Life in the Court of Matane (6 page)

Or thrown up.

One thing's for sure: at that very moment she understood exactly how much she hated the fact that everything had to fall apart. That summer, Elvis Presley died suddenly. Probably because he felt the earth shake all the way from Tennessee. It had been too much for his fragile health. Somewhere in Rivière-du-Loup, someone cried her eyes out on August 16, 1977. Like all the great queens in history, Catherine of Aragon detested unexplained disappearances.

You see, nearly two hundred times a year I feel the earth shake. Every 1.82 days. Two hundred times a year. Without fail. The little earthquakes follow me everywhere. When I'm teaching. In the shower. In the subway. On vacation. I'm only safe on a plane. So I try to travel as often as I can. Whenever my students see me clinging to the blackboard, whenever I clutch the shower head, whenever I rest my hand on the shoulder of a little old woman who looks up at me, her eyes filled with pity, it's because I'm losing my footing. I've long since stopped asking other people, “Did you feel that?” I know that my seismograph is too sensitive. For me, a four on the Richter scale is the end of the world. One day, I told a Toronto psychiatrist about it. A pharmaceutical representative had just given him some samples of small blue pills manufactured in the United States, the very thing, he said, for an affliction that's more common than the medical community would care to admit. I take one hundred milligrams of them a day. The little blue pills have made me lose a lot of weight. I prefer myself like this. They've also helped me stop shouting at strangers in the street. People prefer me like this. Even though I still feel the full force of every little earthquake, I manage to catch myself between the uneven bars. The secret is to always think one step ahead. That way, you won't fall flat on your face in a cloud of dust on the blue mat, with a disapproving Soviet judge looking on.

Boycotts and censorship force their victims to come up with alternatives. The stronger the oppression, the shrewder the ways around it have to be. This is how bonsais grow. The miniature Japanese trees are but the sum of thousands of responses to as many upsets. They are the botanical incarnation of Resistance and a miniature form of art, which also has to overcome constraints. To grow a nice bonsai, you must inflict all kinds of bearable torture on it. Never cut off too many branches. What doesn't kill it makes it more beautiful. When someone harasses or mistreats you, they are turning you into an object of beauty, a work of art. In Montreal, near the Olympic site, right beside where Nadia got her perfect score, there is a huge botanical garden. There's a small Japanese pavilion there where I like to go for walks in July. They serve green tea. There's also a beautiful bonsai exhibit. Sometimes I stop in front of the tiny trees and admire their resolve. They're sold at prices far beyond my means. The Japanese have managed to put a price on suffering and torture. You have to give them that.

The half-brother came into the world. His birth brought to light the plans that had been drawn up for us. It was quite simple: once Quebec became independent and the boat had been built, Anne Boleyn and the king would sail away with the younger brother to go live in the southern seas. Everyone was doing it back then. Anne Boleyn would educate the boy herself. My sister asked what would happen to us. Anne Boleyn replied tactfully. Bringing us along was out of the question. It was a vessel of the future, and we belonged to the past. “You? Well… It's pretty simple. You'll go off to college somewhere. And anyway, you're big enough to understand. You've reached the age of reason.” It was a win-win situation for all concerned. We would study in the colleges of an independent Quebec while they zigzagged between the islands of the South Pacific. Far from incensing me, this rejection struck me as a promise of liberation. I didn't realize that my sister—may she forgive me—was saddened at being abandoned this way. I happily turned my attention to choosing my college. The very idea of being a prisoner aboard a steel ship thousands of miles away from inhabited land with only my father, Anne Boleyn, and Harmonium for company terrified me. So we would be set free at a time of their choosing. What I had taken to be a life sentence had just been commuted to barely ten years. But the whale's entrails had been categorical: separation would come much sooner. Patience was key; now wasn't the time to get ahead of ourselves. Instead, we should let things rot away and disappear by themselves. No sorrow lasts for one hundred years.

