Planes Flying over a Monster, page 4
By the time I started reading him, Réjean Ducharme was already an officially designated urban legend. I liked his writing, although slightly less than I liked the mystery surrounding him. What is known is that Ducharme lived in a house in a neighborhood known as Little Burgundy, and for some years he’d been making sculptures in his garden from trash he collected in the streets—he signed these pieces with the alias Roch Plante: a name that almost means “rock plant,” as if the author had camouflaged himself to the point of blending into the landscape. After nearly two decades in which he published nothing, and with his most famous books lost in the mists of the distant twentieth century, Ducharme had finally achieved absolute invisibility.
During those long treks through the wastelands of the city, I thought a lot about meeting Réjean Ducharme and confirming his existence in this world, beyond the legend.
One of Montreal’s most charming urban characteristics is its alleyways. Every block of houses or apartment buildings has a street or avenue in front and a narrow alley, known as a ruelle, behind. The secret, most intimate life of the city passes in these alleyways—all those scenes hidden from tourists who don’t stray from the main thoroughfares. Here, Hasidic children play on their scooters, down-and-outs forage in the garbage cans for something to sell, some residents organize block parties, and teenagers meet to smoke pot. The ruelles are the B side of Montreal, a parallel circulatory system through which flows its darkest blood.
It seemed natural to seek Ducharme in the alleyways. I was sure a secret writer wouldn’t walk along the main streets or frequent Café Cherrier, where second-rate Francophone intellectuals drink a glass of wine each evening to make believe they are in Paris; I wouldn’t find him in L’Express—the journalists’ bistro—or in the soirées held at the Maison des Écrivains on a corner of Place Saint-Louis; or at night screenings at the Cinema du Parc, standing in line to see the latest Xavier Dolan movie. A secret writer like Ducharme would only walk through the alleyways of Little Burgundy or perhaps of Griffintown. So I, too, became a secret writer. I’d visit—although increasingly less often—the basement of some church, full of addicts opening up about their feelings for the first time, and afterward explore the ruelles of less-well-known neighborhoods, where I was the one foraging in the garbage cans or looking askance at the youngsters, as if the simple act of behaving the way I believed Ducharme behaved would in some way bring me closer to him.
There were times when I thought I recognized him in the uncared for, bearded face of some homeless person collecting discarded furniture, or in the evasive gaze of an elderly man cycling along very slowly, dodging the pools of melted snow. Sometimes, tired of walking, my hands numb with cold, I’d enter a public library and settle back in an armchair, alongside the junkies, the old, and the unemployed, and write in my notebook about the possible routes taken by Réjean Ducharme, the secret writer, as if I were a private detective who had to hand in a report: “Tuesday. La Pétite Patrie. Found the remains of a chair in an alleyway, arranged in a sculptural mode: Ducharme was here?”
In those libraries, I continued to read Ducharme. In those libraries, I also read Mordecai Richler, Hubert Aquin, Nicole Brossard, and Leonard Cohen: all of whom had walked those streets, visited those libraries replete with people on the margins of society.
In those libraries, also replete with bedbugs and slushy puddles left by boots, I attempted to convince myself that Montreal was a possible city, a North American city to which one moved to try one’s luck, and in which one would discover a simple but delightful vocation, and attain a vigorous old age in the care of public health institutions that prescribed morphine like there was no tomorrow. But it wasn’t. Montreal was an impossible city: a system of tunnels connecting shopping malls, a plethora of church basements teeming with addicts, a network of public libraries with blue light in the restrooms and syringe-disposal boxes; it was a city of abandoned warehouses and factories, of back streets, alleyways, and secret writers, where the very act of writing would always be secret, always conflictive and anonymous, always futile.
