Читать книгу The Devil's Paintbrush - André Brochu - Страница 6

A few days have gone by.

One hot morning — a July morning in 1983, with the thermometer already hitting twenty-five Celsius — Étienne, the oldest boy, wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. The dense light of day shines through the uncurtained window. It should imbue him with the young summer’s ardour, give him confidence, but confidence is sulking, draped in poverty. Everything is asleep around him. Gervais sprawls next to him, naked, snoring innocently within a swarm of dreams. At sixteen, his carrot-top and illusory femininity make him a charming rascal, ambiguously elfin, all sparks and sputters like a striking match. Étienne has often yielded to his pestering caresses, just for the fun of it, for the clash of flesh, the whetting of desire. This morning, though, faced with a body pulsing like a heart under the day’s hot fist, he muses bitterly about an impossible purity, about a life of poverty that must be content with present pleasures, and deny the future.

The future ... Étienne is eighteen, and he wants to earn a living, but how? How? First he’d have to make La Lucie listen to reason, but every time he talks about finding a job, she hangs all over him, talking him out of it, infusing his whole body with the sweet poison of heedlessness, holding him to her like a liege knight. She croons that things are fine as they are, that if he has an income, she won’t be able to get welfare, and then where would they be? Always the same song, the same sweet song full of words that lament and caress. Her large eyes gazing into his, a mother’s eyes, immensely brown, like a fool’s paradise. He gets lost in them: he’s never been able to stand fast in the face of such concern. What does she get out of keeping them close, tied to her apron strings, these males who are hollow under their blooming complexions and rampant females?

One day, he’ll have to make the break, take off, even if it means crashing later. After all, his own father fled this enervating sweetness, this song full of milk and honey. Oh, to go there, stay under his wing ... Right! Well, you don’t leave one nest for another, and, besides, Étienne isn’t sure it would be any better.

His father, what a puppet! Behind his rebellions, his hard, rejecting face, his small soul flutters like a butterfly, always ready to run. The village called him Chonchon when he was a little boy, and the name has stuck. Étienne always shudders when he hears it, as though he has a lace and papier mâché father instead of the usual big brute his schoolmates complained about. A flamboyant father, a poet, and, what’s more, a drunk, who makes plush fantasies for the well-tended offspring of the ascendant class. Every year, there’s a story in the papers about this original craftsman and his astounding imagination. “Chimeras by Chonchon.” The magician’s own children never had their solitude enlivened by one of these cozy monsters whose ugliness was so charming. At home, the magician showed only his coward’s face.

Étienne looks about, surrounded by a familiar mess. Everything is tossed higgledy-piggledy: clothes, shoes, faded comics reread a hundred times, dirty dishes in the wildest array of shapes and colours, despairing of one day finding their way to the sink. It is all incredibly dirty, as if the dust that has accumulated over three years is blending with the fabric, the objects, imbuing them with its colloidal qualities. Étienne’s eyes wander over the general greyness, which is sharply highlighted by the sun in spite of the dirty windows, and he plunges into sadness, quickly overwhelmed by the sense of his own impotence. What can he do in the face of an entire household’s smiling, unconscious unwillingness?

He gets up, looks around in vain for clean underwear, and pulls on his jeans and a T-shirt. He turns back to the bed where Gervais still lies snoring and, with a sort of tenderness, draws the sheet up over the proffered body. Everything’s out in the open in this house, he thinks, without pushing the idea any further, although it settles into him, beneath awareness. It is the shape of his despair. In the open. Exposed to the fine rain of debris from the air, the world, perhaps the stars, and treading in the dust of a decomposing destiny, entropy, a vast cosmic collapse. Étienne treads in a universal despondency. He sees his youngest brothers in a pile, drunk with sleep and base dreams. He notices the girls’ crude beauty, garnished with long red or ebony hair, bouquets of grace destined for inevitable despoiling. He, too, is destined for it, like a girl, but without the pleasure. Life will crush his meagre hopes one by one, until he regrets he was ever born.

No! He shakes himself. No! He’ll stand up, rise above all this, above failure. He’ll stare sweet, foolish Lucie in the eye, his big, filthy mother with her vague dreams. He’ll ball up his fists, won’t think twice about using them to clear his path to freedom, to where tenderness, strength, even ambition can blossom. He will be great, he will be the one to take his place among men, earn a full measure of honour and respect like a priceless tribute. Étienne! He will be Étienne Tourangeau, the one who pulled himself out of the family quagmire, out of poverty, sheer folly and insignificance, who hauled himself all the way to ... Shit! He’s eighteen and he hasn’t done a thing yet, nothing, he has no education, not a penny to his name, isn’t even blessed with the amorality that would let him make some quick cash by selling scintillating death — coke, crack, heroin. Becoming successful while keeping your hands clean when everything has been against you from your birth: quite the challenge!

The laundry is piled right up to the stairs that connect the two apartments. The house is sagging under the weight of all these rags, the clothes which the village first strutted in, then happily got rid of, glad to have a way of proving its benevolence. Consignments are sometimes so large that La Lucie stops doing laundry: there’s always something clean to wear. You just have to hunt for it, which can take a while since, here, nothing is ever wasted. There are no garbage cans in this part of the world, the final destination for tattered elegance.

Étienne goes down the stairs, shoving piles of clothes aside with his foot. The two apartments are completely separate, and he has to go outdoors to get to the ground floor. He pushes open the never-locked door. Here, too, chaos greets him. He tries to imagine what the room would look like without all this clutter. Two or three days a year, at holiday time, the mounds of charity are moved into a bedroom, and the living room abounds with balloons, tinsel, garish ornaments arranged according to each one’s taste. Fantastic outfits are assembled from the parish linen, adding a crowning touch to the ambience of total hysteria.

