by André Alexis
Whenever we stopped to eat, or to replenish the radiator, or to wait for the motor to cool, he would rub my head and ask
– Ça va, p’tit?
and look over at my mother. He was so obviously uncomfortable with me, I wondered why he didn’t rub her head and leave me out of it.
– Il parle pas beaucoup, ton fils.
– So…?
– Arrache-moi pas la tête, shit. J’fais juste remarquer, c’est tout.
– Who’s tearing your head off?
– Tu sais c’ que je veux dire…
* * *
—
There were a number of things wrong with Mr Mataf’s car. The worst was a slow leak in the radiator that obliged him to stop regularly to let the car cool down or to refill the radiator. Nor did the car’s headlights work, and this had as conspicuous an effect on our odyssey as the radiator. We drove along back roads, avoiding cities (well, London, Kitchener, and Guelph). We didn’t travel at night.
We were often becalmed. This was mostly dull, sometimes interesting.
The first day out was warm. I filled my pockets with stones from the side of the road and, when the adults needed to talk, I wandered about the side of the road, throwing stones in whatever water I found or at skinny birches.
My mother and Mr Mataf needed to talk, or wanted to be alone, quite a bit. Selfish, they were, and if I’d been closer to either of them, or a little less used to being on my own, it would have been painful. As it was, the stones and trees, toadstools and ferns were just enough to keep me occupied. Occasionally, not too often, I would hide behind the rocks or trees until one, or both, of them came looking for me. I thought this daring, because I wasn’t sure they’d come for me at all.
Still, the really interesting moments came when I returned to the car after a period of exploration. Sometimes Mr Mataf was visibly angry. Sometimes my mother was quiet. At times they were calm, at others agitated. At times they were, one or the other, or both, happy or relieved or, at least, inclined to speak sweetly to me.
We stopped often enough, between Petrolia and Orangeville, for me to anticipate the shifts in mood between the moment I was told (by Mr Mataf)
– Va-t-en voir s’il y a des chevaux dans la forêt…
and the moment I was called back in, though I couldn’t predict what the mood would be at my return.
When I was with them, they communicated with insults or jests or half-sentences that meant nothing to me.
– Je me doutais…
– De quoi?
– Chut!
– Quoi chut?
– We don’t have to talk about that now.
– T’es pas sérieuse.
– Ne vous fâchez pas, Monsieur Mataf.
– Fallait bien que je me fâchasse un jour.
– What?
Each of those syllables, or syllables like them, had meanings that depended on a host of details:
Was his hand on her shoulder? Was her hand on his?
Was his hand on her knee? Was her hand on his?
What was his tone of voice? What was hers?
Was there laughter at the beginning of a sentence? At its end?
Was such and such said at a stoplight, or on the open road?
It was impossible for me to keep all that in mind.
In a way, it was easier for me to tell what was going on from outside the car. That was like watching animals in a cell: soundlessly (from my vantage), they gesticulated, opened and closed their mouths, scratched their heads, seemed to vibrate when angry or slacken when relaxed. This wordlessness (from my vantage) was less recondite than their verbal exchanges.
* * *
—
I now realize that, that day, on the way to Orangeville, which was a step towards Montreal, I was witness to one of the final days of a relationship. I would have to have been much older to reconstruct their affair from what were, essentially, its embers, but it appeared to me, on our first day, that my mother was the more loving, that Mr Mataf couldn’t possibly love her, that he was impatient with things as they were.
And up to a point, I was right.
In all the years I knew her, my mother most often loved men who, whatever their feelings for her, were not inclined to stick around. As far as I’m concerned, that was the only charm most of them possessed.
At times, I blamed myself for their departures, but a pattern is a pattern, and it was my mother’s. I don’t think she was masochistic. Only one of the men who left her was physically abusive, and she was glad to see that one go.
This opens an unpleasant subject, but I must admit I have no idea if my mother was sexually masochistic or not. That’s a strange thing to suggest about one’s mother, and mine is so recently dead…but this veil over our parents’ sexuality (for which I’m grateful, don’t misunderstand me) hides an aspect of love, the physical, that one unconsciously learns from them, don’t you think?
Then again, moving backwards from myself to my mother, it is possible that my own lack of interest in being bound and whipped is proof that she had no interest in it either…requiescat in pace.
In any case, on the subject of my mother and Mr Mataf, the pathos of their “final days” loses its poignancy when one knows that this particular man was one in a line of similar men.
* * *
—
It was soon clear that my mother and Mr Mataf were travelling without much money.
The implications of being without money were still a little murky to me. I mean, my grandmother, while denying me much, never scrimped on the things she felt I needed: woollen long-johns, clothes so sturdy they stood up on their own, shoes fresh from the cow, and nutritious foods like Pablum and bran, bran and Pablum.
I certainly wanted frivolous things. I wanted skates and bicycles, but I didn’t miss them.
It was this trip that taught me some of the miseries of indigence. No, that sounds too dramatic. The miseries I experienced were less than epic, but they’ve stayed with me.
