Читать книгу Larry Volt - Pierre Tourangeau - Страница 14

Vung Tau, 69-70

Knights slew for love, we slay for money.

Inscription on a Zippo lighter,

Unknown G.I.

They want to christen the lounge. It’s La Marquise’s idea, of course. Who else! An honest-to-goodness professional little organizer, she is. Everyone’s cheery counsellor, the den mother of our little Camp Shitty-Ha-ha on the mountain. She sprung the idea just like that, sitting among the flock gathered in the dining hall at noon to chew on its alfalfa. Any excuse to do something.

“Why not find a nice, original name for our lounge? After all, we do spend quite a bit of time there. It would make it more fun, more intimate, cozier. Anything without a name appalls me!”

They all agreed. So a contest was launched to find an original name for the lounge. Whoever comes up with the best name will win fifty dollars. A tidy sum!

I suggested “The Lounge” as a name for the lounge. I won’t win, that’s for sure. A lounge doesn’t need a name. Ultimately, neither do people. Once again, there’ll be those who claim what I’m saying makes no sense. I know, I don’t make sense. I even assume that I make no sense at all. But a man is a man and nothing else. Not my “little Julie” or my “little Larry.” Take the Spaniards: they say hombre when they speak to you. For Black Americans, it’s man. Not “Mister” or anything like that. They say hombre and man, and it reverberates when they say it, it rings loud and heavy. Men are men, nothing else. As for the Gentlemen of Saint Suspicius, they insist on being called Mister. Most likely because they’re not all that sure of being men.

Has anyone ever held a contest to find a name for misfortune? Or filth? Or vice? What would you call it? You’d call it vice. You’d call it filth.

They named the lounge the Catalpa. Julie Horn won the fifty dollars. She was really excited about it. They made a sign with The Catalpa written on it in pink and yellow letters surrounded by catalpa leaves, and they hung it over the door of the Catalpa. It’s as nice as all get-out. Such a warm name. There’s something chic about it, something exotic, too, like “Tropicana,” like “Copacabana”…

They want to celebrate it. There’s going to be a party tonight to inaugurate the Catalpa, a party with dancing and low lights, and drinking and smoking-up and other covert goings-on. They’ll be nuzzling in the corners, they’ll be overflowing with lecherous embraces behind the armchairs and in the nooks and crannies to the tune of Procularum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” their hearts will swell - and not just their hearts - from dancing so close, and they’ll play at romance as if they’ve been at it all their lives. The whole flock will be there for certain. It’s not to be missed. Oscar, Anna Purna and me, we’re already licking our chops over it.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my English class. So I’m going. Reluctantly, because I dislike English and that goes double for my English teacher.

The Suspicians say it’s useful, even indispensable, to have at least two languages. As far as I’m concerned, two brains would be of more use than two languages, but, oh well… Note, they don’t teach us Armenian or Chinese. They teach us just English. The English teacher, Mrs. English teacher, says that in Quebec you can’t do without English, that it’s much more useful than Armenian and Chinese put together, because Quebec is in Canada, Canada is in the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth is in the world, and the world is in the United States. The English teacher claims you have to speak at least two languages fluently to be a citizen of the world. However, the English teacher speaks only English. She says she doesn’t need to speak two languages fluently because she’s a citizen of the United States, not a citizen of the world.

She gets on my nerves. The English teacher wants to angluttize us. The angluttizer asks me to tell her in English what I did over the weekend. Naturally, the angluttizer addresses me only in English. I pretend not to understand. She persists. She repeats the question more slowly, clearly articulating every syllable of the sentence. I still refuse to understand. The angluttizer stops smiling:

“Come on, come on! Don’t tell me you don’t understand…”

I act as if I think she doesn’t get it when I tell her I don’t understand, by making signs at her that I don’t understand a thing. The other students are rolling in the aisles. A number of them don’t like English, and those who do don’t like the angluttizer. She’s getting more and more vexed.

