by Gaetan Soucy
Yes, I say she, because this cherub will be like a bubble to me, I offer as proof the conviction I can feel inside my belly. She will grow up without ever knowing whacks, like the flowers, which don’t have to be mistreated to grow with all their colours flying. She’ll be attentive and polite to all animals, she won’t abandon them to bereftment and hunger like some I know, alas, who will roast. I will teach her to beware of seductive and destructive manikins and dolls as if they were fire, for they are dangerous because of their beauty, according to the sayings of my father it’s at the age of four that one is too fond of matches, and I’ll call her Ariane in memory of the punishment …
A shudder of white cloth crosses the splendour of the autumn sky and drifts above the river, you might think it was a kite the size of a church, it’s the snow geese. I had a kite once in the shape of a fish with golden scales, I looked after it because it was my cloud, but one day it slipped out of my fingers and flew away up above, I gazed at the wreck of it at the summit of a tree one summer long, that was when I was beginning to swell on my torso, troubles always arrive hand in hand. As for the snow geese, every year my father and I would go up to the summit of yours truly’s bookhouse to watch them take off. This fall they seem to be early and I see that as a sign. They’re like thoughts that are too sweet, too beautiful for us to keep cozily inside our chests in anticipation of the long winter months, we must resign ourselves to the fact that they leave us in one go, as a swarm, like those that rise up inside me when I think about the blessed fruit of my womb, thoughts that lure my heart and terrify me with joy and that I must drive away from my bosom, for already there’s no time left for dreams of paradise, I can feel within me, from the dike that’s about to burst, that soon I shall be in the grip of deliverance, and I know from experience that my imaginings have never brought me anything good, any more than my memories, in fact, and now I have less desire than ever to go mad like a flaming partridge stuck through my hat, all smeared with the blood of their religion, and to end up devastated from having waited too long here below, a martyr to hope, which can happen in the best of families.
