Suzanne. Anais Barbeau-Lavalette
Delighted, you accept.
In the living room of a small apartment on Rue de Mentana, a few young people are smoking and talking. Drawings are scattered on the floor.
You immediately want to stay. To make this cloud of smoke, this circle of words, yours.
There are around ten people, mainly boys, but you look at the girls first. There are three of them. They exude elegant simplicity. Claude introduces them. Marcelle Ferron, Françoise Sullivan, and Muriel Guilbault. They glance at you; they don’t feign warmth, but they invite you to sit down.
The men are engaged in a lively discussion about the ink drawings strewn on the floor. They don’t look like anything you recognize. You could lose yourself in them. You understand that, beyond these walls, they would be considered offensive. You feel privileged to be spending time with the offenders.
What is being discussed seems important, but the drawings are just tossed on the floor as fodder for discussion. You like this disconnect between the idea and the object.
Claude, who seems to come down to the ground in this place, stops falling for a moment and introduces you to his brother, Pierre, and then Jean-Paul Riopelle and Marcel Barbeau. They are all around your age.
Marcel asks about the public speaking competition. Claude shrugs and points at you.
‘I lost,’ he says.
You know you should smile, but you tend to forget how in this sort of situation. So you just stay in the moment and let a brief silence of acknowledgement settle around you.
Mr. Borduas, who you are told is the host, and who until now has kept to himself, approaches and offers you a glass of wine.
‘Congratulations,’ he says.
He is about twenty years older than the others. He is short, with a prominent forehead and the sad eyes of the overly intelligent, which are tucked under bushy black eyebrows. You understand right away that he is the leader.
And you want leaders to like you. You watch him. He withdraws, a little removed from the group of young people, where the conversation has resumed. They are discussing Jean-Paul’s latest ink drawings. Their explosive subjectivity. You understand nothing, but you could swim in these ideas for the rest of your life. They are exhilarating.
Marcel reticently places a sketch on the floor. It’s his turn.
There is a barrage of comments. No one says whether they like it or not. They are trying to get a word in about the abstraction. What is its source? Should it survive?
You think it’s incredible. There is a rough sensuality you would happily stretch out in.
Borduas approaches the circle. He glances at Marcel’s drawing; Marcel is on the edge of his seat waiting for him to speak. Then he looks at you. You have captured his attention.
You say it’s beautiful. That you want to lie down and be swallowed up in it.
Borduas laughs. A spontaneous, subdued laugh. It seems to happen rarely, because at first everyone is shocked, and then they all do the same.
It’s midnight, and everyone seems to know it’s time to leave.
The wine has brought you all closer together. Marcelle, who is feeling jovial, has taken you under her wing. She gives you a warm hug.
Borduas retreated to his quarters after offering you Marcel’s drawing and saying good night. Marcel, curled up like a snail in its shell, hides behind the smoke. You ask him whether he wants you to have his drawing, which you like. He grumbles a hollow yes.
Claude offers to walk you back to the station.
On the platform, in the middle of the night, you agree to write to each other. It will change the course of your life.
On the train back to Ottawa, you feel as though you are the only one moving and that everything else is standing still. The night outside is deep and radiant. You have Marcel’s hypnotic drawing tucked in your pocket. You have a geyser in your stomach and there is nothing around you to stop its gushing.
You knew nothing about Montreal. Aside from Hilda Strike and snippets about Duplessis.
You still don’t know much more than that. Except that a door has opened onto bodies in motion, bellowing in a cloud of smoke, sipping and sharing wine, reflecting on arcane, appealing shapes.
These people have rekindled your interest in others.
You were an island, and now you feel like you might have a country.
You return home ecstatic. Things go back to normal, but you navigate them differently. Swimming with the current. Now you know that there is somewhere else out there for you.
What you don’t know is that there will always be somewhere else, and never the same place. That will be your undoing.
You receive a letter from Claude. He kept his promise. With a friendly, uncompromising pen, he rails against the repressive climate that surrounds him. He rants against the Padlock Law, passed to fight communism, which holds his artistic pursuits in contempt. He seems to enjoy being an agitator.
In a passionate postscript, he encourages you to read Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Maldoror being the devil’s alter ego. Excited by the idea of reading everything ever written by an author banned by Duplessis, Claude has taken him for his hero and proudly admits that he has managed to get his hands on a copy.
He includes a few excerpts for you. It’s repulsive and modern. You don’t like it. And you tell yourself that you would have banned it too.
All the same, the daring speaks to you. But what wins you over is Claude’s mischievous enthusiasm. He is quenching your thirst.
It was a spring day. Birds spilled out their warbling canticles, and humans, having answered their various calls of duty, were bathing in the sanctity of fatigue. Everything was working out its destiny: trees, planets, sharks. All except the Creator!
He was stretched out on the highway, his clothing torn. His lower lip hung down like a soporific cable. His teeth were unbrushed, and dust clogged the blond waves of his hair. Numbed by torpid drowsiness, crushed against the pebbles, his body was making futile efforts to get up again. His strength had left him, and he lay there weak as an earthworm, impassive as treebark.
[...]A passing man stopped in front of the unappreciated Creator and, to applause from crab-louse and viper, crapped three days upon that august countenance!
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