From my desk, I can see Anna Puma’s slender blond body at an angle. She turns toward me, smiling with her whole face. Anna Purna is laughing, like everyone else. I love to see her laugh. When she laughs, Anna is as beautiful as a Walt Disney movie. Anna Puma’s hair is like an avalanche. I watch her watching me and I whip up the most dazzling of smiles. Her eyes beam like Cadillac hubcaps in the sunlight.

There’s no end to the angluttizer’s vexation:

“Please, please! Tell us what you did during the weekend. Come on, hurry!”

“Damned shitty monstrance!¹ Why don’t you learn French? It would be a lot easier!”

My point of view on the subject doesn’t interest her. She’s absolutely determined to stick her nose into my private life. The angluttizer is a voyeur. The angluttizer drives me up the wall.

“I did nothing. Nada! Nothing at all, actually…”

“Make complete sentences, please.”

She’s digging her heels in, the cow! The angluttizer is an intrusion, an insinuation.

“I did nothing during the weekend. I slept during two days.”

She’s still not satisfied.

“I’m sure that you dreamt. Tell us what you dreamt.” Frankly, she’s gone too far.

“Frankly, you’ve gone too far. While you’re at it, would you like to know if I sleep in the raw? Would you like to know what colour my sheets are? Go to hell! Shit…”

That’s where the English class ended for me, this time. Outraged, as red as the red stripes on the American flag, she threw me out with a broad sweep of the hand, vowing in the language of Elizabeth II that I hadn’t heard the last of it.

True, as far as hearing the last, I had not yet heard it. Pelvisius took care of that part with a wonderfully edifying speech on the virtues of patience and moderation. It took place in his office and must have lasted an hour. An hour lecturing me, his eyes glued to my stomach, an hour of appeals for calm and of common-sense therapy.

“Beware of your intensity,” he says to me in concluding his epistle to the collegian, “and be more tolerant of the faults and flaws of others. Above all, do not feel obliged to confront those with whom you disagree. Remember that most temptations are the result of an unrepressed gaze. Reflect on that a little. And lower your eyes. Rein in your hot blood, Mister Tremblay. Better to beat a retreat than to do battle at the drop of a hat, for it is often through flight that the greatest victories are won: Fuge si non vis perire.²”

I immediately put his recommendations into practice and backed away with a flurry of bows and mea culpas. He congratulated me for my positive attitude and I thanked him for his sage advice. How could he know that that’s all I do, run away, that flight is my way of life, that I’ll do anything to end up all by myself as much as possible?

Every day, every hour, and every minute, I try hard to wear blinders in order to avoid the world around me, to see no one but me, I strive to move along the same grooves, leading only toward me. I want to see just me, I can stand just me in my universe. Other people, they distract me. When I look at them, they turn me away from me. That’s the reason I’ll always be outside of any herd: I’ll always be my own shepherd, my own livestock, my own pasture. The others can go chew the cud somewhere else. I won’t let anyone hang a bell on me.

I don’t want to bear the misery of the world on my shoulders, I’m not a martyr or a saviour. I have no wish to be crucified. I’m tormented enough already.

When I happen to bite, it’s in self-defence. Nothing to do with solidarity. When I go on the attack, it’s because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. There are aggressive windmills everywhere. I attack only those who’d like to skin me alive. I fight only to survive as long as possible, to keep my head above water, to keep breathing.

Julie Horn scolds me for my unnecessarily hostile attitude. She says I irritate the teachers so much they then take out their rancour on everybody, and everybody has had it up to here with my antics. She says that I’m paranoid, I should arrange to see a psychiatrist. She doesn’t understand, any more than Pelvisius, that I spend all my time running away. If I could, I’d scram from myself.

My words frighten Julie Horn. She’s on thin ice when she approaches me, when I talk to her. She’s afraid for her mind’s virginity, for the integrity of her thoughts. Julie Horn doesn’t realize that she bares herself to me - which suits me just fine - that she unknowingly betrays her secrets to me.

