Twenty-One Cardinals

by Jocelyne Saucier

  I know everyone thought I was hard on her. No one really understood, except her, maybe. I was trying to get closer to that secret part of her. I wanted to shake her so that she would reveal herself and show us what was so alluring about such pointless desires: dresses, trinkets, good manners, all that fool’s gold that drew her like a bee to honey. She let herself be abused. She accepted the trials with an abandon that moved me every time. And her gentleness …

  She was an enigma. I never stopped wondering about her from the moment she let herself be seduced by the McDougalls’ fancy clothes and mansion. None of us would have been caught in such an artless trap. The little girl with the light heart came and went, one foot in our world and the other in a dream. She went away regularly to play princess at the McDougalls’ and came back to us just as regularly, beaming in her doll’s dresses, whirling and twirling, as if she didn’t know that we were going to burst her bubble to bring her back to the fold. Returning from her jaunts was difficult, and yet she always ended up leaving again. She would go back to the McDougalls’ with a persistent lightheartedness every summer, even if every time the reception that awaited her when she came home was more of an ordeal. I could never understand what attracted her to them.

  I thought she was doing it as a challenge, because sometimes I would catch a look in her eye, at the worst part of an ordeal, a look that showed me just how strong she was and humiliated me. I could never say exactly what it was. But I know that it was that hard core that I was after in her.

  We never had real conversations. She was three years younger than me, a superfluous girl, and I was destined to become head of the household.

  Only once could we have had a real conversation, and I blew it, even though I was the one who had wanted to be alone with her. It was on a Sunday afternoon, at the mine. I asked her to come with me, under the pretext of having forgotten a magnifying glass that the Old Man urgently needed. The others smelled a rat. She was in her school uniform, a navy blue tunic and a white blouse, and they were all convinced that I had something special in store for her.

  She impressed me. She had learned English at the McDougalls’, Latin with the nuns, was interested in ancient civilizations and modern mathematics, and she had managed to keep her place in the household in spite of the life she was leading somewhere else. She was sixteen and would soon be off to another world without me having put my finger on whatever burned deep in her soul. I had decided to approach her softly. I wanted her to want to open up to me. But I was pretty unpolished at the time, and I didn’t know how to handle intimate conversations.

  I thought I would take advantage of the Sunday lull. We lived on top of each other at home, intertwined, stuck together, constantly fighting for a tiny bit of space, in spite of the maze of bedrooms and kitchen/living rooms that gave us a great deal of it. But on Sunday, peace broke out, a sort of languor settled over the house, and we scattered here and there, on the porch with a book, in a bedroom chasing shadows on the walls, and we watched time go by. I thought I would take advantage of the hush to quietly ask her to come with me. I hadn’t banked on the interest the slightest initiative of the great Geronimo would generate.

  She was with Tommy in the last bedroom upstairs and, from the tone of their voices, I knew they were sharing confidences. Tommy dug in her heels as soon as she saw me in the doorway. And rather than the friendly approach I had prepared, I heard myself saying, ‘Before you wear your eyes out over your Latin textbooks, come help me find the magnifying glass the Old Man lost at the mine.’

  There was nothing I could do. The commotion that my appearance in the bedroom had caused and the harshness of my words had raised the dust in the house. The shockwave moved from room to room, disrupting the idleness of our Sunday afternoon with the turbulence the news caused: ‘Geronimo is taking Angèle to the mine!’

  We had gone through the kitchen/living rooms on the second floor, followed by faces that each lit up in turn with the excitement of the news. Angèle was tensed with the pain of not knowing what awaited her – it would be something new because she had never gone to the mine – and I was hurrying to hide my annoyance. At one end of the second floor, frozen in a rectangle of light that was its sole source of illumination, was Tommy, impotent in her rage.

  I had hoped that at the mine, in what had become my world – because I went there to split rock every day with the Old Man – I could start a casual, friendly conversation about what we were doing and gently get a closer look at her soul. I was counting on the blackness at the bottom of the mine and that strange silence that penetrated your entire being and left you feeling vulnerable, an impression I had myself when I went there for the first time.

