For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation. His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”
At the clinic.
—What is it about your nose that bothers you?
If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.
—I don’t really like it.
—Don’t really like it?
—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.
—Yes, but…
I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.
—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?
—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.
—I’d like to believe you, but if you can’t tell me why… She hands me a tissue.
—Go on, tell me. What don’t you like about your nose?
I walk out of her office. In the waiting room I get the urge to smash a window and then to do something even worse than throwing myself out it: slash my nose with the shards of broken glass. Make them face having abandoned a hapless young man with his nose.
Instead, I knock over the coat rack and leave it lying on the floor. Outside, my phone begins to vibrate. A text from my dad.
“We’re back in the emergency room. Mom’s getting weaker. She stopped eating. They’re scanning her lungs and intestines. We’ll wait for the results and let you know.”
Sun shines on snow. I’m off to buy boots. I don’t want to stop living. I want to do what I planned to do, and, today, it’s buy boots. Here’s the store. I walk inside. I feign not knowing what I’m looking for as I loiter about waiting to be helped.
—Looking for anything in particular? Anything you’d like to try on? – Uh, yes, these here. Eight and a half.
—We don’t have half sizes.
—Ok, well I’ll try both.
—Eights and nines?
—Yes.
I sit down and brush away a tear, well, hardly a tear, more like a pre-tear. I don’t end up brushing anything away. I should be somewhere other than here. I should already be on the next bus for Abitibi, but tomorrow I’m leaving for Punta Cana. I should be by my mother’s side. Not about to have my face done, not buying boots, not laughing in all-inclusive Mexican resort.
—The eights are too small.
—Oh really?
—My toes touch.
—I’ll get the nines.
I glance myself in the mirror—I look handsome. I used to think myself ugly because my feet were too big compared to my head, but letting my hair grow has balanced things out. I part my hair in my middle, like a French model walking the runway for Givenchy I once saw. Everyone always says I have a European air about me, or that I seem like a dancer. That’s because I always sit in odd positions and stretch my legs when I talk. I’m always switching positions. Currently I have my feet up on the bench with my chin resting on my knees. I look Zen but really I’m just sad. She brings the nines. I put them on, like a dancer would put on his ballet slippers, carefully, unhurried, even as the saleswoman watches and waits. I can already tell they’re going to be too big. They are.
—They’re too big.
—We could add an insert.
—Ok, let’s try.
I’m so skinny that any shoes I wear end up looking like two anchors tied to the end of my legs. I take off the boots, like an injured dancer. I rub my foot like one trying to recover, one who massages his foot to hide that he can no longer dance like before, one who is fed up with a mother on the other side of the country who keeps him from dancing freely.
Even with the inserts they’re still too big. With these boots on my feet, you could toss me in the river and rest assured I’d stay down. Sometimes I think about putting boots like this on my mother and tossing us both in for once and for all.
—I’ll take ’em.
As the saleswoman boxes up the boots, I write to my dad.
“Do you think I should come?” He responds right away.
“It’s definitely a hard decision. I think mom would want you to go to Punta Cana.”
“But I got the cancellation insurance, I anticipated this.”
“I’ll talk to her about it when she wakes up. I’ll get back to you.” I pay for the boots.
*
“It doesn’t look good. It really doesn’t look good. I’m not sure if you realize just how not good it looks.” Apparently that’s what the doctor told my mom, insisting on the “not,” when explaining the results of the blood tests, like she might to a child, as though it were my mother’s fault. They asked if she wanted to be treated, otherwise she would die during the night. She said yes. I cry as I pack my bags. I regret my hesitation in choosing between my Mexican vacation and my mother. She would have canceled everything for me, canceled her whole life, and I couldn’t pick between her and a vacation to Punta Cana. I pace the floor in my white apartment. I don’t want to go back to Abitibi.
I pack black clothes, but also a few colorful things so my mother doesn’t see me all in black: a daily reminder that I’m ready for her funeral. I try to take deep breaths and I think of her–we breathe just alike. Walking past the mirror I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and I see her movements in my own, as if she herself were brushing away my hair. I look like my mother.
