"I have to ask." "I promise it won't happen again the rest of the night." "What?" "What's your name?" "It's Clara." "Clara." "Mine's Nikolai." "I know." "I'm happy you're here." "Yeah?" "I want you to fuck me." " What?" " Fuck me." " Do you have condoms?" " Yeah." "Hang on..." "Wait..." "I have to go to the bathroom." "That's all right." "I'll show you where it is." "Hurry." "Did you come?" "No." "But it's all right." "No, it's not all right." "NIGHT #1" "Clara?" " What are you doing?" " Going home." "OK..." "I couldn't sleep." "Come back up, OK?" "I don't understand." "Please, come in." "I would've woken up at noon... the sun burning bright." "I'd have opened my eyes and remembered the night before." "I would've looked for you, but never found you." "You'd disappear, just like that?" "You're a stranger." "Leave, if that's what you want." "Your hair is wet." "You'll catch a cold, but I don't care." "I don't know you." "You're nothing to me." "Go ahead." "Go freeze to death, if that's what you want." "That's not what I want." "Obviously." "Modern life makes me sick." "Modern love makes me sick." "Modern women make me sick." "It's like they're men." "Did you forget anything here..." "On purpose?" "Earrings?" "Just as proof, as incriminating evidence." "I would've woken up, alone and confused." "I would've seen two shiny things, new and unknown to me." "I would've said to myself:" ""All right." ""That night really did happen}" "It was nothing, nothing at all, of course." "We both know it." "But it happened." "This kind of situation makes me sick to my stomach." "It burns... as though acid were spreading through my body." "We're better off alone." "I've got to piss." "It'll give you a chance to take off, if that's what you want." "There should be a law." "Two people who have seen each other naked owe each other a proper goodbye at the very least." "Seriously." "I've seen you naked." "I bit your neck and your breasts." "I put my tongue in your mouth." "I tasted your pussy." "I know exactly what you taste like." "I think I saw you come." "I know that you shave your pussy, and that you get little red dots from it." "I know you have beauty marks on your back." "I don't remember how many or where they are." "I'm sure some asshole has told you it looks like a constellation, or something like that." "I know that you don't get very wet." "I don't know if it was my fault or if it's always that way." "I know how you give a blow job." "You're good at it." "Well, not bad." "I imagine you'd eventually want to put a finger in my ass." "I think you'd want to have anal sex, at some point." "I know that you fuck well." "I like the way you breathe." "You breathe with your whole body." "I like the way you move." "There you have it." "That's what I know about you, Clara." "Clara who?" "I don't know." "I don't know your last name." "It's Clara..." "I've seen you in every position." "I've seen all that, but I've never seen you eat... just eating something simple... like a piece of bread." "I've never seen you cry... never seen you ride a bike." "I've never seen you swim." "I don't know if you're good or if you suck." "I've never seen you in a public space... during office hours... on a workday." ""I've never seen you on a workday}" "What an odd thing to say!" "You'll be young forever in my mind." "We'll never age." "We'll never speak softly in a funeral home." "I'll never discover your biggest faults." "You'll never hate me for my lies and slip-ups." "We'll never get a phone call with bad news that wakes us up in the middle of the night." "I'll never pat your back as you throw up, crying, when you've had too much to drink." "See?" "It's very sad." "I've started getting to know how you smell, how you feel, and vice versa." "The secrets we share are purely physical." "To be honest, I would've wanted you to beg me to stay... to ask me to stay in bed here, next to you, forever." "I would've wanted you to say:" ""Clara, I don't know you, but I know enough." ""You're magical." ""I don't want you to ever disappear from my life." ""I've been..." ""waiting for you for 29 years." ""You're finally here." "Please stay}" "I'm 31." ""I've been waiting for you for 31 years." ""You're here tonight, and I refuse to let you leave?" "That's what I would've wanted you to say, but you fell asleep." "I would've wanted you to admit that this had never happened to you, that you felt connected to me by some strange force, by something electrifying... that letting this pass you by would be like letting your life pass you by." "Clara or death." "I would've wanted you to see things in me that I can't see myself." "I would've wanted an incredible story to begin for us tonight." "But you fell asleep, and I didn't." "Insomnia's a problem for me." "If I slept eight hours a night," "I'd have a lot less time to do stupid things, but... instead, I had time to think." "I realized that you would've woken up next to a stranger with no clothes on." "You would've searched your mind for my name." "I'd see it written all over your face." "The fuzzy morning after." "You'd ask yourself:" ""Should I fuck her again or not')?" "You might have asked me for my phone