  You entered the mine via a ramp dug into the mountainside, and daylight dimmed as you went deeper into what was nothing more than a roadway, just large enough to accommodate three men of medium build walking side by side. It led to the mine stope. It was there that I hoped to get the truth from Angèle, in the enormous room carved in the rock. The silence was more enveloping than in other parts, and the darkness was thicker. At the centre of this underground cathedral, there was a precise point where a voice, bouncing off the rocky ridges left between the many pillars that supported the vault, came back in a series of echoes, becoming superhuman. I had experienced it a number of times, and it had left me shaken.

  Angèle remained immune to the echo of my voice. We were in what I call the main nave of the cathedral, and I was explaining the ingenious system of arches and pillars that distributed the weight of thousands of tons of rock above our heads. The beam from my flashlight roamed the rock walls, disappeared into the cavernous depths, came back to us on another pillar and sometimes, when I abruptly changed direction, a beam of light would illuminate Angèle’s tensed face. She stayed beside me, ramrod straight, the picture of pride, waiting for the torment to begin or end, because she was convinced that I had brought her there for a new bit of torture and didn’t understand what all the staging was about.

  I couldn’t get a word out of her the whole time we were in the mine stope. It was only later, in the tunnel, after climbing a thousand feet of ladders that led to our quartz vein, that I felt her tension start to ebb.

  The place was impressive, it must be said, for anyone who had never been there. A tiny cubbyhole, barely large enough to accommodate the two of us, flanked on either side by dizzying drops, one serving as an ore chute and the other as a means of access. And above us, embedded in the shale, the quartz vein. It was an apparition of blinding white surrounded by darkness.

  I don’t know if it was the strangeness of the place, her interest in the quartz vein or the budding conviction that I meant her no harm, had no dirty tricks up my sleeve … but I felt Angèle’s resistance fade.

  I spoke in a soft voice so as not to extinguish the faint glimmer of trust that held out for true intimacy. She was listening carefully and, little by little, she started asking questions. About our blasting technique, about how we disposed of the barren rock and, of course, about the quartz vein.

  She was struck by the fact that we extracted six ounces of gold from a ton of rock.

  ‘All this for six lousy ounces of gold?’

  I tried to get her to see the error in her thinking.

  ‘Six ounces a ton is an incredible assay value. Even the Old Man has never seen or heard of that sort of assay. We extract a ton a day, six ounces of gold a day. Imagine what that makes at the end of the year, at thirty-five bucks an ounce!’

  ‘And what do you do with the gold?’

  ‘Well, we sell it to … Okay, we sell it to a guy. He’s the manager of a mine, a little gold mine that’s not doing so well. The guy isn’t too worried about the hows and the whys, and he buys our gold at, let’s say, twenty bucks an ounce because none of this is legit.’

  ‘No, I mean, in the end, what’s all that gold used for?’

  ‘Well, it’s used to make bracelets, necklaces, all kinds of jewellery, gilding for statues, gold teeth …
’

  ‘So … ’ (and here she deliberately emphasized the words), ‘fool’s gold, basically.’

  I was gobsmacked. Caught completely off-guard. I should have been furious, but I was too impressed by her intelligence to contemplate revenge. Luckily there were no witnesses to the affront.

  I pretended to discover the magnifying glass that I had left the day before behind a pile of rocks, and I said in a tone meant to reassert my authority: ‘Let’s go.’

  I swear that I didn’t even think about the tunic and the white blouse. It was when we got home and I saw the car belonging to the parents of a school friend who made a detour by Norco to take Angèle back to the convent that I realized. Her tunic was covered with black, sticky dust, and the only part of the white blouse that was still white were the buttons.

