On a “dark February morning” 1970, they set sail and never fully returned. She, “the perfect little one who recites poems at family celebrations”, part, she had written to her parents, “to make the difference between good and evil”, is going to celebrate her 16th birthday.e birthday on the road. Hosted by friends with her seventeen-year-old runaway companion, in the annex of an old inn in Gaspé.
A month of freedom, before being caught by the police, put in a cell in the prison opposite. Upon return, the real violence of indiscreet questions and the parental inquisition. But the way is now mapped out. “I was born twice in February: once from my mother and once to freedom. “
Despite the love, both will have taken different paths, lived their lives without each other. The state of our roads take the measure of this distance and their reunion. “I tell this, writes Johanne Fournier in this second autobiographical story, to take place in geography, to be part of something, of time, of centuries, to be a good material in the jolt of the tides. “
Twenty-five years later, after having surveyed other cities and other paths, she returned to settle in the very place she had wished to flee with all her might at the age of sixteen, when he did not. had never left, walking its streets for years delivering mail. Speaking to him, the first lover and former runaway companion, she measures the distance they have traveled without each other: “You knew everyone, I didn’t know anyone anymore. “
Documentary filmmaker from Matane (Montagnais de parole, Cabins, The time taken by the boats), Johanne Fournier, born in 1954, turned this long-lasting love story into a brief and melancholy book where, as in Everything must go (Leméac, 2017), in which she evoked the death of her father, she spent I to you.
But this “strange couple”, sharing the same address often living in separate houses (“I like not being too often with you so as not to wash away love”), was able to regain its marks and find its rhythm of cruise. As if the fugue continued.