Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  The bed is narrow but Rhéauna no longer feels uncomfortable at the thought of lying next to her aunt. She could ask to sleep on the living-room sofa as she had intended, presumably so as not to disturb her, decides no, that might be impolite or tactless.

  Régina switches off the bedside light.

  Rhéauna thinks that she ought to say something, to congratulate her grandfather’s sister, thank her. But how? Her words will never be as striking as what she has just heard.

  “I never heard that, a piano, ma tante.”

  She senses the old woman turning to her, feels the warmth of her body next to her own. Her great-aunt Régina isn’t cold after a concert.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  “It’s more than pretty … It’s … it’s … magnificent.”

  Régina wraps her arm around her great-niece’s shoulders and they fall asleep almost immediately.

  This is the first time since the beginning of her adulthood that Régina has slept with someone. But that, no one will ever know.

  Régina-Coeli Desrosiers has never married.

  Everyone knew that the unattractive young girl, shy and awkward, would be an old maid. The youngest child of Rhéau and Simone Desrosiers, she had been brought up to help her mother and serve her brother and sisters. A late arrival in her parents’ life, most likely unexpected, unlike her siblings she hadn’t been able to enjoy their affection, discreet but palpable. On the contrary. Her mother had always made it clear, without showing any regret or guilt, that she had not been desired and she treated her like a servant, with no signs of affection or words of encouragement.

  She had never had a companion and she didn’t seem to care. She had seen her brother, Méo, marry that idiotic Joséphine Lépine and then her sisters: first Bebette with some obese individual who was even more insufferable than she herself, if that was possible, the indispensable Rosaire Roy, king of the Canadian Pacific Railway; then Gertrude, who quickly left for Ottawa to tie the knot with a young lawyer named Wilson, then die of sorrow in strange circumstances and leave behind the appalling Ti-Lou of whom it was said that the life she led was far from respectable and who was known as the she-wolf of Ottawa. As the house was being emptied, however, Régina-Coeli’s personality changed. Or maybe, released from her obligations, free at last to be herself, she let herself go, showing her parents her real personality. Or the one that they’d fashioned for her with their constant frustrations and reproaches. She had not been born sour-tempered, she’d become it. Because of the rest of the family. She had grumbled while serving her brother and sisters, complained about their whims and demands, but to date she had never dared to behave with anyone else as she allowed herself to do from then on with her parents; she sent them packing despite the respect that she owed them for the simple reason that they were her parents, neglecting her duties as cook – she hated cooking and now managed to ruin meal after meal with a kind of dogged will to displease that was very effective – and doing the most rudimentary household tasks.

  She hadn’t looked at men; they weren’t yet aware of her existence. On her twenty-fifth birthday, she had officially declared herself an old maid and her parents had given up for good any thought of one day getting rid of her. They had made her without wanting her, now they had to put up with her. Till the end. Of their lives or hers. Her mother, as a good practising and narrow-minded Catholic, saw her as a punishment for sins that she hadn’t committed; her father, a good defeatist and submissive farmer, as one more necessary evil in an already difficult life.

  And all that time the existence of Régina-Coeli Desrosiers – her double-barrelled name came from her mother’s somewhat excessive devotion to the Blessed Virgin – would have been terribly pathetic had she not had music to console her. For everything.

  Music had come into her life by chance. One of the nuns who taught at her school in Saint-Boniface – the family had not yet left Manitoba, the Desrosiers’s native land – one Sister Marguerite-Bourgeoys, who played the parish organ on Sunday and spent her free time at the piano the rest of the week, had noticed little Régina-Coeli’s obvious fascination with the instrument. She’d started by hanging around the nun and her piano after the catechism lesson on Sunday, which always ended with Mozart’s Turkish Rondo; then she quickly moved on to questions, precise and often relevant, until one fine day she asked permission to touch the keyboard, just to see how it would sound under her fingers … Sister Marguerite-Bourgeoys had asked her if she wanted to learn to play and Régina-Coeli had answered yes. She was the only one in the family who showed a little talent or even the slightest interest in any art, no matter what.

