by Bertrand Laverdure
≈ translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

CHAPTER 1

I’m resting. Dozing off. Doing nothing, just resting. All I want is to lie in bed, arms out like a cross, left cheek on the pillow, legs and chest flat on the mattress. I haven’t read anything today and won’t read anything before one in the afternoon. I am a reader—what publishing houses call “a member of the editorial board.”

Yet there is no editorial board, no summit meeting, no secret gathering to formulate impartial, obvious decisions, ones that are democratic and positive. I am a reader because I have my own view of literature; what it should be; what buttons to sew on a novel’s sleeves; what zippers to place throughout a narrative; the ideal length of writers’ detestable pipe dreams.

My plight is to rule over the ghosts haunting the world of letters. Deep down, I will always be Hercules standing before the Augean Stables. I devote myself to a soldier’s anonymous life. I am sent to the front of others’ words, the unbearable, lachrymose bundles of Monsieur Patenaude and Madame Lefebre, Monsieur Hogarteen and Madame Willoska. The unbelievable heap of manuscripts pollutes my consciousness.

Who wouldn’t slam into the first wall they see, having realized the sheer madness of human beings, their disrespectful desire to impose all their misfortunes and opinions on us? If it were up to me, I would decree a law against abominable books.

In fact, I abhor all these smooth talkers, these idolaters of the freedom of expression. Ok fine, I get it, people need to express themselves, rejoice, appease their egos, pour out their bitterness, recount their troubles, but then they get it into their heads to publish this mother of vinegar, this thick syrup—no, I say! Asinine nonsense. Kill off the whole lot of blowhards, wipe these battalions of human expression off the face of the earth.

I’m resting.

I won’t say that I recant, lose my head, sometimes have regrets. But I’m weary, I feel my calm slipping away.

I read because others’ torments are part of my labour. I read because the harshest truths and the most ordinary dramas—not to mention extravagant desires—emerge between the clumsy lines of the worst fictions.

Authenticity rests in the clumsiness of writers.

I move only because the earth is round. I lose my temper only because talent is everywhere; it is spherical, omnipotent, unstoppable, flimsy, murky.

What do we learn from reading a good book, a book that affects and moves us? What do we learn, exactly? How does this experience enrich us, help us transcend our daily worries?

Books are archives of our restlessness. We live in the era of Pax Americana, a unidirectional democracy imposed as a universal cure. We will use banal terms to write about it in studies read by beings with laser-corrected myopia. We will introduce nuances, avoid making generalizations, cookie-cutter judgements, reductive pronouncements. But we will reach the same conclusion: violence rules the world.

I’ve been a member of an editorial board for almost six years. I read and read and read, convincing myself that this is a natural extension of my scholarly abilities.

For now, my fridge is half empty but my determination remains intact.

Because I want to be a knight of nihilism, someone withdrawn from the world, I found a lousy second job that lets me feel sorry for myself.

Three days a week, I work in a Couche-Tard convenience store so I can honour my obligations as tenant and my small pleasures as cultural consumer.

I am an ideologue, and literature suits this shortcoming perfectly. Literature feeds it and encourages it, disseminates it and indulges it.

≈ ≈ ≈

Every reader has an inner commentator who is thrilled to decipher like some fragile material the void that stands between the reader and the words. Champollion is the grandmaster of readers, the admiral.

We erroneously give readers of publishing houses a key role. Honestly, defending this rumour only promotes misinformation.

Language is a code, and literature uses the cogwheels of this code to shape the space-time that choreographs humankind. The first inventors of language are writers, then come the stylists and historians.

Literature, that same old tune, that scuffed and ancient leather bag, still exists, and it is never more present than among its enemies: human indifference, ignorance, and laziness.

I live at 3270 East Sherbrooke Street, apartment 4. I don’t read without taking breaks.

Walking is my second vocation. I walk north, south, northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest.

What I seek is a sense of continuity, the effect of a long take. A successful walk is one where I become a spectator, a spy.

My penchant for spying leads me to notice commemorative plaques, posters, torn paper stuck to poles, abandoned newspapers, and recycling bins overflowing with sullied books, pages filled with words.

