For Sure
Page 18
“Toittle!”
This from Marianne, leaping back into the fray.
“Turtle?!”
Terry chuckled as he repeated his daughter’s choice of colour. But, in her innermost being, Carmen hoped the little one wasn’t picking up Étienne’s strange habit of constantly inventing names for colours.
“How ’bout you, den, Étienne, what colour would you paint ’er?”
The boy did not want to lose this second chance:
“Alizarin.”
416.27.6
New Car
417.34.11
Lacan
Nothing is more necessary, from time to time, than to find oneself face to face with someone absolutely out of the ordinary.
“Ludmilla, have I ever said I would have liked to have a child?”
“No.”
418.31.3
Questions with Answers
Not to always have an explanation in reserve.
The owner of the van closed his cellphone, put his papers aside and joined the young family.
419.105.7
Reserves/Reservations
“Well, den? Does she suit you?”
“Yeeesss!”
Marianne’s enthusiastic response made everyone laugh, which encouraged Étienne to take advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to pronounce himself as well:
“We want to paint it!”
The owner smiled:
“I’ve some spray paint back home I’ll trow in if yer buyin’.”
With a nod toward the children, Terry inferred that they could be a handful, so he’d take a raincheck on the paint.
“I can unnerstand . . .”
Étienne turned to Carmen and whispered:
“What’s spray paint, Mum?”
“It’s paint you pchhhhhtt . . .”
“Awh! De Reo Sol can!”
420.27.8
New Car
SLANGOTHERAPIST: n. — 2005; from slang and therapy ♦ Specialist in slangotherapy.
SLANGOTHERAPY: n. — 2005 1. Treatment of mental problems via re-education in linguistic deviance. 2. SPECIALT secondary treatment of neuroses and psychoses of alienation. “Gone are the days when grammaturgs denigrated slangotherapy” (Daigle).
421.120.6
Fictionary
The owner gave them the keys to the van so they could take it out for a test drive. Carmen had no trouble installing Marianne’s car seat.
“Well, I suppose you might say dat’s a fine start . . .”
Terry took the highway to Shediac. The occasional tug he gave the wheel just to check out the wheel alignment eventually prompted a reaction from Étienne:
“Wot you doin’ dat fer, Dad?”
“I wants to be sure de steering wheel turns alright.”
He pressed down on the gas pedal. The van accelerated slightly.
“She’s not exactly yer Ferrari, but we weren’t expectin’ dat neider, was we?”
Carmen thought the front of the cab was well designed:
“It’s comfortable, I got to say.”
Once burned twice shy, she twisted the rear-view mirror in every direction to be sure it was well anchored.
Terry panicked:
“Wot’r ya doin’?!”
Carmen suddenly realized that Terry was in the passing lane, looking for a chance to get back in the right and out of the way of a fast car riding his tail.
“Oops.”
422.27.9
New Car
Other facts emerging from an analysis of the first words in the titles listed in La Bibliothèque idéale: the word grandeur appears more frequently than the word heights; book and adventure are neck and neck, as are love and essay; the word child is more common than parent, and the word girl appears more often than the word son.
423.48.8
Inferences
“Dad! Yer drivin’ awful fast! We’re gonna wind up in de ditch!”
“Étienne, speak properly!” Carmen said, cringing at Étienne’s use of the English ditch.
Étienne laughed and did not correct himself. As he did a U-turn to head back to Moncton, Terry admitted to Carmen:
“Have to say, it’s startin’ to irritate me as well.”
Carmen was happy to hear Terry was conscious of the severity of the problem:
“That’s exactly what everyone says: once they’re out of the house, they start pickin’ up udder folks’ words.”
“I know it, only I never tot ee’d pick ’em up so quick . . .”
. . .
“Dat’s where you see how easy ’tis fer de wee ones to learn anudder language. Seems like it goes right into der heads.”
. . .
“She runs fine. Are ya sure you don’t want to give ’er a spin?”
“Naw. I don’t need to . . .”
Carmen was still thinking about children’s speech:
“Wouldn’t that mean proper French ought to be easy to learn?”
“Dat’s right. Why is it harder dan de rest?”
. . .
“Well den, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“De vanne!”
Carmen laughed:
“Ha! I’d stopped even thinkin’ ’bout it. It’s like she’s already ours!
. . .
“Do dey call it a vanne in French, as well, I wonder?”
424.26.9
The Movie
Lacan’s pronouncements often walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, grazing difficult to grasp truths, which are at the very heart of psychoanalysis. It is therefore not surprising that so many pyschoanalysts contest his work. And if Lacan himself long resisted publishing his Seminars, it’s because he suspected that to diffuse his work might turn it into refuse, that publish would lead to perish.
