Читать книгу Baloney - Maxime Raymond Bock - Страница 6

Like ninety-four other people in the province of Quebec, Robert Lacerte was born on November 18, 1941. It happened in a house on the main street of the small town of Saint-Donat, and later in life, when he saw similarities between his poetry and Gaston Miron’s, Robert put it down to their shared homeland in the Laurentians. As if the trees, foxes, river bends, mountains and trails of smoke left behind by vacationers could bring about the genesis of words. But words have a way of finding their own path, and this origin was all he ever had in common with Miron. In the Montreal poetry scene his nickname was ‘Baloney.’ He never told me why, and I eventually realized he himself didn’t know. He was much less ridiculous than the nickname implied, just a tad feeble of body and mind, not entirely equal to the daily struggle of life on the margins, always a touch off the beat, a length behind the others – always, deep down, alone. His weaknesses were clear for all to see, but no one was there when he was flying high. He flailed in silence and died, along with 151 other Québécois, on January 6, 2009, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital.

Robert remembered so little of his childhood that he managed at times to believe he’d never had one, and he would tell himself, when consciousness returned after a fit of severe pain, that life isn’t a continuous flow of which we retain only fragments but an arrangement of broken, unconnected tableaux, accidents separated by cracks where everything is erased. Digging into his past, he might remember an event, a day, sometimes even an entire season, but then there was emptiness, until the next memory, when people re-emerged older and places had changed shape and colour after disintegrating into darkness. He once told me that was why he wrote, to prolong the time he existed, to have fewer of these moments of nothingness. But another time he told me that none of it mattered – memory, words, photos, film – because by their very nature the chasms everything disappears into may well be unfathomable, infinitely deeper than any traces we try to leave, and that’s why we’re no better off than the dead.

For Robert, life didn’t begin when two gametes fused to create a zygote, or when a hairy head emerged from his screaming mother, but on the evening of his first memory when, from his crib tucked under a staircase, he first felt fear of something lurking in the back of the dim room where his brothers lay snoring like two-stroke engines. He then experienced a diffuse series of events as he sat on the parlour floor in piss-stained cotton diapers or at the table, banging his plate with a spoon until one of his sisters yanked it from him with threats. Then others, in clearer focus – games of hide-and-seek out in the fields, fights lost to brothers too strong for him, running bare-headed through the rain, hunting stray cats for the mayor’s public-health campaign. Robert’s childhood wasn’t a difficult one. Nor was it easy. Village life in a French-Canadian backwater in the mid-twentieth century was tough. There was squalor of every stripe: dignified poverty, deep-black misery, filthy indigence, half-bred want, laugh-despite-it-all scarcity, pious simplicity, revolting privation, resigned paucity, mortal destitution and countless others. The Lacertes’ poverty fell on the comfortable end of the spectrum. Saint-Donat had electricity and Old Man Lacerte had ably managed his general store. When his three eldest sons took over, they turned it into a hardware store that supported their parents, who still pitched in when they could, and the siblings who were still too young to work.

Robert was the second-last child of his generation. Before him had passed forty brothers, sisters and cousins; after came but one baby sister who alone enjoyed the usual privileges of the last-born child. The older ones already had families of their own and weren’t much for travel, so Robert scarcely saw them. He stayed home with his aging parents. On the rare occasions when the whole family gathered, the other children called him Fake Uncle or Old Wart or Fuddy-Duddy. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a child whose formative years are spent among the elderly. His course was charted, he just had to slide into the groove and move forward. There was the dirt path to the schoolhouse, worn into the grass along the stand of trees between two fields. The muddy road they all trod single file to church. And to escape, the path to the thicket where everyone snuck off at some point to make out and feel up their first crushes. Robert’s was the daughter of a family of tourists who’d come down from Montreal to ski Mount Jasper, a girl with extraordinary blue eyes, teeth so incredibly large they prevented her mouth from closing, and a body inaccessible beneath her winter coat. The kiss was far from pleasing, and years would pass before he tried another. Of all his relatives, Robert was close to one only, his brother Yves, his elder by one year and seven days. The two boys’ birthdays were marked by a single celebration halfway through the week between them.

