Crossing the Continent

by Michel Tremblay

  “C’mon in, don’t be scared, I won’t eat you!”

  Ti-Lou tosses her purse, hat and gloves onto the first sofa she encounters, takes off her shoes – little soft leather boots in a colour that’s neither black nor brown – sinks into a wing chair covered in pale-green satin.

  “You don’t know how much you’re costing me, little girl … My evening cut in two, my night cancelled … But I shouldn’t tell you that, it’s not very nice of me … I’m sorry …”

  Rhéauna doesn’t know what she is talking about and answers her with a shrug.

  “I’m glad to see you, Rhéauna, and I’m glad to do Maria a favour …”

  Rhéauna has put her suitcase in a corner and is still standing in front of the closed door.

  “People call me Nana … Nobody calls me by my whole first name.”

  Ti-Lou beckons her to come closer, helps her take off her coat.

  “Why, don’t you like your name? It’s one you don’t often hear, you should be proud of it …”

  “No, it isn’t that … Nana’s just easier …”

  “All right, Nana, okay, just step back a little so I can look at you properly …”

  She examines her from head to toe. It’s an embarrassing look, inquisitive, the look of someone who knows all about what she’s seeing and doesn’t let anything pass. It lingers on her face which it itemizes attentively.

  “You’re going to be awfully pretty, Nana. But you mustn’t eat things that make you put on weight …”

  How does she know that? Rhéauna tilts her head, looks at her arms, her legs.

  “It doesn’t show yet. But you have to watch out.”

  “I know, Grandma’s always telling me that.”

  “How is ma tante Joséphine? I haven’t seen her since I was a tiny child …”

  The next few minutes are filled with news about Maria, Regina, Winnipeg, about distant relatives in the prairies, people Ti-Lou has long since done her best to forget and that this very lovely little girl is reviving with her pretty western accent and her colourful language. Perfumes of childhood come back to her and Ti-Lou sees herself visiting Bebette or Joséphine at a time when her mother, Gertrude, made it her duty to take the train at least once a year to visit her sisters and brother and their families. Or to get away from the tyranny of her lawyer husband, Wilson. Simplicity. The simplicity of it all. The stupidity, too. Ignorance. Of the outside world. Wealth. Power. A comfortable little life with no real need to know anything else. Everything her cousin Maria, for instance, has rejected to launch herself into the whole wide world. Early in her career, when things weren’t moving as quickly as she wanted, she surprised herself envying the family of wanderers scattered across the continent, with their discreet little lives made up of humble deeds infinitely repeated with one goal – to get something to eat and clothes to put on their backs. Why not adopt that lethargic and carefree peace in the midst of the wheat fields? But she quickly took herself in hand, shook herself off, refused to let herself drift into pointless daydreaming – how can you choose poverty when you’re born into the bourgeoisie of Ottawa like her, when you’ve always known money, luxury, when you’ve tasted champagne and caviar? – and dove back with false breeziness into the mass of men in rut who were always hanging around her and could well make her fortune.

  Timid at first, Rhéauna relaxes as she speaks. Inflamed by the details she brings to her descriptions of Maria and its inhabitants, she gradually approaches her cousin and sits carefully on a lemon-yellow sofa that looks almost shiny in the semi-darkness. She takes off her shoes, too, rubs her feet like Ti-Lou. Her movements are graceful, her vocabulary amazing for her age; Ti-Lou listens to her with delight. When she has finished, Rhéauna crosses her hands on her knees, tilts her head.

  “That’s all. And I’m really tired. I’d like to go to bed …”

  Ti-Lou has made ready sheets, a pillow, a blanket which they place on the lemon-yellow sofa. Rhéauna takes her nightgown out of her suitcase.

  “Where’s the bathroom? I have to brush my teeth …”

  The bathroom is even more impressive than the rest of the suite: white porcelain everywhere, faucets that look like gold, mirrors on all four walls, electric sconces that imitate candelabra, towels – rose, lilac, mauve, crushed raspberry – as big as sheets. Alas, she doesn’t have time to linger there …

  Once she has finished washing she comes back to the living room, slips under the sheet – satin, a little too cold for her liking but so soft! – and says good night to Ti-Lou, who has come to sit next to her on the sofa.