425.34.12
Lacan
Pomme’s dream: Pomme and Lisa-M. stop for the night at a small country inn. The inn looks like a Greek or Mexican house, with whitewashed walls. Although it’s surrounded by Canadian forest, the building looks like nothing Canadian. The innkeepers, an elderly couple, behave more or less normally. The woman, beautiful but taciturn, attends to the inn; the man, tall and distinguished, but rather indolent, exchanges vaguely odd banter with the few clients. In the inner courtyard, guests take the sun and fresh air around a swimming pool. One of the travellers can’t seem to find her bathing suit. A shot rings out, knocking off the head of a policeman who’s appeared out of nowhere. Suspicion, which falls initially on the woman who can’t find her bathing suit, shifts quickly to the innkeeper. No one takes care of the policeman’s headless body, which has simply been shoved against the wall. The police investigators will not come until the morrow. No one is shocked by this. While they wait, everything proceeds as usual. From time to time, the innkeeper proclaims his innocence to his wife.
426.109.8
Dreams
One day, Le Petit Étienne asked his mother if Ludmilla and Zablonski were relations. A legitimate question, after all, since the couple was perfectly at home in the house, and neither they nor his parents were shy about lending or asking each other for a hand, or falling asleep while the others talked, or getting into arguments without that stopping them liking each other.
427.35.1
The Detail within the Detail
Carmen turned the radio on.
“Geez, it’s already in French.”
Terry figured the owner had probably tuned it to Radio-Canada on purpose to help the sale along.
“Well den kids? What do you tink?”
The excitement had finally won Étienne over:
“Yah! I like it!”
Th
e boy turned to Marianne, expecting her usual enthusiastic self. Instead, he was surprised to discover his sister redfaced and straining.
“Awh, no . . . Mum . . .”
“What?”
“Marianne’s doin’ a caca. Peeyou! It stinks!”
428.27.10
New Car
Carmen twisted around, Terry looked in the rear-view mirror, the smell mushroomed.
“Dat’s right, I forgot, Marianne’s got the diarrhea.”
The sharp, the flat and the natural are musical accidents.
429.78.4
Accidents
Energized by the fresh air rushing into the van to flush out the oppressive odour, Carmen decided to take a turn at driving the vehicle. Terry pulled over to the side of the road and switched places with Carmen, who took her time to get familiar with the controls before setting off again.
“Do you like it, Mum?”
Étienne hoped his mother would say yes.
“Don’t know yet, do I.”
As she drove, Carmen glanced around outside and inside the van to get used to the driver’s surroundings.
“Well, I do like the visibility.”
Étienne was happy. Terry, meanwhile, tried once more to be accommodating:
“Fer sure she’ll cost us more in gas.”
Carmen, now comfortable behind the wheel, could think of other things:
“Well, we’re not payin’ all that much now . . .”
This was true, but Terry had something else in mind.
“We could maybe paint an ad for de Babar on one side an’ de bookstore on de udder. Dat way, we could claim it on our taxes.”
“Could I be painting Babar, den?”
Terry turned to Étienne:
“We’ll see about dat when de time comes.”
And to Carmen:
“Geez, I guess we’ll have to plant a paintbrush in dat boy’s paw afore long.”
“A roller, more like.”
430.27.11
New Car
Aside from the better-known Acadian conjugations of the verb to be, such as je sons, j’étions, y étiont, and alle étiont, there are the even more surprising que je seille (or, in some regions, ending in -o-n-s), que tu seilles, qu’y seille, qu’a seille, qu’on seille, que nous seillions, que vous seilliez, qu’y seillont, qu’a seillont. Perhaps a better way to put this form in writing would be que je sèye (que je sèyons, etc.), que tu sèyes, qu’y sèye, qu’a sèye, qu’on sèye, que nous sèyions, que vous sèyiez, qu’y sèyiont, qu’a sèyiont. How to translate these musical variations into a non-standard English? That I are, I were, dey was, she were . . .?
431.33.9
Chiac Lesson
Back at the vacant lot where the owner of the van was waiting, Carmen quickly detached the baby’s car seat with Marianne in it and carried it back to their old car. Terry took care of the rest:
“She’s pretty much wot we’s lookin’ fer. Aside from de colour.”
In spite of himself, the seller was intrigued:
“An’ wot’s wrong wid de colour, den?”
Terry didn’t quite know what to say. He was sorry he’d raised the subject, because it was mostly Carmen who had a problem with the light green.
“Well, a fresh coat of paint wouldn’t do ’er no harm, patch dose wee rust spots ’ere an’ der.”
The owner moved over for a closer look at the little scratches to which Terry was referring.
“You’ve got sharp eyes, I’d never seen dese.”
432.27.12
New Car
The time to bargain was upon them.
* * *
8. France Daigle wrote “numerous as in fibrous is love” several times in her first novel Sans jamais parler du vent. Roman de crainte et d’espoir que la mort arrive à temps (Without Ever Speaking of the Wind. A Novel of Fear and Hope that Death Might Arrive on Time.)