number." "You'd say:" ""I'll call you, Clara." ""We can get together again if you want?" "And then we would've slept together again because..." "Why not?" "Why not sleep together in the light of day?" "I would've walked back home at dawn and passed by joggers, saying to myself:" ""I'm not like you." ""I fucked a stranger last night" ""in his crappy little apartment." ""I'm obviously not living life the way you are." ""I just go with it." ""I live with intensity}" ""For years, I've lived flattened with fury." ""I've accustomed my friends to an intolerable voltage," ""to a waste of sparks and short circuits." ""To spit fire, to cheat death, to be resurrected a hundred times," ""to run a mile in less than four minutes," ""to introduce a flamethrower into the dialectic and suicidal behaviour into politics 6" ""that's how I've established my style}" "You bring novels to after-parties?" "He's the greatest Quebecois writer of all time." " Who?" " Hubert Aquin." "Never heard of him." "All my secrets are in this book." ""Entwined, dazzled, in a tormented country," ""we've tumbled, united inside a single kiss," ""from one end to the other of our snowy bed}" " "Tormented country?" "I" " Yes." "It's beautiful." "If you like, I'll read you all my favourite passages." "I'll even read you the whole book." "It would take a few hours, what's left of the night." "You'd lie down and listen to the sound of my voice." "You'd close your eyes." "Then you'd read me your favourite book." "You'd show me pictures from your childhood, from a foreign country." "Afterward, we'd go for breakfast." "If you like, we can get married in the Ukraine and start a new life." "Ask me to leave everything behind and we'll leave together." "You're a little crazy." "It's not uninteresting, mind you." "But I'm kind of tired now." "No..." "Stop." " Why aren't you getting hard?" " I don't know." "I'm sorry." "It's too fast, stop." "I'm sorry." "I'll go." "If that's what you want." "It's Clara." "Are you sleeping?" "No." "Come in." "I don't have any woman's clothing, but this should do." "Thanks." "Do you want to be alone?" "Now I'm hard." "Because of you." "I don't have a clothes dryer." "Do you have one at your place?" "Yeah!" "I have nothing." "I'm 31." "I studied fine arts, but I didn't graduate." "Well, I graduated, but I don't have a degree." "Why not?" "I still owe the library $100." "I lost a book... a glossy edition with shiny paper." "Why don't you pay them back?" "I don't have $100!" "I don't really need a fine-arts degree anyway." "Which book was it?" "The Art of Francis Bacon." "Pathetic." "Painting pieces of meat when your name is Bacon, pathetic." "I don't know, I feel like it's in bad taste." "I lost the book." "I was angry." "I think I threw it away." "Who were you angry at?" "I don't know." "I've got this frustration inside me." "You know what I mean?" "Not exactly." "If you were a guy, I'd try and get you to fight me." "I'd want us to be brutal." "I'd want us to throw stuff at the walls and yell out insane things." "But I'll stay calm." "Have you ever hit a girl?" "No." "But I've fucked girls carelessly." "Violently." "I probably hurt them, but not physically." "Tell me about it." "No." "I'll imagine the worst." "You'd be right." "But I don't fuck that often any more." "How long had it been before tonight?" "Six months." "Sex is overrated." "Then why tonight?" "Some of my friends dragged me out." "Literally." "They came up here." "I was reading." "They threw some clean clothes at me and used some pretty convincing arguments:" ""our youth, "overindulging, "living for the moment," ""the call of the night?" "and "the fire within." "I bought into it." "I spotted you pretty quickly on the dance floor." "Why's that?" "You looked free and pure." " And you were dancing badly." " Thanks." "Well, not necessarily badly, just off-beat." "Yeah, I think that's what it was." "When the crowds feet were on the ground, your entire body was up in the air." "You were doing the exact opposite of everyone else, as though you weren't listening to the same music they were." "I'll notice a pretty girl dancing badly, or an ugly girl dancing really well." "I don't give a shit if a pretty girl dances well." "So unoriginal." "You..." "You're a rather pretty girl who dances rather badly." "That works for me." "All that beauty must make your life easier." "Your sunny face..." "I was hesitant about approaching you." "I always end up breaking pretty things." "I feel like I'm a destructive person, in general." "It's as though I'm always sinking and bringing good people down with me." "It really bothers me." ""Cuba is sinking in flames in the middle of Lac Leman" ""while I descend to the bottom of things}" "That's the first sentence of the book I didn't read you." "I'm interested in getting to the bottom of things." "I don't see the connection at all." "Sinking and getting to the bottom of things have nothing to do with each other." "I need a cigarette." "I have trouble paying the rent every month." "I should find a cheaper place, but I'm not sure there is one." "Or get roommates, but I can't bring myself to do that... to live with other people." "To live with anyone