Réjean Ducharme, the most secret of secret writers, gradually sank into relative poverty after the publication of his last book, in 1999. According to the newspaper articles I read on the computers of public libraries, he’d been eating only rice and canned kidney beans for years. Like some sort of Kurt Schwitters, he passed his time collecting trash and sketching, and spent hours each day in his study, perhaps writing a secret work or secreting a silent work, a work that was indistinguishable from the stones and plants of an impossible, polyglot city.
For me, Montreal had passed from being a closed, impenetrable city to one of addicts, open like a carnivorous plant, and then later to a city of recovering addicts, and finally of forgotten, secret writers.
Those other maps were gradually superimposed on the original one of my wanderings to form a stratified city, as are all those we come to know at closer quarters.
When I walked through the alleyways leading from my home to Parc Lafontaine, I’d first hear the Yiddish that predominated in the neighborhood, followed by the English of the hipsters in Mile End, the European French of the Plateau, and finally the Quebecois French of the less gentrified areas. By contrast, if I walked northeast, I’d hear Italian coming from the cafés of Petite-Italie, and then South American Spanish when I reached the market on Rue Saint-Hubert, with the occasional sound of Urdu near Rue Jean-Talon.
I never took morphine again, neither snorting it or in enemas, and one day I completely stopped attending the NA meetings. I’d just received the key ring to commemorate my first six months of clean living. I no longer needed the meetings. Maybe I never really had, except insofar as we all, at times, need to stand before a group of strangers and tell our own story. I began to have a beer from time to time with friends I met at poetry readings, table tennis tournaments, or music gigs.
I never met Réjean Ducharme. In June 2016, when the winter of my addiction finally ended, his partner, Claire Richard, died after decades of acting as his representative and sole contact with the world. Then Ducharme died. And I stopped looking for him in the alleyways and began to frequent the main thoroughfares, the writers’ cafés, and no longer looked into the eyes of the addicts settled back alongside me in the armchairs of libraries, and the map of that phantasmal city of opiates faded from my mind as naturally as it had appeared.
A few days ago, when I got an email informing me that my Grande Bibliothèque library card was about to expire, I wanted to see it as a sign that a period of my life had definitively closed.
As I write, after midday, I notice that my shoulder is beginning to ache. At moments like this, I miss the analgesic lightness of morphine. But perhaps the solution is not to find Ibn Sina’s ideal potion. Perhaps what I should do is go to the countryside. Take a rest cure, as they used to say. Maybe even take the waters in a quiet health resort, or make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, or at least to the sanctuary of Chalma. Or search for traces of a secret writer in an unknown city, during a winter of basements and tunnels. I should put myself in the maternal hands of ritual. Find some meaningless action that, by dint of repetition, ends up being true.
It’s no real coincidence that the period when I suffered least pain was exactly when I was going to the NA meetings each evening, when I arrived half an hour early on Wednesdays to prepare the large metal urn of coffee and repeated certain phrases without completely understanding or even agreeing with them, and held the hands of broken, suffering people, scarred by the most savage whip of our times: those blue pills ground to be injected, that heroin cut with fentanyl, the washed coke sold in seedy bars, or crack smoked in the shelter of a Montreal ruelle. They were people who’d lived in the forest, not speaking to anyone for months, eating berries and dried meat; who had made a living, for a while, robbing banks or gas stations in five Ontario towns. People who’d drunk alcohol from the brown paper bag offered by a generous Inuit man at the entrance to the Place-des-Arts metro station in the fall, or who used to have a four-dollar meal in a communal dining room in Saint-Denis, where Ana and I also ate, at a long table crammed with other Latin American students and artists, alongside likable, toothless old men and ex-cons who sipped their coffee parsimoniously, putting off the moment when they would have to go outside into the cold.
I’m pretty sure there’s no god of recovering drug addicts, just as there are no other gods, but the act of repeating a gesture or a set of random words, putting one’s mind and body into that repetition, is sometimes enough in itself to reassemble the shards of the spirit and reestablish the most beautiful fiction we are capable of inventing: the fiction that, in spite of all, some order does exist. A perhaps precarious, provisional order. A map that is in constant transformation even as we live within the territory it outlines, and which remains stamped in our memory when we—finally—move to another place.
