Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  She is about to fall asleep, she feels numb, her eyes close by themselves – the delicious but so heavy pork sandwich (with fat from the roast) that she just ate probably has something to do with it – when some twinkling in the distance, a nearly imperceptible movement behind the trees that line the railway tracks, a shimmering across what seems to be an enormous flat surface attracts her attention. She presses her forehead against the window.

  Water! It’s water! As far as the eye can see! There! Very close, just behind the edge of the trees! She’s never seen so much water in her whole life! At least not since she left Rhode Island, but that was too long ago, she’s forgotten everything about Rhode Island. It shimmers, it gleams, it shatters into broken lines of waves that crash onto the shore, and sunbeams broken into a thousand pieces that wash onto the riverbank seem to be floating over it all for the sheer pleasure.

  She stands up on the seat – who cares about good manners? – and presses her hands on the glass.

  “There’s the ocean, Madame Robillard, look at the ocean!”

  “The ocean! Honestly, Rhéauna! We’re in the middle of the country! There’s no ocean in the middle of Canada! What’s in the middle of Canada, Rhéauna?”

  She leans across the space between their seats.

  “I asked you something, Rhéauna, what’s in the middle of Canada? You must know, they must have taught you in that godforsaken hole in Saskatchewan!”

  “The Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are in the middle of Canada.”

  “So why did you say it’s the ocean?”

  “There’s so much water, Madame Robillard! It can’t be just a lake! It has to be an ocean! A lake is small, you can swim in it, it dries up in the summer and turns into a duck pond! But that … That … It can’t dry up, there’s too much water, it’s too big, it’s too beautiful!”

  “There’s a reason it’s called the Great Lakes, little girl … We’ve just passed Fort William so it must be Lake Superior you can see and it’s not salt water. It’s not a sea. Seas are way farther away, ahead of the train and in back of it. Far away. I’ve never seen them because I don’t want to go that far, not to the east or to the west. We’re going to turn south in a little while and head for Toronto. Where we are now I can say that I’m halfway there …”

  And resumes her monologue where she’d left off: her sister-in-law Aline came over for a cup of tea the other night to tell her some incredible tale about an eccentric travelling salesman, one Michel Blondin, who …

  On the pretext of an urgent need to pee, Rhéauna gets off the seat and rushes toward the toilet. She meets Devon, who asks where she’s going. She tries to explain in English but he doesn’t understand and finally she indicates the bathroom door. He blushes to the roots of his hair and lets her go.

  But she doesn’t go into the smallest room, which probably stinks to high heaven. (Her grandmother warned her never to use the toilets in public places, not even when she gets to Montreal, because you never know who’s just come out and what they might have left behind that’s dirty and dangerous. Bugs, diseases, nameless and deadly … Not to mention the smells. It’s fine to put up with your own family’s smells, it’s nature, but not strangers’, I mean, really!)

  There is a door just ahead of the little room that she wants to avoid. Rhéauna leans on it, puts her forehead close to the rectangular glass.

  It’s so beautiful!

  The train is now closer to the water, there’s an opening in the curtain of trees, the railway track now follows the vastness of Lake Superior.

  She has dreamed since early childhood about the oceans described in the books she’s read, she has spent hours over the black-and-white illustrations of raging waves or slack seas, stocked with boats or not. It was all magnificent and made you want to take off, to see salt water rise up, agitated, at the slightest wind; the skies pouring out in colossal, destructive torrents; ships trying to clear a way and end up they never know where, but nothing had prepared her for what she sees before her. For the movement. Especially the movement. The water’s undulation, the gigantic mobility, the monumental breathing she’d have been unable to imagine when she was splashing around in the calm little ponds outside Maria.

  The train follows the shore and the waves, unimpressive as they actually are, that seem to her like mountains in motion, for she has only seen very small spurs of water lap at shores that weren’t even beaches.

  She has pressed both her hands on the glass, stuck her face there. She wishes she could shed her clothes, shed her skin even. She doesn’t know what that means but all at once she feels an irresistible urge to take off her well-behaved, obedient-little-girl’s outfit – the coat that’s too big, the ridiculous hat, the brand-new, Nile-green dress, though she thinks it’s so pretty, the socks, the shoes, the white cotton underpants – to be stark naked on the shore of Lake Superior. Then she would remove her skin, which is also a costume, a kind of disguise that hides something more important, herself, that hides herself, she’s sure of it. She would fold her bones, pack them in her suitcase and leave behind what was left of her … What? Her soul? … At least that’s what the fat priest in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan would maintain, yes, she would allow her soul to dive into the sea. Because it is a sea, an inland sea, not salt water maybe but still a sea. Her soul would sink straight to the bottom, among the reeds, the cattails, pebbles, fish, and she would go and live with them, planted in the silt at the exact centre of her journey between Maria and Montreal. A place that she would have chosen. From the bottom of the water she would watch once a day as the train went by heading east and tell herself that she’d nearly – oh, it was so long ago – gone to the end of the railway line, to a mythic city in the province of Quebec, an island with a real, big mountain, where everyone spoke French and her mother was waiting for her.