This tablet commemorates those in the service
of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company who
at the call of the king and the country,
endured hardship, faced danger and finally
passed out of sight of men by the path of duty
and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives
that others might live in freedom,
let those who come after see to it
that their names be not forgotten

Right next to the former Angus Shops, a brass plaque is affixed to the brick building that now houses CECI (Centre for International Studies and Cooperation). The plaque, more like a bas-relief sculpture, depicts tanks, battleships, planes and cannons, elongated through the effect of perspective, accompanied by cavalry and infantry, captains and commanders. The plaque honours the memory of the CPR workers who lost their lives in World War I.

This plaque is a book. It contains the key lessons we should take from life.

Its presence is no longer noticed; no one stops to contemplate its message. Yet, in just a few lines, we can already read the nonexistence of the French-Canadian CPR workers who gave up their innocence for the nation. Not one French word on the plaque.

A unilingual English memorandum, fiercely royalist. The law of economics applied then and still applies now. There is no imperialist grandeur without omission.

This passage now: “endured hardship, faced danger and finally / passed out of sight of men by the path of duty / and self-sacrifice […]”

Does this not sum up what it means to live among humans?

Now forget a writer’s intuition. These lines transcend the brute toil of soldiers, the terse mechanics of orders.

But what exactly do we know about the path of duty and self-sacrifice? We know that it leads to the frontier that conceals us from the sight of others.

If I do not see you, do you still exist?

I was there to catch others’ looks, to telescope their field of vision. I surveyed life with consequential glasses, offering others their tickets to presence. Over time, I started taking notes of the inscriptions I found on my walks, collecting the torn bits of newspaper, trampled brochures, or letters abandoned in the wet grass.

Every morning comes with its harvest of words. Easy pickings every time.

Today, I came home with an entire plaque, a text commemorating the men who sacrificed themselves for the nation. These spoils were enough.

≈ ≈ ≈

Four manuscripts await me on the table.

I ignore them.

The main joy of reading is being idle. We listen to music with no purpose in mind. We occupy time.

Manuscripts are bottles dropped from a sinking ship. They are patient entities.

Authors are definitely not.

Sometimes, the naïveté is touching. Someone in Saint-Rémi or the Town of Mount Royal is waiting. They wait for me. They know that public proceedings have been initiated. Having received their acknowledgement letter, they wait. Solitary or sociable, indifferent or sick, they wait. I listen to their heartbeat, pick up a page, read one line, casually leaf through the manuscript. I look over the cover letter. Read three pages in the middle and two from the end.

The publishing house gives me two weeks to read four 19 manuscripts, assigning me a quota of pages, always the same, based on what I can do, never more than 150,000 words. A normal human being who lives to the age of eighty-four, well trained, with sound command of the French language and average curiosity represents approximately forty-two thousand pages of confessions and diaries. If everyone in the world were to become literate, most tree species would go extinct.

If it were as easy to educate as it is to subjugate, we would have less difficulty imposing goodwill.

I am not particularly keen on reading for the nth time a botched historical novel or a detestable true story dripping with so many of the usual homilies that it doesn’t hold water.

I’ve lost count of the horror stories or self-help books, the memoirs and fantastical ravings. Don’t take me for a cynic. A novel has no good subject per se. Everything is allowed, everything is acceptable. Let’s say it is more a matter of vocation, general knowledge, and practice. In a few paragraphs, I can identify the ignorant and the deranged, the diligent and the dedicated. Everyone has written at least one poem or short story in their life.

Despite my irritation, I believe it is important to take the time to congratulate every person who has completed one or several short stories, a novel or an essay. Regardless of what happens to these manuscripts, a sensitive explorer stands before you. Don’t mock him. Through a curious effect of perspective, he is more alive than you. He is an unveiler, and he has you at gunpoint. He will leave a testament more honest than any notarized inheritance. At worst, he is a feeble fool, at best, an agitated witness, perhaps even a writer.

≈ ≈ ≈

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Marie-Reine-du-Monde Cathedral. As I said, I like to be idle, to stroll. Reading is a profession marked by pauses. Please be patient.
I use the period, the colon, the comma. I have only three friends who are not put off by my profound desire for solitude: Pascal, Courrège, and Maldonne. Pascal refuses to have anything to do with me, Courrège still writes from time to time, and Maldonne hasn’t talked to me since I put a stop to our sexual relations.

