I told the lover that if we could watch our first horror movie with the lights off, we’d be officially home in this house. Why not the old Usher house from 1960 with Vincent Price, as I named my in-laws house that, in homage to the famous Edgar Allan Poe story?
Posted at 12:00 p.m
But the first night after the move, surrounded by boxes to unpack and exhausted, we still hadn’t turned on the TV. So I decided to re-read The Fall of the Usher House in the hot water of the old Clawfoot tub on the second floor. Roderick Usher was still pale and sickly when his sister rolled in her grave. I had a hard time finishing the short story, forgetting how comfortable those deep bathtubs are and how conducive to sleep, even drowning.
This house lives up to its nickname, it looks like a small run down mansion where you “go upstairs” to sleep while in the basement I have the impression of hearing ghosts. “I retire to my apartments,” jokes the lover when he goes to bed in the evening.
I can’t believe we live here now and maybe for the rest of our lives. For six months we lived between two roofs, in factories and moving boxes, an adventure of which I have told you about ten chronicles in these pages. I could easily have written fifty, the topic opens many doors. I don’t know how we did it and it’s far from over, we haven’t even hung the curtains yet. It is not easy to inherit a centuries-old house filled to the ceiling with objects, as happened to my lover after the death of his parents. There is something deeply emotional about it, in full sadness. I said it from the start: I was scared and totally unprepared.
Writing the Usher House chronicles was a form of therapy, my friend believes. A way to convince myself when I was in doubt.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY CHANTAL GUY
The living room as it originally was
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
The living room today… which is not finished yet
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This adventure took place against the backdrop of a deepening housing crisis and I’m not sure we would be here without that crisis. We were happy in our apartment, the rent was affordable. But how long? What will Montreal’s rental stock look like in just a year? I continue to watch rental housing prices with dismay — I know someone who just got a $300 rent increase — because I worry about what this crisis will mean for society. This topic is close to my heart.
For the first time in my life I have a roof in Montreal that nobody can kick me out of and under which I make my own rules. Angie, my baby Shih Tzu, is already acting like a princess due to her distant Chinese Imperial lineage. She has quickly established her routine in her new quarters and we obey her.
The lover gives me big eyes because I’m eyeing cat shelters. I could be going crazy for cats right now and nobody could do anything about it. Except for Angie when she refuses the intruders.
All this to say that Quebec Solidaire’s project to challenge lease clauses where it’s forbidden to keep pets, I’m all for it. It has been banned in Ontario since 1990. It is totally unfair that citizens are deprived of this happiness and have a hard time finding a home if they love an animal while others can have 12 cats if they want one. In the current context, we assume that the shelters will be overwhelmed in July. It can not go on like this.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
The dining room
I made my first family dinner with my mom and brother. When my mother enters this little changed house, built in 1875, she travels back in time. It looks exactly like the boarding houses she lived in with her grandmothers as a child. This means that different tenants lived under one roof, had only one room that they had to pay as rent and shared common areas such as the kitchen and bathroom. It was the solution for people with a very precarious status, and the apartment buildings have not stopped disappearing over the years. The recent story of literary critic Jean-Roch Boivin, who died shortly after his pension was evicted, is a sad example of this.
My mother grew up surrounded by love but in great poverty. She and her grandmothers lived together in my bedroom. Every time I walk into this new home I have this burning awareness of the social ladder. And of course, when I receive my mother, I receive her like a queen.
I’m not used to the sounds of this creaking old house yet. And since as soon as we had TV we had a horrorgy of horror movies, I cringe at the slightest sound while telling myself no one can come in here without being heard, with these groaning floors. What actually surprises me more is the silence. The quality of that stillness in the middle of the city after living my whole life with neighbors on my head or under my feet. I continue to be careful when I walk. There are people who have never experienced it before, broom hits on the ceiling.
A couple of pigeons have settled under a cornice and keep shitting on one of the facade walls. I asked someone what to do to fix it and he replied that the only solution is to kill them because they would pass the nest’s location on to their offspring. So I think we will often wash this wall or give the following hints to our future guests: “It is the house with a trace of pigeon droppings. »
It was in this house that we spent our first night together, my lover and I, almost 25 years ago when he was still living with his parents who had then moved to the country. It’s in my journal, which I found while making the boxes. I arrived at his house in the middle of the night in a taxi with my heart pounding because we had met love at first sight at a previous meeting. Here’s what I said to myself in 1998: “I arrive at a house I don’t know, on a street I’ve never been on. I see red hair in a warmly lit living room. A loneliness waiting to be broken. I go in, it gets me in the guts. A smell of incense, works of art everywhere, an incredible house. A piano, lots of books, black cats. And he. In a moment I wanted to leave everything behind, to give up my whole life. »
instinct or fate? Let’s assume that one often leads to the other.
This place makes me feel like I’m in a hammer movie. And I have to write the end credits of this film, which could not have existed without some essential characters. First and foremost Uncle Michel, who convinced us to take the plunge and supported us in every possible way. Our friends Carl and Amélie, my brother and my mother, the booksellers Bruno Lalonde and François Côté, the notary Mariana Valentin Mocelin, the movers from Plan pas con, the plumber Mohammed, our circumcising neighbor Derek… and Isabelle Audet, who was my boss stood at the beginning of this adventure and enthusiastically made this chronicle series possible.
Impossible to forget my in-laws Mo and Djo who left us this legacy. We talk about them every day because we see them around every corner.
After all, there is you too, dear readers. Your encouragement and advice has really helped me over the past few months. Thanks to you, I didn’t need a psychiatrist. So I owed you this last column, written by the House of Usher, as a fee.
As I write, the hot water boilers are humming, the sun is shining through the skylight of my small office, where my books have followed me, outside you can feel that it will soon be spring, the time for renewal.