  They were waiting for us. The school friend and her parents in their car, doors closed and windows rolled up in spite of the late-afternoon heat, all smiling with the same exaggerated patience and stealing furtive glances at the surrounding desolation. And on the porch was a noisy assembly of the Cardinal tribe, making a show of looking the intruders right in the eye.

  Angèle went to meet her humiliation as a queen would go to the gallows. Straight and serene in her soiled uniform, without a shadow of annoyance on her face, she walked slowly toward the car, giving the audience all the time it needed to admire the damage, and she got in the back seat, beside her school friend, whose horrified face offered a taste of the commotion that the soiled uniform would create at the convent.

  The humiliation was beyond tolerable. She could have taken the time to change in the house and come back with a clean uniform, but no. She chose to embrace the humiliation and force us to look at the disgrace that awaited one of our own at the detested temple of the convent. No one on the porch was in the mood for rejoicing. And standing apart from them, I could only admire her incredible strength of character once again.

  I stopped wanting to drag the secrets of her soul from her. I was wounded deep inside. She had snubbed the hand I held out to her and, more importantly, she had made my life seem absurd – mine, our father’s, Émilien’s, everyone’s – because extracting the quartz vein was the family business, and our gold the most glorious tribute of war that we had squeezed out of Norco. I couldn’t watch it be dragged through the mire of fool’s gold.

  I’ll admit that the tortures that awaited Angèle when she returned from the convent became pure vengeance on my part. But there was no glory, because she took refuge inside herself, leaving nothing on the surface but a smooth image on which we could read our own disarray.

  Angèle’s strength lay in her ability to reach us where we didn’t expect it. I understood that later in talking to Tintin.

  Tintin is the only person in whom I confide emotions that are eating away at me. He has become a sort of monk. He lives with his four or five children at the end of a country road. No wife and no hope other than to watch his children grow.

  When I left Norco, I thought I would never go back. I hadn’t anticipated that the need to grate my soul against our past would force me to return. I go every two or three years now, only in summer, because the road that leads there is impassable in the winter, and for hours I fill my heart with every form of suffering imaginable. The Norco air, the land defenceless under the sun, the smell of warm grass, the gusts of cool air that start from an opening in the forest and whip over the cruellest memories of the past, and, smack in the middle of my line of sight, the house, our poor, big house, awaits me. I do my whole routine: I lean into the most powerful images, I wind and unwind the thread, I strangle myself, I stab myself, I slit my throat, I annihilate myself, I exterminate myself, and once I’m dead, when I feel nothing left inside me but the bottom of the dizzying pit of pain, I get back in the car and I drive along a dusty maze of country roads until I reach Tintin’s place.

  I didn’t know that my wandering would lead to Tintin’s the first time I went back to Norco. I was just back from a mission in Chad. My first mission for the Red Cross. Plenty of others followed, to Chad and other places, to the point that I could no longer stomach reporting to the humanitarian bureaucracy at the pulpit in Geneva. I’m a lone ranger now, exasperating the close-knit international community of boy scouts.

  After Chad, the crush of refugee camps, the overpopulated streets of N’Djamena, and then Europe, I needed wide-open spaces, I needed to feel the bracing air of freedom. After landing at the airport in Montreal, I rented a car and took Highway 117 without thinking.

  It seems that the barbarity of the internecine wars where I tend to others’ wounds have only made my own wounds worse, because as I drive this road, past the inhabited area of the Laurentians, past Mont Laurier, once the air tingles with the bracing smell of pines, once the sky opens up over vast stretches of calm water and my soul wants to go off to meet this grandeur, once it smells the northern air and hears the call of wide-open spaces, my soul clenches, because it knows what’s waiting for it at the end of the road.

  That time, I didn’t know what awaited me. I hadn’t been back to Norco in twenty years. The road was taking me there without my knowing it.

