Oscar Read online

  Biblioasis International Translation Series

  General Editor: Stephen Henighan

  1. I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)

  Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

  2. Good Morning Comrades

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  3. Kahn & Engelmann

  by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

  Translated by Jean M. Snook

  4. Dance with Snakes

  by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  (El Salvador)

  Translated by Lee Paula Springer

  5. Black Alley

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

  6. The Accident

  by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  7. Love Poems

  by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

  Translated by Colin Carberry

  8. The End of the Story

  by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

  Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

  9. The Tuner of Silences

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  10. For as Far as the Eye Can See

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Judith Cowan

  11. Eucalyptus

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  12. Granma Nineteen

  and the Soviet’s Secret

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  13. Montreal Before Spring

  by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald McGrath

  14. Pensativities: Essays

  and Provocations

  by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

  Translated by David Brookshaw

  15. Arvida

  by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  16. The Orange Grove

  by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

  Translated by Sheila Fischman

  17. The Party Wall

  by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

  Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

  18. Black Bread

  by Emili Teixidor (Catalonia)

  Translated by Peter Bush

  19. Boundary

  by Andrée A. Michaud (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  20. Red, Yellow, Green

  by Alejandro Saravia (Bolivia-Canada)

  Translated by María José Giménez

  21. Bookshops: A Reader’s History

  by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

  Translated by Peter Bush

  22. Transparent City

  by Ondjaki (Angola)

  Translated by Stephen Henighan

  23. Oscar

  by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

  Translated by Donald Winkler

  OSCAR

  MAURICIO

  Segura

  TRANSLATED

  FROM THE FRENCH

  BY DONALD WINKLER

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Mauricio Segura, 2016

  Translation Copyright © Donald Winkler, 2018

  First published in 2016 by Les Éditions du Boréal, Montreal, Quebec.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  For the poem cited on page 140, see Derek Walcott, “Love After Love,” Collected Poems, 1948-1984, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986, p. 328.

  first edition

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Segura, Mauricio, 1969-

  [Oscar. English]

  Oscar / Mauricio Segura ; [translated by] Donald Winkler.

  (Biblioasis international translation series ; 23)

  Translation of: Oscar.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-225-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-226-1 (ebook)

  I. Winkler, Donald, translator II. Title. III. Title: Oscar. English

  V. Series: Biblioasis international translation series ; 23

  PS8587.E384O8213 2018 C843’.54 C2017-907311-7

  C2017-907312-5

  Edited by Stephen Henighan and Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Jessica Faulds

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation. Biblioasis also acknowledges the financial support of the ­Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  For Thomas

  1

  Just before meeting the devil in person, that fateful morning with its ashen sky, Oscar was gazing down at his reflection in the canal’s oily waters with the firm intention of putting an end to his days. There were two or three people—at a factory window, on the footbridge over a lock, atop the church steeple next to his parents’ house—who might have recognized from afar his imposing silhouette through the layers of stagnant fog that strangely, that day, no wind had come to disturb. Most of the inhabitants of Little Burgundy knew that in recent months, O.P., as everyone affectionately called him, had been in a bad way, as there’d been little sign of him in the jazz bars. Some said that he’d been trying to forget himself by working as a docker in the port, others that he was wandering about like a lost soul. But no one suspected that his despair ran so deep. So much so that when the news got around that he’d tried to take his own life, his pockets full of stones, and had been saved in extremis by a mysterious stranger, everyone was taken unawares, because up to that point his virtuosity at the keyboard had seemed proof positive of his character’s innate buoyancy. Had not his boogie-woogies cheered up terminally ill patients? Had not his ballads softened the hearts of many girls being wooed by young men who were at a loss for seductive guile?

  Speculation surrounding his suicide attempt soon grew to the point where it assumed the fantastical and disquieting guise of tavern banter. His admirers cited an instance, imagined from beginning to end, of malicious gossip being circulated by those who were jealous of him. His detractors, for their part, speculated on the causes for the affliction that was weighing him down. Was he having trouble with his young wife? With his father? The owner of the Twilight Station Bar, where he regularly performed? Had he forgotten that after the twelfth stroke of midnight you had to take the shortest route home if you didn’t want the spirits to make you f
orget where you lived? Had he met a solitary crow perched on one of the three scrawny maples still left standing near the canal? Others wondered aloud what was in his mind as, despondent, he walked the length of the canal’s polluted waters. Had he, as it had been known to happen, seen his life pass before him in a flash?

