For Sure (4 page)

The little survey conducted among 102 students at the Université de Moncton also revealed that blue was the colour most associated with the vowel
e
. In fact, 44 responders selected blue — one specified a pale blue — which amounts to 43 percent of total responders. On the other hand, 18 responders declared the
e
was green — 1 described it as a shallot green — 9 described it as yellow, 7 as grey, 4 as violet. Orange, red, black and white were named three times each; brown and pink twice; and once each: amber, silver, transparent, and nothing.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon unencumbered by the slightest obligation, while Carmen was browsing a magazine and watching with pleasure as Étienne, Marianne and Terry played like kittens on the living room carpet, Étienne suddenly cried out:

“Dad! Sing!”

Marianne seconded the request by hopping up and down and repeatedly flinging her arms up in the air. Terry was quick to acquiesce.

“
Frè-re Jac-ques, frè-re Jac- . . .”

“No, not like dat, Dad! De udder way!”

Terry played dumb:

“Eh sure!
Au clair de la lu
- . . .”

But Étienne was unrelenting:

“No, Dad! Wid yer arms an' all!”

Terry, seeing Marianne beginning to tremble with impatience, did not want to ruin the atmosphere.

“Awh! Like dat!”

Without knowing where all this was coming from, Carmen decided to play along, and began to clap her hands, drawing in the children:

“Ter-ry! Ter-ry! We want Ter-ry!”

Étienne and Marianne, imitating their mother, clapped their hands with each syllable. Marianne added a slight waddle from left to right.

“OK, OK.”

Terry straightened up, his heartbeat racing. He winked at Étienne.

“Dis here's a song for you Mum.”

Marianne's excitement continued for a bit, but Étienne realized that this was the moment they had been promised: the unveiling of their secret.

“Dis here's a poem Aragon wrote for his lover Elsa.”

. . .

“De song's called ‘Elsa.'”

. . .

“S'pposed to be Léo Ferré sings it, but dis time, well, it's me.”

Terry tried to gain a few moments to slow his pulse down a bit. Étienne and Marianne had no idea what was going on, never having heard Terry introduce a song before. But their confusion quickly dissipated when Terry finally began to sing:

“
Is it possible you only need appear / That look that's so endearing / Your hair that gesture so appealing . . .”

Cravat 28, (C)aging 20, Toye(r) 16, Nov(a)s 21, api(n)g 24, Ju(i)cy 34, Flin(t) 24, Mu(s)h 29, Zi(g) 26, Equ(i)ne 30, (Z)oo 24, L(o)pe 21, Dr(e)w 36, D(y)ad 13, (D)ebriefed 14, (B)it 15, Wa(f)t 20, To(w)n 14, I(s)led 15, Equine(s) 17, Debrief(s) 34, Rente(d) 8, Tom(e) 20, Ear(t)h 13, (a)xle 27, Ek(e) 14, Bo(l)a 28, O(b)it 7, O(k)ra 8, (H)ue 6. For a total of 346 (344 plus the opponent's 2 points) and 260 (262 minus 2 points for the two letters remaining).

Carmen could hardly breathe, her eyes were wet with tears. Étienne and Marianne were staring at her, waiting for her real reaction. Terry, it should be said, had been especially moving. When he came to the line “like the sunlight on the window,” he'd extended a hand toward the large windows of the loft without taking his eyes off Carmen, and even the children could feel how much it meant. Finally, after a long transatlantic silence that shuttled between Terry and Carmen, she ran toward Terry, flung her arms around him and, squeezing tight, buried her face in his neck. The children followed suit, wrapping themselves round two legs each, one of Dad's and one of Mum's. Tears were running down Carmen's cheeks, and Marianne took up her swaying and chanting:

“Ar-gon! Ar-gon! Ar-gon! . . .”

Under the title “Black A,” in
Delirium II – Alchemy of the Word
, Rimbaud also mentions the colours of vowels: “I invented the colours of the vowels! —
a
black,
e
white,
i
red,
o
blue,
u
green.” Easily obtainable in French on the web site rimbaudsillages.free.fr, the tone of which encourages copying and dissemination (the English translation can be appropriated from mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Alchemy).

“Folks'll see
change case
on der screen and dey don' know what to do wid it. Don' know what it means, do dey. Goes way back to de days of de old printing houses, lead type an' all dat. Back den, a case was dat big wooden box wid all de wee compartments where dey puts de letters. De wee letters, the teeniest, goes in de bottom of de case. Dat's why we calls dem letters lower case. Up on top, you's had de capitals, dose letters what have de accents and other stuff we don' use all that much. Some folks says ‘upper case' for capital letters. Below dey put all de punctuation marks, numbers, and de blanks to make spaces betwixt de words. At first dey was lining up all de type into text by hand. Later on, der was linotype. Dey had all dat at
L'Évangéline
when I started work der. I sure would have liked to keep a set of that equipment, but den where would I 'ave put it, I'd like to know.”

Unlike the results for the
a
and the
e,
where a few colours dominated, perceptions of the colour of
i
were somewhat disparate. Whereas 25 responders saw yellow and 16 red, the 61 other participants voted in almost equal numbers for a dozen different colours, including white (and its derivations igloo and ivory), violet, indigo, pink, purple, blue, green, grey, black, brown, nothing, and I forget.

