“I have always wondered where the spirit of these old people was and where it was traveling. While knitting, telling the rosary or, hands placed on their stomachs, where did their thoughts drift? » This is what Adèle, the narrator ofIn the middle, the end. This is perhaps what, among other things, I am trying to understand in my turn by visiting Denise Boucher, who signed this astonishing novel released in 2011. Almost at the same time that year, I published with the same publisher, Leméac, Good girls plant flowers in spring, my first collection of short stories. I of course knew Denise — the great Denise Boucher — by reputation. At that time, I would never have had the courage to write to her to request a meeting with the sole motivation of making her a friend. I would have been afraid of disturbing, of being thought of as a groupie, of displeasing.
Full of doubts and fragile confidence, in my forties I found the strength to embrace my desires and my convictions. So much so that a few months ago, I wrote to Denise. Then, we saw each other in her old apartment with very high ceilings in Outremont. I had just realized that the year I was born, in 1978, was created at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde The fairies are thirsty, one of the most feminist and revolutionary dramaturgical texts in Quebec, and the work that made it known beyond our borders. Formerly barely younger than me now, with a background as a journalist, and unusual years of rubbing shoulders with poets like Miron, Gauvreau and the gang of Overall refusal, she knew how to face headwinds. Deep down, it is perhaps this vital, daring and unrestrained force that I wanted to draw from her beautiful blue eyes. The chaos of today’s world troubles me. I’m looking for answers everywhere, some form of support. Often, I find them in books, but even more among those who wrote them. While they are still there, wiser because they are getting older, but still lucid to start me on good paths, I might as well take advantage of it to learn from their experience, from everything that emerges in a casual conversation around A tea. Sometimes Denise wants to buy me tequila. But I still have my kids to pick up at the end of class… I might as well remain a sober and wise fairy, quenching my thirst with the most inspiring things her world gives me to see.
I like it when we sit at the wooden table in the middle of her living room, the one where there is still a mark from when she smoked. Surrounded by memories of countries she has visited, we get carried away. On a wall between two windows sits this huge poster by the Venetian painter Canaletto, famous for his panoramas of Venice. “Making a dream come true is like breaking the sound barrier. We remain speechless,” wrote Denise, about the city of the Doge’s Palace, in her Letters from Italy, a book from 1987 that is now unobtainable, but which she gave me as a gift. We are crazy about Italy. I love the little Sony device with which she listens to the world’s news every day. Between shows, she always writes in a notebook. Verses, thoughts, lists, things not to forget… I like when she talks to me about her recent readings, like The Kremlin Mage by Giuliano da Empoli. I love when her lover, André, comes to greet me. There is nothing more moving than the complicity of old lovers. I like when she tells me the story of her songs written for Gerry Boulet. If the silence cracks to cut winter in two, you’ve done everything for that… In my anger, I sometimes move from “you” to “you”, I get mixed up and I hesitate. I know she’s not young anymore, but sometimes, often even, I forget the year of her birth… Momentarily, she becomes a friend my age to whom I’m about to throw a dirty joke. Oops.
Before I left her the last time, she gave me The demon of theory. Literature and common sense by Antoine Compagnon and How to live ? A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell. Doesn’t she know that her stories, her presence alone, are enough for me as a shield against the times? Fortunately, there is no age limit for new friendships.