The first event of note in Robert’s life occurred when he was fourteen. He took a trip to what may as well have been the end of the known world, five and a half hours by train and horse-drawn sled northwest of Saint-Donat, to spend a winter, the only one he ever would, in a lumber camp. With its outhouses and stables, kitchen and bunkhouses and large dining hall, the sprawling log cabin was at once modern and archaic. Heat came from wood stoves but the lights were electric, powered by a turbine spinning in a stream a hundred paces off, or a gas generator when the river froze in winter. There was an electric range, a giant cast-iron woodstove and a shortwave radio transmitter and receiver from the First World War. Robert was too spindly to chop trees or mill boards, too weak to drive horses. For a kid like him, the camp’s hierarchy was clear: it would be at least ten years before he touched the brand-new gas-powered lightweight chainsaws and American skidders that Canadian International Paper was bringing in. But Robert had no desire to be a logger, loved his fingers too much to risk losing them to frostbite or a falling axe. He didn’t want to be anything in particular. He had reached the end of compulsory schooling without enough faith in the saints to try for the novitiate, or in himself to consider the classical curriculum. Denis Berval, a boy one year older than Robert, worked alongside him keeping the camp running and the books in order. They cooked for the thirty ogres who stumbled back to camp at dusk, frozen and starving, and did it all over again at dawn so the men could set out into the bush with full stomachs. They cleaned the dormitory and the stables and ordered food and fuel, tools and clothing. Ayotte, who’d drawn the short straw at the start of the contract, picked up supplies and mail at a cache every two months. A forced complicity arose between Denis and Robert. Neither made friends easily, and neither was a natural cook or housekeeper. They didn’t know how to run a kitchen, had never shovelled manure. But their shared workload and the cold forced them together, and when they finally had some free time between mopping the floors and cooking up huge pots of soup with peameal bacon, they would sit and play some cards or dice, sweating next to the stoves, swearing they had nothing in common with their brothers or fathers or the men they slaved away for in this godforsaken outpost. They were both right, in their way.

Denis, the son of the Saint-Hippolyte notary, showed up to camp in his Sunday best. He may have been only one year older, but his education was beyond anything Robert aspired to. That a mind like his should be sent to wash pots at lumber camp suggested punishment, but Robert couldn’t bring himself to ask Denis what the hell he was doing there. Everyone understood the local politics behind Robert’s presence: part of the camp’s supply order went through the Saint-Donat hardware store. Robert was a favour the Lacertes did the Company, an extra pair of hands paid only in morning porridge, evening soup and plentiful heat. Robert never found out what Denis earned for his work. They figured out a way to work together cheerfully, bemoaning their fate only when the loggers were at work, and even then they always found something to laugh about: the long curly red hairs that worked their way into the building’s every nook and cranny, the dead-rat smell in a bag left under a bunk, the shit-stained long johns frozen stiff behind the backhouse, the socks with holes so big you wouldn’t know which end to put your foot in. They were on their own until evening, except once every two weeks when one of the loggers stayed at camp and split a cord of wood to heat the kitchen. Those days passed in silence. The boys did the dishes and cleaned to the sound of splitting logs. On other days, they chatted about their sisters and mothers, the girls they had seen, impossible things, the cast of the light, the splinters in their fingers, the dishes to be washed, the porridge, the liberal professions, horse piss, village stores. Denis had the mysterious gift of perceiving the hidden faces of objects, people, actions and ideas. He always used words Robert knew, yet it seemed that, by naming the world in this way, Denis conjured up another reality, a field of energy drawn tightly around what each term evoked, and thus the frame surrounding things, creatures and concepts was knit together of some unknown fabric. Through his new friend, Robert had access to an exclusive space whose existence he would never have otherwise suspected, a world that closed up behind Denis’s words like the wake behind a boat.