Camil Gaudain was a regular visitor to Didot Books, and he rarely left without buying one or two volumes. Terry had noticed that he read a bit of everything. Or he bought a bit of everything: novels, essays, biographies, philosophy, psychology, gardening, recipes, even children's literature. Terry, who very much doubted Camil had children, assumed he was buying the brightly coloured books for his nephews and nieces.

“I'd like to order Freud in the Pléiade edition.”

“No problem.”

When Ludmilla and he had opened the bookstore, Terry had been obliged to immerse himself rapidly in the universe of books. He had everything to learn. Thanks to Ludmilla's patience and generosity, he was managing pretty well.

“Cold enuff fer ya?”

“Funny ting is I like all sorts of wedder. Even de month o' March.”

No customer had ever ordered a book from the Pléiade. This was nothing abnormal for Terry. People were always asking for authors and publishers he'd never heard of and he always managed to find them. But was Camil Gaudain in a hurry? Terry had caught him glancing at his watch twice already.

“If it's alright with you, I'll come back this afternoon. It's just that I've a meeting in twenty minutes . . .”

“No problem. Dat'll give me de time to do a proper search. I'd best be writing it down doh, so's not to forget.”

Terry pulled out the notebook he kept under the cash register, wrote:
Freud — Lapléyade
. Camil Gaudain noticed the spelling.

“It's two words.”

Terry did not take offence. He put a line through Lapléyade and wrote what his customer dictated:

“
La Pléiade
, capital
P
-
l
-
e
with an accent aigu -
i
-
a
-
d
-
e
.”

Terry read the name aloud:

“
Pléiade
.”

Then, to stimulate business a bit:

“Was der anyting else you might be wantin' me to order?”

On the other hand, a Blanchard is a word of little value, usually made of letters worth only a single point. For professionals, a Blanchard is a word worth less than 60 points.

Chiac is not exempt from slip-ups, which are in fact errors. For example, the sentence “Have you got enough there?” is often translated in French as “
Y en a-tu assez pour toi
?” as though we were saying: “Have you got enough for you there?” The
tu
here should be an
il
(
Y en a-t-il assez pour toi
?). The error is most likely linked to the fact that the question addresses a second person singular. If one is speaking proper Chiac, one must say: “
Y en a-t-y assez pour toi
?” just as in a particular English, one would say: “Have ya had yer fill, then?” The same applies to the exclamation “
Y en a-tu mang
é
õ
r wh
ã
t
!” which ought to be “
Y en a-t-y mang
é õr whãt!” in Chiac, or “
Il en a certainement mang
é
sa part
” in Parisian. In non-standard English, one might say, “Did he scoff his fill or wot!”

A character in Acadian France Daigle's novel
Just Fine,
Camil Gaudain, had no role to play in her two subsequent novels (
A Fine Passage
and
Life's Little Difficulties
), but this did not stop his life from continuing outside the fictional framework.

A few days later, Terry felt better. It may have been just fatigue that had caused him to fret over his role as a father.

“T'other night I didn't tink to say so, but I figures 'twas a right fine ting I did for de kids when I sang de Aragon for dem. ‘Specially dat first time. I sure caught 'em unawares der, surprised 'em in a good way. You should 'ave seen der faces! Like dey was all admirin' me.”

“For sure! I was like in shock meself.”

“I know, but fer the kids, I mean 'twas like sometin went straight into der DNA, marked 'em fer real. I'm pretty sure it did. Could see it jus de way dey was lookin' up to me. Now dat's sometin' I wouldn't mind seein' more often.”

“Ask me, it happens more often than you think, 'cept you can't see it cause you're too close to them.”

“Really?”
2

A parallel play occurs in Scrabble when a word is placed in parallel to another thereby creating several two-letter words. A player creates a chimney when a word is placed between two other words already on the board — or on the screen — to create several three-letter words. When a new word is formed by adding a letter at the beginning or end of a previously placed word we call it a hook, whereas creating a word by adding a three-letter prefix is called a Benjamin.

The sign referred to by all but the initiated as a letter — and as a character by all the initiated, except for the specialists — is composed of more parts than the serif. These include the stem (vertical stroke), the bar (horizontal stroke), the bowl (a curved stroke that creates an enclosed space in the character), a stroke (oblique straight or curved line), and the ascender (the part of the lowercase letter that extends above the x-height). The serif is a line crossing the main strokes of a character, for example at the base of the stem.

Even Ludmilla could not believe it:

“I can't understand their logic. They published Marx after all; why not Freud? Obviously I'm missing something. Unless . . .”

And she plunged into a new search, navigating like Ulysses in the
Odyssey
, sailing from one site to another, as though she knew the virtual network of publishing like the back of her hand.

In addition to typeface and size, the look of a character varies according to its value, i.e., the amount of ink, also known as its weight, its orientation — upright, slanted, italic — and its colour.

“Can you tell me how come I've so much trouble saying
je vais
meaning ‘I'm going someplace,' instead of
je vas
, like ‘I's goin' der?'”

“Well, dat's on account of the economy of language.
Vas
is shorter dan
vais.
”

!!

. . .

“Well, I'll be! At last, an answer wot makes sense!”

Lacan's matheme of “the discourse of the hysteric”