The Quebec Anthology: 1830-1990

"Beach Blues" 1983

Monique Proulx Translated by Sheila Fischman BEACH BLUES Monique Prouk wasborn in Quebec City in 1952. Shehas written numerous radio and television plays, aswell as film scripts and stage plays. In 1983, she published her first book of short stories, Sans coeur etsans reproche, the tide story of which has been translated by Sheila Fischman as "Feint of Heart." The book wasan immediate success, winning both the Prix Adrienne-Choquette and the Grand Prix Litteraire du Journal de Montreal. Proulx's first novel, L'Homme invisible a lafenetre (1993), was translated in 1994 by Matt Cohen (Invisible Man at the Window), who has also translatedher most recent novel, Le Sexe desetoiles, which was also made into a successful feature film for which Prouk wrote the script. "Beach Blues," translated here by Sheila Fischman, is another of the linked stories that make up Sans coeur et sans reprocbe, which follows the lives of two young people from childhood to maturity. In this story, the female narrator and her husband, Claude, are on holiday in California. She is "surfing towards her fortieth birthday" and not liking it: "When is it exactly," she asks, "that we see our lives distinctly cut in two, with the greater part behind us ..." In many ways, Prouk's work is reminiscent of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Both writers portray characters— or rather the characters portray themselves—with grim humour and relentless honesty. "Beach Blues" is a translation of "Beach Blues" published in Sans coeur et sans reproche: nouvelles (Montreal: Quebec-Amerique, 1983). 346 MONIQUEPROULX Monday, March 2 T he sea. Violet, violent, the scent or liquid guts and viscera drifting windward, perfectly casual, dreadfully colossal beneath the cape of light that sets it afire so that it sizzles to the very depths of space, to infinity; it lies there before me, rushes to meet me, and I shrink back, I let myself fall to the ground, terrified, subjugated, overwhelmed, shuddering from head to toe. You got me again, you slut, it's the same thing every time we get together, you swallow my heart, you make me howl with confusion and amazement, you bring me to my hands and knees, I'm paralyzed in your presence and I can stay that way for hours, watching you, absolutely drunk, obsessively persuaded that at last I am touching whatever is magic and holy in the universe. Arrived in San Diego last night after an exhausting sixhour delay due to some problem or other with a motor that kept the plane at the Toronto airport. "Better if it happens down here than up there," as the Californian—fiftyish and already tanned—seated next to Claude in the DC-8 said, laughing. Throughout the entire flight he kept holding out conversational perches that Claude (falling back on his fatigue and his very Nordic coolness) persisted in not taking hold of. The bachelor apartment in La Jolla Claude had reserved two weeks earlier had been rented by somebody else. It was dark, a liquid darkness because of the humidity. Claude fulminated, rummaging desperately in his stock of addresses until he finally unearthed a room for us in Pacific Beach, while I just let him get tangled up in his manly role as guide, laughing to myself as I savoured with delight the youthful glow of the sunburnt faces, the white teeth, the clean T-shirts crowding all around us, I breathed in the scents of hibiscus and wild magnolia that seemed to ripple on all sides in the dark, like ghosts. O, the seductive ease of lands that have known neither ice ages nor mammoths; O, the insidious fascination exerted by anything that is warm, soft, and scented on my poor, white, ill-adapted, Inuit skin... All at once the sun emerges from the yellow smog to consummate its dying on the horizon, then starts to rebound BEACH BLUES 347 off the cliffs of Ellen Scripps Peak and Alligator Head, and I watch it with something like anxiety, I see it going full tilt, setting fire to the rocky arms of La Jolla Cove, then it throws itself at me in a flood of volcanic heat. Bliss. I swoon. Rolling slowly onto my belly I let out little squeals like a cat in heat, let myself be filled to the marrow of my bones by an obscene sense of well-being that falls like manna from...