The Postman's Fiancée

by Denis Theriault; Translated by John Cullen

  ‘What you need is a man worthy of the name,’ Robert went on.

  ‘And you call yourself his friend?’ Tania asked indignantly.

  ‘Friendship has nothing to do with it. This is all about the burning desire I feel for you, my lovely Tania,’ said Robert salaciously.

  Hardly concealing her contempt, Tania ignored him.

  All autumn long, she continued to perform variations on the Japanese theme; she placed a bonsai plant on the counter and persuaded Mr Martinez, the chef, to add some sushi dishes to the menu. For Halloween, she dressed as a geisha, naturally.

  ‘Konnichi wa,’ she said, bowing to the astonished Bilodo when he came in.

  He bowed in return and complimented her on her beautiful costume. Then, as soon as he’d finished his lunch, he plunged into his haiku. This tepid reaction disappointed Tania, who had taken great pains with her outfit – she’d spent two hours just on her make-up and hairdo.

  ‘Nice try, Madam Butterfly,’ said Robert mockingly when Tania, unsteady on her wooden clogs, came to warm up his coffee. ‘You’d do better coming home with me. I’ll show you my big samurai sword.’

  ‘I’d rather commit hara-kiri!’

  Robert insisted, evoking the prospect of a Hiroshima of carnal pleasure, but Tania hurried away to bid farewell to Bilodo, who was leaving already: ‘Sayonara, my love!’ she said, to herself.

  Tick-tock goes the clock

  marking out the hours

  my heart beats for only you

  Tania shredded the poem and threw it into the fireplace, where it went up in smoke. She sighed. Was Bilodo suffering from the same creative anxieties? He didn’t look like it; every afternoon, he applied himself to his own haiku with imperturbable discipline, apparently exempt from writer’s block. Although flattered by Tania’s ongoing interest in his work, he still refused to let her see what he was writing and hastily shut his notebook as soon as she got too close. Thoroughly intrigued by this mystery, Tania wondered whether Bilodo’s poems might not contain references to her, and was all the more curious to have a look at them – and so it occurred to her to start a renku.

  It was while reading a history of Japanese poetry that she’d come across the term renku. This was a poetic tradition that went back to the literary contests held in bygone days in the Imperial Court of Japan. The result of a collaborative effort on the part of several authors, a renku (‘linked verses’) comprised a sequence of haiku in which each one, each link, responded to the link preceding it. The prospect of exchanging poems like that with her own true love had immediately enthralled Tania. Bilodo, she believed, would be unable to resist the allure of such an experience. But in order to succeed, she still had to begin the process by presenting him with a first haiku worthy of achieving her purpose – and there was the rub:

  All along Beech Street

  only maple leaves

  blowing about in the wind

  Dry leaves of autumn

  blowing in the wind

  not a beech leaf among them

  If trees on Beech Street

  are for the most part maples

  this is not my fault

  To beech, not to beech

  how important can it be

  trees couldn’t care less

  Autumn on Beech Street

  the wind – the maples

  what a brimming crock of shit!

  Tania tore up those preposterous haiku. Was there anything more horrible than the sensation of going round in circles inside your own head? Her whole being aspired to wabi (sober beauty in harmony with nature), but it was as though the age-old virtues of sabi (simplicity, serenity) were refusing to penetrate her. How was she to reach the subtle equilibrium between fueki (the permanent, the eternity that extends beyond us) and ryuko (the fleeting, the ephemeral that passes through us), those indispensable elements of a good haiku? Where could you learn to write that type of thing?

  ‘Stop wasting your time writing poems,’ her friend Noémie advised her. They were sitting at the bar in a pub on rue Notre-Dame. ‘If you’re sure this boy’s the right one for you, stop thinking about it, and full speed ahead!’

  Noémie was Tania’s oldest friend in Montreal. She too was a waitress and worked in a café in the Quartier Latin where Tania had also been employed during her first year at university. Pretty and extroverted, Noémie possessed the kind of mischievous smile that captivated men, an advantage she didn’t fail to make the very most of: more than once, Tania had been obliged to help her extricate herself from complex erotic situations involving several concurrent lovers. Nevertheless, although the two of them were very close, it was only recently that Tania had dared to confide to Noémie the tender feelings that Bilodo aroused in her.