Around about the same time, the king had also begun to take an interest in local products like Atlantic cod. Fried, poached, broiled, in white sauce, and even— horror of horrors—baked whole in milk. We also ate cod liver, which we had to extract ourselves from still- wriggling fish. I remember the silver scales would stick to my forearms. Some of the smaller ones became so deeply embedded in my skin that I couldn't get rid of them. They disappeared into the depths of my epidermis only to pop up somewhere else on my body. They still reappear even today, especially during Lent, when the pale winter light brings out all of my skin's imperfections. I have to cover them up with clothes. I have lots of them behind my knees. They're smooth and shiny.

We would wash down the Matane cod with a 1977 Château Rancour. Rancour is an odourless, tasteless white wine that kills slowly. Administered early, its effects can be lifelong. We would sip a few drops every day. We had it with every meal, in the milk we dipped our cookies into after silently chewing our way through meals in the company of the king and queen. The wine made us feel better and promised happier days ahead. We realized that doubt, sadness, and melancholy could be dissolved in rancour. We quickly became addicted. Every day we became a little more resistant. As hard as sculpted whale ribs. We still help ourselves to some on winter evenings when we have nothing better to do than remember. Whole litres that we uncork in the evening and polish off the next morning. We serve it to others, too, so they can feel its purifying effects.

Remember how we feared and hated the sordid decline of every living thing; and, while I'm on the subject, I'd also like her to know that we always showed tremendous discipline in the face of ridicule and despair.

One day, we were allowed to visit her. We had never been permitted to ask to see her. “Let her pay” was what the royal couple retorted whenever we dared ask to visit her. Pay for what? The seventeen dollars the bus ride would have cost? The king refused to pay. Later, years later, there would be attempts at rebuilding. The German language has an untranslatable adverb that perfectly describes the process:
vergeblich
. According to my Larousse bilingual dictionary, the closest French equivalent appears to be
vainement
. In vain. But this approximation, which implies vanity much too strongly, ignores the Germanic root
geben
, which means to give.
Vergeblich
means to not give oneself, to be unable to give oneself something for lack of means. I had no trouble at all learning this word years later. I had carried it within me since Matane. I had the content, all I was missing was the container. I understood it the minute I heard it. Go on, give it a try. Say
fairgabelich
. It drops with a thud, like a dead animal. I'm considering having it engraved on my headstone: “Here lies Eric Dupont, son of Micheline Raymond, professional cook.
Vergeblich
.” If someone asks me, “Sum up your life in one word,” I reply, “
Vergeblich
.” I can't give myself it. It's in vain. I lack the means. From my home on the Gaspé coast, unbeknownst to me I was learning German through the communicative method. All I lacked were the words. They would eventually come, like everything we promise ourselves.

We were occasionally allowed to meet her whenever we visited our grandparents, who had stayed behind in Rivière-du-Loup. With them, certain edicts fell by the wayside, to our great surprise. These visits were offered to us with breathtaking nonchalance. But we had to call her ourselves. There was no way the royal couple would enter into communications. Since my sister was petrified at the idea of speaking to our mother in front of the king and the queen, the task fell to me. She would be surprised to hear my voice. Most of the time, she hadn't even known we were in town. I oversaw the logistics of the prisoner exchange. At first once a year for a day, then more often. It went without saying that we were forbidden to talk about the visits. Especially in front of the younger brother. For years he didn't know the truth. Even the day when, one week after her second marriage—which we hadn't been invited to—our mother came to pick us up for the first time in six years at our house in Saint-Ulric, his ignorance remained intact. “Your mother will come pick you up on Saturday.” Once this woman had materialized, keeping her name quiet became impossible. That which is must be named, Sister Jeannette had made that quite clear. The censors knew no bounds. We were ordered to talk about our mother like an aunt so as not to traumatize the little brother. Admirable thoughtfulness from Anne Boleyn. So she who must not be named was going to turn up in a car with her husband. In front of the little brother who might ask questions, we were to say she was an aunt. You have to admit it was an improvement on not even existing. And the cat? Oh yes, the cat!