  And so the nun started to teach her secretly the rudiments of that difficult instrument, most of the time at dawn before classes began. Régina-Coeli had to leave as soon as classes were over to prepare the meals – at noon and in the evening for her family who – it was obvious from how her brother and sisters behaved with her – mistreated her. She learned to play piano then unbeknownst to the others; no one at home or at school was aware of the ordinary little girl’s new interest in classical music.

  Régina-Coeli was not an exceptional student and she often displayed a difficult nature, irascible when things didn’t go her way – a fingering technique particularly hard to master, a piece that was complicated to decipher, the cold that numbed her hands in winter, the dampness of summer that made the ivory of the keyboard slippery; she would throw a tantrum, hit the piano as if it were a human being, even say bad words she’d heard who knows where that made Sister Marguerite-Bourgeoys blush. Perhaps Régina-Coeli was taking revenge on the piano for what her family made her put up with. The nun was severe as seldom as possible, however, because of the tremendous, sincere passion for music that she sensed was growing in her student who’d learned to read scores in record time and whose tremendous determination to master the instrument, to subject it to her will, was wonderful. But when everything was going well – if Régina-Coeli managed to play one whole piece without a mistake, for instance – she was transformed, radically changed, one could see the beginnings of the pianist she could become, it was obvious from the fluidity of her movements and the intelligence of her performances. Then Sister Marguerite-Bourgeoys would flush with pride. And when, after a year of lessons undertaken with such great seriousness, the little girl began to understand that music could be interpreted, that you weren’t limited to transferring to the keyboard precisely what you read on the score, that on the contrary you were free to play as much what the piece of music made you feel as the printed notes, she had thrown herself into the piano the way others might do into drink, sin or religion. It had become the centre of her life, her panacea, her reward, her consolation. And all, oh joy, with no one else’s knowledge. Because during all those years, she hadn’t said a word to her family circle. She’d asked Sister Marguerite-Bourgeoys to keep the secret but the nun, so proud of her pupil, had let out word to some of her colleagues and then Régina-Coeli Desrosiers’s lessons, though early in the morning, drew something of a crowd. Even the school principal, one Sister Jésus-de-la-Croix, a strict and rather chilly woman, was not averse to the occasional visit to the small room where, it was said in the religious community, divine melodies rose up for the greater glory of God. Her first audience then was a group of black-and-white wimples who thought they had before them a revelation of God on earth, though what was happening before their eyes was on the contrary the raw, pagan passion of a woman, neglected by her family, for an art that was saving her life. Most likely, they would have thought that passion guilty and reprehensible if they had imagined it for what it was. But they chose to remain in ecstasy without thinking.

  No one in Régina-Coeli’s family ever knew that she devoted herself to the piano. With remarkable talent.

  And when she left school at fourteen, she found herself deprived of all music. For ten years. It was out of the question to ask her parents for a piano. Music had never been heard in the house and, in any case, they
would have told her that the living room was too small for such a massive instrument. Or that they were too old to put up with that pounding away all day long. Or too poor to pay for something so useless. Now and then she would slip into the school music room and her former teacher would let her satisfy her passion for an hour or two, but rumours began to fly about the nature of their relationship – it’s fine to be a teacher’s pet when you’re at school, but when you leave, you must never go back – and Régina-Coeli had to give up the piano with no hope of remission. She said her goodbyes to the old, much-loved instrument with a Chopin nocturne, but she couldn’t do justice to all the subtleties and reproached herself for years, mentally correcting her final performance, a failure, correcting it, polishing it, but too late.