(Tr. Christina MacSweeney)
Return to Havana
1. An Invented Memory
This is the second time I’ve begun this piece. I’m writing it in a green notebook, sitting on the terrace of a café in Plaza Vieja. I like writing by hand because, rather than making corrections to a paragraph, deleting and adding things as I do on the computer, I start again and again, from the beginning—the same text each time but different—and so avoid crossings-out. I start a paragraph and I repeat it. I come to a halt and begin again. I copy the same lines onto a fresh page. And even if I write the same, identical text two or three times, like a Pierre Menard of myself, the excitement of beginning persists. There’s a return and an advance. A new return. The ink is different but the same. The blank page is less blank, as it’s always written beforehand.
Writing about Havana in some sense implies a similar movement; almost a spiral. Despite this being the first time I’ve visited the city, the first time I’ve written about it, I still experience a rush of the simultaneous excitement of first times and the feeling that this journey—this text—is also a return.
But a return to what, to where? I know that the sensation has no basis in fact, is a trick. I haven’t returned to anything. The notion of returning to Havana belongs, above all, in the terrain of fiction. In autofiction, if you like.
Thirty-four years ago, in December 1983, my parents visited Havana. Read this fragment at the speed and with the colors of a Super 8 movie. My father proudly sporting the coarse cotton shirt and facial hair of the orthodox Marxist; my mother, convinced that she could change the world on a grand scale—both of them with twenty-two years under their belts. At that time Dad was working at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, specializing in agronomy, and was a union member. He and my mother were also on a support committee that assisted in the relocation of political exiles of the civil war in El Salvador. In fact, they met through that committee, while they were still studying sociology in Mexico City. Their relationship flourished during the period it existed within the frame of a certain form of political activism, a certain revolutionary zeal tinged with that color chart of the twentieth century that has almost completely disappeared and is now revisited with nostalgia.
When, in December 1983, the Chapingo workers organized a trip to Cuba, my parents seized the opportunity to visit the country that had the strongest hold on their imaginations in those days. They spent a week traveling to and from activities and meetings planned by the union, and a further week alone, as tourists, getting to know the streets of Havana. Nine months later, in Mexico City, I was born.
This is the second time I’ve begun to write this piece. If I refer back to the earlier pages of this same notebook, I can read the first version of these lines, which isn’t so very different from this one. A changed adjective, a few added sentences, a little fine-tuning. Rewriting by hand works a bit like classical music: by theme and variations. Like going down the same street at two opposing moments of the day—in different weather, a day split by revelation or a storm.
My parents divorced before my second birthday; they were only twenty-five and, understandably, have both changed a great deal since then, to the extent that nowadays it’s hard for me to imagine them in the same room having a coffee together, much less as lovers walking across a plaza—across a previous version of this same plaza where I now write.
I don’t remember at what moment my father—more given to nostalgia than my mother—told me that I was engendered in Cuba, in some small, fifth-rate hotel in Havana in December 1983. These days I like to think that he did indeed use the word engendered, but I know little else. The memory I invent to fill the gap is this: my father, drunk on five shots of tequila, crying in the garden of the house in Santa María Ahuacatitlán, Cuernavaca, telling his teenage son—me, a version of me that no longer exists—that he was engendered in Cuba, that his parents were a legendary couple, envied by all and sundry, and that they returned to Mexico with their illusions about the Revolution shattered, but expecting a child. The memory I invent can be summed up as: I was born at the same moment as their disenchantment.