“She’s fine here, with all this,” he thinks. “She” is La Lucie, whom he loves and fears and despises simultaneously, pities and would like to protect from the touch of folly that is the source of her misfortunes, and those of all around her. But how do you talk sense into your mother? He’d rather collapse onto her shoulder and melt, dissolve into tears, into scalding words, stammer out his great unhappiness, take refuge in her warmth and sweetness, hear her voice pour over him like the patter of rain, her large mothering body sheltering him from his sorrow, protecting him from his fractured present, absolving him from regret and hatred, strengthening him against the revulsion that courses through him and spoils his life.

Mom, he’d say, why are we in this shit? How come we don’t live like normal people, have a normal chance to get what we want, tenderness, beauty, wealth even? Why are we always at the bottom of the heap? What keeps us trapped in this ugliness, this despair? His head would be on her shoulder, and she’d stroke him gently, silently, and his questions would turn into a single moan, a solitary sound. And then she would murmur the secret, ancient, savage words learned from her mother, words whose meaning she has forgotten, that tie a knot in memory, words that fend off how bad everything seems, the malice of circumstance and destiny. She’d soothe him, her large hand running over the small of his back, uniting the fragmented distresses of a now adult body that doesn’t know where to turn, so turns to her, the mother, the faith, the filth.

Lucie’s bedroom is next to the kitchen, and she sleeps with her door open so she can keep an eye on things. As soon as Étienne steps into the large sun-filled room, she calls to him in a low voice, “Étienne, what time is it, darling?”

“Ten to seven,” he says, checking the clock.

“Good God, are you ever up early this morning! What’s going on? Are you sick?”

“Of course not! A little insomnia, that’s all.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Anyway, everybody gets up now, Mom. It’s not insomnia when you get up at the same time as everybody else.”

“You’re the one who said insomnia. Come, come over here.”

In the middle of the large bed, with only her head showing above the taut sheet, she presents a rare picture, free of the litter of objects with which she is always surrounded. The bed is a desert, and she is buried beneath the white sands. Framed by long, tousled hair, her face looks like a mask of the moon; she is a moon that speaks, her voice emerging from beneath the sand, barely audible because she doesn’t want to wake the children, who are asleep in the next room.

Étienne knows she is naked under the sheet. He keeps himself from imagining the body that, when he was little, she displayed openly, innocently and often, to all eyes.

He stands nearby, and she gazes at him with a wide smile, doubtless proud of the fine specimen of young manhood she brought into the world. Étienne lets her admire him, then sinks back into his gloom. He has to keep his problems, his dissatisfaction to himself — she has powerful arguments to set against any faltering steps toward liberation. “You don’t look happy,” she begins, reaching to him over the sheet that shrouds her. The great smooth beach that is the bed is now somewhat misshapen, collapsing in places, affording glimpses of the figure extending from the head, belying its lunar solitude. She is an ocean, a tide that surges well beyond the confines of the bed, filling the room, the whole house with her soft, warm presence, overflowing into the yard in miscellaneous heaps; she is Lucie, radiance and fanatical love spread around her, matching the huge brown eyes that conceal nothing of her soul. She is a soul, an utterly radiant body, a torrent of flesh proffered in sacrifice for the children who are an extension of her, for Étienne, who does not know what to do with this gift.

All this tenderness irritates him, and he falls back on practical issues.

“Do you need me today?”

“No, sweetheart. Do you want to go out?”

“Yes. I need to do something.”

“Going to see the girls?” she titters.

This is a maternal tack that Étienne can’t stand, when she starts touching on his few private attachments and desires. He rebels.

“A guy like me doesn’t have much to do with girls. I’ve got no job. I’ve got no money to take them out with, out to eat, to the movies. I don’t have a single thing that girls want from a guy. I’d be better off as a fag.”

“Oh, come on, the girls will find out about you fast enough. A cute guy like you has nothing to worry about. You think that’s all that matters to them, money?”

She strokes his thigh lightly, with the tips of her fingers. He steps back.

“Is there anything for breakfast?”

“Of course, darling. When have I ever let you go without? There’s always food in the house. Try not to wake up the little ones; I’d like to get some more sleep.”

She must have had to spend part of the night fornicating with one of her men. They turn up at around eleven o’clock, when the youngest children, who sleep downstairs, are in bed. The visitors stay closeted with her until two or three in the morning. Since she had her big operation, she no longer worries about nasty surprises and submits to the claims of nature without displeasure. The men she accommodates don’t find fault with her ways or the dishevelled look of the house.

They sometimes give her a hefty slap, or a fifty-dollar bill, depending how they feel. Étienne isn’t jealous of them anymore, no longer spies on them to see how they behave. He has benefited from the ruling regime of charity, and is only surprised that his sisters, the oldest of whom are fourteen and fifteen, have not — as far as he knows — begun to ply a munificent public with their charms.

He gulps down three slices of toast and a cup of bad coffee, then counts his money and dashes blithely out of the house. In spite of the heat, the morning’s air, ruffled by a light breeze, is breathable; the piping of bluebirds, accompanied by the blackbirds’ grating call, introduces a subtle gaiety. Étienne barely notices the rubbish strewn around the yard. Leaving his mother and his misery behind him, he recaptures the fleeting but violent joy that always attends his departures, when renewal and freedom could still await him at the end of the road and he hasn’t been seized by the suffocating thought of his destiny.