Crossing the Continent by Michel Tremblay

Author:Michel Tremblay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2012-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

It’s a country road in the middle of the city, like the one in Regina the day before. The frame houses resemble that of her grandparents, with verandas wrapped around three sides and everything, but instead of overlooking a cornfield, they face other houses, painted similar colours and equally worn down by bad weather. They could be a row of houses sitting in front of a gigantic mirror. And multiplied to infinity because Rhéauna saw several other streets like this one when the buggy turned off what seemed to be the main artery in Saint-Boniface, an avenue nearly as busy as the streets around the station, but whose name she hasn’t been able to read yet.

After travelling through downtown Winnipeg, the buggy went across a metal bridge, the Provencher Bridge, then crossed a square where stood a very beautiful cathedral, and great-aunt Bebette said in a tone that contained a certain amount of relief:

“We’re home now, saperlipopette.”

On the veranda of the last house on the right, painted sky blue with white shutters, a pachyderm is waiting for them, slumped in a dilapidated rocking chair, his head back, apparently asleep. Rhéauna had found the word pachyderm in a book about animals. It seems to mean the same thing as elephant. This is the first time she can use it for a human being. She knows people who are big, of course, Madame Houle and Monsieur Cantin, for instance, and even Bebette are all fairly corpulent, but this one is even bigger and she finds it hard to believe that he’s going to extricate himself from the chair in a little while, stand on his feet, say something, go inside the house with them. She imagines him rather as an unmoving guard, like a huge hound attached to a chain so he can’t run away, or as a gigantic garden gnome. A presence that is reassuring despite his immobility. As she climbs the few steps that lead to the front door, she realizes that he is a very old gentleman with pure white hair and incredibly short legs. Maybe because his torso is so huge, his limbs seem truncated – two little arms, two little legs – and Rhéauna wonders if he waddles when he walks, like a gnome in a fairy tale. A giant gnome. Who rolls along instead of walking.

Rhéauna smiles despite her fatigue.

Bebette walks past her, lays a hand on the man’s forearm without waking him.

“This is my husband. He’s big.”

The buggies that were following them have stopped behind Bebette’s and the other eighteen people who greeted Rhéauna when she got off the train have already swept into the garden in front of the house, up the steps, through the front door. They’re of all ages, there are even some children, but in her opinion most are rather old to be stirring up this whirlwind of excitement around her on their own initiative: she doesn’t really understand why they’re fussing around her so much, she doesn’t know them, all she knows is that they are part of Bebette’s family.

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