterates she was in charge of, Sister Jeannette had put a chart up on the wall, where our first and last names appeared in a vertical list. There were fourteen reading levels. The goal was obviously to reach the fourteenth level as quickly as possible. Every week she would have one of us stand up and read beside her desk. If she was happy with our reading, she would give us a little star, which we stuck beside our names. The first stars were blue, the next were red. The second-to-last stars were silver, and the very last ones were gold. Gold like Nadia. This gave me an idea of the speed at which I and the rest of my classmates were progressing. After a few weeks, head held high, I was the first to proudly stick a gold star in the very last box. Far behind, other children were still struggling to earn two or three stars. With scant regard for humility or subtlety, I bragged about my success to the others, expecting them to shower me with praise and idolize me. My hopes were dashed. One day after recess, I was admiring the glorious chart when I realized that someone had clumsily taken three of my stars and stuck them beside their own name, no doubt believing that this lamentable larceny would paper over their reading problems. I filed a complaint with Sister Jeannette. Following an investigation that lasted all of seventeen seconds, the guilty party owned up to her misdemeanour. With everyone watching, she was forced to put the tiny stars back in their rightful place. I derived no satisfaction from this exercise, which had been humiliating for all concerned. It wasn't like other cases of theft when another child stole your teddy bear, candy, or lunch. Truth be told, the star thief had taken nothing from me—to do that, she would have had to make me forget everything I had learned. And you can't force someone to forget. You could burn all the star stickers in the world in a great big pile, but nothing would ever erase what they represent. Everything you know, I told myself, will stay with you forever. All you have to do is remember it from time to time. And to do that, you need to know how to read. If you write “My mother's name is Micheline Raymond. She is a professional cook.” on a scrap of paper, a rock, or a plank of wood, you're not likely to forget. Provided you don't lose the piece of paper, provided the plank doesn't go up in smoke, provided you don't forget where you put the rock, you'll remember it forever.

Being able to read put me in Anne Boleyn's good graces, which gave me access to her collection of comic books. On the other hand, despite my keen interest in reading, my dealings with Sister Jeannette were somewhat distant. The nun's apparent coolness toward me probably had something to do with the pencil incident. One day, you see, one of the illiterates stole my pencil. Just like that, right under my nose. He walked off with the pencil, without so much as looking at me. There was nothing special about the pencil. Its only quality was that it belonged to me. It was a crime against my property. I stood up, paying no heed to the fact that Sister Jeannette was in the middle of teaching us a song about Jesus. The tune was straightforward enough: “The Lord is my shepherd, Alleluuuuuuuuia!” Sister Jeannette was first and foremost a nun. Nuns are always talking about Jesus. Jesus is the son of God and our shepherd and all that. That's the way it is. This wasn't going to get me my pencil back, and I wasn't going to wait for kingdom come to get it back either. So I got up and reclaimed my pencil, punching the crook so hard in the chest that he fell back on his ass. There then ensued a fight to the death accompanied by the cries of seals lost on the pack ice. Sister Jeannette cut her hymn short and, just as I was about to strangle the little louse, grabbed me by the hand and lifted me up off the ground, dragging me out of the classroom to the stairs. The stairs of the elementary school in Notre-Dame-du-Portage, if stairs could talk, would still have plenty to say about the scene they witnessed that day. She held me by the shoulders with the grip of a lumberjack. I yelled that she was crazy, which only made her laugh. I tried to hit her, which made her laugh even harder. I told her in an icy tone that I didn't like her, then promptly burst into tears. Tears tend to calm a nun down. We stayed there for five minutes on the stairs, me resting my head on her bosom, until I opened my eyes and saw her cross right up against my nose. I asked her why she was wearing a cross, when neither I, the king, my sister, nor Anne Boleyn had one. “Everyone has one,” she replied. “You do, too.” The incident was closed. The pencil thief trembled every time I walked past until June.