  ‘Are you waiting for some other little minx to snatch him away from you? Get him in a corner and put him through the wringer.’

  Tania shrugged. That was easy for a sexual electromagnet like Noémie to say, but for the timid Tania Schumpf, it was a different matter entirely. The method Noémie was recommending seemed excessively bold to Tania; to provoke Bilodo that way was to risk ruining everything. When dealing with such a sensitive boy, wasn’t it important to proceed instead with infinite delicacy?

  ‘If you insist on subtlety, I can give you a love philtre,’ Noémie proposed. ‘My Haitian neighbour concocts it. Three drops in your postman’s soup will do the trick.’

  But Tania declined this offer, persuaded that the only fitting magic for her purposes was the magic of words, preferably in sets of seventeen syllables.

  Tania awoke on the sofa at four in the morning, slightly bewildered. Straining to produce a decent haiku, she’d filled page after page, scrawling, crossing out, counting and recounting syllables and then crossing out everything again, until she’d finally fallen asleep amidst an erg of torn paper. Outside, the first snow of winter was falling in lazy flakes illuminated by the pallid light of the streetlamps. Tania hurriedly slipped on her coat and went out. With childish pleasure, she trod the white carpet that covered the pavement. The city was deserted, immaculate. As she walked through the snow, Tania opened her mouth, trying to catch a drifting flake that landed on her nose instead...and suddenly she knew what she had to write. Wouldn’t it be enough to stick to the natural simplicity that had so generously inspired the old masters?

  Tania ran home, and in less than ten minutes, she composed this:

  Neophyte parachutist

  an early snowflake

  dissolves on my nose

  Wabi – sabi – fueki – ryuko: they were all there. It was no work of genius, but it might suffice.

  Tania copied out her haiku onto a sheet of fancy paper and the following afternoon presented the poem to Bilodo, who seemed greatly impressed. In gratitude, he promised to write a poem for her very soon. Tania gloated discreetly; her plan was working, a renku had been born. All she had to do was await Bilodo’s poetic response.

  Tania had no inkling that her patience would be so sorely tested.

  4

  It was already April when Tania, clearing Bilodo’s place at the counter while he was in the toilets, found a folded piece of paper with her name written on it. ‘At last,’ she whispered, presuming that this was the haiku that had been promised her. She’d been waiting for that poem for weeks, and then months, with vanishing hope, and in the end she’d assumed that Bilodo had forgotten. And look, all at once her patience was rewarded. Tania unfolded the paper, burning to read what had taken Bilodo a whole winter to compose:

  Some flowers, it seems,

  are seven years a-blooming

  For a long time now

  I have longed to say to you

  all the love words in my heart

  To Tania’s ears, it was as if a choir of angels had intoned a Gloria. Trembling with joy that bordered on ecstasy, she went and stationed herself outside the men’s toilets, from which Bilodo soon emerged, taken aback at the sight of her. Tania thanked him for the marvellous surprise and confesse
d, her cheeks aflame, that the feeling was mutual. Bilodo gazed dumbfounded at the poem Tania was pressing against her throbbing breast. ‘I have to go,’ he stammered. Gauging how much courage it must have cost so shy a man to make such a declaration of love, Tania required nothing more, for the time being; and while Bilodo, visibly upset, was leaving the restaurant, she favoured him with her most radiant smile.

  Tania spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of weightlessness. She kept on rereading the remarkable poem – five lines long instead of three – that had just magnified her life. Her recent research enabled her to recognize that the verses were written in an ancient Japanese poetic form: tanka, haiku’s august ancestor. A tanka was made up of two parts: the first, a tercet of seventeen syllables, was in fact a haiku, to which a second part was added, a distich – two lines, each containing seven syllables – that responded to the first part and gave the stanza a new direction. In contrast with haiku, which spoke to the senses and tended to involve the observation of nature, tanka dealt with such noble themes as death and love. Tania understood why Bilodo had taken so long to write his poem: unwilling to settle for declaring his feelings in a simple haiku, he’d taken the trouble to explore that other poetic form, dedicated to the expression of complex emotions.