else." "I never have money." "I owe all my friends." "Money, smokes, drugs, alcohol, restaurants..." "I owe all that to all my friends." "I wonder why they still like me." "I read a lot." "The major works." "But a lot of the time, I don't finish the books I start." "Right when I'm about to finish something, I lose interest." "I get drunk in the afternoon pretty often." "One time, I threw up next to the toilet." "I didn't clean it up for a few days." "I don't eat." "I almost never eat." "There's no way I'm in good health." "I'll probably die young." "Are you hungry?" "No." "I don't have a phone any more." "Last winter, they cut off the electricity for two weeks, and I was cold." "It's been at least five years since I've gone to the dentist." "I have a broken tooth." "It's like I'm not able to take care of myself." "Just the bare minimum." "It gets annoying after a while." "The worst part is" "I have no one to blame but myself." "I can't fault society, or my adoptive country." "Things are pretty good here." "I'm unable to work." "Not in the same place for very long, anyway." "I get fired very quickly." "I show up late." "I show up drunk." "I show up dirty." "I stink, literally." "I suspect that I've been fired because I stank." "You smell fine tonight." "I worked at an old-folks home for a few months." "People usually go there to die." "I liked it well enough." "I was a sous-chef." "I made the soup." "Old people eat a lot of soup, every day." "They liked me because my soup was thick." "Why didn't you stay there?" "They have a thing there called an unjustified-absence policy." "After my third unjustified absence, the manager called me into her office." "She asked me what was wrong with an understanding look." "Then asked how we could understand each other and come to an agreement." "I got angry." "That's me:" "absent and unjustified." "There's always that morning when the alarm goes off and I wake up and say:" ""No, not today." ""I'm too intelligent for this." "I'm not going." "I deserve better. i" "I tell myself that this can't be my life." "I feel inspired." "Alive, full of energy." "I tell myself that I won't go to work because I have big plans." "I tell myself that I'll spend the day drawing, writing, making music." "Creating masterpieces that will change the world." "On those days, I call in sick." "When they ask what I've got..." "I can't say what everyone else would say:" "a cold, indigestion." "No, instead, I say..." ""I feel a dire need to live, and it's now or never.i" "That perplexes them." "Then I hang up the phone." "And most of the time, I close my eyes, just for a few seconds, and I fall back asleep." "I end up waking up at noon and don't follow through with my plans." "I read bits of articles on Wikipedia... about nanorobots, artificial intelligence, all kinds of topics." "I whack off to porn of debatable quality." "It's like everything loses its meaning, mysteriously, at some point in the morning." "I don't really remember the important message that I'd first set out to convey through my art that day." "Do you read the paper?" "Sometimes." "I don't any more." "I stopped." "It made me feel weak, powerless and paralyzed." "I prefer not knowing what's going on." "But it's awful, because my indifference isn't aimed at anything in particular." "What do you mean?" "I know nothing, for instance, about Canadian politics." "But you know a bit about" "Quebec's relationship with the rest of Canada?" "Yeah, vaguely, but I don't have an opinion." "I don't know anything about Ukrainian politics." "The world doesn't interest me in general." "I don't speak Ukrainian." "I barely speak Russian." "What language do you speak with your parents?" "Russian." "Say something in Russian." "Why?" "To hear what it sounds like." "It sounds nice, doesn't it?" "Whatever." "It's a bad line from a bad love song." "There's no love song." "I'm just asking you to say a sentence." "Say that the television is on the ground." "I'm not really Ukrainian." "I don't know what it's like over there." "That country's not a part of me." " That's sad." " It really doesn't matter." "Sometimes, I get an uncontrollable craving for varenyky." " What's that?" " They're like big ravioli." "Meat and potatoes." "It's heavy." "You can get sweet ones, too." "There's a tradition when you eat varenyky." "You always have to leave one on your plate." " Why?" " For the vultures." "But when I can afford to buy myself varenyky, I eat them all." "Too bad for the vultures!" "Vultures are fascinating animals." "They're scavengers." "They eat carcasses after the predators have taken all the good stuff." "They can't hunt their prey." "But they're not lazy." "It's physiological." "What's wrong with them?" "Their beaks are too soft or too long, I can't remember." "But they aren't able to tear through mammals' skin." "They can't fight other birds of prey, either." "Humiliating." "Maybe." "But they still have a life expectancy of 35 years." "That's a long time for a bird." "In fact, you look a little like a vulture." "Whatever." "The sunken cheeks, your dark eyes with dark circles under them..." "You've got it all." "I got a girl pregnant once." "It was