  That was how, little by little, she became the sour-tempered Régina-Coeli Desrosiers everybody learned to hate. She only had to give in to her natural inclination toward the impatience, anger, rage that the existence of the piano in her everyday life could lull for a while, and to which she could devote herself. As Chopin, Schubert and Mozart were no longer there to give meaning to her life, she had concentrated bitterly on the role that fate seemed to have in store for her, that she seemed unable to escape – the role of servant to everyone else. Her parents were old, her older siblings were far away, raising their own families, so the work was lighter, but Régina-Coeli went at it as if the house were full of people all year long and the Desrosiers home became the cleanest one in Saint-Boniface, the one that was always held up as an example when anyone talked about a well-run household, where no one would have wanted to live, however, because of that shrew who ruled over everything there or, so it was said, who poisoned the existence of anyone who dared to approach her.

  One fine day she told her parents, just like that, point blank, that she was leaving Saint-Boniface for Regina. She needed a change; she’d been thinking about going away for a while and she’d got a job at a library in Saskatchewan that was looking for a bilingual archivist. At first her parents seemed not to understand, then after she’d explained that, once she turned twenty-five, she wanted to be on her own. They’d asked why, adding of course the usual criticisms: she didn’t have a heart; she was abandoning them in their old age when they’d been so good to her; she would destroy her soul in that city where hardly anyone spoke French; she would become a loose woman to be pointed at by others: to which she responded that people already pointed at her and that she wanted to go far away, cut off from everyone she’d known until now. To start a new life. Then, in a moment of weakness, she promised to tell them before she left the real reason for her decision.

  On the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday, Régina-Coeli, whose parents, no doubt in retaliation for her imminent departure, hadn’t asked what she wanted for this birthday when she would “don Saint Catherine’s bonnet” and join the ranks of official old maids, put on her prettiest dress – she had two, a pale yellow one for weekdays that she’d worn to do so much scrubbing and cooking, and a sky-blue one for Sunday which confirmed that her mother had devoted her to the Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven – and the hat that she usually kept for Sunday Mass and asked her parents to follow her. Rather, in a voice that brooked no retort, and they had no choice but to do as she asked, wondering what on earth she wanted from them. On the morning of her birthday, no less. The three of them inched their way across the parish of Saint-Boniface under the surprised looks of their neighbours who’d never seen them all on the street at the same time: her, small, dried-up and plainly nervous; them, hesitant, dragging their feet a little because they didn’t know where she was taking them.

  She helped them climb the big stone staircase of her old school, greeted the few nuns they ran into on the long corridor and took them to a small, bare room in which a big, decrepit upright piano had pride of place. She pointed to chairs and they sat, frowning. She sat on the piano bench, facing them.

  “You asked me why I wanted to go away?”

  She turned around, opened a music book, raised her hands above the keyboard.

  And what swept over her parents kept them in their seats. It was more than music; it was an ocean of mixed sensations, a deluge of sound so powerful that it twisted their hearts and knotted their stomachs, a whirlwind of feelings, too numerous and too intense to be experienced all together, that made them want to run away and at the same time drown themselves in it forever. Not only had Rhéau and Simone Desrosiers never heard anything like it but the storm of sound set off by their own daughter, whom they’d always thought was too ordinary to take care of herself or to wonder who she was or if she had needs, desires, fancies. Placid themselves, never knowing anything close to an uncontrollable passion, they couldn’t have imagined such a flame in one of their children, and for a moment they thought that their senses were deceiving them, that the piano player was not Régina-Coeli, their so-nondescript daughter who had never distinguished herself in anything at all except cooking and housework, but someone, a music student or nun, who was hiding in the next room. They had to face facts, though, and they listened to the piece all the way to the end. They saw their daughter for the first time in their lives and stayed glued to their chairs, wide-eyed, arms crossed on their chests. Were they moved or upset? Were they experiencing this moment as a revelation after years of intentional blindness? Régina never knew.

  The piece over, she let a few seconds pass before turning to face them. Would they shower her with insults or stiffen as usual in an oppressive and empty silence? As if what had just happened hadn’t?

  At last, she turned in their direction.

  “That’s why I want to go away.”

