Читать книгу Suzanne - Anais Barbeau-Lavalette - Страница 47

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!