For Sure (22 page)

“Étienne, speak properly!” Carmen said, cringing at Étienne's use of the English
ditch.

Étienne laughed and did not correct himself. As he did a U-turn to head back to Moncton, Terry admitted to Carmen:

“Have to say, it's startin' to irritate me as well.”

Carmen was happy to hear Terry was conscious of the severity of the problem:

“That's exactly what everyone says: once they're out of the house, they start pickin' up udder folks' words.”

“I know it, only I never tot ee'd pick 'em up so quick . . .”

. . .

“Dat's where you see how easy 'tis fer de wee ones to learn anudder language. Seems like it goes right into der heads.”

. . .

“She runs fine. Are ya sure you don't want to give 'er a spin?”

“Naw. I don't need to . . .”

Carmen was still thinking about children's speech:

“Wouldn't that mean proper French ought to be easy to learn?”

“Dat's right. Why is it harder dan de rest?”

. . .

“Well den, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“De vanne!”

Carmen laughed:

“Ha! I'd stopped even thinkin' 'bout it. It's like she's already ours!

. . .

“Do dey call it a
vanne
in French, as well, I wonder?”

Lacan's pronouncements often walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, grazing difficult to grasp truths, which are at the very heart of psychoanalysis. It is therefore not surprising that so many pyschoanalysts contest his work. And if Lacan himself long resisted publishing his Seminars, it's because he suspected that to diffuse his work might turn it into refuse, that publish would lead to perish.

Pomme's dream: Pomme and Lisa-M. stop for the night at a small country inn. The inn looks like a Greek or Mexican house, with whitewashed walls. Although it's surrounded by Canadian forest, the building looks like nothing Canadian. The innkeepers, an elderly couple, behave more or less normally. The woman, beautiful but taciturn, attends to the inn; the man, tall and distinguished, but rather indolent, exchanges vaguely odd banter with the few clients. In the inner courtyard, guests take the sun and fresh air around a swimming pool. One of the travellers can't seem to find her bathing suit. A shot rings out, knocking off the head of a policeman who's appeared out of nowhere. Suspicion, which falls initially on the woman who can't find her bathing suit, shifts quickly to the innkeeper. No one takes care of the policeman's headless body, which has simply been shoved against the wall. The police investigators will not come until the morrow. No one is shocked by this. While they wait, everything proceeds as usual. From time to time, the innkeeper proclaims his innocence to his wife.

One day, Le Petit Étienne asked his mother if Ludmilla and Zablonski were relations. A legitimate question, after all, since the couple was perfectly at home in the house, and neither they nor his parents were shy about lending or asking each other for a hand, or falling asleep while the others talked, or getting into arguments without that stopping them liking each other.

Carmen turned the radio on.

“Geez, it's already in French.”

Terry figured the owner had probably tuned it to Radio-Canada on purpose to help the sale along.

“Well den kids? What do you tink?”

The excitement had finally won Étienne over:

“Yah! I like it!”

The boy turned to Marianne, expecting her usual enthusiastic self. Instead, he was surprised to discover his sister redfaced and straining.

“Awh, no . . . Mum . . .”

“What?”

“Marianne's doin' a caca. Peeyou! It stinks!”

Carmen twisted around, Terry looked in the rear-view mirror, the smell mushroomed.

“Dat's right, I forgot, Marianne's got the diarrhea.”

The sharp, the flat and the natural are musical accidents.

Energized by the fresh air rushing into the van to flush out the oppressive odour, Carmen decided to take a turn at driving the vehicle. Terry pulled over to the side of the road and switched places with Carmen, who took her time to get familiar with the controls before setting off again.

“Do you like it, Mum?”

Étienne hoped his mother would say yes.

“Don't know yet, do I.”

As she drove, Carmen glanced around outside and inside the van to get used to the driver's surroundings.

“Well, I do like the visibility.”

Étienne was happy. Terry, meanwhile, tried once more to be accommodating:

“Fer sure she'll cost us more in gas.”

Carmen, now comfortable behind the wheel, could think of other things:

“Well, we're not payin' all that much now . . .”

This was true, but Terry had something else in mind.

“We could maybe paint an ad for de Babar on one side an' de bookstore on de udder. Dat way, we could claim it on our taxes.”