  “Thank you for letting me stay here, ma tante Ti-Lou, and excuse me if I’m bothering you.”

  Ti-Lou runs her hand through the little girl’s hair, leans over to kiss her forehead. The gardenia smell is nearly suffocating.

  “You aren’t bothering me, Nana. Not one bit. And please, don’t call me ma tante! We’re cousins! Distant cousins but cousins anyway! But don’t call me cousin either, that sounds like an old maid, call me just Ti-Lou. Ti-Lou, period.”

  She seems hesitant to leave. Now it’s her turn to cross her hands on her knees and tilt her head. She makes up her mind, looks Rhéauna straight in the eyes.

  “You’re leaving the country and moving to a big city … Keep your eyes open, Nana. I know that your grandmother must have warned you but ma tante Joséphine has never lived in a big city, she doesn’t know what it’s really like …”

  She hesitates again, gropes for her words, starts to get up, changes her mind.

  “What I mean is … You look like a bright little girl, Nana, and all I can tell you is watch out and don’t let anyone get the better of you. I know it’s not up to me to tell you about those things, it’s up to your mother, but she can be rough and it could come out the wrong way and frighten you. I don’t want to scare you, just warn you …”

  Rhéauna, who was about to fall asleep, opens her eyes.

  “Warn me about what?”

  Ti-Lou gives her a big smile in which Rhéauna would like to lose herself, to find herself every night before she falls asleep, to dream about, to feed on to help her get through difficult moments that she will probably experience in the big city, to make it her refuge. Forever.

  “When you grow up, you’ll realize that we live in a world made by men, for men … and often against women … It’s been like that since the beginning of time, it can’t be changed and women who try get laughed at … They walk around with banners demanding the right to vote, for instance, and everybody laughs at them – even other women … You see we have just three choices: old maid or nun – to me it’s the same thing; wife and mother; or guidoune. I’m not saying those are bad choices, I’m just saying those three are all we’ve got. The rest belong to men … And when the time comes to make your choice … I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, you’re too young to understand everything … I just want … I just want …”

  She wipes a tear with a handkerchief she’s just pulled out of the sleeve of her beautiful lilac cotton dress. Rhéauna reaches out, puts her hand on her cousin’s knee, who continues her monologue.

  “For heaven’s sake, what’s got into me? I ought to let you sleep, you’re dead tired … But you’re just beginning your life, Nana, and somebody has to tell you those things … When you think about me again later on, when you understand what I do to earn my living, I want you to know that I’ve chosen to be what I am, that I’m proud of it because the other two choices don’t interest me and it’s my way to fight … to fight men. By manipulating them. But here I am talking about myself and I ought to be talking about your future … Look, here’s what I want to tell you: when the time comes to make your choice, Nana, think about it. Think about it properly. Reflect, don’t let yourself be led around by life, don’t let them all influence you, just become what you want to become … A nun? No problem, as long as you know what lies ahead and it’s your choice. Same for wife and mother. If you choose to be a wife and mother, then become
a model wife and mother. But only if that’s what you want. Don’t let anybody impose it on you if it’s not what you want. And the third choice, well … If you’re ever interested come and see me, I’ve got connections and I’ve got experience. And if you grow into the beauty that I think you will, you’ll be able to wreak havoc in Ottawa. Like me … Or find a fourth way for yourself, you seem intelligent enough for that … In any case, give it a try …”

  Rhéauna is beginning to suspect the meaning of guidoune. It’s vague but she suspects it has something to do with the things her grandmother hasn’t told her about that involve relations between men and women, about the weird and vaguely disgusting behaviour she’s often seen in animals that apparently has something to do with making babies. Animal babies or human babies. Is her cousin’s job to make babies with men?

  She looks around her.

  “Is that how you pay for all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Would I like it?”

  Ti-Lou can’t help laughing. This time, though, her laughter doesn’t get lost in the starry sky but in the wainscoting on the ceiling and the folds in the curtains.

