suddenly the crowd seems alien to you. You don’t know if they like you. You haven’t had time to make sure.
You climb the three steps and find yourself higher than all of them.
At the back of the room, you see the man who, a few minutes before, controlled his fall so well. He is studying you. Yet his strength has an aura with a clear crack. Which you feed from.
And you dive in. You are talking about the end of the war. Of the freedom it has brought women, who are finally out of the house. You know that this sounds shocking: a woman’s place is in the home.
The words are formed round in your chest and grow moist in your mouth. You magnanimously send them out into the room; you offer them up. Here, come have a taste.
People are listening to you, at first tentatively.
You spontaneously stop for a moment. Something is missing. You pull out your red lipstick and excuse yourself as you paint your mouth crimson. You get a few laughs, just a few. You accept them. The lipstick is the elegance your words were missing. You change from a girl to a woman, and you pick up where you left off. The workers at your plant become more elegant, their gestures become more graceful, almost mesmerizing. A page of history has just turned. They can be women and factory workers.
Everything about you speaks of a new era. You stand tall, and despite your diaphanous skin, it seems as though you have just invented the world. You talk about possibility, and it is moving that something huge and invisible is growing from such a slight presence.
You finish. You get a standing ovation.
You win the public speaking competition.
The young man of the cleverly controlled fall comes to congratulate you. Even up close, he looks like he is falling. He introduces himself. His name is Claude Gauvreau.
He invites you to spend the evening at his friends’ place. Delighted, you accept.
In the living room of a small apartment on Rue de Mentana, a few young people are smoking and talking. Drawings are scattered on the floor.
You immediately want to stay. To make this cloud of smoke, this circle of words, yours.
There are around ten people, mainly boys, but you look at the girls first. There are three of them. They exude elegant simplicity. Claude introduces them. Marcelle Ferron, Françoise Sullivan, and Muriel Guilbault. They glance at you; they don’t feign warmth, but they invite you to sit down.
The men are engaged in a lively discussion about the ink drawings strewn on the floor. They don’t look like anything you recognize. You could lose yourself in them. You understand that, beyond these walls, they would be considered offensive. You feel privileged to be spending time with the offenders.
What is being discussed seems important, but the drawings are just tossed on the floor as fodder for discussion. You like this disconnect between the idea and the object.
Claude, who seems to come down to the ground in this place, stops falling for a moment and introduces you to his brother, Pierre, and then Jean-Paul Riopelle and Marcel Barbeau. They are all around your age.
Marcel asks about the public speaking competition. Claude shrugs and points at you.
‘I lost,’ he says.
You know you should smile, but you tend to forget how in this sort of situation. So you just stay in the moment and let a brief silence of acknowledgement settle around you.
Mr. Borduas, who you are told is the host, and who until now has kept to himself, approaches and offers you a glass of wine.
‘Congratulations,’ he says.
He is about twenty years older than the others. He is short, with a prominent forehead and the sad eyes of the overly intelligent, which are tucked under bushy black eyebrows. You understand right away that he is the leader.
And you want leaders to like you. You watch him. He withdraws, a little removed from the group of young people, where the conversation has resumed. They are discussing Jean-Paul’s latest ink drawings. Their explosive subjectivity. You understand nothing, but you could swim in these ideas for the rest of your life. They are exhilarating.
Marcel reticently places a sketch on the floor. It’s his turn.
There is a barrage of comments. No one says whether they like it or not. They are trying to get a word in about the abstraction. What is its source? Should it survive?
You think it’s incredible. There is a rough sensuality you would happily stretch out in.
Borduas approaches the circle. He glances at Marcel’s drawing; Marcel is on the edge of his seat waiting for him to speak. Then he looks at you. You have captured his attention.
You say it’s beautiful. That you want to lie down and be swallowed up in it.
Borduas laughs. A spontaneous, subdued laugh. It seems to happen rarely, because at first everyone is shocked, and then they all do the same.
It’s midnight, and everyone seems to know it’s time to leave.
The wine has brought you all closer together. Marcelle, who is feeling jovial, has taken you under her wing. She gives you a warm hug.
Borduas retreated to his quarters after offering you Marcel’s drawing and saying good night. Marcel, curled up like a snail in its shell, hides behind the smoke. You ask him whether he wants you to have his drawing, which you like. He grumbles a hollow yes.
Claude offers to walk you back to the station.
On the platform, in the middle of the night, you agree to write to each other. It will change the course of your life.
On the train back to Ottawa, you feel as though you are the only one moving and that everything else is standing still. The night outside is deep and radiant. You have Marcel’s hypnotic drawing tucked in your pocket. You have a geyser in your stomach and there is nothing around you to stop its gushing.
You knew nothing about Montreal. Aside from Hilda Strike and snippets about Duplessis.
You still don’t know much more than that. Except that a door has opened onto bodies in motion, bellowing in a cloud of smoke, sipping and sharing wine, reflecting on arcane, appealing shapes.
These people have rekindled your interest in others.
You were an island, and now you feel like you might have a country.
You return home ecstatic. Things go back to normal, but you navigate them differently. Swimming with the current. Now you know that there is somewhere else out there for you.
What you don’t know is that there will always be somewhere else, and never the same place. That will be your undoing.
You receive a letter from Claude. He kept his promise. With a friendly, uncompromising pen, he rails against the repressive climate that surrounds him. He rants against the Padlock Law, passed to fight communism, which holds his artistic pursuits in contempt. He seems to enjoy being an agitator.
In a passionate postscript, he encourages
