For Sure (8 page)

“Dad?”

Terry swallowed his discouragement:

“Yah?”

“Does dat mean God protects Chico?”

That took Terry's breath away.

“Yah, dat's exactly wot it means.”

. . .

“G'night, son.”

“G'night, Dad.”

The temptation, or rather the necessity to enlarge the role of accents: for example, the acute accent on the
e
of English verbs ending in
er
—
bãnkér
,
clãmpér
,
dr
Ä©
vér
,
flũnkér
,
lẽakér
,
mãnagér
– to indicate that these are English words the suffixes of which are pronounced as in French. In this way we make decisions, establish new rules, rethink our mistakes.

“Are ya scared to put yer finger in yer own bellybutton, den?”

“I wouldn't say I's scared. I jus' don't care fer it. Tickles me in a way I don't like.”

The object of facile judgments, of cartoons depicting him with a menacing look, accused of being a sexual pervert, Freud was well aware that psychoanalysis was inflicting a third narcissistic wound on humanity, the first having been dealt by Copernicus, who denied human beings their place at the centre of the universe, and the second by Darwin, who established a direct relation between the human and the monkey. Freud, for his part, like a seismic tremor, had shaken the very foundations of reason.

“I'll be goin' downstairs an' do a bit o' work, catch up on some book orders, if you doesn't mind . . .”

Terry had said
Je vas
for “I'll go.” Carmen corrected him.

“
Je vais
.”

. . .

“No, I don' mind. I won't be late to bed, that's for sure.”

How long would it take Terry to correct the
je vas
and say it properly:
je vais
? Months? Years? And did he have to make the correction at all cost, at any cost? The more often he was reminded of it, the more Terry, in spite of himself, inserted proper French in his speech, but it did not always happen. Sometimes, incompatible linguistic impulses blinked in his mind when he opened his mouth, producing new errors. And so, just for peace of mind, he preferred occasionally to remain silent.

Babar, the elephant cartoon created in 1931 by Jean de Brunhoff, is an excellent model of socialization. His story gently introduces children aged three to seven to the values of citizenship. Babar likes to dress properly, always answers when queried at school, helps others as others have helped him, and learns that each of us has an essential role to play in society. When he becomes king, Babar makes good civil and cultural choices. Under his reign, the elephants build schools, cultivate gardens, play music and attend the theatre.

“Dey filmed lobsters underwater goin' in an' out of de traps . . . Turns out it don't happen de way dey always tot it did, ha ha ha!”

In the last building to have housed the newspaper
L'Évangéline
, all the old printing material — lead ingots, cases, linotypes — lay there abandoned to dust, at the same time as the crafts quietly vanished, a language lost its footing, reality wavered, even memories gradually but steadily fading, fading also in the minds of the elders who now inhabit the place. On my computer I point and click “format,” I read the instruction “change font” and a corner of the veil lifts, revealing that great extinguished body that death suddenly renders fascinating.

“Do you know how many possible colours exist in the universe?”

Le Petit Étienne gazed at the colour chart before him as though there were already far too many to count. Zablonski continued:

“With computers, now we can create sixteen million different colours.”

Étienne knew that a million was a lot. To give the number some weight, Zablonski added:

“It's almost as many as there are stars in the heavens.”

The boy's eyebrows arched. The teacher sensed he was on the right track:

“But our eyes can't see all the colours. We can only distinguish around three-hundred thousand. Which is still a great many.”

Le Petit Étienne considered this.

“Sometimes de sky doesn't have a whole lot of stars.”

“That's true. The stars are not unlike colours: we can't see them all. Because of clouds, or because they're too far away, or because they're not in our sky, because the earth is turning.”

Le Grand Étienne allowed a few moments to pass before taking up his lecture:

“What's particular about all these colours, is that very few of them have names.”

Étienne Zablonski pointed to the colour chart:

“These here, which you can see — marjoram, ondine, melancholy, picador — they're very lucky to have names, because most of the sixteen million colours are known only by numbers. Or letters. Or sometimes a combination of the two, numbers and letters.”

Zablonski wondered if the child made the difference between numbers and letters, but he did not linger unnecessarily over the question:

“Which means that there are still many colours left to name.”

Suddenly, Le Grand Étienne seemed struck by the idea.

“So we can very well name a colour wool green or vein green, even mother's orange, if we so desire. Nothing can stop us doing so. Nothing and no one.”

Le Petit Étienne gazed at Le Grand Étienne. He felt somehow the incomplete state of the universe and how much there remained to do.

CHAPTER 2

The stone is the friend of numerals and numbers. Nothing expresses a mathematical elegance better than a stone to which we have given well-balanced measurements.