  Afloat on a pink cloud, Tania spent her evening creating a tanka that would respond to Bilodo’s and convey, with a judiciously calibrated mixture of passion and modesty, her desire to give herself to him:

  My heart has been yours

  for an even longer time

  Yours, waiting for you

  The fruit that slowly ripens

  tastes all the more delicious

  It was almost noon, and Tania was waiting for Bilodo, her tanka in her pocket, when the postal workers showed up, led by Robert, who was himself preceded by a swollen nose. Tania had noted the swelling the previous day; it was obviously the result of a blow, but Robert had been evasive. When Tania complimented him on the remarkable colouration of his honker, Robert, loquacious as ever, had declared that she should rather compliment his attacker, Bilodo. Having recently witnessed some violent arguments between the two men, Tania wasn’t so surprised. The reason for their dispute remained obscure: it seemed that Bilodo had risen up, and not a moment too soon, against the endless indignities inflicted on him by his co-worker. If Bilodo had gone so far as to strike Robert, it could only have been in reaction to some particularly outrageous insult. In any case, Tania was certainly not going to feel sorry for Bilodo’s tormenter.

  ‘Tell me something, Tania,’ Robert said unctuously. ‘Yesterday I saw you read a note Libido had left on the counter. It was a love poem, wasn’t it?’

  Tania dared not ask him how he knew that, nor how Bilodo’s tanka could possibly interest him. ‘None of your business,’ she replied, preparing to beat a quick retreat.

  But Robert reached inside his coat, took out a sheet of paper, and held it under her nose. ‘Was it this poem?’

  A scalding shudder ran through Tania’s body. Robert was talking about Bilodo’s tanka, many copies of which, he informed her, were circulating at the Depot. A shocked Tania listened as Robert explained that the poem hadn’t been meant for her, that its intended recipient was a Guadeloupian woman named Ségolène with whom Bilodo corresponded, and with whom he was mightily taken: ‘When Libido told me he wanted to give you a copy, I found the notion immoral. I tried to stop him, and that’s why he punched me.’

  A deathly silence had fallen upon the restaurant. The other customers, who’d been following the conversation, looked at Tania and felt terribly sorry for her. It was then, on the stroke of noon, that Bilodo came in. His arrival was greeted by the sniggers of the postmen. Determined at all costs to avoid meeting his eyes, Tania ran and hid in the kitchen, shaken to the core, her back against the wall. She could hear the postmen on the other side, heckling Bilodo and roaring, ‘Ségolène! In your sloop! Sail me back to Guadeloupe!’ Tania took Bilodo’s tanka out of her apron pocket and read it again, trying to understand. So this poem, and all the others – had he written them for this Ségolène person? The thought stunned her, and she let herself slide down the wall. Turning his head away from the stove and seeing her like that, Mr Martinez became alarmed; as he lifted her from the floor, he asked her to tell him what was wrong, but the stupefied Tania barely heard him. Why had Bilodo let her read that poem? Was this a nasty practical joke dreamt up by the postmen? Was she paying the price for some idiotic bet? Seething with anger, Tania grabbed a tray loaded with food and left the kitchen.

  Bilodo was seated at the counter, looking wretched. Tania ignored him and brought the other postmen their meals. Robert’s ostentatious contrition didn’t deceive her; she could feel him enjoying her defeat. She served the postal workers without flinching and then went to take Bilodo’s order, so icy she could have sunk the Titanic. What would he have? Another sitting duck, like her? A guinea pig to test out his poems on? Bilodo told her she was mistaken and asked to speak to her in private, but Tania replied that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. She crumpled up the fraudulent tanka and threw it at him. ‘Here’s your poem, Libido,’ she said scathingly.

