The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

  It can't be, thought Florentine. She was accustomed to their yearly flight — sometimes they'd stayed only six months — but not to this invasion of their home by a bunch of strangers. Hearing the smallest children crying and moaning in the next room, she felt a cold rage. Is this what she deserved to see, after coming home so anxious to find everything in its place, like an infallible sign of safety and security? Why hadn't her father and mother done something sooner to be sure they had a place to live?

  "You shouldn't have let them in," she said crossly.

  "What else could I do?" said Rose-Anna again. And went on to tell how she had arranged things for the moment.

  "It won't be easy tonight. But I spoke to our neighbour. She'll lend us a room. And I kept Philippe's for the little ones — mine, that is," she added, as if the confusion were already dangerous. "I put them to bed as early as I could, you can imagine. The racket they were making with the other kids, that woman's — I don't even know her name — it was enough to drive you crazy."

  She stopped and stared at Florentine, who sat like a statue in front of her.

  "Where've you been so late?" she asked.

  But she didn't expect a reply. Were there any answers to be had in this abyss that so engulfed them you could scream for days and hear no response but the echo of your own despair?

  Rose-Anna stared obstinately at a worn spot in the linoleum. In a dull, weary voice she began to enumerate their woes as if it were a relief at last to see them all together, the old, the new, the small, the great, those that lay dormant in her memory and those that pulsed in the heart's freshest wounds.

  "Your father!" she said. "Your father! He was supposed to find a house. You know your father. He keeps us hanging till the last minute with his false hopes. False hopes! To hear him talk he was going to find a house. A good house. To hear him talk. But IVe got to see to everything. How could I? I spent all my time at the hospital with Daniel. He's in hospital," she said, reminding herself as if she had lost the thread of her tangled skein. "Daniel. And then Eugène! Why on earth did we have to go to the farm? Daniel's been sick ever since. We weren't born to have luck, we weren't. And now it's May there's not a house to be had. Will you tell me where we're going to live?"

  Then, behind the ranks of these troubles, clear as they were, she saw a whole legion of others appearing at every turn. She was at a loss, and grew silent. And the awareness of all her secret sorrows inclined Rose-Anna to compassion. She had no hope left for herself, but at least she could spare a little for others.

  "Did you have supper?" she asked, her voice disconcertingly tender. "I could make you an omelette. ..."

  But Florentine said not a word. Tears of rebellion came to her eyes. Was this what she had come to experience with her mother? Misfortunes so immense and numerous as these? She felt her last shreds of hope disappear.

  She saw Rose-Anna in a dusty dress and with dishevelled hair. The dejection of this woman who had kept ner courage through all their misfortunes seemed to her a sure sign of the family's downfall, and her own in particular.

  Rose-Anna was tugging at the edge of her apron with a tired, futile gesture she had never made in the past — the grandmother's gesture. Her shoulders rocked from side to side in a sad, monotonous motion, as if she were holding a child, or a thought, or an ancient rancour she was trying to put to sleep. Or perhaps she was merely rocking her fatigue, or all her thoughts together. Everything in her posture reminded Florentine of Daniel, whom his mother took with the same movements to calm him when he had fever.

  Daniel! He was so small for his age. He'd always been pale, almost transparent. But before he took ill he had surprised them all by his precociousness. There was an old saying in that part of town: the bright ones don't live long. He was so frail, so serious! What torments he must have been through already! God, I hope he lives, thought Florentine. I'll take his cure as a sign of my deliverance.

  Her thoughts were steered at once to her own panic. She felt nauseated. And this time she knew it was useless to struggle against her certainty. She would have to tell her mother. But how? And especially just now! As in the distance she heard Rose-Anna's voice:

  "And what on earth's your father doing, out till this hour! He's been gone since two this afternoon. What's he up to? What on earth is he doing?"

  This old song that she'd heard a hundred times awoke no reaction in Florentine. She was sinking into a suffocating darkness in which no help, no counsel came from any side, wherever she might turn. She was dizzy. Her stomach rebelled.