“Could I be painting Babar, den?”

Terry turned to Étienne:

“We'll see about dat when de time comes.”

And to Carmen:

“Geez, I guess we'll have to plant a paintbrush in dat boy's paw afore long.”

“A roller, more like.”

Aside from the better-known Acadian conjugations of the verb
to be
,
such as
je sons
,
j'étion
s,
y étiont
, and
alle étiont
, there are the even more surprising
que je seille
(or, in some regions, ending in
-o-n-s
),
que tu seilles
,
qu'y seille
,
qu'a seille
,
qu'on seille
,
que nous seillions
,
que vous seilliez
,
qu'y seillont
,
qu'a seillont
. Perhaps a better way to put this form in writing would be
que je sèye
(
que je sèyons
, etc.),
que tu sèyes
,
qu'y sèye
,
qu'a sèye
,
qu'on sèye
,
que nous sèyions
,
que vous sèyiez
,
qu'y sèyiont
,
qu'a sèyiont
. How to translate these musical variations into a non-standard English? That I are, I were, dey was, she were . . .?

Back at the vacant lot where the owner of the van was waiting, Carmen quickly detached the baby's car seat with Marianne in it and carried it back to their old car. Terry took care of the rest:

“She's pretty much wot we's lookin' fer. Aside from de colour.”

In spite of himself, the seller was intrigued:

“An' wot's wrong wid de colour, den?”

Terry didn't quite know what to say. He was sorry he'd raised the subject, because it was mostly Carmen who had a problem with the light green.

“Well, a fresh coat of paint wouldn't do 'er no harm, patch dose wee rust spots 'ere an' der.”

The owner moved over for a closer look at the little scratches to which Terry was referring.

“You've got sharp eyes, I'd never seen dese.”

The time to bargain was upon them.

CHAPTER 4

Given a certain degree of reoccurrence, chance becomes no longer a coincidence, but a quality.

Benoîte Groulx
,
La Touche étoile (The Star Key),
Grasset, 2006

There were only two days of shooting left. The end was in sight, to Étienne's relief, but tinged with a touch of regret: this mixing of languages was turning out to be a lot of fun. At last, a game that was consistent and required creativity!

“Last night, I
helpé
my dad to
dédjãmmér
de
elevator
.”

“Was der anybody inside?”

“Naw. Only de
pizzaman
, an' his
pouch
was empty.”

At that very moment, the camera was on Étienne.

La Bibliothèque idéale
includes the titles of eight
Complete Works
. They are by Sainte Thérèse d'Avila (in the category “Spirituality and Religions”), Herodotus-Thucydides (“Antiquity and Us”), Stéphane Mallarmé (“French Poetry”), Blaise Pascal (“Philosophy”), Plautus-Terence (“Theatre”), François Rabelais (“Laughter”), Tristan Tzara (“Distorsions”) and Xenophon (“Antiquity and Us”). By itself this information does not really constitute an inference.

The French word
dialyse
(“dialysis”)
,
with the
y
— worth 10 points in the French game (only 4 in the English), placed on the letter counts double (2 × 10) and the entire word doubled (2 × 27) — hence, a little Legendre — plus a bonus of 50 points for having placed all her letters — a scrabble, already! — Antoinette opened the game with 104 points in a single stroke. Still, she hesitated, because her husband would only have to add an
R
to make
dialyser
, which would earn him 54 points, plus the value of the word he would make vertically on the
R
, which would also be worth triple. And all this not counting the fact that he could very well produce a scrabble for 50 more points.

With the advent of the digital age, the avatar has also come to designate entities in cyberspace. An individual can create one or several avatars to circulate in cyberspace in his or her place. BabyDy, SorrosJr, DocFarine, PickPocket, and SCrowbar, to name a few, are all avatars who, rather than concealing the fact that they are avatars, take pleasure in announcing themselves as such.

Marianne had not particularly been bitten by the language-­game bug that so enthralled her brother. Happy and carefree, she flitted about, finding new little friends, handling or skipping around everything she encountered, tasting anything that was eatable, generally doing what she was told, and totally ignoring the filming.

