The car, the motel, the cinema, a wedding
January 1, 1987 – April 27, 2017
Mélanie :
I was driving avidly. Choosing the night the desert to thus expose myself to the violence of the moment which propels consciousness. I was fifteen and before me space, space far off tapering me down like a civilization in reverse, city lost in the trembling air. In my mother’s Meteor I was exemplary solitude with, at the tip of my toes, a brake to avoid all disasters and to remind me of the insignificance of despair amid snakes and cacti in the bluest night of all ravings.
Simon, 7 mars 2016
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m thinking it was just the word “Meteor” that you liked – that out of all the cars around you, you chose this one because you liked its name. I only say this because at first glance, this car doesn’t match your description of the speed and performance of the race car that Mélanie drives. The car – just like science, for that matter – interests you more as a concept or a symbol than as a subject. Besides, in Mauve Desert, when Lorna’s “hands found their way among the pistons, cylinders and greasy cables,” it’s clear that you know nothing about mechanics (it’s impossible to make your way between pistons and cylinders – not without dismantling the engine head, anyway). That isn’t so important. You have nonetheless contributed, alongside other writers, to elevating the Mercury Meteor to the rank of literary vehicles. In Québec, at least. The first mention of this car was probably by Jacques Geoffroy who, in his own book La catoche orange, published by Parti pris in 1970, speaks of it eloquently.
Pierre-Paul Geoffroy, Jacques’ brother, a member of the FLQ and known as such well before the October Crisis, had been arrested in March 1969 for successfully detonating a bomb at the Montréal Exchange on February 13 of the same year. He was condemned to 124 life sentences, getting off after only twelve years. His brother Jacques had never participated in these kinds of plots against the Commonwealth – Jacques was a poet activist – but his friend Pierre Harel made nothing short of a run for it from the first news of arbitrary arrests. He had good reason to do it, since the police paid a visit to his house and roughed up a poet who was staying there in his absence. An unfortunate case of mistaken identity: it was indeed Harel that they were targeting, as he was friends with Jacques, himself the brother of an FLQ member. Harel slipped between the cracks, but Jacques was not so lucky, and on November 5, 1970, he was accused of being a “member of an unlawful association.” Like a good number of poets of that era, he would be imprisoned while waiting for a trial that would never come. The War Measures Act remained in effect for sixty-six days. Enough to make Jacques dream of liberty. A topic that is raised in his only book, although the twenty-seven poems it contains were written several weeks before the Crisis. Although many of them critique the poet’s contemporary society – such as the poem entitled “Une famille unie est une famille qui boit du Papsie” – the one that I found most charming is a dream of escape and love. “Ma raison de vivre: Rita mon petit lapin en nanane” starts like this:
I have a 1963 Meteor for you
vast like my dreams
fiery like my passion
superb like the pride of the greats of this world
shining like the afternoon sun at lunchtime
burning like three dozen ‘lil weston breads
for you my dear my only reason for living
wa-ta-ta-tow
I wonder whether you knew the characters in this story. Well, for me, they’re characters. For you, they’re probably memories … whatever they are, when Claire Côté, humanities professor at CEGEP Lévis-Lauzon, dropped this poem into my hands – I was a student, I was maybe eighteen years old – I did not yet know the name Nicole Brossard, and I had no idea what a Mercury Meteor looked like. But even then, the name alone suggested the possibility of speed, leaving a trail of luminescent dust behind you.
Later, the Meteor resurfaced in my life with your Mélanie on board, the one from Mauve Desert. Mélanie is young, on the cusp of adulthood. She pushes hard on the gas, “wild with the damned energy of [her] fifteen years,” she “[leans] into [her] thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light.” For a long time, she stayed with me, and the questioning look she cast upon reality stays with me. Other than Mélanie, objects with well-defined outlines, with decided function, concrete and material objects serve as a vector for these questions that concern both adolescence and poetry: the revolver, the television set, the dancefloor and, of course, the automobile. A Mercury Meteor that I would find in the works of another writer, the novelist Deni Y. Béchard, whom I met at the Salon du livre de Montréal some time ago. I was reading his first novel Cures for Hunger published by Alto. It talks about his relationship with his father and his fascination with his troubled past as a bank robber. On the title page, we see the latter in his early twenties, leaning against the hood of a gorgeous convertible against a backdrop of mountains that could be in British Columbia. I asked the author what model the car was, and he replied that it was a Mercury Meteor. I objected:
“No, it can’t be a Meteor. It just so happens that I have one and it doesn’t look like that.”