  But no! cried old Jackson, who since the beginning of time had been rocking herself back and forth in front of her humble abode, her face tilted to the sun as if the trade wind itself were at play in her dry, witchy hair. That’s not the way we do things! We don’t look to the past when we’re about to give up the ghost; what we conjure in our heads is a paradise where we’re going to put down stakes, with a beach, coconut trees, a horizon that goes on and on, and—bloodseed!—enough rum to last, God help us, for all eternity! But no one’s perfect, and on this particular occasion everything would suggest that old Jackson was wrong, since if you can take Oscar at his word, there was a wrathful gale that rose up in his mind on that day, to sweep away telephone poles as if they were matchsticks, to rip up newly paved roads, to send flying through the air the factory CEOs’ state-of-the-art streamlined automobiles, and to hurl O.P. himself back several decades, to his father’s first days in Montreal.

  It was already the age of steel. The quilts of melon and turnip fields were no more than a glowing memory in the minds of the neighbourhood’s elders. Like a deep seam, the canal had been dug for some time, while the two rail lines, like zippers, marked off the neighbourhood to the north and the south. Dozens of factories lined the streets, their chimneys exhaling, without ever pausing for breath, smoke of all conceivable shades of grey. That smoke coated the trees with soot from head to foot and darkened the windows of the trams passing by, first hauled by horses, then powered by the hidden magic of electricity; it perturbed the passengers with their noses pressed to the windows and masked the tired faces of the workers who, with their checkered caps and their lunch tucked under their arms, stepped resignedly over the thresholds ushering them into confines where the piston held sway. For some, this gloom was the price to pay for everyone being able to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow; for others, those factories were leading humanity to its ruin. It was in this climate of hope tinged with apocalyptic apprehension that the first members of the community arrived on the scene.

  Oscar never needed much coaxing to talk about that period in his father’s life. The fact is that as soon as Josué learned that he’d landed in a city that was also an island, he decided to make it his home, for certainly among islanders they’d be surrounded by soul mates. In the very first week, since he had a passion for stars, he tried his luck as professor of astronomy at the university, even though he’d never completed his fourth year of schooling. It appears that on the high seas, when he was leading the harsh life of a seaman, and while after dark his companions vied with each other as to who could get drunk the fastest, he played the organ—an old portable set into mahogany—or scanned the heavens with the help of a telescope. He’d come across those objects, both replete with an instruction manual, as he wandered the boat’s hold one night, while the ship’s freebooter captain snored away, an empty bottle of rum clutched to his breast. While the others partied on the bridge, he practised his scales and arpeggios on the forecastle in the open air; then, as his companions were dropping like flies, having spewed out their innards, he studied the celestial bodies, one eye to the telescope’s eyepiece, like a child peering through a keyhole.

  Josué wanted to know music well enough to learn by ear the airs he’d grown up with, airs that beguiled some of the sailors to the point of luring them into the arms of nostalgia, and then those of Morpheus. As for astronomy, despite the constant roiling of the seas that shunted the telescope from left to right, from right to left, he made great progress in his first observations: within a few weeks, the moon, the sun, the stars, and the principal constellations became for him familiar stopping places, just like a grocery store or a bakery for any other mortal. Yet it was the Milky Way that enthralled him; recalling a passage in his astronomy manual that dealt with the Andromeda Galaxy and its spiral shape, he saw, after skilful calculations, and thanks in part to the salt sea odour, that our galaxy too is intriguingly womb-like, its libidinous curves in constant flux, and that is why, to make things clear, he baptised it the Way of Desire.

  And so, a few days after his arrival in the city where the great O.P. was to be born, Josué visited, one by one, all its universities. Wearing a brand new pale-grey suit—he had sunk all their savings into it, to the despair of Davina, his wife—with a yellow hibiscus from his native island, miraculously conserved, in his button hole, he braved the precincts of those venerable institutions, introducing himself in a resonant voice as the most reliable authority on the Way of Desire, given his revolutionary discovery and his seven-thousand-three-hundred-and-fifty-four hours of direct observation. As soon as his voice began to echo through the entrance halls, security guards materialized without fail from who knows where and barred his way. Sometimes, even, his evictors—who certainly knew nothing of the call of the stars—took him by the arms and, with Josué’s feet pedalling in the void a metre off the ground, escorted him to the exit and sent him tumbling down the stairs like a ball of wool. As he got to his feet and brushed himself off, trying as he might to make sense of it all, he couldn’t understand why he, a light unto the peoples, who had withstood so many winds and storms all for the good of humanity, was being treated in such a way. Never, even in his few disconsolate moments, would he have imagined deserving such a rebuff.