  When she stood straight again, her face pale and humiliated, her mother was looking at her. Looking as if she had never seen her before, Rose-Anna stared wide-eyed, with an expression of mute horror. Without pity, without affection, without kindness. She shouted, her voice rising violently:

  "Now what's this? Yesterday morning, and now again tonight! Anybody'd think you were. . . " She stopped short, and the two women stared at each other like enemies. All that came between them was the confused sound of a foreign intimacy taking its place in their own home, on the other side of a thin partition.

  Florentine's eyes gave way first.

  Once more she sought her mother's eyes. She blinked back her tears, her lips quivered and her whole body was in anguish. It was the one time in her life that her expression held this call for help, the call of a hunted creature. But Rose-Anna had turned away. Her head hung low and she seemed to have become inert, indifferent, half asleep.

  Florentine saw herself at an infinite distance, young, gay and feverishly happy because Jean was there. This faraway joy was unbearable to remember, harder and worse than a spoken reproach. She turned, opened the door violently and ran and ran, in a gust of wind that seemed to wrap itself around her body.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Running anywhere, blindly, hating the echo of her footsteps in the silence of the empty streets, Florentine fled from her own fear, fled from herself. Suddenly she remembered that Marguerite had often invited her to spend the night at her place. She had never become very close to girls of her own age. She imagined that they envied her and might play her some unpleasant trick, or simply found them boring. Of those that had been nice to her at work she had found none so irritating as Marguerite, whose loud demonstrations of friendliness she had never been able to discourage with her own mockery and impatience. But she knew that Marguerite had a kind heart, and in her present dejection needed to be with someone — even someone a little simple-minded — who would take her in gladly and who, above all, knew nothing of her misfortune.

  The walls of the great cotton mill on St. Ambroise Street wrapped her in their shadows filled with the humming and whining of their machines. Everything conspired to make her despondency complete: this nocturnal labour whose sounds seemed to come from underground, lonely passersby who stared too curiously at her, the sky which was clouding over, and the trees in the courtyards waving and breathing together in a low murmur that presaged a downpour.

  She emerged into a clearing between the tall textile mills, and recognized the green gables of the house in which Marguerite lived with her aunt, in an alley called St. Zoe. It was one of those old farmhouses, a few of which are still to be found in the area, surrounded by the march of factories and warehouses; the more they are attacked by dust and soot, the fussier they are about lace curtains in their windows, fresh outside paint and a polished threshold.

  A light was on in Marguerite's room upstairs. Florentine, not daring to knock and afraid that Marguerite's aunt, a stern and starchy old lady, might answer the door, went over beneath the lighted window. She called softly first, then more loudly. Finally a shadow appeared behind the curtains. Florentine, panting, whispered:

  "Marguerite! It's me! Hey, let me in. Don't make a lot of noise!"

  When she was in Marguerite's room and sure that the rest of the house was silent, she realized that she would have to explain her visit at this hour of the night. What time was it anyway? She had no idea. Had she be
en wandering alone the whole evening, or all her life? She was terrified of giving away her secret. Her throat dry, she stammered:

  "They're just about to move out of our place. There's no room to sleep."

  But she took Marguerite's hand with a nervousness that gave her away, squeezed it hard and begged:

  "Keep me, please! Can I stay?"

  Marguerite wrapped her dressing gown tight around her and, wanting to look her best for her friend, ran her hand through her short, tousled hair.

  "Why sure," she said. "We can have a chat, we can have a good long char about all kinds of things, eh?"

  But she noticed Florentine's pale face and her wild eyes and asked:

  "What's the matter : Are you sick : "

  "No, no I'm not," Florentine protested.

  She had flopped in an armchair and her trembling hands went from her dishevelled hair to her handbag which she was somehow unable to open. Her reflection in the mirror on the closet door horrified her. Then, repeating those automatic gestures which had helped her in the past, she made a pitiful effort to straighten her hair and, succeeding in standing up. found a lipstick among Marguerite's things and began to cover her dry, chapped lips. Before she had finished she turned away, unable to bear the sight of herself in the mirror. Her shoulders slumped and she gave a little heart-rending laugh, disillusioned, infinitely sad.

