Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  She looks up. And suddenly stops.

  Something about him has changed. He is as handsome as ever, his impossibly grey eyes still set off that same mysterious dizziness, but a sadness that she hadn’t been aware of has appeared on his face, which has turned pale. She guesses that what he is going to say is important. Like at confession. She doesn’t know why but she senses that he is going to confess to her, that it will be hard for him, that she has to listen carefully. That a secret he has never shared with anyone will be revealed here, in a train on the way to Winnipeg, to a little girl who may not understand what it means and will be annoyed with herself.

  All the same she assumes a look of concentration to listen to him. And tilts her head, like him. Or like the priest in the confessional when what you have to confess to him is very ugly and you hesitate. Is that why he is hesitating? Because it’s going to be ugly? She pricks up her ears, waits patiently.

  It takes a while. He doesn’t speak right away. He seems to be searching for words, changing his mind, she could swear at a certain point that he’s about to leave the car, then all at once he takes a long breath and says in a very gentle voice:

  “I don’t like them. Women.”

  That’s all.

  It’s true that she doesn’t understand.

  So she decides to smile.

  “Does that mean you’re going to stay an old bachelor?”

  He raises his head.

  “Probably.”

  “My grandfather always laughs when he says he should have stayed an old bachelor, that women are just a pack of trouble. Is that what you think, too?”

  “No …”

  “Can you play the piano?”

  The change of subject seems to astonish him.

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “I’ve got an old auntie who’s an old maid. She’s my grandfather’s sister. You met her at the station in Regina; she brought me. She plays the piano. It’s so beautiful to listen to … It seems to be the most important thing in her life. If she’s an old maid does it mean that she doesn’t like men, that she thinks they’re a pack of trouble?”

  “No. Maybe it just means that she hasn’t met the right one.”

  “Same with you … Maybe you’ll meet the right girl someday … Maybe even on the train, you never know …”

  “No, when I say I don’t like women that’s not what it means … You’ll understand later on … Meanwhile, forget all that … I don’t know why I told you …”

  A kind of fog creeps into the region around her heart. This time though it doesn’t go lower; it stays there, like a weight. It’s cold and it makes her want to cry. She would like to tell him that she understands, to console him because it seems to upset him terribly, but she does not yet know the meaning of what has just been revealed to her and she stays there, dumbfounded, helpless to come up with anything at all that might help this handsome, grey-eyed young man she would willingly follow to the ends of the earth, who has just confided a mystery that for her is impenetrable.

  Her smile is so sad that he mustn’t smile.

  “Forget that. I shouldn’t have …”

  He is on his feet, he’s going to leave.

  She has to think of something. Just one sentence. A little nothing for consolation, like her grandmother’s remarks when everything is going badly, when she has one of those fits whose source she doesn’t know, that scare everyone because they are so unlikely coming from her.

  “Maybe if you learned the piano …”

  He practically ran out of the coach, one hand over his mouth.

  Silly child! That’s not what she should have said! She’s made him run away, she won’t see him again, he probably won’t say goodbye when they get to Winnipeg. She has destroyed the dream of travelling across Canada with him for the rest of her life.

  Outside, the same never-ending fields of grain pass by again and again. The sky is too blue, the clouds too white. She would like a good dark storm with lightning and thunder, what her grandmother calls a condensed end of the world. Hail, too, to behead the corn, destroy the harvest, overturn the train, bring to an end this whole damn journey, the unexpected end of the road, lifeless life in a world that she doesn’t want to know, that’s going to be imposed on her though no one has asked for her opinion. And to stifle the tragedy that she has just suspected in Jacques, that she doesn’t understand because she is too young, but that she knows is serious, irrevocable, irreparable.

  When she left Maria, she cried; this time, she feels like wrecking everything.

  She unfolds the blanket, lies down on the seat.

  She knows that she won’t sleep.

  She only wants to die.

  Before going to bed the night before, Jacques had left the carefully polished shoes outside Compartment 14. Shining boots and shoes is the job he hates the most, so he was somewhat relieved the previous evening to find the corridors of the sleeping car nearly empty. Just a few pairs, including this one, had been left in front of the closed doors. He had been able to go back to studying earlier than usual. But in the morning a Canadian army major named Templeton had brought his shoes back, telling him they weren’t polished properly, that the army would never accept such a slapdash job and that he’d have to do it all over if he didn’t want a new, official complaint to the conductor. He hadn’t argued – the customer is always right, especially when he’s wrong – and Jacques had brought the shoes to his small cell. In the beginning he’d thought of giving them back as is to see if major Templeton would notice, then decided not to take a chance. He needs this job to continue his studies and he doesn’t want to lose it.

  He is now bent over the left shoe, he’s just spat on the toe which in his opinion was perfectly clean and rubs it like a maniac with his chamois square. No doubt a waste of energy because these shoes are perfect! He has put off starting the job in the hope that Major Templeton would have to walk around the train barefoot, but he just saw him in the dining car, shod in gleaming boots and more arrogant than ever. The officer eyes him scornfully before pointing to his footwear.

  “These are clean boots, my boy! You ought to spend some time in the army, that’d make a man of you!”