  After this setback, when he was offered, like other West Indians, a job as porter with the Canadian National Railways, he accepted, but with a plan in mind. He left on Sunday nights—with under his arm a dish prepared by his wife, into which she took care to deposit a large red pepper to ward off the evil spirits which, everyone knows, circulate freely on overnight trains—crossed the country from east to west, catering to the comfort of the passengers, then took the same route back in the opposite direction. During the four hours the porters were allotted for sleep, he hoisted himself onto the railcar’s roof along with his portable telescope and, ringed round by the prairies’ purple sky, despite the lurchings of the train, gave himself over heart and soul to his grapplings with the mysteries of the universe that were complicating his life. Despite his miserable salary and the harsh treatment he received from his superiors, he’d found a way to follow his dream. When Josué arrived back home, Davina asked him why he seemed so bone-tired, but his only reply was to say I’ll tell you one day, while turning his back to drift off, muttering a few mathematical formulas, his forehead still glued to a telescope which itself, no doubt, was in need of recuperation.

  It was about this same time that Brad, O.P.’s pint-sized older brother, began to play technically perfect scales on his father’s portable organ, even though no one had given him any lessons. After a few weeks he became bored with the instrument’s two octaves, and his fingers began to work away at the empty air to the left and right of the keyboard, producing very high and very low notes that only he could hear. Fate’s own fickle finger then awarded him what most in the world he dreamed might come to pass: a francophone neighbour, moved by the child’s passion for music, sold them for a pittance an old piano on which her late husband used to tinkle away Sunday afternoons. From then on Brad played without stopping, bewitched by the instrument: in the morning after breakfast; in his school’s music room; at night, after doing his homework, drawing crowds to the stone staircase outside their house, where young people danced in the summer and jumped up and down and blew on their hands in winter, enthralled by those swelling notes that evoked dance floors swept by gowns with beaded hems. Sundays, he sat at the church organ and with his rendering of the gospels had hot tears, unstoppable, coursing down the cheeks of the faithful. He practised his scales to such a late hour that his parents ordered his older sister, Prudence, to force him into bed.

  Oscar’s b
irth was greeted with about as much enthusiasm as the knife-grinder’s sporadic appearances, because in the midst of life’s mundane tasks there was not much time left for outpourings of emotion. He was born, one might say, without fanfare, though not entirely, because the trumpet salvaged from a pile of refuse in the park, which had long sat on the upright in the living room because no family member wanted to play it, was thrust into his hands once he’d turned his back on the piano. For him the piano was Brad’s alone.

  After Oscar spent two days trying to get a sound out of the horn, the novelty wore off, and it was restored to its former spot, and its patina of dust. Had you followed him through the byways of the neighbourhood, it would have been hard to imagine that deep down in Oscar there was hidden a great artist. He swept past the neighbours—old men in rocking chairs, drunkards in heated dialogue with their demons, vegetable hawkers with nasal voices, paranoid bookmakers, sun-struck banjo players, and, above all, crowds and crowds of children—a horseshoe in his hand, or perhaps a comics page ripped from a newspaper stolen from a delivery boy. Never mind if his parents urged him to spend more time on his homework, he always managed to slip away to the street, his true kingdom. There everyone knew him, and he knew everyone, to the point where, decades later, it surprised no one that the neighbourhood’s hustle and bustle inspired some of his most beautiful compositions.

  Friday night, in summer, a kite rose into the sky, gaily swaying, as if to thumb its nose at the law of gravity. From behind a wooden fence that was threatening to collapse, O.P. appeared and disappeared, taller and chubbier than the other children. Fascinated, he followed with his eyes the ripplings of the kite’s sail, its cheeky wiggling, its suicidal dives, until he heard a plaintive whistle tearing through the night, eclipsing both the ambient noise and his own good humour. His singling out of the train’s wail, alike in pitch to what he’d been able to coax from the trumpet, is a first indication that there was indeed a musician lurking somewhere inside him. It was this keening that warned him of his father’s imminent return. While the iron monster burrowed through the darkness, sucking up everything in its path and transforming it as it went into a din interrupted by loud sighs, O.P., before moving on, handed the kite-steering stick to his neighbour, and it was not rare to see it slip from his friend’s grip and drift off slowly into the night’s vastness, like a man falling backwards over a precipice.