  Things hadn’t changed much. You could see that prosperity had passed through, but very quickly, and in fits and starts, leaving the towns and the villages with a few new homes, looking proud, facades redone, lawns closely shorn, and, not very far off, a few miles away, in a notch in the forest, a hovel in fake brick, surrounded by horrible bric-a-brac that delighted me, because it was the image I had taken with me and that I was finally revisiting, the image of a man living alone or with a wife as forlorn as him, a few kids perhaps, a dog, a gun, obvious, unselfconscious poverty, a life that defies all the laws of this world.

  When I arrived at the side road I knew so well, I realized that Norco no longer existed. The road was just a thin ribbon of dirt, with long yellow grass growing at its centre, leaving two uneven ruts on either side that I was driving in. It was when I spotted the covered bridge at the bend in the winding road that descends slowly toward the river that I knew that I was going to meet my pain. From the other side of the bridge, there was that spot, burned in my memory, where Tommy’s black eyes came crashing down on me. ‘Look, look at me, look at what you’ve done.’ I crossed the bridge slowly because of the planks that had come loose from the deck and the voice that pursued me. ‘Look where your sick games have led.’ Coming out of the half-light of the covered bridge, I saw us, Émilien, Tommy and me, out in the sun, out in the nightmare, in Émilien’s old car. ‘Look at her carefully. Listen to her scream. See all those tons of rock raining down on her. Look at her flesh tearing, the blood splattering, her stomach splitting open, her brain exploding. Look what you’ve done. You’ve killed Angèle.’

  ‘Noooooooo!’

  I was the one screaming in horror. The vision I was being forced to look at was too horrible. My entire being was rejecting it, while simultaneously trying to feed on it, to wallow in the abomination to reach the peak of the pain. I saw Angéle dying in a pool of her blood. I saw the mound of flesh and organs. I replayed the scene from the beginning, from when the scream started to the unrecognizable body, torn open, eviscerated, ground under tons and tons of rock, and I started over. Salvation was to be found only in torture.

  Tommy got out of the car, taking with her the pants and shirt that would put an end to the horrible charade. We knew from that moment on, Émilien and I, that she had taken charge of saving the family. Or that she had been put in charge of it. We waited for her while she went behind a thicket to take off Angèle’s dress, her flowered Sunday dress, and put on the pants and the shirt that would hide the death, my blame and our family’s vulnerability forever.

  As she gave me back the dress, she said, ‘I never want to see you again.’

  She headed back to Norco, with her slow, purposeful step, and I followed her fading image, wondering whether other visions awaited me and whether I would survive.

  There were st
ill a few houses standing. Ours and the Laroses’, the Morins’ and the Desrosiers’, I think. Over the years, I have seen these houses go downhill. Every visit, one more has fallen down and yet another will finally lie down to rest once the weight of the winter is upon it. Only our house was still truly standing, with its old companion, the dynamite shed, at its side.

  This time I was able to go into the house. The porch and the outside stairs could still hold me. I went through every room, I opened the cupboard doors in the four kitchen/living rooms. I searched everywhere, brushing aside spiderwebs, chasing mice that had made their nests in whatever had been left behind – broken box springs, piles of boxes, nameless clothing and objects – but when I wanted to go down into the basement, my heart couldn’t take it anymore. I had exhausted all my suffering. I stood before the big black hole in front of me, unable either to take the step that would have sent me headlong into it or to step back from muddled contemplation of what I could make out from the faint ray of drowsy light coming from the small basement window: on the dirt floor, blocks of cement and the debris of the stairs, and on the west wall, our father’s workbench, above which dangled boards that had served as shelves.

  I don’t remember leaving the house: I only remember finding myself lying stretched out on the mountainside and the long cry that escaped from my throat.

  I must have driven there because when I got up, I saw the car below. I could see the glint of the metal in the sun through the brush that had taken over the road to the mine.

  I could taste blood and tears in my throat, and I had the impression of having broken all my limbs in hand-to-hand combat with an invisible force. I was overwhelmed, completely panicked by the idea of having lost consciousness for all this time. The rental car that sparkled in the sun seemed like my life buoy.