Classes got underway again. A few days later, Sister Jeannette sped up the rhythm of my existence even more. A huge grey book lay on a lectern. Its pages were so thin and fragile that Sister Jeannette wouldn't let us touch them. We were allowed only to look. Approaching the book was not without risk. One morning, she got us all to be quiet and asked me to come stand beside her at the lectern. Slowly she turned the book's pages, squinting and pointing to the passage I was to read out loud. The text was numbered and set out in narrow columns to make it easier to read. The pages had no pictures and had turned slightly yellow. My classmates looked at me and sniggered. A girl wriggled on her chair like she had worms. I didn't know what tone I should adopt. The occasion made me plump for solemnity and seriousness, which intimidated me a little. Sister Jeannette had often read aloud from the huge book, but she had never let one of us do it before. She told me to ignore the numbers scattered around the text. I took a deep breath and launched into the passage she had pointed to.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

The other children applauded. In the corner, a knucklehead studiously picked his nose. Sister Jeannette smiled. A fog of happiness enveloped the classroom. I hadn't really understood what I had read. I didn't know what “meek” or “merciful” meant. I had never met anyone like that. You have to admit it didn't take much to bring about the conversion that morning in 1976: a nun, a bible, a ban, Madame Thénardier, a promised inheritance, and a view of the St. Lawrence thrown in for good measure. Anyone can afford that.

I remembered that my mother would sometimes mention God. One day, she had brought me to a huge, freezing-cold house beside the hospital, where only women who looked like Sister Jeannette lived. The convent. She took painting classes with one of the nuns there, and I had to wait for her. She painted flowers, landscapes, vases. Her teacher spent her time smiling at me and trying to get me to say something. I didn't like it there. The convent was just up from the Thénardiers' house, at the top of the town of Rivière-du-Loup. Having the Thénardiers so close threw me into a panic. At the tender age of six, I was already looking to get as far away from them as I could. I waited impatiently for the class to end. In the convent there was a Sacred Heart below a floating paper banner that said, “I am waiting for you in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus was addressing the persecuted and the poor in spirit. After my triumphant reading, someone had asked Sister Jeannette what “poor in spirit” meant. She said it was when someone wasn't planning on doing wrong, when someone didn't yet know that there are things you can do and things you can't. In a split second, I wondered who among us was poor in spirit. I still don't know to this day.

I told the court of Henry VIII all about my brush with the “poor in spirit.” I was as high as a kite. As far as I was concerned, Sister Jeannette had delivered the Truth to me bound hand and foot, and this Truth had come from my mouth. Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII didn't deem the matter worthy of interest. They seemed aware of the existence of the poor in spirit, without caring to wonder where they lurked among us. The king raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Typical nun!” My story was met with a touch of disdain. They stopped just short of calling me a halfwit. The kingdom of Henry VIII was not the Kingdom of Heaven. The king even had the strange habit, when he hit his thumb with a hammer, of crying “Damned nuns!” He said it when he stubbed his toe against a piece of furniture in the morning, when the electricity bill arrived, when there was no beer left, when a pot boiled over, and when his car wouldn't start in the winter.

Life at the palace continued. I now had access to all of Anne Boleyn's books. She had novels and comics. I got Tintin's
Shooting Star
for my birthday. The back cover showed all the other Tintin books. “You could collect them. One every year.” At that rate it would take me twenty years to collect them all. An eternity. Fortunately, I also got one at Christmas and at the end of the school year.

The idea of collecting them summed up Anne Boleyn's nature perfectly. Accumulating little by little. Like an ant. Gaining a hold over the everyday items that would otherwise only end up at the dump. “Look after your nickels and dimes, and your dollars will take care of themselves.” Common-sense accounting. Anne Boleyn may have shown a little more determination than Catherine Parr (the sixth wife), but definitely less assurance than Catherine Howard (the fifth). She ended up setting me a challenge I could rise to: forgetting. The memory of my mother—as solid and implacable as Michelangelo's Pietà—towered over my father and her. The constraints of daily life with Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII prevented me from publicly defying this order to forget. The consequences would have been unfortunate. Rather than act as a third uneven bar between my mother and father—which would have helped with my movement—Anne Boleyn was the blue mat where gymnasts distracted by a flashbulb or a shout from the crowd missed the lower bar by a millimetre and fell flat on their faces. But I had watched Nadia Comaneci closely. I wouldn't miss a beat.