  He didn’t have the nerve to ask if shining shoes properly was the prerogative of a real man, if it was the kind of idiotic thing they put into soldiers’ heads, and he turned his back after saying that his shoes would be ready in less than half an hour.

  All this pointless rubbing allows him, however, to think back to the conversation he’s just had with young Rhéauna, to the confession that had escaped him when he couldn’t hold it back from a little girl who didn’t know what it was all about. Never before had he talked about it to anyone. It was a secret he’d kept buried since early adolescence when he thought that he was the only boy to have that kind of thought, which haunts him and has several times brought him to the edge of the abyss. He knows now that he’s not the only one, that there are others who have the same tastes and the same desires as his, he has informed himself, read articles, was appalled by the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, but those he’d encountered – a chance meeting, the look in someone’s eyes in a crowd – put him off because they were never equal to his expectations. Because those expectations – and this is one of the things that disturb him most – are to a large degree aesthetic. It’s beauty that he’s looking for in men like himself but he has never yet located it. Not even once. They’re never handsome enough, they’re too fat or too thin, and it’s their fear of discovery above all that can be read in a bitter crease of the mouth that makes them ugly. Is he like that, too? Can he be spotted in the crowd because of that lost look, that easily detected panic that smells of victim ready for sacrifice? Does he have the look of the damned that he sees in others? Does it make him ugly, too? And maybe he’s not handsome enough either for the aesthetic criteria of the men on the prowl he sees now and then, even here on the Montreal-to-Vancouver train …

  Brought up Catholic
like all Quebeckers by parents who were always talking about God and the Blessed Virgin and with only crass ignorance to guide their behaviour, he’d been so naive as to go to confession when he became aware of his condition in early adolescence. He suspected that what he felt was not altogether normal, but would never have imagined that it was so monstrous. The priest had frightened him so much that, for months, he could hardly sleep, considering himself both sick and dirty, convinced that he was a pariah no one would ever want, condemned to be alone on the fringes of society. He’d tried to change, to direct his dreams and fantasies toward women; he took cold baths – the priest’s advice – he punished his body, he prayed to God, begging to be turned into a boy with healthy ideas, but nothing changed and what he saw when he was masturbating – also forbidden, considered dangerous for both mental and physical health by the priests – even if he made a nearly superhuman effort to disguise it, erase it, transform it, was still the body of a man.

  At nearly twenty not only is he still a virgin, but he has never seen a man naked. His own body is the only one he knows and, if he mentally undresses someone, it’s always himself, with his puny physique, hollow-chested and nearly hairless, that’s so unappetizing. Only his eyes are attractive, his mother has always said so, but grey eyes, especially when they’re your own, aren’t enough to fulfill the dreams of caresses and kisses of a young man filled with odd urges.

  He has even gone so far as to wonder cynically if he’d only decided to become a doctor in order to see naked men! Since he has been attending university he has studied in detail all the art books in the library, he has crammed himself with paintings from all eras – the sturdy physiques of the Renaissance, the lankier ones of the nineteenth century – he has been moved by the perfection of Greek and Roman sculptures, but there’s not one image, no matter how beautiful, how inspiring, by which he wants to be intoxicated; it’s a genuine flesh-and-blood man with sounds and smells, with amazing, unexpected reactions and an infinitely renewable capacity for sensual pleasure. But his religion and his society forbid it. He’s actually convinced that he is afflicted with a serious, debilitating vice and he asks himself every day how he’ll be able to live the rest of his life if he’s not able to change his nature.

  And he has just expressed all of that out loud for the first time in two short sentences in front of someone innocent who perhaps will never even know that it exists or, on the other hand, will, like the rest of society, see it as a dangerous mental illness that must be cured at all costs, or at least overcome.

  Does he feel relieved? Did saying those words to someone else, even one who is unaware of the importance of what’s going on, do him any good? He would like to answer yes. That the mere fact of, once and for all, having said aloud in an intelligible voice what has been tormenting him for so many years has rid him, even if only a little, of the anguish that is crushing his heart. But no. He is well aware that she was not the right person and that it wasn’t the right time, that it came out in spite of himself, in vain, and nothing has changed, he is still alone with his pain over the Canadian army’s pair of shoes and his shoeshine kit.

  Before his confession he was filled with rage; now he feels drained of rage. Is that any better?

  A gentleman in uniform and cap has just shouted something in English; it can’t be far to the station in Winnipeg. Nana again presses her nose against the window, which she has just closed. The fields are smaller; big, rich people’s houses speed by, often protected by enormous, leafy trees of unknown species, there are no more cows on the horizon. A paved road runs along the railway tracks; dozens of cars or more drive by, blowing their horns to greet the train. It slows down a little, blaring like a nervous animal and spitting smoke, then turns left. A city stands out at the end of the plain. Much bigger than Regina. A genuine big city, her grandfather had said, a capital. She had asked what a capital was, he told her that it was an important city, where the government of a country or a province was located. Regina was the capital of Saskatchewan; Winnipeg, much bigger, was Manitoba’s. She immediately lost interest in the word. Not beautiful and too official.