a girl I met one night, just like you." "I acted like a real bastard." "She came here to tell me she was pregnant." "Fortunately, she didn't want it." "I promised I'd help, but I didn't let her in the door again." "I was harsh." "She cried nonstop." "She was fragile." "She came here one day and asked me to look her in the eye... and say:" ""It's a sad situation, but we're doing the right thing." ""One day, a man will give you a child" ""because you're a good woman." ""You'll be a good mother." ""But not us, not now, that's all.T" "Did you tell her that?" "No." "I said I'd go to the clinic with her, but then I disappeared." "I didn't see her again after that." "You should've gone with her." "The same kind of thing... happened to me once." "You really are easy, aren't you?" "What?" "What?" "You don't like getting to the bottom of things?" "You don't know what it means to get to the bottom of things." "You quote passages you don't even understand." "Your tormented country!" "What tormented country?" "What are you doing for your tormented country?" "You dance at after-parties to music with no lyrics written specifically for robots who speak no language." "Androgynous guys who all look a bit faggy." "Girls with boyish figures and heads like dolls, looking strung out, and proud of it." "Proud to be on drugs, lost, aimless... even proud to be an aborter, in your case." "We have nothing in common anyway!" "Nothing!" "Clara, please don't go." "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "Fucking coward!" "I fucked a loser!" "You'll never do anything with your life!" "You could die and it wouldn't change a thing!" "You're useless!" "You think you're the only one who gets that this shit sucks?" "I hate it as much as you do!" "You poor pathetic idiot!" "You fucking pathetic idiot!" "Let go of me!" "Why do you know so much about vultures?" "One of my students did his term project on vultures." "It was a lot of work." "You're a teacher?" "Yes." "Third grade." "How old are they in the third grade?" "8, 9." "You aren't the typical third-grade teacher." "I know." "I don't think I'm very good, either." "If we weren't unionized, I'd have been fired a long time ago." "I've gotten warnings, just like you did at the old-folks home." "How come?" "Well, I'm absent a lot." "I don't respect the dress code." "I sometimes tell the kids the truth." "The administration doesn't like that." "The truth?" "Nothing too serious." "I censor myself a lot." "That's better, I would think." "Yeah." "I have a job..." "and a dryer." "But none of that means a thing." "Weekends start on Thursday and end Sunday night." "I never miss one." "I get drunk." "I drink vodka shots at the bar till I have to go and puke." "I do a lot of drugs, too." "Coke, MDMA, ecstasy, speed." "Just stuff that gives you energy, or makes you want to fuck." "I combine them all." "It's always the same." "When the sun starts to come up, I panic." "Real life catches up to me." "I feel completely empty." "I'm nothing at all... nothing but a body." "A body that dances, has sex, reflects the light." "I'm nothing but sweat, mine and other people's mixed on my skin, nothing but hair flying all over the place every time I jump in the air on the dance floor." "You know?" "I have a body, but there's nothing living inside it." "I'm a surface, an empty shell." "I don't know if you understand." "I get scared when the sun comes up." "I can't let the euphoria end." "I want to cry, but there are no tears in me." "I don't want anything at all." "I can't eat anything, not even fresh fruit." "There's nowhere in the world I want to be." "And there's no music for moments like that." "Being alone is unbearable, but there's no one I want to be with either." "I'm far from everything, far from everyone." "Sometimes, I take another pill at around 6:00 in the morning." "It wakes me up for eight more hours, and I go find another after-party." "At this point, normal people have been home for ages." "They're right." "The ones out right now haven't found what they're looking for, or don't even know what they're looking for any more." "I have a lot of sex, too." "I fuck strangers I've just met." "I go home with them." "I know a lot of apartments like yours, all over the city." "I've lost track of how many guys I've slept with." "I have sex in alleys, in parking lots." "I make up a name sometimes." "I let men fuck me in the ass." "A lot of the time, I ask them to." "I like feeling pain." "I like seeing in their eyes that they think I'm a slut." "I want to be desired." "I like entering a room and feeling as though all the men desire me, want me, are driven crazy by me." "Where were you at this time last night?" "Here, asleep." "I was in an apartment in Saint-Henri with two other guys and a girl." "The four of us slept together." "Who were they?" "A couple I met at a bar and one of their friends." "Nice people." "The girl's clit was pierced." "I didn't really know what to do with that." "I dive headlong into situations like that." "Sometimes, I snap out of it and have a moment of clarity." "Last night, I started thinking." "I was holding both of the guys' penises, one in each hand." "More than