  There followed a burst of applause, for Tania was not without supporters. Bilodo stammered that it was none of his doing, that she had never been meant to see the poem. So he didn’t deny having written the tanka for someone else, which Tania considered equivalent to a confession. Refusing to hear any more about it, she commanded him to go somewhere else and find another victim – an order punctuated by fresh applause. It was too much for Tania, who once again ran to the kitchen for refuge. Bilodo wanted to follow her, but Mr Martinez – 130 hostile kilos, not counting the kitchen knife in his hand – blocked the postman’s way and advised him to make himself scarce. Bilodo chose to comply. Tania heard him slam the restaurant door. Devastated, she sagged against Mr Martinez’s shoulder and cried her eyes out.

  ‘How could you let yourself be manipulated like that, Tania Schumpf?’ she said in self-reproach that evening, seeking to drown her sorrows in a bottle of Chardonnay. So Bilodo’s feelings for her, the feelings she’d thought she perceived – they’d been only fantasies? How could her sublime love story have turned into a horror film so suddenly? Tania was certain of only one thing: she was suffering horribly, from Bilodo’s duplicity, from his cynicism – but the most piercing of all her torments came with an overwhelming realization: ‘I still love him.’ For so she did, as absurd as that was. In spite of all the wrong Bilodo was doing her, she continued to love him. ‘But he loves someone else!’ she cried to herself in despair, and it was as though a knife had been thrust through her heart.

  What was he doing at that moment? Was he writing to his Guadeloupian woman? Dreaming about her?

  It was only out of her sense of duty that Tania went to work the following day. Twelve o’clock passed with no sign of Bilodo, who dared not show himself. Better for him. The other customers, having witnessed the previous day’s psychodrama, treated Tania like a delicate porcelain piece the merest impact could pulverize. People felt sorry for her, which only further stung her wounded pride.

  The crowd from the Postal Depot invaded the restaurant at ten past twelve. ‘Your fiancé won’t be here today, my poor Tania,’ Robert announced. ‘He called in sick.’

  Tania stoically took the postmen’s orders and passed them on to the kitchen. Then she saw Ulysse signalling to her from the back of the dining room. The peripatetic Ulysse was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, in which he had suffered a head wound and from which he’d returned much diminished mentally. Like his illustrious namesake, he was a wanderer, roaming around in the subway, travelling from one station to another, trying to get back to his home, whose address he had unfortunately forgotten. Ulysse sometimes sank into paranoia and thought he was being pursued by a Cyclops disguised as a policeman, but he always behaved like a perfect gentleman with Tania, whom he worshipped, taking her for a Greek goddess.

  Concealing her trou
bles, Tania went to him and asked to be told the wishes of Ithaca’s exiled king. But the latter didn’t want to talk about the menu: ‘I saw everything, noble daughter of Zeus. I was here the day before yesterday, and I watched that dirty swine’ – here Ulysse paused in his whispering and thrust an accusatory chin in the direction of Robert, two tables away – ‘carry out his dastardly scheme. I saw him seize on a moment of inattention, when you were in the kitchen and the postman was in the toilets, to place on the counter the infernal poem through which your honour was tarnished.’

  ‘Thank you, Ulysse,’ said Tania, lining up the offending postal worker in her sights.

  Everything appeared in a new light. It was all a plot, engineered by Robert. Bilodo was innocent: he’d tried to explain, but she’d been deaf to him. A wave of shame took Tania’s breath away at the memory of how despicably she had accused and insulted him. What must he think of her?

  So this fine mess had come to her courtesy of Mr Robert. The reason why was obvious: by inducing Tania to believe the tanka was meant for her, he was killing two birds with one stone – punishing Tania for rejecting his advances, and avenging himself on Bilodo for having punched him. Itching with an urgent desire to annihilate Robert, Tania brought the postmen their meals. She placed their daily bread before each of them apart from Robert, and then, serving him last, she coolly poured his plate of spaghetti on his head. Robert shrieked and leaped up, overturning his chair. ‘What’s wrong with you, you stupid bitch?’ he yelped, throwing off spurts of Bolognese sauce.