The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (35 page)

They would know where Raphaël was. If I called out to them, they could take me to him. Even if I decided that I didn’t want to get back together with him, I was still worried about him. I thought about going to see Véronique. But I realized that it was useless to ask her advice. She didn’t even know how to talk about what had happened to him when he was a little boy. I felt like getting a bullhorn and going into the middle of the street and stopping the traffic and letting everybody know. If
not for him, then for me. I didn’t know how he managed to keep the weight of his secret when the burden of it was crushing me.

One of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows and hanged men.

I
WAS GETTING READY TO GO AND SEE
É
TIENNE
read my speech before a crowd on Avenue du Mont-Royal. I was wearing a blue cotton coat with tiny white flowers on it over a white dress. My outfit was to match the colours of the Québec flag. I was delirious with anticipation. I knew that there were going to be a lot of people showing up. We were very into the collective experience in Montréal. There was nothing that we liked more than a pretty mob. I felt tingly and excited as I hurried down the stairs with a plastic bag hanging from my wrist. This was going to be more interesting than when I had been in the beauty pageant and had flung my hair about. Now there were things at stake.

I took the metro to get there on time. It was jam-packed with people and I loved the feeling that we were all headed to the same spot. I was just a happy sardine in a tin of other sardines.

The square was filled up with people. They stopped the traffic going in all directions. There was a bus that had slowed
down, and people climbed on top of the bus to see. People were sitting on top of all the buildings with their legs dangling off the sides. Everyone had blue daisies in the buttonholes of their jackets and behind their ears.

Even if you weren’t for separation, surely you would peep out your window to get a look at these cultural luminaries. Those broke philosophers in their old suits, driven in by their children from their small houses, in which they had been brooding over manifestos for years.

There were some university students talking about Che Guevara. There was something about revolutionary speech that worked when it came out of the mouths of young people. It was untempered and uncensored. A quality that, when there is a group of kids at the back of the bus, can be positively annoying. But when it comes to incendiary rhetoric, it can be quite lovely.

The old man next to me took out his teeth and wrapped them in his handkerchief and tucked them into his breast pocket. Then he began to enjoy a piece of fudge that was shaped like a maple leaf. He was going to enjoy that fudge no matter what damn country he was in.

My heart was beating like crazy. The crowd would be hearing my words soon.

I looked around for where Étienne might be. I saw that there was an artist’s tent, so I figured he must be in there with those guys. People put their hands out to stop me as I was going in, but then they smiled and pointed me toward my father.

Étienne was smoking a cigarette furiously. When he was really anxious, he was able to inhale a cigarette in two drags, which was actually very disconcerting. A woman was trying to pin a carnation onto the lapel of his jacket. He kept swatting her
hand out of his face. He kept forgetting what she was doing, and he kept mistaking her hand for a wasp.

I had never seen him look so distracted before a performance. He was looking at the other artists. They were shaking each other’s hands, amazed to see one another after more than a decade. Étienne looked at them as if they were strangers. They had had very different fates than Étienne. They weren’t living off welfare in men’s hotels. Gilles Vigneault was there, and his songs had practically become anthems in Québec.

Étienne was wearing a suit that had seen better days. It seemed almost as if he had slept in it a bunch of times. He had probably pawned the lovely pinstriped suit that he had worn to my wedding. For the first time he looked like he was desperate to fit in. When you are young, you can dress in rags and stand on the table and piss in telephone booths. In a young person, these are the traits of a poet. But if you exhibited any of those behaviours at forty-five, people would think you were a degenerate.

He motioned for me to follow him. We went out the back of the tent and toward the metro. We sat on a bench inside the metro just to be away from the crowd. There was a river of people coming up the elevator from the underground train. We were sitting next to an old woman who was wearing a navy blue dress and a red apron with giant pockets to hold change in. She was selling roses out of big green buckets. We were sort of hidden away by all the fat flowers.

“Should I have had this suit dry cleaned?” Étienne asked me anxiously.

“No, I like it. It looks good. It looks more comfortable now, like you’ve been on tour and have been doing loads of speaking engagements.”

I spit on a napkin and then rubbed off a splotch of something on his sleeve.

“But that’s just it: I haven’t been doing any engagements. These are lovely words, but can I deliver them with any sincerity? You know it’s never just the words. The words have to be delivered with an arrogance. You have to believe in them.”

“You haven’t retired. You’re always delivering speeches at the café.”

“I don’t think that I’ve ever had stage fright in my life—you know that? But I just have some terrible jitters. Do you know that? Feel my hands. For God’s sake! I’m a nervous wreck!”

“Look at me. Remember when you were just a little boy in rubber boots delivering newspapers at five in the morning. And everyone said to you: you are not distinct, you are not unusual, you are not special.”

“Et moi, j’ai répondu: Oui, j’suis unique. Oui, j’suis distinct. Oui, j’suis spécial!”

“You were born to do this. Of course you’re wretched at most things. Everybody knows it. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do this one thing.”

Étienne held on to my wrist. He was listening to my every word. I was telling him what he needed to do in order to win the crowd over. I knew it exactly. The way that he knew exactly what I had to do to make the audience eat me up when I was very young and he’d fix my hair up with a bow or give me a daisy to hold.

“Look what I brought you.”

I reached into the plastic bag dangling from my wrist. I had climbed into the back of the closet in the bedroom at Loulou’s, looking through his old paraphernalia. I had found one of his old top hats. This one was worn out. That was probably why it
had been relegated to the back of the closet. The fur was worn away from the side of it, and the top was beaten in. But somehow it was even better this way. I held the battered top hat in my hand for Étienne to see. It was a poem in itself.

