enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

CBC Literary Awards - First Prize Travel Literature

DENTS IN THE LAURENTIANS

Text: ROGER GREENWALD

The bus takes almost an hour to get out of Montreal. It’s a -lovely city when you’re downtown, on foot, but when you’re leaving it by bus it seems only gray: concrete buildings, sidewalks, empty lots, shopping malls with their vast parking lots. The cloudy weather doesn’t help. In the middle of the city I see a line of at least fifty people waiting for a transit bus.

After the city and the usual suburbs, the bus starts climbing gradually. It’s a local bus, makes a lot of stops, people getting on and off, going short distances. There are Francophones and Anglophones: an old professor with waxy skin, a beret, and a beat-up briefcase; couples going to their country places; students visiting their parents for the weekend; and along the way, laborers: men with boots, ski jackets, large hands and messy hair. And of course a few I don’t know what to make of, like the skinny, wiry guy with a kit bag, a scar on his face, and a challenging glance all around.

Since January smoking’s been prohibited on these buses, but that’s only a few months, and there are always some people who figure if they’ve done it before they can still do it, or they can do it till someone protests, or just let them try…

After a while it’s clear that the bus route follows one main road up into the -mountains. It’s spring, there’s been a thaw, but there is still lots of old snow on the hillsides, on the ground that’s visible between the trees. Not much snow on the trees. Occasionally, down an embankment from the road, I glimpse an old rail line snaking along.

The scenery is grim. Gas stations, stores, fast-food places, suburban-style restaurants, used car lots, auto body shops. Two words recur on the signs: piscine and débosselage. Swimming pools for your back yard; dents banged out of your car (bosse is the same word as English boss – the round hump in the middle of a metal shield; embossed is a relative. But in English the boss is what sticks out, not what’s dented in.)

All the towns are named for saints: St. Jérôme, St. Agathe, St. Faustin. In the last half hour of the trip the roadside clears, the mountains get higher, I can see lifts in operation at the ski runs and a few black figures zigzagging down the slopes. It’s the last weekend of the season.

I get out at the Hôtel Montagnard and go in to phone Delphine. It’s all wood inside, and beyond the corridor with the cigarette machines and the cashier’s wicket there’s a large room with a curving bar, a TV tuned to sports above it, and further back, an even larger hall, with a stage. The floor has chairs that can be moved aside for dancing, and you can be sure they play accordions here on Saturday night.

Delphine arrives in a jalopy driven by Leon, who rents a room in her house. Leon is a friendly guy with a big head of graying black hair, large hands, and a body I think of as the French waiter type, slim with no hips, the belly curving out a little as in young boys. He speaks good English, of course with a Quebec accent, which I like the sound of: the warmth of it comes through in English. Leon pronounces his name as in English (LEE-on), rather than as in French (Lay-OHN). When I later ask Delphine why, she says he likes the idea that his name means Lion, thinks the English version is more leonine.

The old house is being rebuilt, and it’s chilly. They took two thousand slats off the walls one by one, put in insulation, and put the slats back. Up the street is a house that belonged to Delphine’s grandmother before she sold it to a relative, Delphine’s aunt. But the grandmother still uses it. A neat little wooden house, painted gray with white trim, and with a cedar porch around three sides that Delphine’s husband, Philippe, built last year.

In the corner of Delphine’s living room (which has no wall dividing it from the kitchen just now) is an old upright piano that Delphine says is quite a good one, though it needs tuning. She can play.

Delphine met Leon when she was working in a lodge at one of the ski slopes a year or two ago (to make money, of course – nobody lives from writing, and she’s never even applied for a grant). Leon had worked there for nine years. Then he was fired, just like that. I think there had been a strike; this was retaliation, perhaps. After he’d been unemployed a while his wife found a lawyer she rather liked. A few months ago she moved to the lawyer’s place with her and Leon’s two kids. Leon had to sell the house to give her half its value. So he had no place to live and no job except for short stints here and there. He asked Delphine if he could rent a room; they needed the money; so here he is. A few rows of his kids’ drawings line the wall above the sink in the kitchen.

Leon likes plants. He shows me his collection, which for the moment is standing in the second-floor hall. Mostly cacti. He asks me the names of a few in English and we talk about how often or how seldom they flower. Leon went to Mexico recently and is eager to go back. He’s begun learning Spanish.