  “You won’t know that for a good long while. Meanwhile, it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning and you leave early tomorrow afternoon. Sleep now, don’t think about all that, I shouldn’t have brought it up, I should have let you sleep.”

  Rhéauna yawns hard enough to dislocate her jaws, closes her eyes.

  Ti-Lou pulls up the sheet, bends down again to give her a kiss.

  Ah! Gardenia! Rhéauna falls asleep intoxicated by gardenias.

  The telephone rings several times in the course of the night. Rhéauna vaguely hears Ti-Lou’s voice that at first sounds stern, then threatening, but it’s all mixed in with her own dreams about gardens of creamy white gardenias with a heady perfume and brand-new castles that give themselves airs of great age when they’ve barely been open for business. Later on, someone knocks at the door of the suite, a voice, pleading, whining, drunk, rises up in the corridor: “Ti-Lou! Ti-Lou! You can’t do this to me! We had a date!” Rhéauna thinks she can hear furtive footsteps on the living-room floor, the sound of a door being opened a crack, a woman whispering: “You’re really being unreasonable, Minister, my young cousin’s asleep in the parlour …” The footsteps go toward the bedroom, the smell of alcohol and cigars blends with that of gardenia. Rhéauna’s cousin is no longer alone. She’s going to make babies with this minister Rhéauna hears say, laughing in a very strange way, this time she is fully awake: “Is your cousin old enough? Could she join us?” The crack of a slap. A man’s laughter. The rest she couldn’t interpret. It lasts for a certain time, the man seems to be puffing as if he’s just run two miles, he squeals like a stuck pig. He is crying and laughing at the same time. Rhéauna closes her eyes, tries to get back to sleep. It’s hard because the minister’s shriek is getting louder. But her sleep ends up taking her away and the crazy gentleman’s voice mingles with the scent of exotic flowers and the vision of the Château Laurier, the refuge, one might think for peculiar heroes from a very strange fairy tale.

  Louise Desrosiers, known as Ti-Lou, the she-wolf of Ottawa, balked very early at bearing her father’s name, Wilson. Already in elementary school she wanted to be considered a Desrosiers, her mother’s name – a bold move on the part of a child at the end of the nineteenth century brought up in a strict and oh-so-provincial society. But she was adventurous, had always been what her father called pig-headed, which allowed her in fact as an adolescent to escape from her family’s clutches and the laws of polite Ottawa society thanks to a near-diabolical strategy.

  When asked why she wanted to change her name, she replied that Wilson was English, that she was proud of her French roots and of the beauty of her mother’s language. But certain nuns, less naive than the others, had quickly guessed that something fishy was going on in that rich and influential family – Wilson was one of the most respected lawyers in Ottawa – but they did not intervene: out of propriety, a legacy of the Catholic religion where everything is always hidden; or out of cowardice, their three vows – poverty, chastity, obedience – exempting them from any intervention while leaving them with a clear conscience.

  Louise tolerated her father’s cruelty without a word – she wasn’t his only victim, everyone in the family had to suffer lawyer Wilson’s insults and blows, their mother most of all – she contented herself with renouncing his name and taking her mother’s. When he found out through an indiscretion by one of her classmates, Louise had got the thrashing of her life. With the buckle of a leather belt, James Wilson’s favourite weapon when he’d drunk too much or someone angered him. Emergency, doctor, stitches. But no one in Ottawa would have risked exposing James Wilson and matters stayed there: a stupid accident, a fall downstairs, a reckless little girl running too fast in a house where the floors are too well waxed. And Louise, against her will, had to agree once and for all to use the name Wilson. And the stigmas that go with it.

  That law of silence within her family and even inside Ottawa’s high society was one of the things that shocked her most. Hypocrisy, spinelessness, fear. Despite her great love for Gertrude, her mother, and for her brothers and sisters, she couldn’t understand why no one rebelled against her father’s behaviour – she herself, as the youngest in the family, discovered she was helpless to intervene – and had decided very early that she would make him pay. Not violently, no, leather belts with metal buckles didn’t hold the slightest interest for her. Another way. How? Fate would look after finding a solution.