When he put it on his head, I held out a tiny pocket mirror for him to take a look at himself.

“I can’t stand mirrors,” Étienne said. “They are always trying to convince me that I am an old man.”

“Well, why don’t you go out there and prove them wrong.”

“Because I’m a handsome young buck, right? In my prime? Wait until they take a look at me. I’ll be like that handsome and fabulous man in that story, who never ages. What was that gentleman’s name … Ah yes, the fabulous Dorian Gray.”

He took a tiny can of breath freshener out of his pocket and sprayed it generously into his mouth. He smiled with his giant teeth. He was quite happy that he still had every one, although the tops were grey. Then he gave me one of his big, wet kisses.

“This is such a lovely speech that you wrote for me, sweetheart. I can always count on you.”

It struck me that I could never, ever say the same thing to him, but I decided to let it go. We walked out together. He went to the stage and I moved back into the audience to watch him. The crowd started whistling as soon as they spotted the top hat on its way. The audience. What a beast. A beast that screams it loves you and then lets you drown, like the sirens that called out to Ulysses’s men from the water. Everyone was so visibly excited that there was an electricity in the air. I couldn’t help but feel charged by it. How could you not give a glorious speech on this day?

“So. I read the papers. Some journalists are going to drag my past out of the closet to say that I don’t have a right to speak out?”

He had a deep voice. His voice was a little bit raw from smoking so much. It gave it a sort of lovely effect now that he was shouting. It made him sound as if he had been weeping and that his voice was ravaged with emotion. He lunged forward when he spoke, as if he was going to grasp someone by the throat. He waved his arms out in front of him as if he was clearing a path through some tall grass.

“Well, go ahead. People have been talking about my past for years. Yes, I have been in prison. Not once, not twice, but three times. I’m broke. I’ve been a womanizer. I’ve been a drinker. I have more than once disturbed the peace.”

The audience was quiet now, looking at Étienne uncomfortably.

“Now, since we are bringing my past out of the closet, let’s go all the way back before those days. Let’s go right back to
La Grande Noirceur
, the Great Darkness.”

The audience let out a roar.

“My father never went to school. He had fourteen brothers and they were taught what their place was in the world. Good jobs went to the Anglos. Bad jobs went to the Tremblays.”

Everyone cheered.

“And let’s see … When I was a teenager I woke up with the tanks rolling down my street. I went outside to see what was happening and there were horses with police riding them, clunking me on the head with their batons. If you want to know why I started wearing this top hat, it was to hide
les grosses bosses sur ma tête
.”

The crowd started laughing happily at their age-old grievances.

“They were treating anyone in a turtleneck sweater like a criminal. Give a frog a dictionary and they become a revolutionary
and start putting bombs in mailboxes and asking for their own country.”

Someone screamed out, “We love you, Étienne.” And there were whistles coming up from the crowd.

“And when the Trudeau government drafted the constitution in 1981, they didn’t get Québec to sign. While René Lévesque was asleep, the other premiers got up and worked on the constitution at midnight. At midnight! While we were in our underwear, trying to convince our girlfriends to have sex with us. We were watching our
téléromans
and farting, and they were busy drafting a new constitution without Québec! Whenever I need a knife, I don’t go and get one out of the kitchen drawer; I just reach around and pull one out of my back.”

Here the crowd started stomping their feet. There were people on balconies who started banging their pots and pans.

“When we asked for a constitutional amendment all these years later, they called us ungrateful and ignorant and racist. They finally bought a
Dictionnaire Larousse
just so they could look up some words to insult us.”

Everyone screamed. They were in heaven!

“It is not me who should be ashamed of my past, because I own up to everything that has happened. You, the Canadian government, should be ashamed of our past!”

There was only one more line to go and I could go back to breathing and enjoy his success.

“And look at my daughter, Little Nouschka!”

My heart stopped. He was going off script. For a moment I thought that he was going to acknowledge that I had helped him with the speech.

“She’s going to give birth to another Tremblay any day now. Is there anything more miraculous than birth itself? Well, the
most wonderful day in my life was when my two twins were born. How many men can say that they have had two miracles happen on the same day? It is like having lightning strike in the same place twice!”

That was it. The audience was applauding like wild. He had rediscovered the love of his life. I understood why Étienne had always been single. Étienne kept taking bows and flinging his arms back into the air. Once again I was a pretty prop in his performance. There was nothing interesting about me, other than that I got to stand in his shadow. He was going to be the genius in the family. He was always going to take the credit for the Étienne Tremblay Show.

And now he had no intention of leaving the stage, even though his speech was finished.

“If it weren’t for my children, I’d have been no more than a drunken mop of a man.”

Everyone laughed, but I did not like it one little bit that he was carrying on. From having watched his odd performances for the documentary crew, I knew that they were uneven, to say the least. It sounded like he was going some place interesting with his thoughts, but if he spoke for more than a few sentences, the sense would run out of them quick, like the flavour out of a Slush Puppie.

“I am a degenerate! Look at this nasty old suit! I couldn’t even afford anything decent to wear to an occasion such as this!”

He was going to keep going. He thought the trick to winning over the crowd was to be self-deprecating. He had lost touch with the Everyman years before.

“I am not special. I have done everything that a dog would do. And yet here I am before you, calling myself a man. I mean
really, am I a man? Or am I just a dog in a fancy suit. Bow wow wow! My colleagues and countrymen. Bow wow wow!”

The young men started laughing and cheering him on. Others started having quizzical looks on their faces.

I was cringing. Please, dear Lord, cut him off, I thought. I waved my hands at one of the organizers. He was too young and too intimidated to go out and interrupt Étienne Tremblay. I motioned instead at Gilles Vigneault.