  They were already standing in front of their chairs: he, with his hat on; she, clutching her purse against her stomach.

  Ready to be on their way.

  When she awoke the next morning, Rhéauna rediscovered the unpleasant great-aunt she’d met at the station the day before. Cold, stiff, pinch-lipped and frowning. Gone was the passionate woman pinned to her piano, vanished the rapturous performer of Monsieur Schubert and Monsieur Chopin. It was as if she wanted to make what she’d exposed of her real personality disappear in front of her great-niece, a vice that she had to keep hidden, a shameful flaw, and concentrate on fixing breakfast, grumbling.

  She wakened Rhéauna quite unceremoniously, shouting at her from the bedroom doorstep:

  “I’m going to think you’re dead! You’ve barely got time for breakfast before you leave.”

  She has already forgotten that she’d just shared the warmth of her bed with a little girl she’d charmed and overwhelmed with great swaths of unsettling music. She is herself again after her everyday fit of madness, her nourishment, her reason for being, and now is acting as if she doesn’t know that the day at the Regina Public Library lying before her will be nothing but a long, tedious prelude to the ecstasy awaiting her tonight. She has traded her inspired performer’s costume for that of a grumpy archivist everyone’s afraid of. As if the one didn’t know the other. Or the more interesting of the two didn’t exist in the daytime.

  Rhéauna is discouraged. The porridge, too runny to be porridge, is the same colour and pretty well the same consistency as yesterday’s eggs goldenrod. The toast is made from a hard, stale loaf, as if the delicious bread from the night before had dried on the counter all night, and the milk has a funny smell. Not sour, but nearly. She knows, though, that she’ll have a long journey from Regina to Winnipeg and she tries hard not to show her disgust for what she is forcing herself to eat, which like last night’s food is rolling around in her mouth. She makes a few stabs at conversation, comes up against a wall of silence, finally resigns herself, with her nose in her glass of milk.

  Her great-aunt drinks black coffee without swallowing anything else. Maybe she doesn’t like her food either and prefers to eat out … In Maria it would be unthinkable. Everyone eats at home and never, ever, would they even think of eating elsewhere, except when they’re invited by relatives and always fo
r supper; here in Regina, though, in such a big city, there may be what her grandparents call restaurants, magical places that Béa dreams of, where for a sum of money and in no time at all they cook whatever you want, like the lemonade man in the station but more elaborate.

  She tries not to think about Montreal.

  With her suitcase packed again and her coat on, she waits for her great-aunt on the balcony. Another taxi will come and Régina lets her niece know that she’s beginning to cost her a lot. Rhéauna nearly offered to pay for the taxi but she was afraid that would break her budget, which is fairly slim. As on the day before, she doesn’t have a lunch and will have to buy something before she boards the train. But just before she starts down the steps to the sidewalk, Régina slips her a brown paper bag.

  “Something to eat on the train … Winnipeg’s a long way away.”

  Rhéauna shudders inwardly at the thought of what might be in the bag. Should she get rid of it without even opening it for fear it might take away her appetite?

  She looks out at the store windows that file past. She will have crossed this city twice without stopping, without meeting anyone but this strange great-aunt who changes depending on the time of day, one half of her not seeming to know about the other one’s existence. A walking lie.

  She knows that all the people she has seen on the streets of Regina since yesterday just speak English and that, anyway, even though her English is fairly good, a real conversation would have been difficult. In Maria, she could stop and continue a conversation with anyone where she’d left it the last time she’d met that person and … No, she has to stop thinking about Maria so much, it doesn’t help to compare everything to her little village. That’s all over, all in the past. The tremendous scale of the adventure she’s embarked on with no one asking her opinion comes back to her all at once and, as she gets out of the vehicle, her anxiety has her bent in two. Régina thinks that she’s tripped over something and tells her to watch where she puts her feet. She feels like replying in the same tone of voice. But what good would it do? She keeps quiet, takes her suitcase, climbs the steps of the enormous stone staircase.