  But she’d chomped at the bit for years and never saw any way out taking shape on the horizon. Everything stayed as it was. James W. Wilson was still reigning by terror and violence toward his family, the whole city, or at least its elite, knew that, and no one dared to do anything. At home, he was the lord and master. He had all the rights and he abused them all shamelessly. Louise had finally thought, to her great despair, that Ottawa might be full of James Wilsons, amoral torturers exonerated by a society they had invented according to their own sadistic needs, that life was made that way, life was like that, unfair to the point of cruelty and that she herself, a poor little girl, couldn’t change a thing.

  Then at the age of sixteen, she read La dame auxcamélias, a scandalous novel from France that a friend had given her, saying that she mustn’t show it to anyone because it’s a forbidden book, a book on the Index, a shocking story set among Paris courtesans, the most depraved women in the world. And the most beautiful.

  Reading about a dissolute life, about the poignant ordeals and the tragic death of Marguerite Gautier had left Louise dumbfounded. Everything in the book had moved her deeply, the story of a young girl who was allowed nothing and knew nothing of liberty: mid-nineteenth-century Paris, its splendour, its immorality, its exaggerated romanticism that had never managed to make its way to Ottawa, a dead city preserved in its hypocrisy. She wished she belonged to a world of powerful demimondaines, of idealized whores, of women who are powerful because they’re beautiful and sassy, who are respected, adulated, decorated and carried on a man’s arm instead of being looked down on; to know to its innermost recesses that antithesis to life imposed on an entire country by two religions based on humiliation and the denial of any sensuality; to see finally an open-mindedness, a happy-go-lucky attitude, an existence with no barriers, made up of unbelievably rich parties drowned in champagne or manic nights that ended in vast fragrant beds, of the impossible love between a penniless young man and a courtesan ready to do anything to keep him at her side, all crowned by a sense of duty that no one in her circle had to her knowledge ever shown, especially her father. In that book she found everything she was forbidden and she revelled in it.

  She wanted to be Marguerite Gautier, to live like her, and if necessary, to die like her, young but experienced. And above all, avenged. She thought that she’d found her way out, found her revenge. U
nthinkable for a girl of her position who shouldn’t even have known about her, the fate of Marguerite Gautier became for her the example to follow, the goal to reach: nothing indeed would offend her father as much as learning that his daughter had lost her virtue, that she even used her body in her work.

  But how to go about it, especially in a city as secretive as Ottawa where never, or hardly ever, was the word prostitute pronounced, reluctantly, on very rare occasions, expressions like “woman of ill repute” or “fallen woman,” with wrinkled nose and hand on heart?

  Was that really what she wanted to become, a “woman of ill repute”? Too young to weigh all the consequences, she wouldn’t let herself think, concentrating on the thirst for revenge that she wanted to quench, the shame of her father in the face of the fait accompli and the indelible stain that would make him pay for his unwarranted invective and for the leather belt with its metal tip. She refused to see beyond revenge, most likely for fear of lacking courage or of having to pay the price: the everyday life of an Ottawa prostitute, very different no doubt from that of the heroine of a novel.

  No, she preferred to wallow in the most syrupy romanticism and drown in it rather than risk the predictable melodrama that her life was liable to become if she risked doing some irrevocable deed.

  And so one sticky night in 1892, she did something that couldn’t be undone, with bravery she’d never suspected she possessed. It was behaviour at once planned – she had long dreamed about it – and impulsive – the deed was done on a whim, it was brave and suicidal and, as she had hoped, it turned her life upside down.

  As far as sexuality was concerned, Louise was pretty well ignorant, like most young girls from good families at the time. She’d had the necessary conversation with her mother when she was fifteen or so, but it hadn’t really taught her much. A few references to the mechanics, the precautions to take before and after, the repeated trauma that had to be put up with because it was her duty … Nothing clear – allusions, incomplete sentences, all delivered with eyes lowered and face red. Gertrude Wilson as much as her daughter would have preferred to be elsewhere, that was obvious. Louise had concluded that sex was a most disagreeable occupation and decided that she would try to avoid it as much as she could. She certainly had no idea that she would soon make a profession of it and that it would become the source of a rather impressive fortune.