Arvida Read online

  Biblioasis International Translation Series

  General Editor: Stephen Henighan

  Since 2007 the Biblioasis International Translation Series has been publishing exciting literature from Europe, Latin America, Africa and the minority languages of Canada. Committed to the idea that translations must come from the margins of linguistic cultures as well as from the power centres, the Biblioasis International Translation Series is dedicated to publishing world literature in English in Canada. The editors believe that translation is the lifeblood of literature, that a language that is not in touch with other linguistic traditions loses its creative vitality, and that the worldwide spread of English makes literary translation more urgent now than ever before.

  1. I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of

  Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)

  Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

  2. Good Morning Comrades

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  3. Kahn & Engelmann

  by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

  Translated by Jean M. Snook

  4. Dance with Snakes

  by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)

  Translated by Lee Paula Springer

  5. Black Alley

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

  6. The Accident

  by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  7. Love Poems

  by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

  Translated by Colin Carberry

  8. The End of the Story

  by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

  Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

  9. The Tuner of Silences

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  10. For as Far as the Eye Can See

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Judith Cowan

  11. Eucalyptus

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  12. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  13. Montreal Before Spring

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald McGrath

  14. Pensativities: Essays and Provocations

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  15. Arvida

  by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  16. The Orange Grove

  by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  Samuel Archibald

  ARVIDA

  Stories

  Translated from the French by

  Donald Winkler

  Biblioasis

  Windsor, Ontario

  Originally published as Arvida: histoires by Le Quartanier, Montreal, 2011.

  Author photo © Le Quartanier / Frédérick Duchesne

  Copyright © Samuel Archibald, 2015

  Translation copyright © Donald Winkler, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  first edition

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Archibald, Samuel, 1978-

  [Arvida. English]

  Arvida / Samuel Archibald ; translated by Donald Winkler.

  Translation of: Arvida.

  Short stories.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-042-7 (paperback)

  I. Winkler, Donald, translator II. Title. III. Title: Arvida.

  English.

  PS8601.R39A7513 2015 C843’.6 C2015-903738-7

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Edited by Stephen Henighan

  Copy-edited by Allana Amlin

  Cover designed by Kate Hargreaves and Chris Andrechek

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  My Father and Proust

  ARVIDA I

  My grandmother, mother of my father, often said:

  “There are no thieves in Arvida.”

  For a long time, it’s true, there were only good people in Arvida. Honest and industrious Catholics, and the Protestant owners and managers of the aluminum plant, who were basically, if you could believe my father, good human beings. You could leave your tools lying around in the garage. You could leave car doors unlocked and house doors open.

  There was a very beautiful photo from after the war, which was, like all beautiful photos, an empty picture, with practically nothing in it and everything outside it. In it, a dozen bicycles were strewn over the lawn in front of the clinic. Outside the photo, in the building’s basement, children were lined up before a large white curtain, waiting to be vaccinated against polio. Outside the photo, the few times I saw it, my grandmother pressed her finger down on it, saying:

  “You see? There are no thieves in Arvida.”

  That’s what she said all her life, my grandmother, mother of my father. Except for about twenty years when, from time to time, she looked at my father and said:

  “There were no thieves in Arvida. Now there’s you.”

  *

  It’s true that almost all the family stories relating to my father were tales of larceny. Including the very first. At the age of three my father was overwhelmed for the very first time by desire for the giant May Wests beckoning from the baker’s basket. They were called Mae Wests then, after the actress. Vachon kept this spelling until Mae West’s estate sent them a legal letter, in 1980. May Wests cost five cents, and the family budget did not allow for this kind of extravagance. After being told no by his mother a good dozen times, my father decided to change his strategy.

  A bit later that year, my Aunt Lise received fifteen cents from her godmother Monique for her birthday. One morning, while his mother was dealing with the baker, my father entered the girls’ room and stole the money from their chest of drawers. He went downstairs on tiptoe, snuck outside without his mother seeing, and hid behind a tree. When the baker went to get back in his truck, my father came out of hiding and intercepted him, hanging onto his legs.

  He opened his hand and held out fifteen cents.

  “My mother forgot to give you this.”

  “What for?”

  “Some May Wests.”

  “What you have there would give you three big May Wests.”

  “It was my birthday this week.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Ten.”

  The baker knew perfectly well that my father was lying about his age and everything else. But he’d seen the little man drooling over his basket for so long that he didn’t want to play the policeman. He sold him the cakes. My father went and hid himself away in the shadows under the porch. He crouched down among the dry leaves and the rotten boards along with the spiders and centipedes. In no time at a
ll he devoured the May Wests, taking huge mouthfuls, like a starving creature that had had nothing to eat all winter.

