Catherine Leroux - Madame Victoria

EVERYTHING STARTS at the throat. The thirst, the cough, the voice. The words that move mountains, the breaths like punches, the burning that comes with every swallow. All the rest proceeds from that pain: the woody aromas, the texture at once subtle and firm, the dry savours that swim to the core of your being. A tiny wound that forges your thoughts, filters colours, sharpens sounds, brings the world into focus.

What does it say about a woman that she drinks Scotch? In a man this would be a sign of determination, strength, refinement. Success. In a woman, the same, plus one more attribute: ambition. Victoria raised her first glass as one might utter a password to gain entry into the holy of holies, where alliances are formed and power is confirmed. The place where ascension becomes possible, amid mahogany and pipe tobacco, thirty metres above the multitudes.

In her teenage years it would have been hard to picture her at such lofty heights. She was not born into one of those families where a learned father eager to pass on his knowledge imparted to his sole descendant the rudiments of Aristotelian philosophy and an uncommon ability to decipher anagrams. In Victoria’s house, you learned to darn socks, peel potatoes without lifting the knife, and not answer back to adults. Victoria did not answer to anyone.

In boarding school she kept her distance from the chattering cliques, unable to fathom their frivolity, their puerile humour, their obedience. She hunched over books from which she emerged unappeased and impatient. The sisters’ prayers, psalms, and theoretical simplifications failed to satisfy the famished mouth lodged somewhere between her mind and her heart. The days and months streamed past with a slow precision that made Victoria feel as though she were living at the centre of a gigantic clock.

Early in her final year, when the most brainless of her classmates were beginning to dream about the men to whom they would surrender their youth, and the most sensible were preparing for the cloister, Victoria decided to ask the principal for a letter of recommendation in support of her college application.

“What are you going to do there? What about farming?”

The nun eyed her suspiciously. Victoria imagined a future of plowing, mud, swollen udders, and the stench of liquid manure.

“No, Sister.”

“And what about marriage?”

Victoria shrugged. Throughout her life she had seen exhausted women married to men for whom it was not enough to burden their wives with yearly pregnancies; they themselves were a burden the women had to shoulder while remaining under their sway. Women who were captives of a decision taken in haste thirty years earlier because it was spring, the birds were singing, and the pollen had driven them temporarily mad.

“I… I’m not very domestic-minded. I’d like to go on with my studies. To go further.”

Her reply drew a rare grin from the all-powerful mother superior.

“Well, I’ve waited a long time to discover one who’s interested in learning.”

The next day Victoria found herself in possession of a flattering tissue of lies that praised her faith, modesty, and remarkable intellectual achievements, thereby liberating her from the misery of the countryside and the benighted suitors her parents had lined up for her. She was seized by a vague but stubborn intuition: she must take full advantage of this unhoped-for opportunity. Clutching the letter in her fingers, she uttered the first and only oath she would ever take: she would become something different. Something that did not yet exist, and which would surpass all else.

She moved to the metropolis, a city seething with a wild yet friendly energy from which Victoria, however, was almost entirely cut off by the austere walls of the teachers’ college for young women. This establishment trained its students to become schoolteachers, governesses, or spouses who played minuets for their in-laws. But what the college turned out to be mainly was a hotbed of quarrels. For Victoria’s fellow students were not primarily concerned with reading ancient texts but with securing a best friend. So, turning her back on the dramatic intrigues that grew out of that necessity, Victoria concentrated unenthusiastically but rigorously on her studies.

Every other Sunday the young women were allowed to venture out into the volatile winds of Montreal. For Victoria, those days were a blessing. Detaching herself from the other students, she went out to explore the ordinary neighbourhoods, to immerse herself in the sultry intimacy of their inhabitants. It was not the people themselves that interested her so much as the effervescence of their closeness, the untidy world that they constituted. Among the outcrops of English and the yellow lustre of Montreal French, she made her greatest discovery: newspapers. Their smeary pages made her feel she was at last moored to the world, not as before through the theory and pious gaze of the clergy but by facts, the simple, lucid enunciation of the truths teeming around her. At night she devoured the newspapers under her blankets, deaf to the murmurs of her dormitory mates. She had found her home.

A week after she graduated, Victoria, wearing short hair, pants, and a sober blouse, sat down at her typewriter for the first time. Hired by a major newspaper as a stenographer, she lost no time in overstepping the bounds of her position. Amid the jibes of the other secretaries, “Full Stop Victoria” a.k.a. “Mrs. Trousers” furiously underscored spelling mistakes and accosted reporters with a raft of suggestions on how to improve their texts. The journalists quickly forgot their wounded pride and welcomed, even solicited, the advice of this woman, who rescued their articles day after day.

Despite this, she was shut out. As though an invisible barrier stood between the typists tapping away and the ink-and-tobacco redolence of the newsroom. To get closer to the messy, reprobate, garrulous men that she aimed to surpass, Victoria decided to force the door of their sanctuary: the tavern.

A snowstorm was raging. Dressed in a felt coat and a battered hat, she confidently crossed the threshold of l’Ours qui tousse, The Coughing Bear. Immediately, the dampness produced by melted snow and evaporated malt shrouded her as if to soften the gazes suddenly directed at her by a hundred men. Unperturbed, she cleaved the dense row of stools and took a seat. The room fell silent. Only her neighbour to the right, already well in his cups, muttered unhappily from time to time. No one at l’Ours qui tousse had ever seen a woman stay for more than thirty seconds, just long enough to retrieve her husband. That one of her sex should actually sit down at the bar was so absurd her bewildered colleagues chose to ignore her.

The evening might have continued like this down to the dregs, with the men politely sipping their pints of Dow and the barman content to offer Victoria a spruce beer, when the solution appeared in the form of a mug overflowing with ale. Nicknamed The Trouble, the huge mug was impossible to get completely clean and was reserved for the unlucky, the cuckolds, the losers, anybody who one way or another was being shown the door. In the absence of someone less fortunate, The Trouble was allotted that day to Victoria’s neighbour, a reporter who had been chastised by his editor-in-chief for a factual mistake.

When the fellow tried to grasp the mug and his hand came down wide of the mark, Victoria had a sudden stroke of inspiration.

“He’s had enough to drink. I’ll help him out,” she declared.

With her customary resolve, she seized The Trouble, raised it to her lips, and proceeded to quaff the pint and a half of beer contained in the unwholesome jar. Her experience with this drink was limited to the drops her father would leave at the bottom of his glass, of which she had retained a sour and dismal memory. She first had to overcome that feeling and then deal with the froth that flooded her mouth, the sensation of being instantly replete, to discern at last the rare subtleties of the local brew, the sugars and bitterness that lend it a slight degree of dignity. As the crowd looked on dumbfounded, Victoria downed the whole thing in one go, regally set The Trouble down again, let out a brief belch, and announced, “Drinks for everyone. This round’s on me.”