Two or three times a week, I feel the need to speak and hear a response, to touch the people I know, to become an empty glass that is filled by the water of the world.
Yesterday, I didn’t feel this urgent need. I was completely alone. I had been reading Perec’s Je suis né, and Georges had infected me with his asceticism, his diligent passion for solitude.

I drift in and out of books, and respect the state in which they leave me. It’s not that I am impressionable. After all, I am a reader by profession. I get paid to assess the real and the sustaining. I accept that books change me, but I don’t impose the same on you. To each their disposition, to each their innocence and function. In thirty-four years of reading, I have never tried to ascertain my colleagues’ level of engagement, make sure the book had been read, the material understood. Much freer than a film spectator, less constrained, technologically speaking, than a web user, the reader is first and foremost a connoisseur of the tactile, a sensualist and artist, a master of slowness. The reader’s workforce is made up of contemplation, photocopying (like photosynthesis for plants), the length, heft and shedding of complexity’s leaves. So I was alone on the steps of the cathedral. The guide’s tiny office was deserted. Only an elderly woman stood smoking nearby.

I didn’t make the sign of the cross, and it fitted the mood.

Georges Delfosse had painted all the wall paintings adorning the cathedral. Another era spoke to me. Reading the same book several times over alters our state. Especially if it is a self-help book, a contemplative poetry collection, a fantasy novel that interprets a way of life. I understand them much more than they think I do. I am one of them. I believe in them.

I looked for a brochure and found one. There was no guide; the brochure would do.

≈ ≈ ≈

The Couche-Tard next to the Joliette subway stop, my evening job. But it is not quite right to say that it is adjacent to it; I always had the impression that it was embedded in the subway stop, joined to it by an imperceptible connective tissue.

A chrome yellow glow, yellow bricks, harsh lighting. These were my surroundings.

With the usual discomfort, I had donned the large Town & Country navy-blue shirt, made in Canada, 65% polyester and 35% cotton. The stylized Vittorio Fiorucci owl, a winking red bird, hovered above the store’s name embroidered on the shirt. The whole ensemble was supposed to reassure customers of my good intentions and professionalism. Or in any case, lend me the authority to serve them.

A circus beast, like all logo beasts, the winking red owl didn’t threaten anyone. It instilled a kind of complicit relationship that I would develop with the customers of the convenience 1. the four aces 22 readopolis store. I was complicit in their cravings, malnourishment, fleeting pleasures, their poverty, rage, and small obsessions.

In the 1970s, the Office québécois de la langue française, the province’s very own version of the Académie française, was dismayed by the multitude of words used to describe the corner store—including anglicisms such as magasin d’accommodation, from “accommodation store” […]. So the Office recommended that the term dépanneur be used instead. Unlike similar attempts in France (in 1987, the French government promoted the term bazarette, but it never caught on), dépanneur quickly integrated itself into the local parlance of both languages, bridging the widening cultural divide of the time. English-speaking Montrealers are the only Canadians who buy beer at “the dep.”

From an article by Christopher DeWolf published in Maisonneuve 7, February 2004, p. 12–13.

Why has this type of store prospered to such an extent; why has it infiltrated our lives, our literature, overrun our urban environments? In Montreal, there are more deps than mail boxes!

I’ll try to explain. In the early sixties, the distribution systems of soft drink companies and food conglomerates surged. Shopping malls grew like mushrooms in fields everywhere, became warehouses, dispersed wherever the taxpayers—the middle class—lived. In poorer neighbourhoods and even in more affluent ones, it was undoubtedly judged that being too far from these food service centres hindered modern procurement, a life now governed and fed by a pleasant prosperity.

In an epoch when stores were closed on Sundays in Quebec and were not open twenty-four hours, most people developed the need to acquire their comfort foods, basic necessities, cigarettes, beer, and soft drinks within walking distance from their homes. The shopping mall was conceived in relation to the car, its ability to transport things over long distances, and the oil companies that were overjoyed by this windfall. While the convenience store was conceived for walkers.