“I'll give you half me
licorice
if you gives me
half yer
chocolate
bar
.”

Marianne did not understand what the older girl meant.

“You doesn't want to
share half-an-half
?
”

When the girl simply plucked the chocolate bar out of her hands, Marianne didn't protest in the least. Attracted by the cries of children playing in the sandbox, she took off without awaiting her due. And that's what the camera captured.

In the matter of virtue, politeness is most important because, without it, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to approach let alone accede to the other virtues. According to André Comte-Sponville's
A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues
, politeness is the first rung on the ladder
.
This marvellous book would undoubtedly have found a place in one of the categories of
La Bibliothèque idéale
if it had existed at the time of
La Bibliothèque
's first printing in 1988. Nevertheless, since every reader is invited to add a book of his or her choice to each of the categories of the library, it's perfectly appropriate to add
A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues
to the “Social Sciences” section.

Suddenly, Antoinette was struck by a kind of illumination. Since
Y
is a word on its own in French, couldn't she count it as a second word, this one reading vertically, and since the
Y
would land on a word-counts-double square, wasn't it worth four times 10 points? These additional 20 points would bring her total to 124, which was not bad at all. That clinched it.

The quality of inferences depends on the clarity of the message being communicated.

The Cripple immediately saw the potential of the word
dialyse
. He also followed the point count, which Antoinette conducted out loud. He expected her to end at 104, and could not understand why she returned to the
Y
for more.

“
Y
is a word, isn't it. It's my vertical word. An' it counts double, so dat comes to 104 plus 20.”

The Cripple had never heard anything like it.

“Vertical!?”

Antoinette repeated her explanation. The Cripple did not agree.

“Can't be a vertical word, der's nuttin above or below it!”

“Dat don't matter, 'tis vertical all de same, on account of
Y
is a word.”

The Cripple shook his head, at a complete loss.

André Comte-Sponville's
A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues
does appear however in the category of “Philosophy” in “La Bibliothèque idéale des sciences humaines (The Ideal Library of the Social Sciences),” a special issue in 2003 of
Sciences humaines
, a French journal of the social sciences. The other disciplines included in the Social Sciences are anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, education, linguistics, communications, sociology, ethology, prehistory, history, geography, political science, economy, and philosophy, according to the table of contents of this particular journal.

“I'm not riding around wid our kids in a van dat advertises Le Babar. Like it or not, children and a bar just don't go together. It seems immoral.”

It was as though Terry had never heard the word.

“Immoral. You mean, like . . . indecent?”

But Carmen was not to be distracted.

“Not only dat, but 'twould be like we were workin' all de time. We couldn't be just our little family, out fer a picnic on a Sunday or sometin', widout everybody an' his uncle knowin' who we are. It identifies us.

. . .

“Are you sure we've got to put an ad on it to be deductin' it on our taxes?”

As a matter of fact, Terry wasn't sure.

“I'll check wid de accountant.”

“We aren't already deductin' our car?”

“Naw, she's too old. She's not wurt enough.”

. . .

“We can only be usin' a part of de cost o' gas. An repairs. An' dat's only if we keep de receipts. Which me brudders at de garage aren't too good at givin'.”

“The Ideal Library of the Social Sciences” lists 545 books, 518 of them belonging to 14 of the disciplines named above, which it will do no harm to list once again here, still in the same order they are named in the special issue of the
Sciences humaines
journal: anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, education, linguistics, communications, sociology, ethology, prehistory, history, geography, political science, economy, and philosophy. To complete this list of complete works are added a number of essays dealing with related issues on life and society. This category includes 27 titles.

The Cripple had run out of arguments. He'd never thought of the
Y
as a word in relation to Scrabble, and he'd certainly never heard of anyone counting score the way Antoinette was proposing to do.

“In dat case, we could be doin' de same ting wid de letter
a?

Antoinette had not thought of the letter
a
:

“Dat's true! Dat gives me anudder point, makes 125.”

Antoinette and The Cripple both ran through the alphabet in their heads, but found no other letter that makes a word on its own.

“Hmmm . . .”

