original French copyright © David Turgeon and Le Quartanier, 2017
English translation © Pablo Strauss, 2018
First English-language edition. Originally published as Simone au travail by Le Quartanier, 2017
Coach House Books acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities. We are also grateful for generous assistance for our publishing program from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Turgeon, David, 1975-
[Simone au travail. English]
The supreme orchestra / David Turgeon ; translated by Pablo Strauss.
Translation of: Simone au travail.
ISBN 978-1-55245-375-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77056-571-5 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77056-572-2 (PDF)
I. Strauss, Pablo, translator II. Title: Simone au travail. English
| PS8639.U7276S5613 2018 | C843′.6 | C2018-903967-1C2018-903968-X |
The Supreme Orchestra is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 571 5 (EPUB) 978 1 77056 572 2 (PDF)
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The morning was blizzarding, the gallery deserted. Alban Wouters, proprietor, attended to his ledgers, eye wandering from time to time toward the backdrop of plump grey snowflakes, when an unknown man in a fur-lined cloak of military cut pushed open the door and entered the gallery along with a cruel gust of arctic wind.
Inclement weather sometimes brought just such unknown quantities out of the cold and into his establishment. You could recognize them as the strangers they were by their polite, noncommittal way of sauntering into the gallery’s main room and their inquisitive looks as they dutifully eyed the gallery walls with at best an imperfect understanding. Now, Alban Wouters had nothing against unknown quantities per se; confronted with just the right piece, an unknown quantity might metamorphose into a paying client, like larva to butterfly. In such instances, after pondering the work in wonder and at length, the unknown person might turn to the gallery owner and speak.
‘How much is that one there?’
Alban Wouters looked up from his ledgers. It was a day for butterfly hunting.
‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, getting up from his chair, ‘that one’s sold.’
‘Really,’ said the man in the pelisse. ‘And that one to the left?’
‘That one too, I’m afraid,’ said the gallery owner, who in the meantime had drawn closer. ‘If only you’d been here yesterday.’
Not one to be deterred, the man in the pelisse wordlessly approached another work whose subdued colours had been applied with a studied carelessness, all rectangles and rounded corners, art made to measure for the living room wall of any good bourgeois home.
‘It’s not your day,’ said Alban Wouters. ‘The show went very well. There’s not much left. Perhaps this?’ he said, pointing out an underwhelming miniature.
‘I don’t know,’ answered the cloaked man who, after a moment’s hesitation, stuttered, ‘It feels like … it just doesn’t work as well, that small.’
‘You may be right,’ echoed the gallery owner, who had often made the very same remark himself, expressed in the same words and sequence.
The mouth of the man in the pelisse betrayed the onset of disappointment. He looked poised to climb back down the ladder, to the rung of unknown quantity. Time for Alban to make his move.
‘Have you, by chance, seen our backroom?’
‘No,’ said the man in the pelisse, apparently unaware the gallery had such an appendage.
I really must fix my signage, the gallery owner thought, an idea translated into audible speech with the remark that he’d heard this comment before.
‘The clients think it’s private,’ Alban Wouters said, putting the man in the pelisse, who had been labouring under the same misconception, at his ease and in the happy company of the gallery’s regular clientele.
The man in the pelisse was Fabrice Mansaré, who had that very morning been taken by a powerful urge to decorate his apartment, the kind of urge that percolates for days before bubbling over into action. Why now? Excellent question. One wonders what was on his mind the night before, to cause such a desire to bloom.
But perhaps there’s no need for such psychological profundities: perhaps Fabrice Mansaré simply woke up that morning and found his bachelor apartment too large, too beige, altogether too empty. It’s true that he received no visitors; wasn’t often home; took dinner, lunch, and breakfast out. The apartment offered little to distract him: six shrink-wrapped albums leaning against a high-end stereo; ten mismatched books, gifts in the main; a TV he by and large ignored. The only art to speak of was a drawing made by his niece, Eugénie, when she was four and a half. It was stuck with a magnet to a fridge 90 percent empty, an appliance as extraneous as everything else in the luxury kitchen of one disinclined to cook.
It was the home of someone who never stays in one place long, the domicile of a diplomat or hit man.
As if to whet his decorative ambitions, Fabrice Mansaré’s contact had failed to reach him that morning. With nothing on the agenda and a vague sense of concern, there was little to keep Fabrice Mansaré in an apartment that was, to say the least, ill-equipped to alleviate his boredom. He resolved to go out. And only once he was outside the lobby door did he notice the raging storm. The spectacle of blowing snow was tonic; Fabrice Mansaré, imperturbable. He began walking, batted to and fro by the north winds savagely howling between the skyscrapers of downtown Bruant.
First stop, espresso: he drank his short and piping hot, then headed out to face the elements. Along deserted sidewalks he made slow progress, enthralled by what was a novel experience for him. Second stop, a lighting shop whose wares caught his eye while he was waiting for the traffic lights to turn. Forty-five minutes later he re-emerged in a flurry of heartfelt thanks from a salesman reassuring him that his fixture would indeed be delivered and installed that very afternoon.
Fabrice Mansaré proceeded to visit a Chinese import store, a kitchen shop, a tailor’s, and finally Alban Wouters’s gallery, where he was eventually shepherded into a backroom that was in fact difficult to find for those not in the know.
In this second gallery he came upon a mosaic of medium-format drawings depicting people of both sexes in states of partial or complete undress, individually and in pairs and sometimes in small groups, in positions of abandon that left little doubt as to the tenor of the moment caught on paper. To be blunt, scenes of the most elegant debauchery. The artist’s pencil outlined flesh and faces in a manner that blurred certain areas and traced others in disconnected, vacillating glimpses simulating the effects of movement or unchecked transports of delight. The gallery owner scrupulously avoided any mention of the work’s content, focusing resolutely on its formal and commercial properties: oil pastel screen print in blue ink; a run of twenty, hand-numbered