“Well,” he replied, “since the book was published, many people have confirmed that it was indeed a Meteor. I even have testimonials: someone’s father had one, someone’s brother had one. Everyone says it’s a Meteor.”
I acquiesced, but I was not convinced. Subsequent research confirmed that it was a Meteor 1961. Mine is two years younger. However, in 1962, the car was redesigned. It pains me to say that the ’61 model is way cooler. Especially with a bank robber posing in front of it.
I wrote poems about the Meteor, three years before I even got one. Naturally, it was Mélanie that steered me towards the car. In fact, this character is the real subject of a book that bears her name and that was published in 2013 by L’Hexagone. I wrote this book in Mexico, where I picked up seven copies of El desierto malva, the Mexican translation of Mauve Desert. I got a group of women together to read the novel and to do some writing exercises. Out of the seven, two accepted the task, but they all kept the novel that I lent them. I promised you I’d bring you back at least one copy; I failed. However, the efforts were not in vain: Lyliana Chavez and Mariela Oliva agreed to immerse themselves in the universe of Mauve Desert. Their texts, freely translated by myself, are found in Mélanie, my book of poetry that some have described as a bastard novel and others as a UFO – in both cases, the descriptions give me great pleasure. As such, I made my mark on the Mercury Meteor’s literary legacy. After Jacques Geoffroy, you, and Deni Y. Béchard, I added a few lines to it.
But who remembers the Meteor? It’s not included in the Automobile Pantheon alongside the Pontiac Parisienne, Chevrolet Impala, Dodge Charger, Ford Thunderbird (which Susan Sarandon drives with Geena Davis in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise). And I am convinced that it has not had the same impact on the imagination of American writers. And for good reason – the Meteor barely existed in the United States. While over there, it was only manufactured between 1961 and 1963. Ford had already commercialized it in Canada beginning in 1949. In 1960, the name Meteor became Mercury and remained as such until 1976.
Mercury is the entry-level subsidiary of Ford Motors. A digression: isn’t it interesting to see that while the mother brand has a man’s name, its cheaper subsidiary is named after an ancient Roman deity? Pride and prejudice? Just a thought.
If there are two things I’ve learned behind the wheel of a 1963 marine blue Mercury Meteor assembled in Oakville, Ontario, they are:
1) In the 60s and 70s, this model was widespread across Canada. In fact, it had been created specifically for this market. It was presented as a quintessentially Canadian car. To support this affirmation, different models of the Meteor were given names that have reverberated in the collective imagination: Rideau, Niagara, Montcalm.
2) It drives like an old pickup. Under the hood, of course, I have a V8, but it’s the smallest one Ford made – that is to say, 260 cubic inches. The transmission is manual, three-speed. The first serves to kick the heavy iron mass out of inertia, the second gives it the necessary momentum to shift into third gear, and the last is for rolling at comfortable speeds between 50 and 100 km/h. Yet, if Mélanie is driving at high speeds in the desert in a Meteor, that could mean that she is either driving at 110 km/h in my model (at over 100, I essentially feel like I’m putting my life at risk, especially since I don’t have seatbelts in my car) or that she is driving another model. It’s true that there were Meteor “sports” models with a beefier cylinder capacity. This is the case with the Montcalm S33, for example. These models are nevertheless pretty rare. I mean, why buy a high-end Mercury when you can get the Ford Galaxy 500 literally from the same dealer? Even my little V8 is pretty rare: it’s the six-cylinder model that was sold the most. I base these statements on my various encounters: at gas stations, red lights, parking lots, everywhere – people ask me “What year is it from?”, and that often leads to anecdotes – “My brother-in-law had one, but in burgundy” – then they ask “Is it a straight-six? My brother had a straight-six …,” etc. Almost all the father, uncle, grandparent Meteor owners that talked to me had a 170 cubic inch inline-six engine under the hood, the engine offered with the base model.
In any case, the Meteor Montcalm S33 simply did not exist in the United States. In its place, the Monterrey could hide a huge cylinder displacement under its iron dress.
Finally, the reason I’m telling you this – all this anecdotal and technical information – is because, in fact, I want to get closer to Mélanie or, better yet, bring her closer to me. That is to say, that this translation that we want to facilitate from literary language to cinematic language and then towards theatrical language is also a transposition in time. Mélanie is from a world stuck at the tail end of the Cold War, where the spectre of the nuclear menace always lingered. In her world – that belongs to a fictionalized past – the Meteor is an old jalopy, not a collector’s automobile. No one stops Mélanie to ask her about the year of the model or the size of the motor. No one notices her car. She drives, anonymously and quickly, slicing through the desert like a hot knife in butter.