It wasn't the 21 points that bothered The Cripple; it was the principle of the thing. He took the time to scan the rules of the game printed on the cover of the box, but, alas, there was nothing there to rule out counting the
Y
or the
A
as words. On the contrary, he was beginning to suspect that a strong debater would have little trouble in defending Antoinette's cause.

“Well, I just don't know. One ting's fer sure, I never did see anyting like dis 'ere before now.”

In the English version of Scrabble, because
Q
and
Z
are the only letters worth 10 points, and neither is a word on its own, as is the
Y
in French, Antoinette's feat would have been impossible. On the other hand, if she were to produce the word
muzjiks
(a Russian peasant), laying the
Z
down on the letter counts double square, she would score 128 points, 129 if she were allowed to count the
I
as a word in the vertical.

Unbeknownst to her, Ludmilla had also lodged Jacques Brel in Terry's singing heart, especially the lines
But why me? Why now? Why so soon? Where to go?
that Terry would belt out from time to time when his heart filled up to overflowing. Especially since he loved the way Brel pronounced that strange line
Where to go?
with a distinctly Acadian accent:
“Yoù aller?”
Clearly, Acadia had Belgian roots . . .

Since Lisa-M. spent many an evening at home practising her flute, Carmen and Josse knew they could always call on her in an emergency, which is what they were facing tonight, the Babar being short of arms and legs to serve the customers.

“Wot's goin' on 'ere?”

“Der's a whole lot of folks all of a sudden an' Jeannine couldn't stay. She 'ad to go an' have 'er bikini line done.”

Watching Josse pop the caps on six bottles of beer at once, Lisa-M. thought how lucky the employees of the Babar were to be able to take time off for the most frivolous reasons. Dropping the bottle opener, Josse added:

“She's in such a state, it's beyond understandin'. It's her first time goin' down sowt, I didn't want to say nuttin'.”

Customers were pouring into the bar. Lisa-M. rolled up her sleeves.

“Der's sometin' goin' on fer sure! I gotta find out wot.”

As she spoke, Lisa-M. spotted Pierre and Antoine, and went over to make enquiries.

“What? You don't know? We're celebratin' Hektor Haché-Haché's one hundredth letter to the editor of
L'Acadie nouvelle.
Bones is comin' to play an' all!”

Lisa-M. came back to tell Josse what the fuss was about.

“Dat's wicked! When we opened up de place, dat's how we wanted tings to be! A real place fer folks.”

Ethology is probably the least known of the social sciences. This discipline, which studies the behaviour of animals in their natural environment, often reveals troubling similarities between animals and humans.

Terry had decided The Cripple was an excentric the first time he set foot in the latter's home.

“One of de walls is covered in Polaroids of Scrabble. Every skitch shows a different
game
wid different words.

“
Game
?”

Terry had used the English word
game.

“
Jeu
,” he corrected himself. “Right off I'd say der was hundreds. A body can read de words if you gets up close enough.”

Carmen liked the idea.

“Ee says every . . . game . . . ee's ever played is der. Every time ee plays, he snaps a picture.”

“Who, Dad?”

Ever since he'd been part of a film shoot, Étienne had taken an interest in cameras.

“De fellow who moved in down de hall. De Cripple.”

Carmen jumped:

“Don't call him dat, my God!”

“He tol' me 'imself I's to call 'im dat!”

Carmen was stunned.

“Ee says dat's more like his real name den de one his folks gave 'im, Arturin LeBreton. I seen it on 'is credit card.”

Étienne was beginning to want to know more.

“Wot does ee play at, Dad?”

“Scrabble. It's a game wid letters.”

Love — beautifully defined as an excellence by Comte-Sponville — tops all the other virtues. Between politeness — classified by Comte-Sponville more as a value than a virtue — and love, 16 other virtues are scrutinized in order to unravel true from false, and to reveal how really difficult they are to attain. Loyalty is the second rung on the ladder. The penultimate virtue, just below love, is humour.

Lisa-M. was working hard at the Babar, but not unhappily, since the crowd was more stimulating that exhausting. The packed room was in fine spirits, thanks to the grab bag of humorous observations that Robert Melanson had gleaned from a whole gamut of human follies that Hektor Haché-Haché had taken the time and trouble to bring to the attention of the readers of
L'Évangéline
and
L'Acadie nouvelle
over the years.