After the summer solstice of 1977, the wind changed at Friendship Park. My sister and I began to foresee the signs of imminent catastrophe. First, our neighbour, a kind soul and father to a number of children, started to jokingly call us the Mataners. We didn't know what a Mataner was. I presumed it was grown-up talk for rascal. Then there was a long car ride along an endless road. In an unknown town, the king and queen looked for a plot of land. We slept in awful motels. It was in this town, I remember, that Anne Boleyn found out she was pregnant. We were told in the car. Back in Rivière-du-Loup, things moved fast. Objects disappeared into boxes. People came to bid farewell to the king and queen. All to the heady scent of apocalypse. There were probably a few scarcely perceptible earthquakes. The day of the Great Upheaval, Heidi had just returned to Switzerland to learn that Peter's grandmother had died, and I think after that we reread
Hansel and Gretel
, a prophetic tale. Along with the gospel according to Matthew, Grimm's fairy tale had been my favourite literary illustration of the ways of the world. Although I found the German fairy tale more realistic. At one point, the father and wicked stepmother abandon Hansel and Gretel in the forest. Some children switch off at this point, thinking it unrealistic, that no one would ever do such a thing. Others, traumatized, put the book down altogether. I found it all completely run-of-the-mill and unoriginal. There was nothing very surprising about the whole thing if you asked me. I enjoyed the story's vivid realism.

The horror didn't end there. We would be moving to Matane, we were told, three hundred kilometres east of Rivière-du-Loup. A dizzying distance for a child of seven. They seemed pleased by the news. The king had been transferred there. At his own request. A truck came to the trailer park, and our home was lifted up off the ground and put on a platform with wheels. It followed us all the way to Matane. It reminded me of a Russian fairy tale in which a house with chicken legs spins around and around. We got in the car and set off for Matane along Route 132, our home following far behind.

As the car sped east, I took up the position that every son adopts one day or another in relation to his father. He was driving, facing forward, barely aware of the drama unfolding less than a metre away. Kneeling on the back seat, I was facing the other way, looking back as though at a plane wreck, staring open-mouthed at the crater of devastation we were leaving behind. Like Amqui before it, Rivière-du-Loup grew smaller and smaller until I could no longer see it. I was told to turn around, sit up straight, and stop surveying the wasteland behind us. Looking back could be dangerous, they said. It would make me feel sick. So I faced the other way. The licence plate on the car in front had Quebec's motto on it: “Je me souviens.”

One day a chubby, loud-mouthed girl from Ontario who turned up her nose at everything that wasn't English grilled me about Quebec's motto. “What does it mean,
Dje me souvienne
?” she asked, before tucking into a fried bacon sandwich smothered in butter. I found the question idiotic. “My mother,” I told her. “I remember my mother.” She must have thought that Quebec had come up with a pretty humdrum motto. Everyone remembers their mother. But do they really have to go around writing it on all the licence plates? Yes, in some cases they do.

I thought I could see, running behind our car along the asphalt of Route 132, Sister Jeannette with a bible under one arm; my mother, her arms raised to the heavens in a panic; and even little Nancy, late as usual, who had missed the bus again because she had left her catechism book at home. Thrown back against the seat as the car sped forward, I heard a long whistling sound as we left Rivière-du-Loup. A new acceleration.

Even today, every time I drive along Route 132 east of Rivière-du-Loup, I fall into a kind of trance. Something about it upsets me. Despite the picture-postcard scenery, despite the lovely people and the smell of the sea, something presses down on my lungs, reminding me that I'm moving away from where I belong. I watch in the rear-view mirror as Rivière-du-Loup slowly recedes into the distance. It's usually at times like this that I feel my little earthquakes.