Suzanne. Anais Barbeau-Lavalette
is being smothered by Nocturnes.
Claudia doesn’t know where to love her children because there is no room left.
Claudia is filled with emptiness.
Claudia is a desert.
Claudia wakes the oldest ones.
Asks them to help set up a pallet in the hallway.
Claudia will sleep next to the piano now.
Away from Achilles’s penis.
You’ve been in line for two hours. The ration card in your clammy hand. You close your fist over it so as not to drop it, or else everyone will go hungry, because of you. You’ve pictured the scene at least twenty times: the card falling, the wind kicking up and carrying it off. You running after it. The card flying off to the river and throwing itself into it. You hesitating and diving in. The river swallowing you up. You floating with the dead in the cemetery.
You tighten your grip.
Take a few steps forward.
Seven ounces of sugar, seven ounces of butter, one and one-third ounces of tea, five and one-third ounces of coffee. The weekly food ration.
The lady in front of you smells like burnt caramel. Her skirt brushes your face and you like it. You want to sleep under it. Your little head pressed against her fat thighs. Her damp, sweet skin. You would slip your tattered card into her sock for safekeeping. And you would rest a while in the shade of her bottom.
The line moves forward a few steps, and you collide with her feet, apologizing.
As you put the food away, the radio is broadcasting the commentary on the French-Canadian Hilda Strike’s one hundred-metre dash at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
At the whistle, Hilda is off like an arrow, a projectile; she splits the air, shaking off her adversaries, leaving them in her wake. In just two strides, she is already one metre ahead of her competitors.
You freeze, a bag of sugar in your hands, suspended, caught up in Hilda’s flight.
The Meteor from Montreal. The Canadian Comet.
‘Suzanne?’
Your mother, annoyed that you’re just standing there.
Hilda shatters the world record, she pulverizes her adversaries, she gulps in air as the astonished crowd looks on. ‘Hilda! Hilda! Hilda!’
But barely fifteen metres from the finish line, Walsh, the Polish champion, catches up.
The two women are neck and neck!
Walsh gives it the rest of what she’s got and beats the French Canadian, barely two strides, just a few inches.
Claudia turns off the radio and suggests you put the rest of the groceries away.
Your eyes are watering. You could picture Hilda sprinting; you imagined her taking flight. She loses and suddenly, here you are, stuck in an ordinary living room, putting away your meagre provisions, with your mother avoiding your eyes.
She doesn’t like displays of emotions. She is afraid of getting dragged along in their wake. She never looks a tear in the eye.
To put an end to it, she opens the bag of sugar and holds it out to you, inviting you to dip your finger in. A rare dip you take advantage of. The sugar mixes with the saltiness of the few tears you shed.
You ask your mother where Quebec is.
Your mother points to the living room wall.
‘That way, I think.’
You stare at the floral wallpaper.
Which you imagine suddenly split open, torn apart by Hilda Strike’s meteoric entrance. In shorts and a tank top, muscular, gleaming with sweat.
A trace of a smile on your face.
One day you’ll go to Quebec, where the women run fast.
Learn to express yourself properly and you will never be truly poor.
Achilles Meloche
This morning, you accompany your father, who is getting his hands dirty. He is in the second stage of dandelion picking. They have emptied the downtown of dandelions; now they are going to the edges of the country, where the city spills over.
Sitting beside him in the Bennett buggy, you set your shoulders square with the sky. Achilles likes things straight. When you hunch, his large hand whacks you on the lower back.
He says that Ontario French Canadians are people who stand tall. That’s what helps them survive.
Sometimes you purposely hunch so he will touch you.
The car moves forward, pulled by the horses, as rusty as the car itself.
You like driving with Achilles because he talks to you. No: he makes you talk. It’s not so much what you say that interests him. But how you say it.
He asks you to describe what you see. He makes you start over until the sentence is perfect. The best words, the best order, the best diction. Polished till it shines.
Even if you’re describing something dirty.
Today, Achilles stops the Bennett buggy in front of the Hole, a pile of mouldy, makeshift shelters. The smell of sardines and dried piss hangs in what is left of the air. Music – the Boswell Sisters? – crackles in the distance. A few scattered clotheslines stand watch over the rags of families in survival mode.
The Hole looks like it’s a thousand years old, but it’s new. The Hole is one of the country’s first slums.
Achilles parks his Bennett there and won’t let you avert your eyes. He wants you to look at it.
He wants you to find words you don’t know to describe it.
You say: wood, scrap iron, horror. You say: rat, laughter, music. And then: sad, wet, end of the world.
A child is walking barefoot through the mud.
You say: ‘Daddy, I want to leave.’
Achilles asks you what you’re afraid of.
He won’t budge until you figure it out. Your six-year-old mind tries to put your finger on what is scaring you.
The little boy holds out his hand to you. He wants money. You look down at your lap.
You say you don’t know where to look, that everywhere you look you make the misery worse, you make it more real.
The little boy is still holding out his dirty hand to you.
You grab on to your father, beg for his help. Which he denies you.
So you take the little’s boys hand in yours. And you introduce yourself using your school voice: ‘My name is Suzanne.’
The little boy pulls away from you, running off into the meanderings of the Hole.
Your father hails his old team of horses, which sets off again.
He is satisfied.
You have dipped your tongue in dirt.
You leave the Hole and those rotting in it behind you. But there is an aftertaste of shit and lives with pieces missing.
That’s what he wanted.
He wanted you to taste it, to feel sick to your stomach, so that you would do anything to not end up there.
A field of dandelions. Twenty or so men already hard at work. You hike up your skirt and get out of the car. You follow your father, who says hello in English to his brothers in misfortune.
And you get down to work. You have to uproot the flower, attack it by the root. You want to be good; you work with both hands.
Around you, the men are talking about this