*
I hate the nine hours on the bus that separate me from Abitibi. I hate the people sitting there sitting, the people who make chitchat like they know each other, the people who say the driver is crazy and look at me to corroborate when, in fact, she is not crazy and is just doing her job. They never let up. They have no secrets. They’re not dreamers. All of them are happier than me. They’ll live longer, never die, sleep peacefully in eternity, with their faces unchanged. They remind me of where I come from. And me, I’ll die on the operating table. A face blurred from having been broken. I will die for beauty. I will have my face remade.
I hate Abitibi. Abitibi hates me. I have too many shallow aspirations that snowbanks cannot satisfy. I’ve held onto an ashen complexion to match the shade of vinyl that covers the soulless houses and the tint of the organs made ill from inhaling air spewed from the mines’ chimneys. It was in Montreal where I found surroundings that finally allowed me the right to not to be real. I pick a seat in the middle of the bus. Not in the front, because people who sit in the front always want to talk. Not too far back, because the last people on the bus give up and sit next to a stranger when they start running out of rows.
*
I can’t fall asleep. A stranger sits down next to me. We aren’t even a quarter of the way there.
I’m writing a letter to my mother to explain that I’m going to have my face redone. But I can’t find the words. Mom, I’m having my face redone. It’s less a letter and more an insult. I close my notebook and try to force a tear to slide from my eye onto the notebook, to give the people around me a show. These people who hardly seem capable of even noticing a show happening in front of them. The only show they might appreciate would be if we slammed into a deer, flipping the bus over and into a ditch, killing half the passengers. They would take a picture of deer carcass and send it to the local paper.
Nobody would be care to see a picture of my carcass on the operating table with a broken nose ready to be remade. They’d just say this young man is fake. The thought brings a smile. Surgery has become deceitful, subtle, shifty. Gone are the days you end up with a nose like one on an old American movie star with little tapered nostrils and a stretched-out bridge. I smile again knowing all these bus people sitting around me would be jealous. Them with their puffy faces, rosacearidden cheeks and unsightly facial hair. They dream of having another face, but they’ll never get up the nerve.
The stranger next to me falls asleep. He smells like cigarettes and bad cologne. He clasps his hands together and rests them atop his stomach. But as soon as he drifts to sleep, his hands release and his left arm falls into my lap. His large belly leaves little room on either side for his hands. The fall of his arm wakes him. He reclasps his hands on his stomach. Every five minutes the show repeats. I place my notebook in my lap for protection. I can’t bear the man’s smell, somehow worse when he’s asleep. Maybe with my nose job I’ll have a worse sense of smell. That would upset me. I have a wonderful olfactive memory. A certain cheap cologne transports me right back to the hallway of my elementary school, the smell of a cigarette to the first time I smoked and to the dandelions I lounged in as I told myself: you’re killing yourself, weakening your body until one day it will no longer reap any pleasure from these colors. It would take having never left Abitibi to still be able to swoon over the yellow of a dandelion. The world has so much more to offer than nature’s second-rate beauty: architecture, the cut of a designer’s cloth, a face that’s been resculpted, redrawn. I will have my face remade.
*
The man’s arms fall again. His hand lands on the notebook on my lap. This time, he leaves it there. He’s deep asleep. I can’t lift his hand, can’t touch a stranger. I dot a line the length of his flabby arm with my pen. I’m prepping him for an overnight surgery. I imagine my pen turned scalpel. While the passengers sleep, I put them all under the knife.
The bus stops. We are in the middle of Verendrye Park. The man next to me wakes up, his arm dotted top to bottom but he doesn’t notice. He opens the overhead bin, grabs his jacket, covers up his surgical preparations, and gets off. He heads into the forest. I could hardly guess where he might be going. It is almost as though he got off because he sensed I was about to start slicing into his arm. But I’m well intentioned: I want to make over the world.
Before putting away my scalpel, I return to the letter for my mother in my notebook. Mom, I am going to have my face redone. If I want to make over the world, it must start with me.