  When his mother began calling him he went into the house, certain of having perpetrated the perfect crime, until she asked him why he had chocolate all over his face and even in his hair. He spent the entire afternoon in solitary confinement, and was freed only once, to give rein to a colossal diarrhea. So began a long series of weeks that my father spent in his penitential bedroom.

  On another occasion, my grandmother had bought a box of factory-made cakes for Sunday supper. That seems a bit gauche today, to serve that kind of dessert to the whole family plus two or three priests. But it wasn’t at the time, in the mid-sixties, when even in families as traditional as that of my grandparents there reigned a fascination for all things modern. It was a cardboard box with a diamond-shaped film of transparent plastic in the lower right corner, through which you could glimpse the whipped cream topping and little caramel coulis of a Saint-Joseph cake pre-cut into individual portions. Flushed with pride, my grandmother set the object down on the table and raised the lid, only to discover, at the same time as her guests, and to her own stupefaction, that the whole cake had been eaten except for the pitiful portion visible through the plastic. She might have torn my father limb from limb, but he had already fled, and was roaming the Arvida streets on his bicycle. As usual, when he knew that he wouldn’t be leaving his room for quite a while, he rode very slowly through the town, taking in his favourite sights: the baseball park on Rue Castner, the two coulees where he went with his brothers to toss rocks at skunks, and the spacious no man’s lands near the Alcan factory where he practised his golf shots. He gazed on them and touched them with his child’s hands long enough to be able to inhabit them in his imagination during the weeks his sentence would last.

  My father told dozens of stories like that. I thought for a long time that this litany of stolen treats and confiscated desserts had something Proustian about it.

  Only later did I see how wrong I was.

  When I was an adolescent myself, my father would sit at the head of the table and pass his time conveying an unlit cigarette from his mouth to a pristine ashtray. He drank a little wine, constantly refilling his half-empty glass. He didn’t eat. He sat there, his legs crossed and his shoulders bowed, staring at us thoughtfully.

  “You’re not eating?” Nadia asked him.

  “Eat. I’ll eat afterwards.”

  When everyone had finished, he lit his cigarette. Often, he didn’t eat at all. For a long time Nadia, my brother, and I, wondered why he did that. We couldn’t explain it because Nadia was an excellent cook. The devil only knows if he did it on purpose, but my father contrived to have Nadia live her life surrounded by enough cooking pots for twenty grandmothers. It’s often thought that men choose younger women so as not to have to deal with those who are mature. There’s some truth in that, but real life has its way with these men just as it does with all others. In many respects, young women are the scourge God invented to punish men who prefer young women.1

  Nadia was just out of adolescence when she became part of my father’s life, and he himself was a belated adolescent of thirty years and a bit, but over the years she became a woman, her own woman, very different from and often the diametric opposite of what my father would have wished her to be. But in the kitchen she was the amalgam of all the women my father had known. Who knows whether he’d planned it that way, but the evidence is there. Since he was small he’d always behaved as if he had a plan in mind. Whenever he ate something good, he showered his hostess with compliments, so as to get the recipe. My father knows that women accomplish and become what they want, but he also knows that at certain times women are not their own creatures, and that flattery is the best way to induce that state.

  The devil only knows how he did it, but ten years after having met my father, Nadia had become a fabulous cook, haunted by the ghosts of dozens of women she had never known. She made extraordinarily good meals, and David and I told her so often, as did my father, after supper, walking the streets of Arvida.

  “The first course was delicious.”

  “That was Mrs. Whitney’s recipe. She was our neighbour when I was little, before Reynolds hired Mr. Whitney and they moved to Pittsburgh.”

  “And the main course?”

  “Your grandmother’s recipe.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No. The mother of your mother. Éliane.”

  And yet, after the world had blessed him with the sum of all the cooks in his life, he sometimes never even touched his plate, or put anything on it. We saw this during the holidays, when I was visiting. I hadn’t been back to Arvida very often since my leaving six years earlier, and I hadn’t seen my father on a hunger strike for years. It may have been a reunion, but my father, at the head of the table, watched us eat in silence, sipping two fingers of wine from a water glass.

  “Pa, aren’t you eating?” asked my brother.

  And that’s when my father let it slip. He said:

  “No, you eat. I’ll eat what’s left.”