Shopping mall = driving a car
Convenience store = walking

In accordance with market logic, deps reproduced the sales systems of shopping malls, but on a smaller scale. The owners of these new SMEs had understood that they needed to offer their walking customers the best-selling foodstuffs, the canned goods in fashion, and everything that would please the kids, most of whom were initiated into their first monetary exchanges in these small shopping schools. In supermarkets, it was necessary to create bagging stations and offer home delivery. In convenience stores, people only bought a few products at a time, so baggers lost their usefulness, yet owners quickly gave in to the temptation to imitate the delivery service of supermarkets.

Most supermarkets were first established in these small commercial villages set up along highways. The concept of the supermarket permanently united retail trade and food distribution. An oil and car driven world, a disposable world. A world in which a packaged chicken has an expiration date, as does a shirt at Zellers (since fashion follows the cycle of the seasons).

Everything for sale is perishable because the absolute is not commercial.

In some cases, we find comfort in the perishable because it resembles the absolute. We’ll always find cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup on the shelves; in most Zellers, Glad garbage bags, Vim cleaning products, J Cloth, Ajax and bath towels, Drano, La Parisienne bleach, and Spic and Span. The world of home cleaning and food storage rightly fights, by any means possible, against the endless onslaught of decline, clutter, and dust. A benevolent coating to appease our commonplace interiors, our accustomed stomachs, and our fantasy of imperishable food. I protect my life against stains and refuse. I fight for a clean conscience. I am North-American to the core.

Refuse is the beginning of death; the eternal preservation of food, one of our Edenic dreams. ≈

by Maxime Raymond Bock
≈ translated by Pablo Strauss

CHAPTER 2

Ithink about Robert a lot. I can hear his voice, smell his rank cigarette-and-coffee breath and the greasy stench of his apartment, and feel his frail handshakes and the lightness on my chest of our quick hugs when we greeted and said goodbye. We met a year and a half before he died. Not long in a lifetime, but long enough for an already damaged creature to quickly finish the business of wasting away. Sometimes, toward the end, what he said had only the slightest purchase on our world and seemed poised to fade to silence after the next comma. He would forget that he had already told me certain stories, and on their second or third tellings they would veer off in different directions, but deep down I knew he spoke truthfully each and every time, more truthfully than everyone else. He was the one who made me see the vanity of my own life. When I picture him now, emaciated body and translucent skin, matted beard and sticky hair, always clad in the same worn-out jeans and t-shirts, eternally hunched over his coffee table rolling the cigarettes that ate away at his alveoli and caused him to spit up bloody gobs of phlegm, like full stops after the coughing fits that interrupted our discussions every ten minutes, the present comes into focus for me as a single whole, my senses open up and take it all in with no filter and I concentrate in order to ward off the uneasiness this idea inspires in me – that as soon as the moment unfolds it is over, and we can’t take anything of it with us, except a faint outline that can only be filled in through invention. I walk in the park next to my house, on the sidewalk next to the Rivière des Prairies, where families enjoy the still-warm afternoons though October is upon us. I have fun with my kids, we climb monkey bars and chase each other around the playground equipment and I make an effort to be mindful of it all, to push my consciousness to its limit, soak it all up. It brings a degree of well-being. I feel part of an indefinable skein of meaning, a great force intelligible only through spirituality, a holist intuition that draws me in but which I will have no choice but to give in to once I realize that, of everything that just happened, all that remains to me is a ghost.

At that point, with two manuscripts rejected and a third accepted – subject to an impossible rewrite – by a friend who ran a small press, I had turned my back on poetry. But not on poets. I still went to launches and readings, and sometimes to parties. Since finishing university and having children these were my only chances to see this circle of acquaintances, where I still had a few friends. I was now a minor player. I no longer stepped up to the mic to read. A new crop had arrived on the scene – pretty young poets with a strong sense of showmanship – and they had pushed me to the margins. The esteem certain people had once held me in was rekindled for a while when I managed to publish a small collection of wide-ranging stories of uneven quality. It got a brief review in one of the papers and a few blog posts. Two or three people told me they’d read and enjoyed it.

