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The Devil’s Paintbrush
The Devil’s Paintbrush
a novel
André Brochu
Translated by Alison Newall
English Translation Copyright © Dundurn Press and Alison Newall, 2003
This work was first published in French by XYZ éditeur, Montréal, in 1996, under the title Les Épervières Copyright © XYZ éditeur and André Brochu, 1996.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Copy-editor: Jennifer Bergeron
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Brochu, André, 1942-
[Épervières. English]
The devil’s paintbrush / André Brochu ; translated by Alison Newall.
Translation of: Les épervières.
ISBN 1-55002-396-9
I. Newall, Alison II. Title. III. Title: Épervières. English.
PS8503.R615E6413 2002 C843’.54 C2002-902133-2 PQ3919.2.B73E7413 2002
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Cover Painting: Gustav Klimt, L’arbre de vie, v. 1905–1909
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1
Each house is an enigma, sheltering its own impenetrable share of the unknown. It is often an aroma, something about the shadows, the rumour of voices and laughter, songs and shrieks, the rustling of myriad lives. These things, and a thousand other bits of trivia, give each inhabited space its uniqueness. The roofs are imposing or discreet, essentially black with asphalt or tar, but retaining a hint of blue, red, green, or gray. They top masses of brick or wood pierced by windows that open dimly onto pallid interiors, forming watertight containers of life for a few people, sometimes for one, under a tranquil canopy of old trees.
In the houses live beings who are sheltered and free, who attend industriously to the small chores that mark the passing of existence. For it is elsewhere — in offices and factories — that they earn the right to subsist and be happy. Houses are there for the time they have left over, and for pleasure. There, they cook, wash dishes, make love, and raise a few candidates for the future who will, in turn, found their own homes. Houses beget houses, further sanctuaries dedicated to hallowed domestic life, or to selfishness, or to cultivating a couple’s delights and hatreds. Houses are nice. They’re tidy, redolent of well-tended property. We live and die in houses, there await the passage of time, limpid and eternal. If time stopped passing, stopped short, matter itself would vanish, leaving no trace in memory.
But in some houses — very rare — time stagnates. These are the dwellings of unfettered poverty. They do not elicit sympathetic attention, but simultaneously whet and repel the curiosity of passersby. Dilapidation. Filth. Usually, large families buzz about them, and sometimes they turn pretty spots, adorned with trees and water, into dumps. The Tourangeau house is like that. Blue, enormous, and hunched, it rises up halfway down the slope between the road and the water.
The river. At the foot of the lot, its current rises in a vast movement that, a little further along, turns back on itself, forming a large eddy. Lucie Tourangeau is quite proud of this whirlpool. She has nothing, yet the blessing of this reversing current is hers. Across the river, on Île Jésus, she glimpses mansions hidden in the greenery, lawns rushing down to the lapping rapids, and tells herself that, over there, the water flows in the orthodox direction, from southwest to northwest. The rich people across the way might envy her current.
There is also the drop-off, twenty-five metres deep, just off shore. It is deep enough to hold several houses piled atop each other. When she swims, Lucie Tourangeau pauses, upright, just above the abyss, and listens from within her own depths to the silence below. She communes through flesh and blood with the stony river bottom, urinates languorously into the dark water, and is fulfilled.
There is this bounty, and the public’s bounty: Lucie Tourangeau is a well-cared-for pauper. Swimming against the currents of fashion and comfort, she has no trouble feeding and clothing her nine children, endowing them an old-fashioned look in modern times, a distinguished air, overflowing with health — and great drive, too. They have a way of venturing freely out into peaceful territory, of confounding decorum. In spite of the public’s solicitude, the Tourangeaus are a feared tribe. Nice, of course! Well spoken — speech marred by carelessness, yet sprinkled with rare expressions springing up about the edges, manners that abruptly reveal indications of a proper upbringing — and then an utter, profound, spontaneous, incurable lack of distinction, inherited from their mother: La Lucie, whose name alone can make her peaceful neighbours sigh.
Sigh — that gangling beanpole, Dutch on her father’s side, Mohawk on her mother’s, that monument of pregnancies whose ideas are enough to make you laugh and grind your teeth, such a fright in her big rumpled dresses!
She lives with her string of boys and girls in a two-dwelling house by the water. The house must have been charming, once, beneath its fifty-year-old ash trees. No more. Among them, the ten occupants quickly transformed it to suit themselves. Three years ago, they acquired this unhoped-for lodging following a joint intervention by the mayor and the parish priest, and marked the event with various gestures of appropriation that have left spectacular traces. The front yard particularly is choked with debris of all types and sizes: unhinged bedroom doors, scattered shutters, old windows whose panes were shattered by the violent child, Fernand, and which have now been replaced by plywood. Not to mention the harvest of imported booty — tires, hubcaps,