Michel Tremblay - Birth of a Bookworm

Michel Tremblay

translated by Sheila Fischman

Talonbooks 2003

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Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canadas three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canadas cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the author, Michel Tremblay. You may also be interested in the first two books in the education of Michel Tremblay series, Bambi and Me and Twelve Opening Acts.

Copyright 1994 Michel Tremblay
Translation copyright 2003 Sheila Fischman

Talonbooks
278 E 1st Ave
Vancouver BC
V5T 1A6

www .talonbooks.com

Cover design by Adam Swica

First Printing: June 2003
Electronic edition: March 2015

First published in French in 1994 as Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tle by Les Editions Lemac, Montreal.

Cataloguing data available fromLibrary and Archives Canada

ISBN-13: 978-0-88922-967-9

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.

Do you, like me, dream in the style of the author youve been reading before you fall asleep? If so, mount this joual, this horse of mine, as late at night as possible, take off with him while you sleep, hes friskier than ever in spite of all the uptight supporters of the theres-just-one-way-to-write-proper-French crowd, hes pawing the ground with impatience while he waits, and I promise you, he gallops like a god! You see, Id like to be able to think that I too have the ability to make you dream.

M. T.

My mothers roots are complicated and mysterious. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Maria Desrosiers, a Cree from Saskatoon who spoke French, but badly, and a sailor from Brittany by the name of Rathier, whose first name I never knew and who soon disappeared into the abyss of memory, she was brought up by her maternal grandmother because Maria Desrosiers-Rathier had decided to stay in the States, to work there, according to some family members, to live a life of debauchery, according to others, and because her children got in her way. So shed put them on the train and stayed in Providence where it must have been easier to find money than it was in the Middle of Nowhere, Saskatchewan. How did my mother end up coming to Montreal in the early 1920s to marry my father? I dont know. I could call and ask one of my brothers but Id rather believe in the call of destiny, the inevitability of fate, and some incredible adventures back and forth across America twice in search of love and happiness... Im a child of Jules Verne, of Victor Malo and Raoul de Navery, and Ive always assumed that I had a mother straight out of an adventure story.

As a child, I would try to imagine what my mothers life would have been like if she hadnt left Saskatchewan. Whom would she have married? And who would have been my father? And when I learned that it takes two to make a child, that if they hadnt met I wouldnt have existed, I had my first existential crisis. So chance plays an important part in making babies, does it? And if my mother had stayed in Saskatchewan, my father would have met some other woman and I wouldnt have been there wondering why they hadnt met? I nearly hadnt been born and nobody seemed to care.

Saskatchewan was always floating around in the apartment on Fabre Street and then the one on Cartier, a tremendous ghost the colour of ripe wheat and a too-blue sky. When Mama talked about the prairie that had no beginning and no end, about the fantastic sunsets above a sea of wheat, the brushfires that spread at the speed of a galloping horse, about the horses too, in fact, that shed loved so much, always with a little quaver in her voice and her gaze turned to the window to hide the homesickness that made her eyes mist over, I wished that I could board the train the long one that took five days to travel all the way across Canadaand take her to the middle of an endless field lulled by the south wind and the cry of the mourning dove, and tell her: Breathe, look, touch, devour this landscape; its my gift to you.

My father, a good man but of whom diplomacy was not the principal virtue, often promised when he was drinking, because he loved her, that he really would take her one last time to her native land, which was even farther away than that of Gabrielle Roy, whose books she consumed with long painful sighs. She had one brief moment of hope, but she knew as well as the rest of us that she would be forever a prisoner of Montreal where her wandering had brought her for good, and shed fall back into those endless reveries shed share with us in little bits and tiny scraps. I would climb onto her huge, soft, fragrant body, throw myself onto what I used to call her two pillows because Id often fell asleep there, and Id say: Katchewan! The floodgates of memory would open, the two of us would glide onto a river of melancholy for her, plans for western journeys for me.

Ive never been to Saskatchewan, and fields that are too flat, too vast, too lulled by the wind break my heart.

***

Did Mama have an English accent? Today I ask myself that question before I talk about her sister, my Aunt Bea who, like her mother, Maria Desrosiers, whom I never really knew, didnt speak French very well. Could my mother have had an English accent without our realizing it? Can a person spend the first twenty years of his life in the company of someone who has a foreign accent and not know it? Thats something I checked with my brothers: whew!

My mother and my Aunt Bea (with no acute accent and it was her full name, not a diminutive for Beatrice) could have been twins, they resembled each other so much: the same vast frame, broad but not tall, the same square face, the same round cheeks, the same long, flat forehead scored very early with deep wrinkles, the same copper-coloured skinand the infectious Desrosiers smile that as soon as it appeared, wiped out all your anxieties and troubles. The spitting image of their mother. Theyd inherited nothing from the Breton sailor, whose only role had been to conceive them, and everything from the resourceful Cree woman who had crossed half a continent in an attempt to earn some kind of living in the land of opportunity. All shed brought with her though were three daughters and a son who all resembled her.

When the two went walking along Mont-Royal Street, speaking English to be sure that their secrets, the secrets of two little girls who hadnt grown up, stayed secret, people would say:

Madame Tremblays happy today, her twin sisters come for a visit!

They kept telling each other the same stories about their far-off childhood in the depths of Saskatchewan: Aunt Bea, who always kept a few peanuts in her purse on Sunday afternoon so she could boast about finishing her snack