Mélanie drives an invisible old piece of junk. The modern equivalent could maybe be the Mercury Topaz. My mother had a Ford Tempo 1989. White with burgundy interior. For me, it was certainly the most anonymous car made in the last quarter century. Its design is entirely devoid of personality. Having said that, I don’t discredit the person who designed it, as the wind decided the Ford Tempo’s contours. In 450 hours of aerodynamic testing, the course of its lines were modified more than 900 times. Although from an engineering perspective it’s a revolutionary car, from the aesthetic standpoint – and in saying this, I am fully conscious of my subjectivity – it is certainly one of the ugliest cars in the history of the automobile industry. To preserve a link with the Meteor, then, I propose the Tempo’s twin: the Mercury Topaz. Essentially, from the early 80s on, Ford no longer made any effort to distinguish Fords from Mercurys. As such, the Thunderbird is identical to the Cougar, the Taurus is the same as the Sable, Tempo and Topaz are perfectly interchangeable. The only distinction: the symbol in the centre of the grille, as well as the grille itself.
So that solves the problem of the car’s anonymity. But, as the American automobile myth has diminished along with the size of the automobiles, the Topaz is completely emasculated. We must find another analogy for machismo. In fact, hats off to you: in Mauve Desert, you distilled the underlying and constant menace so well without explicitly saying that it’s nestled within and found in all objects, in the relationship between objects, the relationship between people and objects. The confusion between the end of the world, patriarchy and everyday life is perfect. This forms a continuum against which you oppose an anthology of strong women coming to restore equilibrium to the world, at least in fiction.
Today, few Mercury Topaz remain. If we consider the fact that it has not been produced for over twenty years, that’s probably to be expected. I said that I wanted to bring Mélanie closer to me, but I don’t think that it’s possible, or even desirable, to bring her towards us. I mean, here and now. It’s good to maintain a healthy distance from our fiction, to organize this space from which we can inject our own point of view. I can turn around and look back at the end of the 80s while maintaining a link with my positioning, but I can’t go back as far as the 60s. Placing myself back in this era puts me in a different relationship with the past – a historical past – a relationship that I should document, project myself into as one does into fiction. On the other hand, Mélanie belongs resolutely to the 20th century, and it’s certain that things fade gradually into this new millennium. Family motels are definitely part of this.
Finally, if I cast doubt on the possibility of racing against death in a Mercury Meteor, I have to highlight that in a Ford Tempo equipped with a three-speed automatic transmission, I achieved a respectable speed of 180 km/h on the 4e Rang between Honfleur and Saint-Lazare de Bellechasse. That was in 1992, and I’m not dead.
Nicole, March 30-31, 2016:
One rightly associates the car with movement, freedom, speed, danger, excess, death.
The car is an undeniably North American symbol, it travels great expanses, often to the west or the south. The sun bathes the space, one rarely imagines an old guy at the wheel. The car is everywhere in our cinematographic images and our daily lives. In Europe, it would be the train.
Why did I choose the car, symbol par excellence of masculinity, to say nothing of virility?
Because the car is also the dream, melancholy (Rebel Without a Cause), adventure, the possibility of elsewhere (Thelma & Louise). At that time, I think I even dreamed about a bridge linking America and Europe, so that I could easily visit a desired woman. The car allows one to wander in thought. I’m thinking of the works of France Mongeau for example.
It is true that the car is a mythical object maintained as such for economic and commercial reasons, but it is also a mark of the values of the times. Some years they are beautiful, refined, elegant; other years, they are menacing like a tank, intimidating like a dictator. Five years ago, I began to appreciate cars for their form, and I confess that some of them evoked aesthetic pleasure in me.
Yes, it’s true that I chose the Meteor for its name that implies speed and adventure. It flies. An American-turned-Canadian writer, George Bowering, had written to me to tell me that the Meteor I was talking about had never really been American, that it had been sold mainly in Canada. This historical and realist fact did not affect me. Of course, the information could feed into the idea that it was a mistake, but it does not at all erode the symbolism of the Meteor: freedom, speed, excitement, danger. The same principle applies to the pistons, cylinders and oiled cables, that bespeak the manual labour inside the object, that are symbolic of innards and thoughts.