Times were changing. The company was adopting modern ways and equipment. The lumberjacks talked about a union, but in their hearts still cleaved to the old ways, loved yelling at workhorses harnessed to stumps and the feel of the axe thrumming in their hands. Above all, they had grown used to the rule of the cook who’d been with them eight winters, a heavy-set man with a huge nose bulbous from rosacea whose qualities included never getting hairs in the porridge (he didn’t have any) and putting any man in line with a single look. They said that he’d died over the summer. They said that he’d gone off to cook somewhere else in the Pays d’en Haut, that he’d had enough of the smell of gas oil and pine and given up camp life to be a stevedore, that he’d killed three whores in Mont-Laurier, that he’d been given the boot by the Company and the less they knew about it the better. The two new hands slept one above the other in the bunks closest to the kitchen so they could start the morning porridge without bothering the men and go to sleep as quietly as possible once the dishes were done and everyone was in bed. Most of the time the frozen loggers found the soup too cold. They called the cooks little faggots or skunk-fuckers, and the boys could hear angry shouts from the far end of the bunkhouse ordering them to stop making the mattresses creak and get their hands out of their pants. One night when it seemed the insults might turn to blows, Robert and Denis stacked the sacks of grain along the kitchen wall, protected by a row of mousetraps, hung the sides of salt beef from the rafters, and pushed the bunkbed into the empty pantry. They just barely managed to squeeze it in, and they couldn’t shut the door behind themselves, but at least that way they got some peace and quiet. The lumberjacks could go right on insulting them in the bunkhouse, raise a ruckus, sing all the songs they wanted – the kids felt safe. Robert took the top bunk. There was so little space between the mattress and the ceiling that if he wasn’t careful turning onto his side, he tore holes in the shoulders of his woollens. They froze in their little alcove, but cold was a fundamental element of the camp, like air or water. It didn’t enter anyone’s mind to complain. And they were lucky to be closer to the stovepipes than the other men. Robert often climbed into his cubby when he had an hour of downtime, to finally sleep without the sound of thirty men snoring.

One mid-January afternoon, a jingling bell and a Whoa! from the driver turned the boys from their cleaning. Denis cried out, unusually happy to see the winter’s second delivery. The first, in November, had arrived in the middle of the night and a week late. It wasn’t a fond memory. Ayotte, covered with half an inch of frost and in the throes of vertigo, had jumped at the boys, seeing two evil spirits with putrefying faces. The lumberjacks had to step in and knock him out. This time the horses had made a good trip of it, the day was cold and clear, and Ayotte was cracking jokes about the previous delivery. While he warmed up at the stove, Robert and Denis unloaded the bundle of mail, last month’s newspapers, two jerry cans of fuel, a side of beef, a new oven element, two metal files, six axe heads, hundred-pound sacks of oats and buckwheat and big bags of laundry. Though the sled appeared empty, Denis went out one final time and came back holding a packet the size of a music box, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, which he immediately slid under his bed. When the lumberjacks went back out to swing their axes, Denis pulled out the package and called Robert over. He severed the string with his teeth and tore off the brown paper. Fifteen books, a hundred-odd sheets of paper and a few pencils spilled out onto the floor and mattress.

That was the end of their afternoon naps. Denis became distracted and less thorough with his work. He read a quick line every time he passed by the bed, took more frequent trips to the outhouse and burned an oil lamp in the alcove to read by once the dishes were done. It fell on Robert to make up the work that Denis left unfinished. With no partner for cards or dice in a camp that felt suddenly empty, Robert couldn’t help taking an interest in the written word. Fifteen books and nothing but French-Canadian verse. Robert was wholly ignorant of poetry, though he’d managed to sound out the opening of Routhier’s ‘Ô Canada.’ The first lines of the first volume he opened, by Alain Grandbois, seemed at once obvious and empty, a series of words dumped out one after another. There was nothing to understand. Perfect: he hadn’t understood a thing. The next day he tried again with Gilles Hénault. Even worse. He went back to the kitchen. A few days later Denis started writing little chunks of text, leaving large white spaces on the paper – not frugal practice in such an isolated camp, Robert couldn’t help pointing out. By way of answer, Denis opened Anne Hébert’s Les songes en équilibre on his bed and invited Robert to take in and compare the positive and negative capability of the black and the white spaces. The pile of blank sheets began to dwindle and Robert wondered whether he shouldn’t take a few before they were gone. Denis gave him four. Robert slid them under his mattress.