I pushed too hard against the paper and the scalpel bled. My hands are now covered in blood and the letter stained.
I have nothing to wipe my hands. I make my way to the washroom in the rear. Not daring to steady myself on the seatbacks with my dirty hands, I walk with them in the air, like a surgeon ready to operate, trying to avoid contamination. I struggle to keep my balance. Everyone is sleeping and I imagine them all with faces covered in dots. I go into the bathroom and close the door. The light comes on. I want to wash my hands but there is no sink, only hand sanitizer. I get the worst of it off with paper towel.
I return to my seat. As I sit, I wonder where that man went, leaving like that, into the woods with no bearings. I wonder where people go when you can’t see them anymore. Where will my mother go when I lose sight of her? Little kids, at a certain stage of development, are convinced that their mother stops existing when they can’t see her. Where will my mother go when I can no longer see her?
It’s like I’m incapable of a happy thought. Incapable of imagining death as some bliss we might dream of. I fantasize about such a thing but don’t believe it. Nothing on earth is reassuring besides the forest… the blue sky… nature… but I hate nature. If there is no paradise to be found on earth, why would there be one elsewhere? I sense not even my imagination could divine the intensity of the pain that awaits us after death.
I fear making a mistake when it comes to my mother. I’m scared of fouling up a prayer at her grave, of accidentally saying, “hell be with you” and immediately regretting it because, of course, I want her to go where things are best. As though I had the power to influence where she goes.
Now I fear driving myself crazy by thinking about it too much, but I can’t help it. I have to keep myself grounded in earthly considerations. Have to keep my distance from somber spirituality, from meditation that only serves to drive me crazy. I think too much, but when I stop thinking I feel vulnerable. I’d like to keep my mom’s soul with me to keep her from floundering in that terrible place. Let it take possession of my body, of my soul, and may we come together to form a single living being.
I need to distract myself again with my face, my nose in need of fixing, my clothes, my hair parted like the Givenchy model’s, and my eyes that I’d like to turn blue. When you look into my eyes, I want you to see my mother’s. I want every plunge into the blue of my eyes to bring her to back to earth. I want blue eyes.
I know blue lenses are possible. They used to be gaudy, overdone, immediately noticeable, but now they make more natural versions, a little grayer.
I look on my phone and find some options. There is a whole selection of blues and one in particular has the exact color of my mother’s eyes. When I think about these lenses, about my nose job, about how I’ll look, I breathe better.
I order the pair of blue lenses. They cost $100, come with a case but no cleaning solution, and, with proper care, will last between six and twelve months. If I live as long as my mother, fiftyone years, I will need at least twenty-eight pairs. I drift to sleep.
*
As I wake, I touch my face. Nothing has changed. I didn’t sleepwalk. I didn’t butcher myself. The car dealerships mean we’re near. I alert my dad with a text. He’ll come pick me up at the end of the line and we’ll go straight to the hospital. I’d like to sleep, eat, wash my face, but I’ll keep that to myself. My mother is sick and nothing is more important. Nothing more important than being there, by her side, in Abitibi, to breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts. Let us all be sick together: the Cancer family and proud of it. Abitibi is a breathable disease.
Stepping off the bus I’m greeted by my father, a big smile on his face. My sister, happy to see me, jumps into my arms. Soon to be eighteen, and her mother is dying. She needs a brother, but more than that she needs a mother. I wish I return that to her.
They say they’re doing well. I regret asking. I want us to cry, sob, howl, for everyone at the bus station here at the end of the line to look at us, but we appear unphased. We tell each other we’re fine and we get in the car. They have never seen me with long blond hair.
Because the buildings aren’t as tall here as in Montreal, you can see the sky. My mother used to tell me that the sky here is bluer than anywhere else. And when I think of the blue of her eyes, the blue that I ordered online that should be arriving in a few days, I tell myself yes, all told, perhaps the sky does have something calming about it.
We enter the hospital. I cease thinking completely. I am with my dad, my sister, and we are going to see my mother. When the doors open onto the third floor my grandmother is there. She has been waiting for us.