I like that you tell me the history of your connection with the Meteor and with your own, the gorgeous blue one. Moreover, our meeting in Québec, June 5, 2013, and the little drive we took in the blue Meteor behind the Musée national des beaux-arts are permanently etched into what I call my “fictional memory” – a memory that, I presume, will serve me all along our hybrid route through the Mauve Desert, and to which I will return even beyond that.
I could also talk about my relationship with the automobile. The automobile is a reality that comes to me, I am certain, through cinema.
I realize that Mauve Desert is all about one thing: freedom, an immense flight of freedom, of beauty defying boredom, mediocrity, corruption. But I must also say that this all rests on an ambiguity: the motel defined as inherently cheap. In general, it is linked to illicit, sexual, vulgar activities. The word “motel” does not make me think at all of families on vacation or old retired couples. That said, it always makes me think about solitude. A bit like the laundromats that, because of their neon-nocturnal lighting, are for me the epitome of solitude and abandonment.
Objects make us reflect on how much we invest in a word, the texture they create in our view of the state of the world. What in a word suddenly turns on the imagination, memory, desire? And why does it do this at this precise moment in collective and individual history? Why do certain words stand out in our conscience, offering us pleasure and fear simultaneously, while awakening a quest for meaning? Here, objects are described as more or less autonomous beings.
The motel and its network: lost on a back road. A sign, eye-catching neon. At its origin, the motel is a hotel for cars (motor hotel). Intended for drivers. To passers-by. By definition, the motel is temporary. One doesn’t stay there long. Yet Mélanie, her mother and others live there. Here, there is a temporal anomaly to explore.
Simon, April 27th, 2017
A long line, traced by the hand of humankind, cuts through the countryside. A straight line, denying the accidental countryside. In the desert, the route links two remote points. A distance that is not possible to cross in a single day. One has to stop. Sleep. Or benefit from the anonymity. Go to the bar, drink some alcohol, open your arms wider and wider to better welcome the unexpected – the accidental, really – which will make this day just slightly different from the last.
It is the age of the traveling salesperson. It is a cinematic memory. A past that will have never been. Not for us. It is on another scale, continental; another collective imagination, American; but close nonetheless, maybe because it intrudes on our own.
The motel and its network. In a space like l’Isle-aux-Coudres, it is immediately something else: close to a dozen motels are spread out along the single road surrounding the island, which can be circled in half-an-hour. The clientele varies, gladly family-oriented. The Red Arrow Motel and La Roche Pleureuse have something in common: they’re both from another era. An era where we dreamed of a society of leisure that we believed was possible. On the island, I noticed the ruins of a tennis court below some motel rooms with a view of the river. These motels have borne witness to a century that has just ended. They resist, while waiting for someone to toss a sole Hilton into the countryside.
Ready to pounce..
Nicole, March 30-31, 2016
The pool and its network: water, crashing, shrill voices, surprised screams, splash, scotch, pretty girls, handsome boys. A space for bodies, muscles, skin, breasts, abs. Bathing suits. The pool = danger also. Film: La piscine, Jacques Deray, 1969
The bar: a place for fleeting encounters, drinking alcohol. In the desert, the place is generally dark, protected from the heat and the light. The bar has always been associated with cigarettes, up until about ten years ago (the smoke, the fog, the blur). There is the urban bar and the roadside bar or the village bar.
The bar is a place of freedom where words fly away in the form of delirium, anger, tenderness, intimate conversation. The bar allows us to meet people that we never would have met in our daily lives. There, there is potential for unforeseeable cross-cultural exchanges. There, you meet strangers, the strange and the familiar with a touch of intrigue. A place to flirt. A place to be lonely.
Deep down, I may have written a book about danger and loneliness.
The cinema is everywhere in Mauve Desert, and it seems natural to me that you wanted to make it into a film, that you wanted to translate words into pictures. Now, in 2016, I would maybe like to translate the ephemeral or the permanent into meaning, objects, even beings. To explore the strong impression that there lies an enigma that grasps us wholly by the heart, by the throat, by the bulk to one day instill in us as a certainty, a shadowy extension of the being.