Jean Giono
,
“
La pierre”
(“The Stone”) in
Le Déserteur et autres récits
(
The Deserter and Other Stories
), Gallimard, 1973

Terry called out to the customer as she was about to open the door to leave.

“An' do you know dis book over here?”

Terry grabbed hold of the large volume under the counter and moved toward the woman.

“Gaston Miron's de only Canadian dat's listed as one of de forty-nine best books of poetry in French in
La Bibliothèque idéale
.”

The woman glanced at the cover of
La Bibliothèque idéale
, a work that claimed to list all the books that ought to be included in a francophone's ideal library. She did not seem to have seen it before. Terry showed her the table on pages 124 and 125.

“Eh? I don't see any udder, anyhow . . .”

The woman quickly scanned down the list.

“No, nor do I. But I don't know them all.”

“And as doh dat weren't enuff . . . turns out dat was the feller's only book.”

The woman nodded, going down the list again more closely.

“Maybe you'd like to borrow it? 'Tis right interestin' just to look at. A body doesn't have to read it all.”

Aware that he'd switched to the less formal
tu
in addressing her, Terry offered the customer
La Bibliothèque idéale.

“You can haul it back when yer books come in.”

It was really a sales trick of his. He actually owned several copies of
La Bibliothèque idéale
, which he would lend out from time to time. When they returned it, people also tended to order a few of the books listed within. A few even ordered a copy of the reference work itself.

“Yes, I wouldn't mind.”

“Like I say, it's interestin' readin' bits of it now an' den . . .”

In her novel
1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold
, Acadian author France Daigle does not mention the creation that year of the publishing house Hachette's paperback division, Livre de Poche. Henri Filipacchi, then Secretary General of Messageries Hachette, launched three books in paperback:
Koenigsmark
by Pierre Benoît,
Les Clés du royaume
(
The Keys to the Kingdom)
by A. J. Cronin, and
Vol de nuit
(
Night Flight
) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Legend has it that the idea came to Filipacchi to publish books in a smaller, cheaper format when he saw an American GI, standing in front of a Paris bookstore, tear a book in two and stuff it into his pockets. The paperback had already existed for some time in England and the United States.

“Gaw?”

“Gone?”

“Gaw?”

“Yup, de lady's gone.”

Standing by the big glass door, her Tatou in her arms, Marianne looked from side to side without spotting the departing customer.

If the
u
seems to be the vowel that evokes the least colour, the
y
is the one that's most often forgotten. In fact, 8 of the 102 participants in the survey simply did not mention it. Although this absence is notable, it should not eclipse the fact that 39 respondants said the
y
appeared to them in yellow. For 15 others, it suggested purple. Then comes oblivion — third place, after all. Oblivion is followed by green, which was mentioned seven times; black six times; no colour four times; blue, green, and red each named three times; brown, purple, and white twice each; and cyan, maroon, orange, gold, turquoise, sky blue, beige, and pink.

“Only, I has de feeling she don't talk much fer her age, I mean. Like today, when she said dat, it hit me dat she don't often say real words. Don't you tink?”

“Well, might be she doesn't have a whole lot to say. There's plenty folks like that.”

“I know kids don't all come up de same way, there's dem dat starts walkin' later, udders get to talkin' later, or wears nappies longer . . .”

“Well, sure, but 'tisn't like she doesn't understand us, is it. I don't think she's deaf or anythin'.”

The ads were coming to an end, and the TV show was about to start up again. Terry made haste to get his question in:

“Do doctors check dat sort of ting?”

“Well, I hope so . . .”

In
Petites difficultés d'existence
by France Daigle (Les Éditions du Boréal, 2002), translated by Robert Majzels as
Life's Little Difficulties
(House of Anansi Press, 2004), readers learn that an arsonist completely destroyed the home of Étienne and Ludmilla Zablonski in Baltimore, which explains why the painter possesses so few objects from his past.

Regarding
Petites difficultés d'existence
, the second edition of the French version of the novel is preferable to the first, because the latter contains minor errors. Luckily, these errors do not actually affect the narrative itself, but they could confuse those who take pleasure in closer readings. Mention of the second printing is included in the publications page at the end of the book. If there is no mention of a second printing, you are in possession of the version containing errors. Those in possession of the English translation, entitled
Life's Little Difficulties
, will be relieved to learn it does not contain the errors in the first edition of the French version.