294.142.8
Notes
9. In Acadia, some say thériaque, others tiriaque. They are speaking, in fact, of licorice. Here too, we can only guess the origins of the word. There are those who believe it comes from the First Nations (tériak? tiriak?), others point out the similarity with la tire, or taffy, the eatable and malleable paste made of boiled molasses or maple syrup. Of the two current dictionaries of Acadian French, only Yves Cormier’s Dictionnaire du français acadien includes the word tiriaque. Cormier also notes the variation ciriaque. Considering the well-known children’s rhyme Je te bénis/Je te consacre/Je te mets dans mon sac/Je t’emmène à Shédiac/Te faire manger du thériaque… (I praise you/ I answer you back / I put you in my sack / I take you to Shediac / I feed you thériaque,” it’s surpising that the word does not appear in Le Glossaire acadien compiled by Pascal Poirier, who is himself a native of Shediac. And although it is not listed in Robert’s dictionnaire historique de la langue française, the Petit Robert does mention that long ago thériaque was an antidote for snake bite. The dictionary adds that garlic was once considered to be the thériaque of the poor. It has not been possible to establish any link to Socrates’ famed hemlock. Translator’s note: On a guided tour of the Hospices in Beaune, France, founded in 1443, the translator was shown a sample of a medicinal treacle called theriac, which was apparently administered to all patients, regardless of their disease or injury. The panacea has been traced back to the Greeks in the first century C.E. The translator suspects it is mostly an opiate that kills the pain and quiets the patient. Not unlike the effect of licorice sticks on children.
338.142.9
Notes
10. The French novelist André Gide claimed that memoirs are only partially sincere, highly ambiguous, and hesitate between their content and form.
406.142.10
Notes
CHAPTER 4
Given a certain degree of reoccurrence, chance becomes no longer a coincidence, but a quality.
433.144.4
Epigraphs
Benoîte Groulx,
La Touche étoile (The Star Key), Grasset, 2006
There were only two days of shooting left. The end was in sight, to Étienne’s relief, but tinged with a touch of regret: this mixing of languages was turning out to be a lot of fun. At last, a game that was consistent and required creativity!
“Last night, I helpé my dad to dédjãmmér de elevator.”
“Was der anybody inside?”
“Naw. Only de pizzaman, an’ his pouch was empty.”
At that very moment, the camera was on Étienne.
434.26.10
The Movie
La Bibliothèque idéale includes the titles of eight Complete Works. They are by Sainte Thérèse d’Avila (in the category “Spirituality and Religions”), Herodotus-Thucydides (“Antiquity and Us”), Stéphane Mallarmé (“French Poetry”), Blaise Pascal (“Philosophy”), Plautus-Terence (“Theatre”), François Rabelais (“Laughter”), Tristan Tzara (“Distorsions”) and Xenophon (“Antiquity and Us”). By itself this information does not really constitute an inference.
435.48.9
Inferences
The French word dialyse (“dialysis”), with the y— worth 10 points in the French game (only 4 in the English), placed on the letter counts double (2 × 10) and the entire word doubled (2 × 27) — hence, a little Legendre — plus a bonus of 50 points for having placed all her letters — a scrabble, already! — Antoinette opened the game with 104 points in a single stroke. Still, she hesitated, because her husband would only have to add an R to make dialyser, which would earn him 54 points, plus the value of the word he would make vertically on the R, which would also be worth triple. And all this not counting the fact that he could very well produce a scrabble for 50 more points.
&nb
sp; 436.28.1
A Couple’s Life
With the advent of the digital age, the avatar has also come to designate entities in cyberspace. An individual can create one or several avatars to circulate in cyberspace in his or her place. BabyDy, SorrosJr, DocFarine, PickPocket, and SCrowbar, to name a few, are all avatars who, rather than concealing the fact that they are avatars, take pleasure in announcing themselves as such.
437.76.2
Avatars
Marianne had not particularly been bitten by the language-game bug that so enthralled her brother. Happy and carefree, she flitted about, finding new little friends, handling or skipping around everything she encountered, tasting anything that was eatable, generally doing what she was told, and totally ignoring the filming.
“I’ll give you half me licorice if you gives me half yer chocolate bar.”
Marianne did not understand what the older girl meant.
“You doesn’t want to share half-an-half?”
When the girl simply plucked the chocolate bar out of her hands, Marianne didn’t protest in the least. Attracted by the cries of children playing in the sandbox, she took off without awaiting her due. And that’s what the camera captured.
438.26.11
The Movie
In the matter of virtue, politeness is most important because, without it, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to approach let alone accede to the other virtues. According to André Comte-Sponville’s A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues, politeness is the first rung on the ladder. This marvellous book would undoubtedly have found a place in one of the categories of La Bibliothèque idéale if it had existed at the time of La Bibliothèque’s first printing in 1988. Nevertheless, since every reader is invited to add a book of his or her choice to each of the categories of the library, it’s perfectly appropriate to add A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues to the “Social Sciences” section.