—Have you eaten?
—Yes.
—Your hair is long. Christ. Not too attractive.
I laugh.
—I made you soup.
—No way. Thank you!
—I put it in the refrigerator. I wrote down the ingredients and I was careful: no milk, no eggs… definitely no meat and no…
—No honey… that’s perfect.
—That’s right, no honey.
I want to see my mother, but my grandmother blocks the way, like she’s trying to hide something unpleasant. I get past her, I know the room number, my sister text it to me, I’m almost running. When my mother sees me, she lifts her two feeble arms, two arms like two twigs covered by too much skin. She is happy and I almost melt into tears, almost lose it. Instead, I say: – Hey there, recognize me?
I sit on the bed next to her and don’t know where her legs are under the sheet. They have turned to two ropes with knots for knees. When people ask me how the end of her life is going, I’ll tell them “badly”.
I give her the letter I wrote, stained by blue ink: Mom, I am going to have my face redone. If I want to make over the world, it must start with me. And already not even you recognize me.
*
She is sent home. We are lucky she can die here. Everyone at the end of their rope, my grandmother in the bedroom, my aunt and cousins having coffee.
I keep to the living room, waiting for my blue lenses. My sister is with me. I don’t know if she understands mom is going to die. She is not naive but she is young. She has never known pain, heartbreak, a face and eyes in need of fixing, recoloring. When our dog ran away, she was inconsolable. She roamed the streets of the neighborhood in her pajamas weeping and calling out. She looked like a wartime child. She was completely beside herself and it was all over a dog. I feel like grabbing her by the shoulders and telling her the awful truth. Do you get it? Mom is going to die. We are going to be alone. We are going to miss her. For months, for years, you will see her things lying around the house, you will still need her advice, she won’t be there to be proud of you. You will never again see your mother proud of you—do you get it?
And I want to see my sister break down so she can experience the worst of it right away. But I say none of that.
—I ordered contacts.
—Oh yea? Why?
—I dunno.
At her age, I used to often imagine that she or my mom or my dad were dying. I would tell myself that every shallow little thing would lose all meaning, that I would find the television insufferable, that the world’s banality would become unbearable. I would feel guilty about choosing clothes because I saw a model wearing them, because I feel sexy wearing them, feel guilty about doing my hair, about washing up, about clipping my fingernails, about brushing my teeth, because all these things are trivial, have nothing to do with life or death, and I just want everything to be grounded in the big questions all because my mother is dead.
Today, however, just the opposite. To save myself from ethereal darkness, I turn to aesthetics. I ordered blue contacts online and I cannot wait for them to arrive.
*
They’re here. I place the lens case on the table. I would like to be with my mother. I walk to her room and go in. She is asleep. I take a seat in the chair next to her bed. Inside the box a smaller one is nested. I open it with my teeth. She still doesn’t stir. I remove the contacts from their plastic seals. They are exactly the blue I wanted, exactly her shade. I grab the mirror from the nightstand and inhale deeply. I don’t know why, but I get the feeling that the moment I put in in the contacts might be the moment my mother dies. As though my eyes becoming hers will allow her to go in peace. I put one in. Still breathing. I put in the other. She opens her eyes. – Look mom. I have your eyes.
She shuts hers without a smile, without a reaction. Nothing. She doesn’t care, she’s exhausted, there’s no use in staying here.
I’ll go back to Montreal, tonight, and get my face redone.
*
I told my grandmother we can’t stop living our lives for my mother. She said that yes, when someone is dying, we have to stop living. With tears in her eyes, she told me that. That’s what family is. Everyone has stopped: my father, my aunt, my grandparents. They aren’t going to work. Everything is paused for my mother and when she dies, they will be devastated. She’s sleeping. Let her sleep. Let her be. If I die one day, I hope everyone here is dead before me. I’m leaving for Montreal tonight. I called the clinic again. I came up with fantastic reasons for needing a nose job and they acquiesced. My appointment is in five days.