  She was not aware of anything when she left Saskatchewan for Manitoba. Except for the city at the far end of it, she knows this landscape; it’s the same as back home, but she had hoped that, when she left her province, she would find a different panorama from the one she was used to – mountains, maybe, at least one big hill with forests (she’s been dreaming for so long about seeing a forest). No, prairies still, even if there are more trees and smaller plots of land, with an omnipresent sky that eats up everything, even the silhouette of the city that’s approaching – wheat, corn, oats, barley. She’ll never get away from it!

  She turns her head, cranes her neck a little. Jacques didn’t come back to see her. She’d had a hunch that he wouldn’t, while hoping she was wrong. She would like to say goodbye before she gets off the train, tell him that she hadn’t understood what he’d told her but that, when she did understand later on as he’d told her she would, most likely when she was grown up, she would have a kind thought for him, even if it was ugly. Because, though his words had been unclear, it was because what he’d confessed was something not very nice.

  So men exist who don’t like women. What do they do? Are they alone for their whole lives, old bachelors buried deep inside their big, deserted houses? Without ever having children? The question she asked Jacques earlier comes back to her. Does it mean that her great-aunt Régina doesn’t like men? And is that something serious or ugly? Will Jacques be unpleasant with sudden mood changes like her great-aunt? She wishes she could get answers now, right away, wishes she could leave the train knowing what will become of him, if he’s going to succeed in life, come into his own as a good doctor. But the future – her own as well as the kind young man’s who looked after her during the journey – is not a novel to be read at bedtime, and all that she can do, she knows it, is to decide that, as of now, the Prince Charmings from her books will have grey eyes and, in secret, they won’t like women, whatever that means. She thinks it’s romantic and she can’t quite understand why.

  Another whistle of the train, this one more prolonged. A few jolts, the wheels screech against the rails: they have arrived. A huge brick structure appears, the train enters it through a long tunnel, a wood-and-metal platform starts to unwind along the car. It seems as if the train is motionless, that the platform is moving, more and more slowly. One last little jolt, one last blast of the whistle, a final sputter of smoke and everything stops. A weary animal has just come back to the stable.

  Loads of excited people are running in every direction, talking in loud voices, standing on tiptoe trying to see inside the cars. Hands wave, shouts rise up from the platform. Among all these people is her great-aunt Bebette, whom she’s fond of but doesn’t feel like seeing.

  Another night in a strange house with too-old people who will ask her too many questions.

  She gets up, heads for the exit. Her suitcase is there somewhere in the storage area. Good and heavy.

  Jacques is standing at the top of the three steps, holding her suitcase and wearing a sad smile.

  “You weren’t going to get off the train without saying goodbye, Nana!”

  She felt her heart leap in her chest. A solid punch that cut her legs out from under her and made her stagger. And the heat in her solar plexus has come back all at once. She is convinced that she won’t be able to say a word, that everything will be stuck in her throat, that she’s going to come across as a little idiot.

  He crouches in front of her, puts his hands on her shoulders. She is taller than he is and has to bend down to answer him. Maybe that’s what helps her speak. Because she does manage with no problem.

  “I thought it was up to you to come and get me and take me to my aunt Bebette …”

  “You’re right, that’s my job. But mainly I came to say goodbye, that I was glad to meet you, to talk with you, and to advise you not to be afraid of Montreal or of the
life that’s waiting for you there with your mother. It will all be fine, Nana, you’ll be happy, your mother will be nice, you’ll make friends … Sometimes a change is good, Nana. You think it’s going to be horrible and in the end you realize it’s better that way. I’m not expressing myself very well, but I just want to tell you that I hope you’ll be happy.”

  Will she ever love someone as much as she loves Jacques at this moment? She doubts it.

  And she kisses him on the mouth, right there in front of everybody.

  And tells him:

  “I don’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter.”

  3

  Bebette

  No sooner has she stepped onto the platform than she is drowned in a surge of arms, heads, clothes in many colours. Her name is shouted, people kiss her, children hop and skip around her, her feet get trampled, adults laugh, in the midst of the hubbub her suitcase disappears as if by magic. You might think that everyone in the station when the train pulled in was there to welcome her, and she doesn’t know which way to turn, especially as she doesn’t recognize a soul. Have they made a mistake? Do they think she’s someone else? No, it’s her own name that she hears and she thinks she can recognize in the curve of an eyebrow or the roundness of a cheek a reminder of great-aunt Bebette’s looks. And so she starts to reply to the kisses and hugs, she laughs, too, and shakes hands and asks people she’s certain she doesn’t know what’s new. A prisoner of the whirlwind of sounds, of smells and colours, she walks away from the train without realizing it – she has the impression that she is being taken away as children were in some of the novels she has read where they were sold to go and work in the mines – and all at once she realizes that she’s in the waiting room, an area even bigger than the one in the Regina Station, more impressive and noisier, too. It could hold not the Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan church but the whole village! She is dazed, tired. She wonders when someone will finally explain to her what exactly is going on when a loud saperlipopette rises up nearby, making everyone around her freeze. It’s no longer her name being shouted, she’s no longer being hugged. The group surrounding her is divided in two, like the Red Sea opening for Moses.