I was looking for a way to start writing again, and coming up blank. The same words saturated my mind but their meanings seemed to have evaporated. I could no longer read anything beyond what crossed my desk for copy-editing  – poorly conceived advertising, business reports written in gibberish, tourism and mechanics magazines, literary manuscripts scarcely better than my own. My kids were taking over my entire life, sucking me dry to the very marrow; it felt like I was withering away for them while they, conversely, flourished. Bags were appearing under my eyes and not even a good night’s sleep, when I actually got one, could make them go away. I lived in terror of my pens. When I saw a moment approaching when I might actually be able to write, on weekends when the kids were at their grandparents’, or during nervous nights when I couldn’t take another second of listening to Joannie sleep, I would squander them fucking around on the internet. When Robert came into my life, one June evening in Parc de Hochelaga where the Poetry Van was making its rounds, I had more or less resigned myself to the idea that I would never write another word.

The poets took turns at the mic in front of the van, reading from crumpled up bits of paper, books, and magazines. I was spending my evening chasing Chloe, my youngest, through the crowd. In between two performances, while I chatted with an acquaintance, she got away from me again and I found her sitting on a park bench next an old man. He was looking at her, smiling, with a smoke dangling from the corner of his mouth. As I rounded up my daughter I said hi to the old man and thanked him, then promptly forgot all about it. Next month I recognized him when the Poetry Van stopped in Centre-Sud. He wasn’t just a park regular drawn by a pop-up artistic performance. He’d been following the Poetry Van around town, a constant presence on the outskirts of the crowd, sitting on a bench, just close enough to make out the amplified voices. He didn’t react to the readings, seemed content to sit there smoking and listening. I approached him and he nodded, asked me why I hadn’t brought my daughter this time. I explained that the family unit could be a bit of a prison cell, and I was out on furlough. He showed me a piece of paper folded up in his tobacco pouch, said he was trying to decide whether to read at the open mic at the end of the event. He didn’t get the chance. Darkness was descending. We went out for a few pints. ≈

by Patrice Lessard
≈ translated by Caitlin Stall-Paquet

by Patrice Lessard
≈ translated by Caitlin Stall-Paquet

by Louise Dupré
≈ translated by Caitlin Stall-Paquet

by Bertrand Laverdure
≈ translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

- 1 -

At the Cirio in Brussels.

I just woke up.

Slept for about thirty minutes. That’s all. Yet my entire life passed before my eyes like it does for the dying in an operetta. Only now, I had the feeling of really waking up, as if for the first time ever.

Everyone learns this at some point or other. Nature has no secret plan. Nature is not a kind organizer. Nature doesn’t give a shit. She does her thing. Drops us through the hole, then waits.

Problem is, we all have illusions. We’d all love a purpose. Love to have our roles all set out, envision a grand plan, imagine that context, time, technology give us the benefit of distinction or even education, give us our blue blood, our late-night trysts, our heritage. All bullshit. Infantile drivel. There are never any options. We fall in and that’s all.

As soon as we step outside we speed up the process. Think before you step.

Everything around me has taken on this tinge. Even the Italian waiter with his aggressive look and biting tongue seems more real.

We often live twofold, in our heads, then in our bodies. It’s normal, natural; nature is complicated. Yet in waking I had the strange sensation that I live here and now, without a second of time difference. At last, at the focal point of a typically blurry objective. I don’t ask myself who watches through the viewfinder though I know that most often we are outside the frame or absent. Then suddenly, I’m there and fall in step with the present’s speed.

Event: the swinging door of the local jams up. One of the waiters goes to rescue the stuck customer. From afar I can’t make it out well, but a large blue and white splotch greets the owner. I forget about my Rodenbach. A few customers begin to fuss over this fanatic in disguise. Several raise their glass as he passes. Sharp, pseudo-jackass eyes, corruption in his wake, this is a strange regular, I tell myself. I’m not dreaming either; this thing comes towards me. I refuse, at first, to identify him.

But resign myself to look at him. It’s Jokey Smurf.

I use this major diversion to leave aside the impolite Italian waiter whom I’d love to knock out. Jokey Smurf deserves my full attention.

The Smurf hands me a present. The box we all know: yellow with a red ribbon. I feel like striking up a conversation with him.

He explains that he’s never known what makes the box explode, but he’s never had any doubt that it will explode. This Smurf is a notorious tautologist. In truth, he sees no further than his nostrils and this bugs me.

Me and Jokey Smurf, it just doesn’t add up.

Since his conversation leads nowhere, a repetitive loop of two or three lax commonplaces, I quickly become supremely bored.