  She wishes that the train would come to a halt, that the panorama before her eyes would freeze, that time would stop. To let a lost little girl be found. At the bottom of the water.

  Then the train negotiates a slight turn toward the south en route to Toronto and the sunset sweeps over everything. The sky turns from calm to fire.

  She has seen sunsets before, though. Sitting on Grandpa Méo’s knees, she was often thrilled by the yellows and the oranges floating over the fields of grain behind the house, their two heads strained toward the west where Méo claimed that the day would end in the swirls of the Pacific after it had hooked its feet into the Rocky Mountains. Méo also said that it was the most beautiful moment of the day, of every day, the blessed hour when you had to be silent before such grandeur and look at it and thank providence – he didn’t like the word God – for having invented it simply for the pleasure of our eyes. So that the farmer who worked like an animal all day long can tell himself that his day hasn’t been wasted.

  But a double sunset, what a gift! First the sunset itself, magic and sublime, then as well its reflection blurred by the movement of the waves, its colours transformed by the water, the red becoming gold streaked with green, the gold becoming green streaked with red, the clouds looking at each other’s belly, comparing themselves and sizing one another up self-importantly, vying for the light, all mixed together, stirred, overturned, inverted, the top half solemn, impressive, the lower half furious and wild. A silent end of the world, a symphony without music.

  She wants to stay! Here! Now! Wants this moment never to end. Wants the train to not advance. Wants the sun to not move. Wants the little girl gazing at it all to exist only plunged into the mad colours. A painting. That couldn’t be hung anywhere because it would be too beautiful.

  A hand on her shoulder. The perfume of old lady unique to Isola Robillard, her exasperating voice.

  “I was getting worried, I thought you’d been taking a long time. I was afraid you couldn’t find the toilet.”

  Then she in turn glances out the window, bringing her hand to her heart.

  “It’s true, it really is beautiful, eh?”

  And go
es on without even catching her breath.

  “It’s exactly what I was saying to your aunt Bebette the other day when she came to bring back my big kettle that I cook my beans in … Madame Roy, I say to her, in your opinion, now tell me honestly, there’s no one around … is there anything in the world more beautiful than …”

  Isola Robillard is well aware that she talks too much. She’s been called a chatterbox, a blabbermouth, she’s been threatened countless times with being shut up by force, eventually she isolated herself – her son and daughter-in-law in Toronto are terrified at the prospect of her arrival – but she talks and talks, over and over with no end, to herself or to everybody, not because she’s afraid of silence, that would be too easy, she’d just have to leave the house, throw herself into the crowd and listen to the unremitting din of the city; no, the reason lies elsewhere.

  Actually, she is afraid of being boring. And every day of her life, since her husband’s death, she turns nasty to avoid being invisible. If only she were unaware of it, if others went into hiding to talk about her neurosis, if they laughed at her behind her back, but no, she knows it, it’s repeated to her non-stop. “Will you keep quiet, Madame Robillard?” (Her butcher who starts to curse every time he sees her come into his shop.) “Will you shut your trap once and for all or I’ll tear your guts out!” (Her brothers and sisters who do everything they can to avoid her, but she always manages to discover where they’re hiding.) She simply can’t help talking. She is convinced that she’ll disappear into the scenery unless she talks, that people will forget she exists, look right through her, go around her with nary a look in her direction, that she’ll always be isolated at the bottom of a hole of silence – Isola the isolated, that thought comes to her twenty times a week – disconnected from everything, crazy from loneliness. The stupid old woman with nothing to say.

  She hasn’t ever been fascinating, that, too, she knows. She has no gift for conversation, or very little, she couldn’t care less what goes on outside her immediate world, her family, her own little bits and pieces, her banal problems. Her husband resembled her, they spent decades not needing anyone else, brought up children who soon turned away from them because of their lack of curiosity, while at Ernest’s death – her Ernest, the love of her life, her man – she came up against a wall of silence, all alone in her house with nothing to say. And no one to say it to. Then she started talking nonsense to just about anyone to remind people that she still exists, to avoid being thought dull because she’s too discreet or too shy. Or else … She has long since chosen not to think about it. Maybe madness. In any case, despair.

  She is looking at the little girl sitting opposite her now that night has fallen, she knows that she’s pestering the child with her constant chattering, but someone is looking at her, or at least pretending! It’s better than nothing. If she didn’t talk to this little girl she would feel as if she didn’t exist all the way from Winnipeg to Toronto, so almost without catching her breath she says whatever springs to mind about whoever springs to mind, she gets dizzy, she jumps from one subject to another, laughs at jokes that she knows are laboured, she drowns the poor child in a flood of names and anecdotes of no interest to convince herself that she’s still alive, to avoid being in her own eyes the most boring person in Creation.

  She is worse than boring, she’s unbearable, but at least someone knows that she exists!

