Lots of hairs were sticking out of his ears as well as his nose. No doubt it was to create a happy balance between his bushy eyebrows in his little advantaged face. He seemed to be dressed for eternity in a more completely white shirt and a gray synthetic fiber suit. And even with all the goodwill in the world, it was difficult to agree on a time when, in human history, such clothing could have been considered fashionable.
We were just children. Every day, we watched him go down or up the long hill of the village. He was riding an old upright bicycle, all black. The bike groaned with every pedal stroke. The chain, the crankset, the wheels: everything seemed to ask for mercy. The rhythmic squeaks warned us of his arrival. We could thus announce in advance that he was going to the factory or that he was coming back.
Then, I had aged. Enough in any case to end up seeing this man differently. For a while, I was told, he had ventured to court a village woman. He was going to bring her big bouquets of gladioli, columbines, irises, forget-me-nots. He cultivated many flowers, with infinite care. But her flowery declarations were useless. Eventually he must have told himself that no one liked flowers.
In summer, he ran across the fields, a butterfly net stretched at arm’s length. The passion for butterflies pulled him out of his prison. He owned hundreds of them, mounted with long, thin-headed pins, placed under glass, in large frames. He exchanged them with collectors all over the world, maintaining a lepidopterist correspondence with them. Had he traded some with Nabokov one day? It is not impossible. He also often came back from the fields with his arms weighted with succulents. He slipped the sheets into large notebooks. He botanized, as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Emily Dickinson. He, however, could never have believed that one day his name would be known, read, heard.
His name was Gerard. Gerard Pageau. When, to his correspondents, he wrote in English, he signed Gerry Post instead. This assumed name amused him. He abused it. Gerry Post was the wink he had found to signify to the whole world another of his passions: postage stamps. In philately, he had a specialty, a reputation: small queens. Many stamps bearing the image of the queen had been printed with a wide variety of inks, depending on availability at the time. Gerry had made himself the expert on their classification. At the time when the greats of this world, all related by the left thigh or the toes, remained seated on their respective thrones, “exerting around them the ancient tyranny”, as Lytton Strachey writes in his biography of Queen Victoria, there were already people to collect these cameos, all assured that they would last for eternity, that the place of this royalty could never be questioned.
Can we imagine that a minister like George Marler, who became interim leader of the Liberal Party in Quebec, devoted his spare time to writing an entire book where he analyzes the different variations on the Canadian postage stamps of King George V , dressed in an admiral’s uniform, and issued from 1911 to 1925? All of this belongs to a bygone past, when confidence in the State was confidently transferred to these little rectangles of paper illustrating, in the middle of the colony, the quiet permanence of the monarchy, in the feigned illusion of a consensus at his subject.
Gerard had obtained from the bosses of the factory who employed him the permission to proceed himself, each week, to the purchase of the stamps necessary to frank the mail of the company. This allowed him, at the village post office, to track down, among the new stamp issues, any anomalies likely to transform these scraps of paper into even more interesting objects to collect. What did he get out of it from a financial point of view? Usually less than nothing.
However, one day he came across some sheets of Her Majesty’s stamps, the faulty serrations of which made for him a crown of a new kind. The punctures cut through his neck, as if in symbolic decapitation. Someone in Toronto had bought that lot from him. With the money he made, he swapped his old bicycle for a car. He kept it for a long time, until it ended up making noises of the same type as his old bicycle on the high hillside of the village.
Gerry Post died prematurely. As a legacy, he left a number of butterflies which flew into the consciousness of his village, in the midst of those great meadows lined with oblivion on which the peoples for too long conquered by the sole desire to continue their ordinary feed.
Shortly after her death, at the local post office, the oil portrait of Queen Elizabeth that sat there was replaced by advertisements for new stamp issues. Yet my grandfather maintained that it was still there, even though in its place was now a stamped representation of the Canadian flag. From the passage of the queen to the flag, my grandfather had perhaps only seen the continuity of the same heritage. And so he was right against my eye.
“You took the trouble to be born, and nothing more”, wrote Beaumarchais to criticize those who crush everything around them with their own mass, in the sole name of their lineage. Aside from jesters accustomed to serving all types of kings here below, who would dare seriously claim that the greatness of a more egalitarian social project would only serve, in the end, to establish a race to the bottom?