That was in the house in Saint-Ulric, our ninth address in as many years. Just outside of Matane. Construction of the sailboat was underway. The household's entire finances were poured into it. I was as much in favour of the project as my sister was apprehensive about it. I must have been eleven, which would have made her twelve. Our faith was out of control; our laughter, sovereign. Our faith made us careless. We were daring to the point of going through their things in their bedroom, right in the heart of the court, looking for clues that would help us bring down this iron regime. The stakes were high. We couldn't allow ourselves to be caught. My sister would keep watch by the window, looking out for the square-shaped red Volvo coming in the distance, while I rifled through the wardrobe. It wasn't very well hidden. I turned the painting around and knelt before it. It was Kitty all right. She had painted it from the photograph in Amqui. A white cat in front of a white refrigerator, signed in her name. I wouldn't have swapped it for Dali's
Persistence of Memory
. I remained prostrate in silence before the cat my mother had painted for me. This scene, with my sister looking to the horizon and me kneeling before the painting, pretty much summed up our childhood. Then she would take my place in adoration before the icon. We did this a lot. One day we went up into their bedroom and discovered to our horror that the painting had disappeared. They must have thrown it out. It must have rotted in the Matane dump along with the other items that aren't deserving of a place in our homes and memories.

It was at precisely this time that I developed a fascination for the process of forgetting, like a researcher fascinated by an illness he has just discovered. Fascinated by the perfection of this thing that kills memory to allow us to live. Something inside me yelled that my memory would develop even more by learning my times tables by heart.
8
×
7 = 56
. That I would save my mother's memory from the clutches of oblivion by learning the names of America's fifty states by heart, from west to east.
Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan
. My encyclopedic learning rose up like a wall around this ocean of oblivion. I forced myself to remember the ten Canadian provinces (with capitals and the dates they joined Confederation), the titles of all the Tintin books, relative pronouns, subordinating conjunctions, French adjectives ending in
–ail
that become
–aux
in the plural, the Apostles' Creed, the kings of France, the names of the twelve disciples, the periodic table, all the cities that have hosted the Olympic Games since 1896, not forgetting Melbourne (1956) and Antwerp (1920), Quebec's administrative regions (my favourite to this day is
Abitibi-Témiscamingue
, you have to repeat it three times before you get it right), Canada's premiers, the names of a cow's four stomachs, Radio-Canada's broadcast schedule, and, of course, the fifteen Soviet socialist republics. No memory exercise would be complete without them. Once processed by my mind, these mountains of data translated into a simple
Micheline Raymond, professional cook
that I had to cover up with a thundering laugh. Strangely, this heap of useless information pleased the king and queen. In fact, it was the best way of attracting their attention and earning their approval.

It is reassuring to know before the age of ten that forgetting is like the universe. It expands exponentially. The speed with which it spreads increases over time. Memory, on the other hand, is limited, at least in principle. For example, whenever you gaze up at a star far, far away from Earth, it's not the star you're looking at, but an image of the star as it was billions of years ago. The further away objects are in space, the further away they are in time. Stars gradually fade and disappear. Some take longer to fade than others. In the dark skies above the Gaspé Peninsula, memory is richer than in the city. It's only when you leave the countryside that you realize with amazement that there are barely any stars left. Hardly any memory left. The noise prevents you from seeing the memories that had seemed so clear in the country. Although seeing the Thénardier star fade away behind a cloud of smog could be the best thing that ever happened.

For a while, we kept reading and rereading Grimm, until the tales' inconsistencies moved us on to other books. In
Hansel and Gretel
, the children find their parents again after a brush with a cannibal witch's cauldron. Right up to the end, I had imagined a malevolent alliance between the witch and the children. A symbiotic union in which the witch would feed Hansel and his sister in exchange for fresh flesh they would lure back to the witch's house. This scenario in all its horror struck me as more palatable than a wholly improbable return to the parents who had left them to be eaten in the forest. To my mind, the return of Hansel and Gretel is, at once, the fairy tale's great beauty and tragic flaw.