The Red Notebook by Michel Tremblay

Author:Michel Tremblay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77201-167-8
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

While I was preparing a bed for the Duchess, who was too hyper and drunk to be sent home, I found the papers I’d scattered on the living room table when I left the apartment. I’d been right that morning—you might as well say centuries ago, so much had happened since then—to think that my rebellion would be short-lived; that I would let the ups and downs of everyday life relegate it to a corner of my memory; that the two matters, regardless of their importance (General de Gaulle with his arms flung up in a V and the poor black people in Detroit made violent by injustice and hypocrisy) would still be there because I couldn’t do anything about them, it wasn’t my role; that they would assume a secondary importance behind the problems, so superficial, of the Boudoir and those who work there. I’m not powerless at the Boudoir; I can act, get things done, as I’d proved all day long. But alas! what I read in the papers will stay in the papers. No matter what I think about it. Or what I wish I could change. I can be up in arms about it, point to those I think are guilty of all the troubles on earth, I can accuse, rant and rave—I’m still unarmed and helpless. A mere concerned reader.

I sat on the edge of the sofa that I’d just opened so I could put on clean sheets. The Duchess was taking her shower. I could hear her singing an opera aria about a holy temple and the appearance of a Virgin … With just the inflections of her voice she can turn some perfectly innocent words into a double entendre that would make a sailor blush. It’s very funny too. And that summed up her life: make fun of everything, absolutely everything that presented itself to her, turn reality inside out like a glove and remake it in her own way, by embellishing or mocking it.

And what about me, about my life: how could it be summed up? Rebelling against what I read in the papers while knowing full well that I could never change anything and collecting money in cash from foreign visitors who came to relax in the arms of not-too-beautiful fake women, each one hysterical in her own way?

I hadn’t been preoccupied by my own future until then, I left it—too much—in the hands of fate, telling myself that I was young, that I had time to think about it, that I didn’t know yet exactly what I wanted to do and, most of all, that nothing was urgent … But now, sitting at the end of the living-room sofa in the apartment on Place Jacques-Cartier, worry, or worse, anguish, made me feel a pang, as if an icy vice were closing over what I was doing with my life. I didn’t think I was intended for some great destiny, that’s not what I mean, I may have been too late

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