He seems disappointed by my irrepressible yawns. Between two takes of the same sample text monotonously recorded by a sullen actor, he re-hands me his present. I’m struck dumb.

Oscar Wilde predicted it: the only way to resist temptation is to succumb to it. There, it’s done. I accept the present.

Naturally, the present explodes. Jokey Smurf bursts out laughing, as he should. Then, all of a sudden, I’m no longer there.

- 2 -

I reappear.

Blink my eyes two or three times to realize that my clandestine passenger body is resting on the cloth of a comfortable hammock. A bed of fortune held up by two solid straps, each wrapped around a trunk. I’m balancing between two trees with ludicrous nonchalance. Sausage of feet and legs, thorax and head, gently bound in its canvas skin.

I rest, relieved by my situation.

A few seconds is all it takes to realize the origin of the leafage around me and, incidentally, identify the source of various noises—the tennis balls and cars, the slight mayhem of picnics and baseball games: La Fontaine Park, southeast side, close to Sherbrooke Street.

I’m in Montreal, Quebec, surrounded by buildings, Notre 12 Dame Hospital, a statue in honour of Charles de Gaulle—a genuine blue knife of cement piercing the clouds or an immense sundial, it depends.

From a leafy fold, the shadowy corner of a branch, I glimpse a squirrel, head lowered, suddenly advance. In a fury. A formidable fury. Piercing, magnetic sounds—like a badly playing track in a CD player or digitally treated noise—escape its snout. Annoyed by this unbearable monologue, I untangle myself from the hammock.

Then I walk away, heart in my throat.

The city abounds with numerous excessively subtle melodies, teeming sound curves. I’m all ears. Like Ulysses, let myself be carried away by the merchant murmur, the dense drone of the neighbourhood.

My new outlook and the ambient odours intermingle to form an ethereal mosaic. I feel protected. Walk leisurely along, like a great holy man or a stork. We get used to everything. First to Mondays, then Tuesdays, then the rest of the week, the need to sleep, to amuse ourselves, then death. There is no universal truth, but cultivating our own truth helps pass the time. Mine doesn’t correspond to yours but makes up for all the rest.

— Press play…

The squirrel panics. Hops up to me and grips onto my leg. More aggressive than a wolverine, its downy body a small docile bomb, it clutches at my skin with solid harness-claws. Its cutting teeth, a makeshift blade with anaesthetizing powers, begin to gnaw at the epidermis, dermis, then the muscles, the bone. My leg detaches, a flower unfolding.

I fall into a dark coma.

- 3 -

Crippled, I need to figure out how to fix my deficient locomotion. End up ripping off the pant leg, so that the loose threads (skin and fabric) won’t hinder my movements.

Suddenly, a crowd gathers. They bemoan my unlucky lot, call the paramedics, take their time to faint, write sad verses, speculate on the causes of my predicament. Upset by my condition, an amateur musician stops noodling on his guitar, abandons it under a tree in the park, then helps me to stand and, declaring that he’ll fix my problem, offers me the comfort of his car. Wearing a plethora of charms and trinkets, he seems versed in the occult sciences. Naively, I ask him about it. He replies that, to be more precise, he’s a “collector.” Out of necessity rather than caution, I take my chances. Our mobile journey puts my mind at ease. An amusing and talkative polyglot (with even a basic understanding of Aramaic), this Jonathan Bélanger makes conversation while I attempt to get my new posterior as comfortable as optimally possible on the seat of his car.

A curious collector, he tells me he owns a good hundred artificial legs, made in different eras. He’s a connoisseur of orthopaedic devices and an enthusiast of African art.

He makes me wait a long time in front of his house. The neighbourhood is shady, the alleys are garbage-strewn. Five scruffy kids loiter on the street corner, a toothless old man in an Expos baseball cap sips his afternoon beer. A quiet, desolate place. Scratching my thigh brings some relief.

The collector returns with a retractable wheelchair, an old model.

Somehow or other, I manage to slide into the chair. He pushes me to the door.