We had stopped in Lucan, for gasoline, when Mr Mataf said
– Viens-t-en toi. On va se promener un peu.
I thought he wanted to walk around the station, a little something to stretch our legs, but we crossed the street and went into a restaurant.
The restaurant smelled of kerosene. It was dimly lit, with counter and stools to one side, booths to the other. To the right of the front door, behind the first booth and partially hidden from the counter by a spin-a-rack of books, there was a red Coca-Cola cooler.
– Tom, va chercher trois Cokes, et amène-les à ta mère.
– Okay.
– ’Ey you dere, ’ow mush for da Coke? Mr Mataf asked the man behind the counter.
– How many?
As he went to the counter, I took three of the emerald-glass bottles from a pyramid in the belly of the cooler and carried them to my mother as he’d asked.
My mother was suspicious of the offering.
– Where did you find these?
– Mr Mataf got them for you.
– I see.
She kept quiet until Mr Mataf returned, paid for the gas, and drove us out of Lucan.
– Thank you for the drink, she said darkly. Whose money did you spend?
But Mr Mataf was in a good mood.
– Il est bien ’andy, ton fils…
(He was handy himself. He was the first man I ever saw open a bottle with his teeth. Not that I’ve sought them out since.)
– You used our money to pay for these?
– Oui, mais j’ai pas payé pour toute. J’ai payé pour une seulement.
– And how did you manage that?
– Je t’ai bien dit qu’il était ’andy, ton fils. Il a pris trois Cokes sans que Monsieur Tête Carrée l’aie vu, puis ensuite…ensuite, t’
aurais du me voir…Le monsieur derrière le comptoir, il pensait que c’était avec des frogs qu’il avait affaire. Ça j’iai compris tout’d’suite, et je me suis dit: Okay d’abord tu va en avoir des frogs toi. J’ai fait semblant de ne rien comprendre, mais pas un mot! Il répétait, “ ’Ow many? ’Ow many?” puis moi, “ ’Ow mush? ’Ow mush?”…
Mr Mataf was pleased with himself.
– Ça commençait à l’agacer. Alors, j’ai dit, mais lentement, “ ’Ow…mush…for…ha…Coke…for…da…boy?” Là il a embarqué. Il criait, “Ten cents! Ten cents!” Il me criait ça en face, “Ten cents! Ten cents!” Okay, mister. J’ai sortit mon argent et j’ai laissé dix sous noirs. “T’ank…you…very…mush” que j’ai dit. Il était pas malheureux de me voir du dos, celui-là. T’aurais du voir la face qu’il avait.
They were in fits, both of them, by the end of the story. I didn’t see anything funny in it, though. It all amounted to Mr Mataf using me to steal two bottles of Coke, and though I’d stolen one or two small things in my life, I’d been led to believe theft was wrong.
It was wrong, in my little world.
In the real world, the bottles of Coke were our lunch, though we drank them before noon, and there was nothing between them and the ham sandwiches we ate for supper.
* * *
—
After our first day together, I didn’t know my mother a great deal more than before we met.
No, that’s not true, but what did I know?
I knew how she looked. That’s not negligible. Her skin was darker than mine; her nose wasn’t as flat. She was thin, and her hair, unruly and long, was more or less constrained by a brightly coloured, beaded hairband. To the left of her mane, just along her neck, there was a dark mole. From my place in the car, directly behind her, it was the distinguishing mark I saw most.
I suppose my mother was pretty, though when I close my eyes to picture her face as a young woman, it’s difficult to keep in mind. (Her face is all the faces she has had in Time, from the moment I first saw her to the moment she turned away from me and died.) She wasn’t what I had expected. Her voice was lower. She wasn’t warm and loving, and we didn’t take to each other right away.
Worse, there was something in the way she carried herself, something in her gestures, that suggested my grandmother.
Above all, there was self-control; self-control even when she lost control. She never raised her voice, never showed the outward signs of panic, even in panic. You’d have called her level-headed, but for the fact
a) she’d abandoned her child
b) she’d never visited, though she’d written as if she might have liked to
c) she returned for her only child two weeks after her mother’s death, but penniless in the company of a penniless man who seemed not to like children
d) she returned in a car on the verge of collapse.
And that’s only a partial list of what, from here, look to be signs of recklessness. It might have been easier, for me, if her instability had been more obvious. On our first day, the only moment she lost composure came when she ate. I could see the effort she made to control herself as she bit into her half of our ham sandwich. She devoured it, and then opened the window for a breath of air.
I thought her bad-mannered. I ate slowly.
* * *
—
We stopped with the coming sunset, just outside of Orangeville, by the side of a dirt road, beside a flooded field, the nearest farmhouse some distance away.
It must have taken us about eight and a half hours to go from Petrolia to Orangeville, 160 kilometres away, stopping every half-hour or so for fifteen to twenty minutes; the equivalent, as I reckon it, of 5.6 hours waiting against 2.8 hours travelling, and a mean speed of just over 57 kilometres/hour along pebbled back roads, beside flooded fields, barns for Someone and Son, cows, horses, dung.