Elementary operation adding the numerals in the number 666, a number considered by some as satanic. Identical result when working from right to left, as in Arabic writing:

Any attempt to elaborate a correct definition of desire will demonstrate to what extent people like Freud and Lacan were possessed of a kind of genius. Because there is no simple definition of desire. Similarly, the art and science of psychoanalysis is based on dense and intricate concepts, which are not easily rendered accessible to the layman. For the moment, let us limit ourselves to saying that desire is to psychoanalysis what strawberries are to strawberry pie.

The addition of the numerals making up the number 1,728, the multiple of 12 supposedly representing plenitude, yields a similar result to that obtained from the presumed satanic number 666:

By the beginning of the '60s, the enormous success of the softcover cheaper format led French economists to add the paperback to their list of consumer products included in the calculation of the price index. At the same time a typically French polemic erupted around the paperback as “democratic and egalitarian illusion.” None other than Jean-Paul Sartre himself signed a text in
Temps modernes
responding to the article in
Mercure de France
that had sparked the debate. Notwithstanding these arguments, nothing seemed to slow the promised rise of the paperback, not to mention the benefits to reading, authors, and texts.

“You, yer a writer! Are you seein' colours, den?”

This had been going on for a while now. It turned out that all the residents of the lofts who were in the Babar at that moment saw the
a
as yellow and the
i
as red. All, that is, 9 of the 27 residents. At 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon, on a Thursday.

A scattered novel, then. Serenity being, after all, something that must be earned.

Élizabeth is strolling in the streets of Moncton: Highfield, Winter, Portledge, North, not necessarily in that order, because all this happened some time ago. The trees along those streets are more damaged than they were back then, but they still manage to form an impressive canopy. Élizabeth is on her way to or from the hospital. She lives at the end of one of these streets. Still lives there today. Just a little bit in retreat. Élizabeth is always in retreat. Her life, her work, her thoughts. In retreat, and yet, not.

Additional results of the small impromptu survey on the perception of colours in vowels: all but 6 of the participants used loose leaf three-holed paper; 63 of these sheets were lined and bore the Hilroy insignia in the lower right-hand corner; three respondents tore loose leaf sheets from their three-ringed binders, thus tearing the holes. As for the others, 3 tore a sheet from spiral notebooks, and 1 participant used a sheet of paper that was not white, pink as a matter of fact. Also, 50 respondents used blue ink ballpoint or felt pens; 31 used pencils; 10 used black ink ballpoint or felt pens; 4 combined blue ink and grey pencil; 3 used purple ink; 2 used red ink; 1 used green, and the last made his or her mark by combining red and black ink.

Terry and Zed had made an appointment with a Halifax architectural firm to discuss their project and to explore the possibilities. On their way they dropped a few coins in a beggar's cap. In return the man smiled his thanks, revealing no less than a half dozen golden fillings.

“Well, 'tis nice to 'ave a bit of sometin' put away, like dey say.”

Boredom conceals anger and anxiety. Superstition is the anticipation of difficulties due to the projection of hostile desires. Happiness does not exist except as the realization of a childhood desire. Religion is the childhood feeling of impotence carried into adulthood and projected into culture. Paranoia is evidence of homosexuality. Groups, crowds, gangs, and families are held together by diffuse libidinal ties; disintegration and panic ensue when the erotic relation is extinguished. All dependencies are a substitute for the primary habit, masturbation. The arts are a cultural narcotic without the disadvantages that other drugs produce over time. Adult scientific curiosity is the extension of the child's search for the truth about sexual differences and the mysteries of conception and birth. Aesthetic creations, making love, war, laws, and constitutions are all means of mastering the universe, or a way to disguise the inability to master it. Fiction offers the human being a diversity of lives we require to live. Neurosis is an individual religion, religion a universal neurosis. The true founder of civization is the man who thrust an insult at his enemy instead of a sword. Human beings are not meant to be happy, their happiness is not part of creation's plan.

“Dey went an' bought all dis stuff, den in de end dey's worse off dan when dey started. Turned out, de feller dat sold it to 'em was crookeder den a dog's hind leg, even doh dey'd known him fer a dog's age, what 'appens a whole lot in dat business, supposedly. A real racket, or dat's wot dey say.”

In 1972, the publisher Gallimard created Folio paperbacks.
L'Étranger
(
The Stranger
) by Albert Camus became Folio's bestseller with 6 million copies sold. Hachette, meanwhile, can boast sales of 300,000 copies of novels by Mary Higgins Clark and Bernard Werber in paperback.

“Dad, did you see? Dat man over der trowed 'is coffee cup on de ground.”

As a matter of fact, Terry could see the Tim Hortons cup rolling in a half circle on the pavement.

“Should I be goin' over der, Dad, an' tell 'im to pick it up?”

Terry thought his son was brave, though he wasn't sure this was a healthy quality in this case.