  Devon brought her something to eat. Which she put aside as soon as his back was turned to dig into the final sandwich – lettuce, ham, mustard – from Bebette. The meat is chopped fine and tastes of cloves, the crustless bread is saturated with mustard, there’s even a hint of butter; it’s luscious. After all those hours of pointless chit-chat, Rhéauna has finally managed to disregard the old woman, and while she chews she looks out as the lit-up farms – some even have electricity – speed by in her field of vision. Pinpricks of yellow light on a black silk curtain. The night is moonless so it’s possible to see millions of stars through the barrier of fir trees that come very close to the railway. The milk that Devon brought her is just a tiny bit too warm for her liking but she doesn’t get upset and takes long gulps, being very careful not to let any of it run onto her chin or her cheeks. The last serving of the pink-and-green cake is down – more icing was left than cake, which made her very happy – she stuffs into the now-empty bag the greasy paper, the crumbs of bread and cake, the paper napkin on which she has just wiped her mouth and she gets up to look for a bigger wastebasket than the one hanging under the window.

  At that very moment, Madame Robillard leans over, places one hand above her eyes and presses her nose against the window.

  “We’re arriving in Toronto. See how beautiful it is!”

  Rhéauna places the bag on the seat, comes back to the window.

  Something that looks like a huge yellow boat stands out in the distance. A long ribbon of light, like the reflection of the starry sky but in shades of gold and copper. Soon it covers the horizon, comes closer, then disappears because the train is turning south. The pitch-black night comes back, the sky falls again, swooping over everything. Rhéauna has the impression that she’s just experienced a hallucination, that she didn’t really see a yellow ribbon of light, that it was a remote reflection, maybe the northern lights in the middle of the summer … Northern lights on the ground instead of in the sky? No, impossible. It was Toronto, all right. Then it comes back, even closer, so dazzling that it’s nearly disturbing. She has never seen so many electric lights in one place; it’s more than beautiful, it’s sublime. And so imposing that it’s frightening. The train – a foolhardy butterfly in front of an oil lamp – is quickly swallowed up by the shimmering golden light. And for the first time, it is lit from outside: the lighting coming from outside is stronger than that which it projects into the night. It is now drowned in light, it passes quickly, it runs along every side, houses go by at full speed, streets are lit up, too, and viaducts that straddle the railroad. Three prolonged whistle blasts, the train starts to slow down. Brand-new warehouses come closer, a station even more imposing, more gigantic than the one in Regina, than the one in Winnipeg, a lantern of unimaginable proportions, swallows up the train that’s now surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of parallel tracks forming an inextricable network of intersecting roads that run in every direction before they end up at an incalculable number of concrete platforms.

  Madame Robillard has of course been holding forth non-stop but this time, Rhéauna doesn’t hear her, plunged as she is in the bath of light.

  The platform is packed with people waiting to board the train. The stretch between Toronto and Ottawa is a very busy one and the train is a little late. Impatient travellers holding suitcases are already craning their necks in search of cars that aren’t too full.

  Madame Robillard puts on her coat, her crows’ nest, her gloves, all the while commenting on what’s going on outside. She describes to Rhéauna what they can both see perfectly well, the idiot! Then she concludes as she places herself right in front of the little girl.

  “I want you to know, you won’t be on your own to Ottawa, poor child … I hope that Devon will take good care of you … At night there aren’t the same people as in daytime, you never know who you’re travelling with … In any case, good luck. Say hello to your mother for me. I’ve never met her but I’ve heard a lot about her …”

  No hug and no kiss, not even a handshake, she turns her back, walks away, erect as a fence picket painted black.

  Devon appears, looking busy, and gestures to Rhéauna to stay where she is, most likely to let her know that she’s not in Ottawa yet. As if she didn’t know. Then he disappears with the bag she wanted to throw out.

  The new passengers are noisier than those who’ve just left the train. Some, crimson-faced and out of breath, reek of alcohol, and Rhéauna hopes that she won’t have to deal with a bunch of drunken uncles who will shout and tell stories she won’t understand while they keep sucking at their forty ounces of gin on the
sly. But Devon arrives with what seems to be a family: a father, a mother, two children – boys – people who speak French as well and who sit down beside her. The boys give her a look, frowning, a funny look; she chooses to ignore them and pretends to be asleep.

  She falls asleep for real even before the train leaves the platform in Toronto.

  Interlude iii

  Dream on

  the Train to Ottawa

  This time she dares.

  She jumps into the water. A standing jump.

  It’s cold. Not too cold, though. The water makes the light ripple around her but to her astonishment she’s not surrounded by waterweeds or fish. At the bottom of the water fish live and weeds grow, everyone knows that, and a multitude of creatures move about that aren’t even fish, so they say – the whale, for example, an animal that lives underwater though it’s a mammal. Here, no. The ocean, or Lake Superior, or that mere pond she’s just jumped into that’s empty.

  And she can breathe there!

  She brings one hand to her neck, checks to see ifgills have sprouted without her knowledge. She remembers enjoying the class about gill structures at the local school in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan. She laughs, she imagines being able to breathe underwater, not having to keep coming up to the surface, spend hours, days, her lifetime under water. Swim between the sunbeams. Filter oxygen with the help of her gills. Play with hersisters, who’ve also become mammals that live underwater though they aren’t fish.