*
The surgeon is the same one from before. I do not care for her, I do not trust her, but she is the only one I met with. I get the impression she does not understand what I’m telling her, how I want my nose, but I show her pictures. She tells me it has to look natural, otherwise she’ll refuse. She makes me feel guilty. She is not reassuring. It’s normally during the consultation this needs to be discussed, she tells me. I apologize again and again. No, I have not weighed the pros and cons. No, I have not been thinking about this for long. But I lie. I fill out the paperwork before returning the next day for the surgery. This won’t be covered by insurance or anyone else. Take this prescription for the post-op medication to the pharmacy. Thank you.
*
Today’s the day. General anesthesia. Though rare, it happens: I might never wake up.
The gown doesn’t cover my butt. I’m given something to wash with, an antibacterial. I have to take off my jewelry, easy, I don’t have any. They take pictures of me from every angle. They mark with a pen where they plan to cut, patch, redo. I place little confidence in these dots. The anesthesiologist asks questions. No heart problems.
—So, we’re going to put you under, ready?
—Yes, let’s.
*
Painless. Strands of gauze wind in each nostril deep into my skull to prevent hemorrhaging and keep my nose fixed in place for the first few days. I can’t breathe through my nose. When I eat, I go deaf. I want to die. My breathing is swallowing, I breathe my food, I sleep sitting up. My father sends me an email. I need to come to Abitibi, mom’s entered palliative care for her final hours. But I can’t. I need to return to the clinic tomorrow to have the gauze removed.
*
I grab a taxi, too ashamed to take the metro. I fear they’ll tell me I cried too much, I ruined everything in the first days of recovery, the crucial period, the tears infected my nose, it will be forever deformed, and it will forever remind me of the pain of having lost my mother under such selfish circumstances. My father is texting.
“Call me as soon as you can, son, it’s serious.”
I put my phone away and the nurse begins to remove the gauze. He pulls for so long, so long it seems like the gauze must have been taking root in my intestines.
It’s beautiful, the tears did no damage. My nose is still blocked up, everything has swollen. I thank everyone, they rebandage me, and I head home in a cab. I pack my bag, medication, bandages. If something happens to me in Abitibi, I’ll be helpless. My nose, my face, my mother, by teary blue eyes. I am in danger.
My father buys me a plane ticket. If I hurry, I’ll catch today’s flight. I can be in Abitibi in three hours but I will need to come back in ten days to have the stitches out and the cast removed.
*
When I arrive my grandmother grabs me by the arm.
—First your hair, then your eyes, now this? What is this?
—I had my nose redone. How is my mother?
—Dead. You weren’t here.
I see everyone crying. My sister in my father’s arms. My aunt in my grandfather’s. My grandmother who isn’t in mine but would like to be. She can’t; I’m not the boy she knew. I had my face made into my mother’s. It was her in the pictures I showed to the surgeon. Everyone is crying, and I’m faceless.
My mother is dead and I do not even want to see her.
When I go out into the February sun, it’s she who steps out. Mom, you’re free. I’m free. I walk and my hair is the same shade of blond, the same length, my eyes the same blue, my face the same softness. I have the same pain in my step. I do not walk, I glide, each step cutting through the air. I am the woman who will sleep next to my father tonight in the slowly growing abyss, I am the mother of my sister, the ungrateful daughter of my grandmother. I am the woman returning with a vengeance. I am a woman alive, living among the living. I am the woman remade. The woman to make over the world.
Translated from the French by Trask Roberts
Antoine Charbonneau-Demers is an actor and writer born in 1994 in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. For the short story featured here, Charbonneau-Demers was awarded the prix du jeune écrivain (young writer’s prize) at the 2019 Paris Salon du Livre. He is the author of five novels to date: Coco (2016), Good Boy (2018), Daddy (2020), Baby Boy (2020), and Roman sans rien (2024).
Trask Roberts is a translator, writer, researcher, and teacher based in Northeast Ohio. He teaches courses in translation theory and praxis, and in French language and literature at Kent State University. He has published essays, reviews, and translations in the Journal of Modern Literature, Exemplaria, Electric Lit, Hopscotch, Symposium, and elsewhere.
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