We ate our bits of sandwich in silence, drank warm water from the bottles Mr Mataf had filled at a gas station. It was the first time I drank water that smelled of eggs. Then, the adults got out of the car and took a small tent from the trunk.
– You won’t mind sleeping in the car, will you, Thomas?
– C’est pas un enfant, voyons.
– You’ll be more comfortable in…
– I don’t mind.
– Tu vois?
It was still light out as they looked for a bit of dry land on which to pitch their tent. I watched them from the car until the tent was raised and the two of them crawled in.
It looked too small to accommodate them both.
Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if I’d been able to sleep. I lay down in the back seat, as night came, listening for the sounds of night.
For a frightened child, I was self-possessed.
VII
From here, it looks as if the second day with Mr Mataf, from Orangeville to Marmora, was the real beginning of my life with Katarina.
Though I lived it as a single, chaotic passage, I remember the day as threefold:
1 Hunger
2 Misunderstanding
3 Night
1 Hunger
I hadn’t slept, or I’d drifted in and out of sleep.
The dark had intimidated me. The stars that, on other occasions, I’ve been thankful for refused to become the constellations I loved. I might have found Orion if I’d wanted, but I didn’t want. It was cold and I had no cover, save for my jacket and a sweater I found on the floor.
By morning, the air was like sand in my mouth. There was a fog on the road, and the sky was grey. (I’ve always disliked fog.) And I was hungry.
Naturally, wishing for the reappearance of my mother and Mr Mataf seemed to keep them away. Every minute from sunrise to late morning, when the two of them actually woke, was excruciating. And, when they did get up, it took them forever to crumple and fold their tent, to put it back in the trunk.
* * *
—
It’s odd, but nowadays I both love and dislike being hungry. For me, being from a class that disposes of hunger easily, it isn’t the soul-destroying thing it is for those whose lives depend on the next bite. For me, hunger is one of the more interesting agreements I have with my body. It begins with an almost pleasant feeling of lack, an awareness of something missing. And this awareness I can ignore, the same way I have, until now, ignored nostalgia. But from this first moment, centred in my innards, the state becomes gradually more general; it goes from being physically insistent to being both physically and intellectually manifest. This is the stage, when I’ve been hungry for hours, I like best. There’s an exhilaration to the beginning of an accord of mind and body. You may be thinking of whatever, the way bare trees look when they’re shaken by the wind, for instance, when suddenly these same trees remind you of a whisk whipping cream, of the brushes used to glaze a fish, of broccoli, and if broccoli then salad, and if salad then soup. And once you’ve thought of soup, and soup is, let’s say, the thing you really wouldn’t mind eating just now, it’s as if you’ve always had a particular relationship to soup. Soup itself becomes an intellectual proposition, as important in its way as the soul. And what, one wonders, did St Augustine like to eat? Well, he was from Carthage, so his soups would have been fish-based, fish-based and salty, and how could one possibly understand St Augustine without knowing this about him? The purpose of all this thinking is, of course, to get me to the kitchen, but when it works and I do go to the kitchen, I’m inevitably surprised to find myself there, a can of soup in one hand, a can opener in the other. It’s a moment of unknowing, of lostness in thought, that brings one back to knowing, back to the thought: hunger. From here, if one chooses not to eat, the impulse may vanish, as if to say: Okay, I brought you to the kitchen. It’s out of my hands. Don’t blame me…And off it goes to do its strangest work, disappearing now only to return stronger, more insist
ent later, turning everything to food, turning food itself to something luminous. I also appreciate this stage of hunger: the feeling of lack isn’t yet unavoidable or painful; the conversation between myself and my self has simply grown more heated. It’s the beginning of seeing clearly, or seeing intently, and it can last for days, days during which I feel more excitement than pain. Just after this, of course, there’s a point when, tired of sending messages you use as entertainment, your body gets on with the business of eating itself, sending signals of alarm occasionally, when it remembers it isn’t supposed to do this. That’s when I like to eat, if I’ve been fasting. To go on after that is self-punishment.
Anyway, on the morning I’m speaking of, I was hungry somewhere near the beginning of hunger, but I was too young to savour it…
* * *
—
They had been arguing.
Mr Mataf was annoyed. He grumbled his way through key finding, car starting, and taking off. My mother asked how I’d slept.
– I’m hungry, I said.
– Your son is ’ungry, said Mr Mataf.
(It sounded as if I were “angry.”)
– I heard him.
– Alors, on va faire quelque chose ou…
– I’m hungry, I said again.
And I began to cry, need having shown me the tragic in my situation: alone with strangers, far from the only home I’d ever known, unhappy with the woman who was supposed to be my mother, intimidated by the man she was with, cold and uncomfortable from a sleepless night in the back of a car, hungry.
– Okay, toi. On n’a pas besoin d’Hollywood a c’t’heure.
And then from my mother
– Don’t talk to him that way.
Mr Mataf let out a stream of invective, with maudit this and maudit that, calice, hostie, tabernacle, before my mother hit him on the side of the face. (I was going to write “slapped,” but I distinctly remember a fist, and the car veering out of its lane and onto the soft shoulder.)