Delphine and Philippe have had another boarder too, a guy about twenty, blond, short, also slim but with the stance of a weight-lifter, the arms curving out a little, the head thrust forward on the neck, and even the features of his face elongated in front, as if his mouth and nose were taffy that someone has pulled on. Narrow head. He broke into his place of work with his girlfriend and stole some money. Spent a lot of it, got caught. It’s a long story. It’s his room I have for the weekend. He’s staying at his girlfriend’s. He got sentenced to probation and community service; had a little job on the side at a pizza place; lost it because of his temper. Delphine and Philippe are about to tell him to go elsewhere, find a job. He hasn’t been paying them rent lately, and they figure he’s not helping himself by depending on them. He just happens to drop by one night at dinnertime. Shows off his new leather jacket. Turns around to show the back. Very serious about it.

We go for a walk through this tiny town in the High Laurentians, Lac Ferré. A derelict railroad station they are going to turn into a library; a huge church of gray stone with a bowling alley in the basement (yes! fully automated lanes) to generate income for the church; a snow-covered lake that no one skates on – they use a rink – because who would clear it of the snow?: not one of the present mayor’s priorities. All the intrigues of a small town, pettiness, envy, xenophobia, nosiness. And a poor town at that, people often unemployed. More than one house in the long process of being rebuilt as fast or as slow as the money becomes available, the work done by the owners and by friends: pickup trucks carting supplies. Utility before aesthetics – except on some of the hillsides, where developers are beginning to build luxurious lodges to sell to city folk.

When we get back I ask Delphine what it means that there are so many signs that say "débosselage" along the road the bus took. Surely all of Quebec can’t be coming to this one stretch of road to get their cars fixed?

It means, she says, that around here you have to have a car, and that around here the people can’t afford to buy new ones.

Ask, and you learn.

And so I am in Lac Ferré, sitting at the kitchen table wearing two sweaters, my first night there, when suddenly I hear music from the one room on the first floor that has walls. It’s a strange and melancholy sound, with drawn-out notes that float as if through the space between the planets. It’s Leon, Delphine says. He started when he took the room here, started playing the harmonica. Then he tried the piano. After a while he went and bought himself an electric piano.

After dinner he shows it to me. A black Yamaha with a round speaker beyond either end of the keyboard, facing up. There are maybe ten buttons behind the keyboard, marked Electric Piano 1, 2 and 3; Harpsichord 1 and 2; Vibraphone; Marimba, etc. And in this cassette, Leon says, slipping it into a receptacle, is the programming for 128 different instruments. Violin, organ, trumpet, drums, even a chorus that sings "Ahh" in whatever note you press, for as long as you press it. A liquid-crystal display shows which program you’re using. They’re numbered as well as labeled. The piano has two pedals, too.

I like the way Leon plays. It’s great, he says. It takes you out of this world. It helps to kill the time. He looks at me. That’s the most important thing, he says: it kills the time. I understand Leon. Delphine says he’s the one who always re-sets the kitchen clock. A concern with time always has two faces, and one of Leon’s kids must take after him: made a paper cut-out with various openings (perhaps clouds) that hangs in the window of the back door. It’s blue on one side, dark gray on the other. Just turn it, the artist told Delphine, depending on whether you want day or night.

The weekend passes: sleep, walks, food, talk, poems, translation, putting books onto bookshelves, taking photos, reading newspapers. The last evening, cold and tired, I answer Delphine’s questions about the English of the poorly written novel she has translated. Even the next day, as they are driving me to the bus stop, Delphine turns on an engaging tone to say, "Roger –" (Yes?) "Have you heard the expression ‘Take your pick’?" And I explain it.

But there was a moment, late the night before, when Leon and Philippe were finished making a double racket on the electric piano, and Delphine and I went in there and said we wanted to play. and I sat at the left side and she on the right, I had Leon set it to Electric Piano 1, and we started. I can’t play, you understand. I just did what I sometimes do at the piano in my friend Inger’s large living room in Oslo when it’s dusk and I’m alone in the apartment. Low notes held one at a time with the left hand, middle or high notes and occasional chords with the right hand, improvised as feeling dictates, to the extent my untrained fingers will permit. Delphine embellished or answered higher up the keyboard. We played for ten or fifteen minutes. I had to concentrate too much on my part to be able to engage in a dialogue, but I was aware that the two parts came together, such as they were, and that the ethereal sounds had taken us, for these moments, to some other place.

That’s what remains with me. Leon, Delphine, and an electric piano in an old house in a poor village in Quebec. Tonight, back in Toronto, I have a late dinner in a Chinese restaurant after seeing a film I didn’t care for. At the end of the meal I ask for two fortune cookies (I figure I can always use a second chance). The first says "You will have a long and happy life." The second says, "First God made gold. Then he hid it."

[Author’s note: I have changed the names in this piece to protect the -privacy of the people portrayed.]

-----

Roger Greenwald has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight, and has translated from norwegian and swedish into English several volumes of poetry and fiction. He teaches writing in Toronto.