  "What on earth do I look like, Marguerite?" she asked plaintively. "I've got ugly, haven't I?"

  "Why, no!" said Marguerite. ''You always look nice, even when you're tired."

  "Yeah," said Florentine weakly, "that's it . . . I'm really tired." Then, broken and defeated, she admitted, 4 T want to go to bed. Marguerite. I want to sleep."

  Her cry was a doleful complaint rather than a wish, and it came out as of its own volition.

  "My God, how I want to sleep!"

  The tiny bed, pushed against the wall, was unmade.

  'Til change the sheets," said Marguerite. "It won't take a minute."

  She went out to get fresh linen. Alone, Florentine ran to the mirror and there, with no one to look on, stared long at this new image of herself as enemy — these features that she hardly knew, so wild that she found them frightening; and she could barely hold back her tears. The doorknob turned, and she hurried back to the chair, as if she had been sitting there the whole time. Soon the fresh sheets, turned back invitingly, called her to rest, and she took off her shoes, stockings, sweater and skirt, and with a single bound threw herself on the bed. The coolness of the cotton on her tired limbs was too sweet, and suddenly she lost control and burst out sobbing. She raised her hands to her eyes to hide her expression from Marguerite, exasperated and angry with herself. And she turned to the wall and beat on it with her head in self-punishment, moaning softly.

  Marguerite let her weep for a time, then came close to her chilled body and laid an arm around her shoulders, talking to her as to a child:

  "Come, tell me what's wrong. Sometimes that helps."

  She felt Florentine stiffen, and insisted:

  "Tell me what it is!" And as one tries to get a child to speak: "Was it something your mother said? No? Is it your boyfriend? He's not the only one, you know. There's other fish in the ocean, they say. It's not that? Is it because people are talking?"

  "Who's talking!" cried Florentine violently, still sobbing. "Who? Who's talking about me?"

  "Nobody, nobody, I just wondered. . . " said Marguerite, who had several very precise examples in mind. "You mustn't cry about that, now, come on. They're only gossips, you mustn't pay any attention. I know you couldn't do anything wrong."

  Marguerite's confidence, as well as a certain reticence which Florentine sensed, made her furious. She pulled away to the very edge of the bed and declared:

  "If you won't tell me who's talking, that's your business, don't tell me." Then she cried defiantly, "And there's nothing wrong with me, nothing at all!"

  Shaken by fresh sobs, terrified by the gulf between herself and the other girls in her circle, she dug her nails into Marguerite's shoulders as if to transfer her own unbearable anguish to the other, to take it out on some human being.

  ''Put the light out,' 1 she begged.

  In the dark it was even worse to be given over to her own solitude, the frightening, impersonal solitude that was her lot and hers alone, one not to be rejected or even shared.

  Marguerite was quiet now, warned of the truth by a very sure instinct. It had not escaped her that Florentine had changed in the last few weeks, and that the other waitresses were slyly watching her every move with a faintly hostile curiosity, often exchanging a look of complicity and understanding.

  Good God, is it possible? she thought. And she was surprised to feel no contempt for Florentine, though she had always been severe in her judgements on love outside of wedlock. She had even made fun of it, and perhaps enjoyed the kind of scandal the waitresses spread around at the Five and Ten. And here she was, thinking only of protecting Florentine from the ruin she foresaw ahead of her.

  What could she do? She was so young — in fact not much younger than Marguerite, but more frail and fragile and therefore more to be pitied; prettier, too. and thus the more exposed. What would she do, poor Florentine. pretty and all as she was? Would they dismiss her from the store? And what might she not do in her despair?

  Grief and pin* and a rebellious need to do what her heart told her took hold of Marguerite.

  She wasn't yet sure if she would have the courage, but she tried to force herself into the position where courage would come.

