This summer, I will not make a garden, no, we are leaving this morning to meet La Petite-Gaspésie, in the absence of the big one.
– Maria, you can’t get to know Quebec without getting to know the river, I told my Mexican roommate.
“But I know him, I see him every day, Josèè.
– It’s not the river, that’s the seaway, its commercial portion, where it lost its soul. The St. Lawrence is not made of the same water.
It’s her present of 32e birthday, go and sit for a few days in front of the flats, near Kamou, in L’Islet-sur-Mer, chemin des Pionniers. There, the river and the salt marshes merge according to the moons, where beluga whales used to come and get caught in the harts of porpoise fishermen. Opposite L’Isle-aux-Grues, it is here that the first Blanchets came to land. As well start from there, for the rest of the world.
Explaining the country in a language that is not its own is not easy. It is easier to make it feel, that it seeps through the veins to the heart. A journey as wide, as long, is lived more than it is told. The river sniffs, like an aroma.
Tributary, foreshore, iscle, so many pretty words that roll and break and freeze in your mouth. They say so much, but we read them so little.
It’s like Charlebois, after she saw him performing at the Francofolies (“I’ll remember it on my deathbed, Josèè”), I was able to explain the song to him Between two seals that she had recorded without understanding it.
A copy of the Duty lying on the dining room table, an article by my colleague Jean-François Nadeau on Pierre Bourgault (lyricist of this song), its political, historical dimension. I translated every nationalist verse from my former journalism teacher who even lent me a pretty brooch for my first marriage. Between two joints, you could do something. Between two joints, you could swarm the country. And this country is also the eddies of a river.
“The way water envelops or contains a country influences the way it is written. In French literature, the sea is an escape. In English literature, she is a prison. Here, we praise the nourishing waters of the river, the jugular of our territory,” writes Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette in river woman.
Here, the river is a nourishing horizon and a primary vein that has rhymed with misery.
Our pantry
The river is part of my ancestors. I kept the beacon of François-Xavier Mercier, my father’s maternal grandfather, still on display on the cupboard, an interior beacon. He hung it on the end of his barge in the dark night to go cod fishing off Cap-des-Rosiers. I went out for Maria the historian, who never tires of yellowed photos and dusty archives, photos of yesteryear, those of Gaspésie in black and white.
The nourishing river was also the inn of Mam’, my ancestor, the wife of F.-X. In the book of Centenary of Cap-des-Rosiers, 1872-1972, it is said that it was around 1935 that Madame Mercier and her husband opened a dining room in their house. “They were people who loved the public very much, feasted with them on occasion. It was the perfect place to eat good lobster. »
I showed Maria the menu framed by my father, 35 cents, in English (for Americans), fish, lobster and crab. Homemade. The pantry spread out in front of the house, the horizon, the “sea.” Today, the house has disappeared, replaced by Forillon Park.
I’ll have to tell Maria that these fishermen faced the river without knowing how to swim, risking their lives, in the drizzle of uncertainty, never being certain of returning to the shore. The people of Gaspé feared and mistrusted him, rode him without ever taming him. “You try to paint the river and you can’t. He is stronger than you. […] The river alone, the river as an entity, continues to intimidate you,” continues Anaïs, addressing her lover-painter.
“The river is our great inner sage,” the writer Marie-Ève Sévigny told me. And faced with a sage, we are silent and we listen.
Cartier’s fault
“We will go out barefoot / In silence / We will go out / By the horizon. I’ll have Félix play in the car, well, it seems to me that from the Île d’Orléans to L’Isle-aux-Grues, his words will carry us. I will play Maria an excerpt from For the rest of the world by Pierre Perrault even if I will have to translate my grandfather’s language.
I am to read We here on the island a reissue nicely prefaced by Jean-François Nadeau who assisted Perrault in this work of historian and documentary filmmaker. I am envious of their bond.
He took over the river talk. He read the book of the river. And he strives to build bridges between the past of the first comer and the present of our ignorance. He holds himself responsible for meaning.
From Isle-aux-Coudres, discovered by Cartier, to the word misery, Perrault tames the word of the islanders while quoting Michel Serres: “It is about the state of misery that would never have a history and of philosophy because it lies before the first and apart from the second. »
Perrault works from memory by resuscitating the fishing of porpoises (belugas) on the island, the river, its “noère miseries”. “He declared allegiance to misery and even if he takes advantage of the present he lived the past… this time of misery… like an ancestor. Isn’t that the only valid way to be in the world? And the world only exists thanks to heroism. »
And the filmmaker notes “having had, for centuries, to face by sail, oar, oar, in the drift of the lunar cycles which trample and drive back the tides, in the vehemence of the currents which overlap the lower slopes, among the ice in jumble, in clusters, in broken… to face”.
Maria, the avid historian of the past, knows that we are born of all the miseries of the world and of both sexes (it was a limited time on this side). Here, we come from the river, from Cartier to write it and long before to say it.
To a young friend who asked me the other night why I kept the pan-fried cod menu (without caper alley with seaweed spray on vanilla lobster broth) from a now defunct Gaspésie inn, I answer with the words of Perrault: “Memory is a lifeline to escape eventual shipwreck. »