It probably isn’t either the second or the third time I’ve begun to write this. I’ve most likely written many other versions of these hurried paragraphs littered with commas and doubts in green notebooks that I’ve now lost, whose contents are the invention of my memory. And I’ll go on writing this same text for the rest of my life: versions of and variations on these same lines, this same punctuation. But all the versions will contain this: Plaza Vieja, the confluence of the sound of three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza. All the versions of this text, copied and recopied in hundreds of green notebooks, will contain the sound that, like the wind, comes together in the center of a plaza, by the fenced-off fountain, mingling with the polyglot murmuring of tourists. And I’m one of those tourists: exploring the city and memory with the same Bermuda-shorted aplomb, with the same diffuse curiosity.
If, as Plato believed, knowing is remembering, then I’ve been remembering Havana forever, and right now I’m writing a version of the text about my first impressions of that joyful city. This is not a philosophical rhetorical device but writing by hand: confusion, muddle, the convergence of the sound of three groups with different styles in a sun-filled, sweltering city I’m discovering and recognizing.
Beginning to write something is learning to write again, stumbling, filled with doubt, even if the text has already been written an infinite number of times in lost notebooks, in mislaid notebooks that I invent.
Havana is the origin. The text has always begun.
This: the slow, slow dance of a crumbling city, an architectonic striptease to the unremitting music of the waves—the salt air seeping into everything like a rumor—and, out to sea, in the distance, the hazy mirage of another island, a carbon copy of this island where I write another version of these words.
My father had a dozen cassettes with recordings of Fidel Castro’s speeches stashed in a drawer in the bookcase with his porn magazines and the first draft of a novel he never finished. In the living room of the apartment in the Fovissste Cantarranas social-housing project, when the two of us were living alone, he used to play the song “Caballo Viejo” over and over on a vinyl single, while drinking a shot of tequila.
It’s an invented memory, of course, like all the others that help to explain who I am. So what will my memory of the memory of this Havana café—sitting at this table looking onto the Malecón, inventing the mirage of an island—be like twenty years from now?
This is the third, the fourth time I’ve written these same lines.
I sometimes imagine that I have a twin somewhere, a lost brother, like an island that turns its back on its mirage. An identical twin who mirrors my gestures, who, perhaps, walks through the streets of another Havana, without us ever meeting.
Is that brother I never had, that carbon copy of myself, an invented memory? Is the rum I drank last night, facing a mural of nineteenth-century heroes in Habana Vieja, a perfect mirage?
In the ruins of a green building, a woman is contorting herself. Four gray cats in the trash. Two blond tourists taking a photograph of a teenage girl. A conversation about philately while smoking a cigar. The language of a scam hemming you in. The missing statues. A waltz for Oshún. The piss at the foot of the streetlight . . . Which memories will remain when I return, when I write these words again?
2. Tourisms
December. On the day I have to fly to Cuba, Montreal awakes to a coating of ice. “Verglas,” says the weather alert on my cell phone. I slither from the door of my building to the cab, skating, feeling the ice creak under my fabric tennis shoes. The plane departs an hour late, no big deal. As it takes to the air, I gaze through the window at the barren, white, asphyxiating landscape that I’m leaving behind. Beyond the horizon, the promise of limitless summer: Havana for the thirst. This is my last winter in the north. This is the last time I’ll escape the frozen tundra, desperately in search of the sun. The cabin is full of Quebecois-speaking tourists. One of them attempts to chat, but I pretend not to understand his language and, the truth is, I don’t really understand it.
(I’m writing this again, returning point-by-point, a posteriori, like a sleuth of my own life. As though I’d lost something on some Havana street corner and wanted to reconstruct each step, each gesture, to find it.)
In passport control, the official asks me if I’ve been in the country before. “No,” I reply, with a slight hesitation.
Have I been in Cuba before? To be honest, I’m not certain whether the answer is yes or no. I could have been here briefly as a breast-feeding baby, or in a dream. I’ve been in many places I don’t remember, and I remember many places I’ve never set foot in, where I never drank a mojito. (If I write this after having been in Cuba, recalling it, would it be possible to modify the memory here? Might I give a different response to the official questioning me?) “Welcome to Cuba,” he says, handing me my passport.