  "Listen, Florentine," she said. "Maybe you're in a jam. If that's what it is, I'll help. Do you hear, I'll help you through."

  But this was not enough, and she knew she had to get in deeper yet to overcome the egotism of nature that prompts us to stand aside from others' problems.

  Marguerite suspected something of the sort, and murmured:

  "Listen, Florentine, there are ways. Other people have come through it. I'll be with you, Florentine, I promise. And I'll stick up for you, what do you think? Just let them say one word at the store, I'll be ready for them. It'll just be a secret for the two of us."

  Thinking of the difficulties they faced, she nevertheless talked of how she could help, and Florentine, too stunned by anger and amazement to say a word, let her go on:

  "I've got a little money saved up," she said. "That'll be a help. I'll lend it to you, if you're too proud to take it."

  Florentine was still silent. She was thinking, too. But far from being touched by Marguerite's offer, she was petrified that her secret had come out so easily, and especially that Marguerite dared to mention it ... to talk about what would happen later, that event so terrifying that she herself could not envisage it. What a fool Marguerite was! What a great idiot! A stupid fool! At all costs she must stay quiet, take it easy. And, above all, destroy this idea the big ninny had got into her head.

  "You must be crazy!" she said, half angry, half mocking. "You're really crazy with all your ideas. I tell you nothing's wrong. It's just nerves. It's only nerves."

  She repeated the word, raging and defiant as if to convince herself. And when she saw Marguerite half convinced and penitent she felt such relief, such progress toward her own deliverance, that she hastened to pile on more reproaches:

  "It's a good thing you were only joking, or I could get mad. I'd leave here in a minute if I knew you thought that about me, what you just said, there. Now take it back, or I'll be mad. You must be crazy, you and your crazy idea

  Then she pretended to yawn and stretch, as if she were dead-tired, and said firmly:

  "Now let's get some sleep, so we don't look too dumb in the morning. Good night."

  She wanted to escape from any further concern on Marguerite's part. When she finally heard her even breathing she felt free to move. Lying on one elbow she stared into the dark.

  At first she was surprised at the strange calm she felt. Confronted with the obvious by Marguerite's remarks, w
hose pity had been more convincing than nature's own warning, she had no use at this point for regret or shame. She simply wondered, her cold hands pressed against her throat, what she was going to do. She stared at the darkest corners of this unfamiliar room as if it were in a far country. But always the same question returned to haunt her: What, oh what am I going to do?

  She rubbed her eyes, she pressed her hands to her temples as if she could squeeze out a hope or a solution. She forced herself to think logically. She remembered a factor}' girl who had told her a most horrible thing one day as they walked down the street together. She also remembered that on that day life had seemed a cruel venture. But there was nothing to be done about it. . . . She toyed with the idea, stiffening at the idea of physical pain, knowing she would never accept it. Whenever she thought about such things, or about what the girl had confided to her (it had stuck in her memory like a poisoned dart), a different vision rose in competition, mingling the church, the holy images and the burning candles, the morning when she had gone to Mass with Emmanuel. Days of pure and innocent joy came to her mind. Then she felt cut off from light, from the sun, from life itself, and close to death. She thought of doing some violence to herself, but abandoned the notion, knowing she could never go through with it.

  Again the maddening question throbbed against her temples. What was she to do? Confess? Confess this to her mother? Never. . . . But what then? Tell Marguerite? Her throat tightened. That would never do, either. Marguerite, and all her promises to help: imagine her not talking! She could well afford to play the sister of mercy, that one. Nobody liked her, nobody would go out with her, except Alphonse who didn't have a job, and she likely gave him money! Marguerite was somebody who knew nothing about life. She probably was just curious, that was why she put on the kindness act. Just so she could spread the story afterwards. Women! she thought, contemptuously. Could a woman help another woman? But who, who was going to help her?

  She thought of a different way out. She was still young and pretty. Other men besides Jean Lévesque had noticed her. So many of them had paid attention to her at the restaurant! She dwelt a while on this possibility, but the memory of her physical experience renewed her despair.