A new rhythm began to take hold, a break from the routine. The days grew longer but the cold dug in its heels. Robert cultivated an interest in Crémazie, Fréchette and Gill, who were much richer in evocative power, to his mind, due to the smaller spaces they left on the page. Denis recited verse while scrubbing pots and deboning hunks of meat. The lumberjacks went about their business. In the evenings they would emerge from the bush in clouds of steam to slurp down their soup and stink up the bunkhouse with their pipes and roll-your-owns. They were getting rougher with the boys. The stables weren’t clean enough: luckily, the shit froze the second it hit the ground, but sometimes the loggers had to shovel it themselves. The soup was disgusting, the porridge too sticky, the beans too mushy. Robert and Denis counted the days till spring.

Big Lambert came in from the bush at noon one day in March, treading silently over a foot of powder so fluffy that, once disturbed by his feet, it took flight again. As he approached the pile of logs to split behind the kitchen, he peered through the window and saw the two boys bent over books in front of the furnace, a plaid blanket spread over their laps. That night, standing on an overturned washbasin in the bunkhouse, he entertained the men whose cheeks were flushed with brandy and throats raw from smoke. Their raucous laughter as he slowly, loudly read from one of Denis’s books, following along with his finger, concealed a crude, contagious fury. The recital dragged on at least ten pages, and the boys heard every word, never taking their eyes from the little lumps of crud in their dishwater, even when two lumberjacks poked their heads into the kitchen archway to say, ‘Looks like we got some fiery virgins here, boys,’ and ‘Hey, it’s Mardi Gras, come do a little show for us.’ The young poets tried to decline but felt themselves shoved from behind into the centre of the circle. Over the muttering and clinking of flasks, Denis was forced to read a few pages of Saint-Denys Garneau. He was so parched that each syllable stuck to the roof of his mouth. He felt outside himself as he turned the trembling pages, standing a few inches taller than Robert, much skinnier than other boys his age. His patchy blond moustache was darkened with sweat. Robert felt sorry for him. He also felt violently naked. The book held over his pelvis like a fig leaf afforded no protection. After a mocking ovation, the men demanded more. They were drunk. Insults flew. The pleasure of humiliating wanted only a spark of weakness to flare up. Robert leafed frantically through his William Chapman, tearing out half pages, cracking the leather binding, then pausing a second and breathing deeply before he launched into a passage:

The breakup of the wide Etchemin, that swims

its imprisoned waves under the ice,

And, with a cant hook in hand, proud and strong

floaters drag the heavy logs, stranded on shore

Or on the ice clad, jagged rocks, whole forests

That ran aground, are slid across the freshets

By the valiant woodcutters of Dorchester and their iron

Toward the giant river that carries them to the sea.

It’s been days with no peace nor relief,

The bold log rollers singing while they work.

Turn after turn, on the riverbanks and in their long canoes,

They work on – with all the drive of heroes –

Commanded by a leader with the shoulders of Hercules.

Their job is mighty hard but no one backs down

– The Company name takes the place of a flag –

When they must risk their shirt or their skin …

In a trance, Robert failed to notice the astonishment of the men, who now sat rapt, or the brief silence that descended every time he turned a page. Ayotte put a hand on his shoulder. Robert kept on reading, his cracking voice a grotesque yodel. Ayotte shook him gently. ‘Stop. Go finish the dishes. And make sure the porridge is on time tomorrow. We’ve got to finish cutting the trail along Lac Vert. Before the melt. Understand what that means, son?’ The men went back to their bunks; the boys walked shakily to their quarters. From that night on, the porridge and soup were to the lumberjacks’ liking and the stables were swept and the dishes gleamed. A week later, when the time came for a final run to the cache, Denis, with a notary’s son’s promise of reward, convinced Ayotte to take the boys along. Denis left everything he owned behind. Robert brought his four sheets of paper, folded in his pocket and covered in writing on all eight sides.