Simon, April 13, 2016:
Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon archival footage showing Fellini hard at work during the filming of Satyricon. It’s 1969. We see him directing the pool scene. There are a good hundred extras, maybe a dozen actors, the set is noisy. Waiting for the camera to roll, the extras – half naked and submerged to the waist in the pool – naturally converse and all these conversations inevitably form an impossible uproar. Used to large scenes, the master does not seem – at first, at least – bothered by the noise. He is focused, he directs: one who taps the bum of another using a flyswatter, to do it in such a way, another wringing the neck of a distinguished court lady to do it as if she were a chicken (he repeats this twice: “like a chicken”). He asks for a bit of quiet in the pool please, for everyone to stop moving and look at the camera. He says “let’s go,” then he explodes: “EVERYONE SHUT UP, DAMN IT!” and even louder: “STOP MOVING!”
He gets silence.
His gaze is firm, his face severe. “Action.” A loud buzz resonates across the stage, that’s the signal. He continues to give directions: “My dear, lower your head, a bit more, smile.” While saying this, his voice softens. His gaze too. As he commands her to smile, he gestures with two hands, on each side of his mouth, while opening the corners like a blossoming flower. Someone screams: “Rolling!” The master does not bat an eye, he directs: “Sing, Ligny,” “No moving in the pool!” “Roberto ….”
He never says “action.”
They’re rolling anyway.
As the scene comes to life in front of the camera, he keeps quiet, he lets things happen.
I think of this politics professor I had in CEGEP – I no longer remember his name – who, in the hallway in front of his classroom, had spoken to me about Fellini. It was the first time I had heard anyone talk about the celebrated Italian filmmaker. I must have been eighteen years old. The professor was complaining about modern cinema, too artificial according to him. In Fellini’s films, you eat, you burp, you fart, you live! “Like real life,” he told me. Yet, when I watch the “making of” Satyricon in black and white today, I see clearly that it is actually an impression of real life. That in fact, the film is based on – by humans, if I can say that – a worksite and that, while we don’t see the machines (in Italian, Fellini refers to the camera as “macchina”), it’s because their gaze is turned towards fiction.
And with them, we observe.
Soon, the frame of the screen no longer contains the fiction because our imagination – or our desire to believe that fiction is truer (or from another truth) than reality – completes the image beyond the edges. In the end, I mean that this video I happened to see yesterday on social media made me think of this professor whose face I remember very well, but whose name I can’t remember and that, in turn, this professor made me think of you because of this sentence that he might have said.
“Like real life,” these are also the words that you uttered at my wedding. We were reunited on the grounds of a motel on Isle-aux-Coudres. The ceremony had ended, the banquet too, drunkenness not only from alcohol, some people were picking at what was left of dessert, but most people had already started to dance. Had the sun already set? The moon was rising, full and round. I believe that we danced, yes, that’s it, we danced together to a Philippe Katerine song – Louxor, j’adore – and it was then, in that moment of poets clumsily swaying, that you said to me: “Like real life.”
It’s not the sentence that surprised me. I believe I understood what you meant to say, even though I recognize now as I write these lines that I never truly sought to understand the exact meaning that you gave it, preferring to leave it as an impression of understanding.
An impression … that’s definitely what it is, as the sentence remains imprinted in my memory and, even today, it only takes a video I saw on the internet to remind me of it.
Moreover – was it the same night or the next morning, another day or later – Fellini had been mentioned. Was it really you who brought him up? Our wedding would have had something “Felliniesque” about it. Indulgence maybe, but more certainly joyous improvising: someone had put together a wildflower bouquet for the bride (we hadn’t thought of that), another had brought firecrackers, they had roasted lambs on a spit suspended between a bike rack and a mile marker … I must say that I organized my wedding by myself and that, once the papers were signed, I let things go, I let go … and at the moment where the moon, full and round, came out from between the few clouds on that beautiful August evening, three young women jumped out from behind the groves and skipped around the bride and groom, holding firecrackers.
Nicole, April 26, 2016:
“Like real life.” The sentence remains perfectly mysterious for me. Did I mean to say that despite the river, the country – I am certain that it also played a role, at least for me, the Montréaler – the full moon, the motel, the bride’s mauve dress, that stage exit on bicycle that you took along the shore, the wedding and the evening were cinematic? And yet, even in the middle of a surrealist sensation, literary guests and a magical impression of fiction, you were in reality “like real life”: A man with parents, a brother, a sister, guy friends, a spouse.
Yes, it’s me who said that it was a Felliniesque wedding for invoking an impression of fiction. It is moreover without doubt because your wedding gave the impression of extraordinary fiction that we talk about. It is also undoubtedly because each of our encounters were about fiction, “in search” of fiction to put the brakes on the reality that obscures everything, including its own potential.