enough..." "I wasn't really there." "But I wasn't really somewhere else, either." "I was watching myself from above, from a distance." "I was nowhere." "I feel ashamed Monday morning at school." "I can't look my students in the eye." "Then, as the week goes on, the images from the weekend disappear." "I become a good person again." "It really is a double life." "If my colleagues knew, they'd find it pretty disturbing." "Most of them are girls my age." "They have no idea." "Nor does my mother." "Well... do we have AIDS or something now?" "No." "I just got tested." "I got chlamydia six months ago, but it's been gone for a long time." "Don't worry." "Do you know who gave it to you?" "No." "It's disgusting, huh?" "A little." "I don't really care about anything." "There's always this fog between me and the world." "It's like nothing is real." "It's a game." "I'm giving a performance... a long show." "When I started sleeping around," "I'd have a new heartache every weekend, a new disappointment." "I thought I'd been close... to someone or something, but it always disappeared." "It hardened me." "After a while, I understood." "I sleep with all these men, but I don't belong to any of them." "I take advantage of them as much as they take advantage of me." "I'm a feminist." "Fucking is so simple." "Women have vaginae, and men have penises." "We're designed for it." "That's all that unites us, you and I, you, and a thousand versions of you," "me, and a thousand versions of me." "Random couples based on the simple geometry of internal and external organs." "I'm restless all the time, in every way." "I never feel like things are in order." "The older I get, the less insight I have into what life is." "I don't believe in anything." "I honestly think I have no ideals." "It's asking for too much of a commitment." "If I believe in something, I'm scared I'll change my mind, or stop believing." "It's as though I'm unable to exist in the world, to really be a part of it." "It's true that I quote passages from a book that I don't understand." "I have no idea what needs to be done for my tormented country." "I don't think I even give a shit, when it comes down to it." "The people I really like seem to be part of another world." "They don't really have a goal as individuals or as a group." "They go through life like little white ghosts." "They leave no footprints on the ground." "And they don't make a sound." "They're almost invisible." "If they disappeared altogether, it would hardly change a thing." "Odds are that no one would even notice." "I'm like them." "I just want things to unfold more or less the way they're supposed to." "Birth, life, death." "Maybe find one or two truths to hold on to... some force that would keep me with the living in the here and now... that would stop me from flying towards darkness all the time." "It feels like I'm struggling with everything, all the time." "I'm a little tired." "I don't mind fighting." "I have the stamina." "It's just that..." "It's such an absurd fight." "It's a constant battle." "It's like treading water." "I'm doing what it takes to stay on the surface, just enough not to drown." "But fuck, I'm swallowing water... big mouthfuls." "It's brutal." "It hurts." "I think I'm really tired." "I don't think I'd mind dying." "That's what I really think." "Someone needs to take care of me." "Someone strong, who can pick me up and carry me... to I don't know where." "Wherever I have to be." "Then put me down..." "And everything would get calm." "And I could breathe easy... just breathe easy." ""This lovely language with its beautiful words" ""Carries its history through its many accents" ""Filled with music and the scent of herbs" ""Goat cheese and fresh bread" ""From Mont Saint-Michel to the Contrescarpe" ""Listening; to the people of this country speak" ""ls like a warm breeze caught in a harp" ""Where the harmonies resonate forever" ""The colours of this lovely language are of Provence" ""And its heartbeat is found within the words" ""Conversation gives birth to a celebration" ""And words flow as freely as a river" ""You'll get up early Put on your cap" ""Go outside" ""The tree down the street The fellow at the docks" ""The young girls' eyes The sleeping baby" ""All of this is yours" ""You'll touch the ground, the sea and its islands" ""You'll see the ships, the gate and the friar" ""The castle and the bridge and all the oat fields" ""This is your country" ""You'll return home heavy after taking in all that is yours" ""And you'll tell your mother that the horizon is clear" ""And she will be proud to be from that country?" ""For a moment, I forgot my name" ""it allowed me to write this song?" "Well done, would." "Juliette, it's your turn." ""Tomorrow I will vanquish" ""The night and the rain" ""For death..." ""For death is no more..." "T" ""No more than a cold little thing?" ""Tomorrow I will vanquish" ""The night and the rain" ""For death is no more than a cold little thing" ""Of no importance at all" ""I will reach out to it tomorrow" ""But only tomorrow" ""Tomorrow" ""I will reach out my hands with great sweetness?" "Translation by Joshua Beitel" "Subtitles by Vision Globale"