  Nadia, David and I looked at each other. Smiling. Nadia’s recipes were inspired for the most part by a time when people worked hard and families were big. She didn’t know how to cook light and she didn’t know how to cook for four. You could always find something in the kitchen, on the butcher’s block and the counters, enough to feed my father’s friends, my brother’s and my friends, the scroungers and strays who turned up at our house any old time, most often just before dinner.

  We finally understood. In the midst of all this abundance, the lasagnas, the roasts, the boeuf bourguignons only a third consumed, my father for ten years had been acting out a great comedy of privation, with himself in the role of the father sacrificing for his own. A comedy of abnegation set in a regimental mess.

  When I think about it now, the comedy darkens. The more I age, the more something tragic makes its presence felt, the sense of a bitter nostalgia at the core of all things: the idea of wanting to do something magnanimous for people who ask for nothing and are in need of nothing; the idea of a sacrifice reduced to a risible and secret simulacrum; the idea that the object of desire has nothing to do with desire itself; the idea that the fulfillment of the desire never satisfies it, nor does it make it disappear, and that in the midst of all the things longed for desire survives in us, dwindling into remorse and regret.

  My father no longer lacks for anything, but he misses the taste food had when there was not enough of it.

  It’s in pondering this that I understood that my father’s childhood tales have nothing to do with Proust. They’re even the polar opposite. In him, the deceptions, the gaffes, the misdemeanours and venial sins, the amorous thrills, the athletic exploits, everything, truly, in the end dwindles and melts away.

  He told us how he saw people come out of their cars and throw up during a showing of Jaws at the Chicoutimi drive-in, and the story got side-tracked, lost itself in the odours of canteen grease and steamed hot-dogs.

  He told us how Ghislaine, mother of the Devaux brothers, had been the first woman in Arvida to have breast implants inserted, early in the 1960s. After having seen a television report on the procedure, she had emptied her savings account and taken the only plane to Florida, saying to her husband Marcel:

  “I’ve always liked that, big boobs.”

  We wanted to know how people had reacted, seeing her lissome silhouette deformed by twin mortars, a spectacular affront to the laws of gravity and good taste that she still flaunts in the summertime, slung high in her sweaters, at almost eighty years of age. Before getting that far my father more often than not strayed into a digression concerning the same Madame Devaux, who served him his first spaghetti bolognaise, a dish whose taste and texture he’d found unspeakably gross.

  He often talked about the time he’d almost died on his way home from the sports c
entre. After a game, his hockey bag over his shoulder, famished, he’d swallowed a Cherry Blossom whole, biting into the chocolate and sucking on the syrup, while overlooking the maraschino cherry, which blocked his windpipe. He’d tried to breathe as best he could, feeling his strength wane and his mind lose focus, before giving up the ghost and letting himself drop onto a snowbank. The hard snow’s impact expelled the cherry and sent it flying off into the grey sky before his clouded eyes. My father had lain there for a long time, numbed, before getting his breath back. We wanted to know what impact the incident had had on how he looked at life, but instead he chose to pronounce himself on Hershey Canada’s buyout of Lowney’s in 1952, and its inimical effect on the quality of a delicious chocolate that, to his mind, had become inedible.

  If my father is a seasoned storyteller, food is his Achilles heel. For him, childhood does not spring full blown from a madeleine. On the contrary, all his childhood memories trail away into the evocation of a lost pastry and its indefinable flavour.

  To truly understand what my father is talking about, you’d have to be able to savour a Sophie cake, a Saint-Joseph, or a big May West of yore, transforming a succession of vague metaphors into bodily stimuli. Phrases like “a chocolate that tasted equally of burnt coffee, cinnamon and crème fraiche” or “whipped cream icing with a hint of hazelnut and orange peel” strive to say something, but only to our minds, not our taste buds. The words taste of nothing. They accumulate in a long list of lost desserts, sketching out in thin restless lines the likeness of a penurious childhood.

  There is no memory in our experience of things. Long lost pastries bring back childhood for ourselves alone, and even then, if we take the time to chew them as carefully as we should, we have to admit that they no longer taste the same.

  1 Laganière, an old friend of my brother, has cited my father as an example ever since he set his eyes, at the age of twenty-four, on a beauty from the Saguenay five years his junior. He likes to say to us (never in front of women, obviously), “Me, I saw Doug in action and I said to myself, ‘There’s a guy who’s figured it all out.’ Why weigh yourself down with an impossible woman and all her flaws when you can take one who’s really young and mould her to your tastes before she’s had time to develop a goddam nasty character?” My father always makes as if to accept the compliment, then he whispers in my ear, and that of my brother, “Poor imbecile. He doesn’t know what’s lying in wait for him.”