Everything I Own by Raymond Beauchemin

Author:Raymond Beauchemin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550713879
Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc

Verse Four

Musique et paroles

Bijou had led a charmed life. I told her this often enough over the course of our marriage. And of course she argued that she hadn’t. No one ever admits they’d had it easy. One of Bijou’s gripes was the inequality she’d felt as a woman in Beaupré. But the argument, to me at least, held as much water as George Harrison’s complaints about being overshadowed. “You were in one of the most successful groups in Quebec history! On the frontline of the discussion of our political future! Look at all the songs you wrote! The last album is almost entirely yours!”

This charmed life found expression elsewhere as well. Like death. Until age 40, Bijou had not had a death in her family or among close friends. Three grandparents had died before she turned two, so she had no recollection of them; the fourth, Bijou’s maternal grandmother, was considerably younger than her husband and still played Bingo and took walks around the block. Aunts, uncles, cousins, all still alive. Friends, still alive. Teachers, the ones she cared about, still alive. It made for a lot of Christmas cards and comps when she played the Spectrum.

But the year Bijou turned 40, Dany Vox died of cancer. Dany was Daniel when his parents named him and he was Daniel Vaudreuil until he decided he would be a singer. Jesus, did Dany have a voice, not one of those European bel canto voices or those all-vibrato Parisian-trained voices like Dubois’, but one hewn from Quebec maple, no knots, subtle grain. When Dany sang, he tapped into the elemental. One April a couple of years before he died — it was, in fact, 1988, because Bijou, Laurence and I had just returned from Paris where Bijou had done an extended stay at the Théâtre de Paris to record Mes racines, Dany gave an acoustic concert at the Olympia in the east end. One thousand fans, and not one wouldn’t have bled for him that night. That voice that night, singing “La Belle Mort” and “Memoirs de printemps” — that’s how I wished to remember him. After the Olympia show, we’d sat on the edge of the stage while the roadies broke down the set around us. Bijou was there; my sister, Marie-Eve; Serge, Dany’s brother whom we met that night; and Serge’s boyfriend, Louis-Philippe, a Bombardier engineer whom we called LP.

“I don’t know how you all do it,” my sister said. “Songwriters say so much with so few words.”

“Economy,” Dany said.

“To the economy,” I said and I raised my bottle. The chorus of clinking echoed in the near-empty hall. “You never said that to me before.”

“I’m saying it now,” Marie-Eve said.

“Thanks.”

I reached over and squeezed my sister’s shoulder. She rubbed my leg and gave it a pat.

“So how do you do it?” Serge said. “You’ve had some success, writing for Bijou. I heard you even—”

“No, no, don’t say it!” Bijou said, put her fingers in her ears and shook her head.

“Céline.”

“You

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