“You make a fool of yourself, Julie Horn. You’re as easy to read as a Coca-Cola sign. It’s obvious you’re frightened. It’s obvious right away from your nervousness, from the beads of sweat on your scalp, from that strange habit you have of innocently looking away as soon as I come into your peripheral field of vision.”

She’s not even listening to me any more, won’t let me get another word in. She says that I’m raving, that I spout rubbish like a machine. She says certain people would be better off if they permanently shut up, certain people ought to turn it over in their mind before coming out with a lot of nonsense. I answer that certain people would be better off turning it over in mommy’s womb before coming out.

Julie Horn is peeved. She won’t let anyone say things like that to her. I’m wasting my breath, she’s no longer listening. She’s put her hands over her ears and is pretending not to pay any more attention to me. Poor chick! Poor goose! Go hatch your eggs. You’re too much of a boob for it to be your fault. For Chrissake!

I left her in the hall. I went to the Catalpa, where about a hundred students were already gathered. We had visitors. A cop from the City of Montreal had introduced himself to Pelvisius that morning and asked for permission to address the Gentlemen’s students. Re: the terrorists. A year ago he would have come for something else, probably drugs. He’s come to curb the nationalist outbursts of the most ardent among us, to remind us that violence is not the way to achieve one’s goals in a democratic society. I suspect he’s there on the initiative of Pelvisius himself, who felt powerless in the face of last Friday’s walkout and didn’t want to see it repeated.

He’s got the look of a bona fide cop. Short hair, stout and fortyish, fluid speech but laborious syntax and humour. Mounted on the little platform that’s used as a dance floor when the Catalpa turns into a disco, he answers questions with a policeman’s amiability after stammering through a bit of a yawner on the importance of defending one’s convictions within the framework prescribed by society. The audience is polite, that’s all. Not that the flock is very keen on confronting the constabulary, but still, a cop is a cop, and a cop does not practise a profession worthy of any real interest or admiration. What’s more, this cop isn’t even an officer. Imagine! Sending us some nobody.

There were actually two or three people who tried to have some fun with him by pointing out the contradictions in his pretty speech, but it fell flat because he didn’t understand that they wanted to take him for a ride. It all would have ended without a snag if that big turd Allie Buy hadn’t gotten a notion to jump to the defence of law and order by suggesting to this poor cop, who would have settled for much less, to establish vigilance committees in the colleges. A mere trifle! The cop, who like everyone else was doing his job because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, seemed rather put out. In the end he said it might not be such a good idea, because to each his own, after all.

Yet Allie Buy wouldn’t let it go. He thought he’d had a brilliant idea, and, since this didn’t happen to him too often, he stuck with it.

“It’s not very complicated,” he insisted. “All that’s needed is to set up a small committee of three or four trustworthy people with whom we could discreetly share our suspicions, if we have any, and who would then take the appropriate steps for the good of society…”

I was fuming and I wasn’t the only one. To the point where several ovines of the flock, who were vaguely principled, felt obliged to grumble. Even La Marquise and her disciples didn’t come to the rescue of this lost sheep. In fact La Marquise grumbled loudly enough to be heard: “I can hear the hobnailed boots a mile away - it’s appalling!”

But Allie Buy just turned a deaf ear. He didn’t even pick up on Oscar Naval’s suggestion that his committee be known as “The Black Shirts.”

“Those who are interested, come see me at the end of the meeting. We really ought to do our share to prevent Quebec from sinking into anarchy!”

People began to leave the shade of the Catalpa, and the cop took the opportunity to thank the audience and slip away.

Me, I thought I was doing the right thing by submitting my name to Allie Buy. He gave me an unpleasant look before replying that he would get back to me once he had the names of all the volunteers.

It was my turn to leave, and, as agreed, I went to catch up with Oscar, Anna Purna, and Rickets. The afternoon was winding down, and we were to eat together at the fast-food restaurant down the hill before going back up again for the Catalpa inauguration party. We were looking for a way to have fun during the evening, so we agreed to regale the flock with the great game of friendship and reconciliation. Just for laughs, you know. There’s no harm in having a laugh.