In his basement, which I reach by clutching onto his sleeves and straining my abdominal muscles a few times, he parks the wheeled contraption in a corner. All around the walls hang artificial limbs, canes, primitive flutes, Dogon ornaments and statuettes from Sudan, Mali, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, hollow sticks, oblong faces excessively stretched out, giant amulets for elephants, cylindrical masques and other wooden art objects. He hesitates for a moment. Slowly closes his eyes. Reopens them with great calm, then walks towards a giant teak chest with a frieze portraying a traditional antelope hunting scene of spears, the cornering of the prey and the dismembering of the animal. Once opened, the great trunk releases an odour of fresh tobacco and cigars. He rummages inside for some time. Hard wooden pieces bang against each other. Gently, he pulls out a jointed sculpture of some indefinite material and hands me the object.

Examining it closely, I realize it’s an ornamental wooden leg, particularly well-crafted, with an impressive knee reflex action mechanism. Carved out of some sort of jet-black wood, this work of art could have figured in any cabinet of curiosities.

Overcome once more with a spiritual presence, and apropos of my new acquaintance, I suddenly envision a devout gesture and slowly raise the wooden leg above my head. In my own way, I pay tribute to the human capacity for invention, which unexpectedly moves me. As impassive and mute now as he had been chatty and mischievous earlier, Jonathan Bélanger breathes without a sound, then rubs his slightly irritated right eye.

Politely, he takes the object from my hands and fingers it cautiously. He seems to be assessing its strength, looking for defects that could remove the object’s magical charm. After a few moments of sombre silence, a generous smile lights up his face.

“Encore,” he says to me.

Not quite knowing what to say to this truncated phrase, I simply nod my head. He continues, laboriously, to explain. In four attempts at elocution he manages to formulate a robotic phrase: “Encore is the name.”
He repeats this phrase several times. “Encore is the name. Encore is the name.”

In a wheelchair, in a cluttered basement, I feel confined. Start losing my patience. Nervous, I begin manhandling the shoulder of my unhinged interlocutor. Suspicious of all this repetitive benevolence and motivated by a desire to promptly take care of the stagnation, I deal him a dizzying blow to the stomach, then topple to the floor. He bends over in pain, choking, and in the confusion crashes against a pair of black jointless legs, wrenching them off the wall in his fall.

Both of us are now in truce mode. Externally, I hold back. Yet I’m boiling with the fury of a frightened one-legged man who feels that a trap could close in on him at any moment. I grab at his sweater, shake him à la Lino Ventura. Then aptly ask, “What are you talking about?”

The collector’s jaw swells with every passing minute, his cheek muscles gradually get rigid, I melt with rage. Yet before I have the nerve to pummel his face, three other words escape his gullet: “The leg’s name.”

He falls asleep immediately.

I give up. This type of object is its own legend. I extract the jointed wooden piece from the soft grip of my saviour. Take it upon myself to give it a noble purpose, a matter of not causing too much remorse.

I match the tip of the wooden piece to the stump of my thigh. I want to win the leg over, take up residence in it. An artwork that will transform me into an artwork: art contaminates everything it touches.

Encore fits me like a glove. I try to not be surprised.

Liberated from my momentary torpor and struck with unusual life force, I lean on the wall to reach a standing position. Manage to haul up my carcass by alternately dragging my dead leg and living leg. Putting some shoulder force into it, I take up my bipedal appearance.

Plant my feet flat on the ground. I’m finally standing upright.

Right then the collector tries to wake up. But when he opens his eyes, they emit a thick smoke. From all the orifices of his head, a black gas emanates. His face is now a fire pit. Then his body is consumed. The fire takes over the entire room in record time. In this basement trap, nothing is visible anymore. ≈

by Camille Deslauriers
≈ translated by Susan Lemprière

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY

It’s like lying way out in space.

To her left, the Millennium Falcon;
to her right, the Death Star.

She’s laughing ‒ she can’t believe it: the pale blue sheets on Nathan’s bed, they have Star Wars on them, he’s fifteen!

She’s not laughing now ‒ her Hello Kitty panties yanked off and already he’s coming, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick… grunting. It’s like she just did it with Chewbacca!

“Did you come?”

Above all, lie ‒ say yes, look starry eyed.

Afraid she must be frigid, feeling like she’s got nothing but sandpaper between her legs.

Losing her virginity in a galaxy far, far away, with no condom or foreplay, between Social Studies and Biology, at lunch time when Nathan’s parents are out.

Then being blamed for staining the sheets.