The Doorman of Windsor Station

By Julie Vincent and Javier Alfonso

Francisco will forever be haunted by the sight of his best friend Juan lying on the floor of a train station, pierced by five bullets. He’ll remember that sight as he flees the political uprising in Uruguay that night. He’ll remember when he’s holding a dying homeless man in Windsor Station in Montreal eight months later. He’ll remember when he’s a successful architect. He’ll remember when he’s having an affair with a Québécoise pianist named Claire. He’ll remember when he’s much older, a vagrant sleeping in a café that was once part of Windsor Station, where he meets his son, an activist in the student strikes in Quebec.

As he tries for a better life, Francisco’s past keeps finding him, until it blurs with the present in a series of hallucinations, challenging him to reclaim his identity and his rights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770918160

Julie Vincent

Julie is an artist, poet, singer, song writer, PhD, and given the opportunity, a performer. She finished her PhD in Social Theory on the ethics of practice in mental health services at The University of Melbourne and travelled the world, creating art and poetry as she went. She came back and travelled across the top end, creating songs, poems and art works en route. She lectured at Newcastle University School of Nursing and volunteered in Orphanages in India and a health project in Uganda and the World Social Forum in Nairobi. In 2008 she was in an accident that nearly killed her and saved her life. She had a spiritual experience and married an Aboriginal man and found herself in Alice Springs Volunteering with Indigenous kids!

Book preview

Contents

Doña Quixote and the Vagabond Preface by Javier Alfonso

Author’s Notes on Staging

Production History

Characters

The Doorman of Windsor Station

Prologue: Montreal, 2005

1: Montevideo, 1960

2: Montevideo, The 1970S

3: Next Day In Montevideo

4: Montevideo, 1973

5: A Few Hours Later In Montevideo

6: Montreal, Eight Months Later

7: Montreal, Three Days Later

8: Montreal, A Year Later

9: Montevideo, 1973, The Faculty Of Architecture

10: Montreal, The 1980S

11: The Same Night

12: Montreal, A Few Months Later

13: Montreal, The Cinéma Verdi

14: A Few Hours Later

15: Montreal, Six Months Later

16: Montreal, A Year Later, In Francisco’s Studio

17: Montreal, A Few Years Later

18: Montreal, Eight Months Later

19: A Week Later In Montreal

20: Montreal And Montevideo

21: Montreal, The Years Pass By

22: Montreal, January 1998, The Ice Storm

23: Montreal, 2005, The Student Strike

24: Next Morning In The Café At TheTrain Station

25: At The Station Café, Several Days Later

26: Montreal And Montevideo, March 2005

27: Montreal, The Same Day, At Night

28: Several Weeks Later

29: Montreal, A Month Later, At Night

30: Same Place, Same Night

31: Montreal, A Few Hours Later The Same Night

32: A Bright Morning In Montreal

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Translator

Copyright

Doña Quixote and the Vagabond

¹

Preface by Javier Alfonso

One day we’ll meet in another carnival; we’ll be lucky if we’ve learned there aren’t any corners or piers that can dissolve what we once were in their hiding places; time comes later.

— Fernando Cabrera

Montevideo, October 2007. A grey evening. The wind and the rain hold the winter captive on the Rambla de Pocitos. The meeting place is the Che Montevideo, across from the Plaza Gomensoro, at the end of Trouville. Julie Vincent, the artistic director of the theatre company Singulier Pluriel and author of La Robe de mariée de Gisèle Schmidt, is seated at a table facing the rocks. Everything is very francophone. Nothing is by chance, I’d been thinking on the bus. It’s not often I get the chance to interview someone in French. It’s definitely a motivation. My parents were right in making sure I learned the language of Astérix and Tintin. The challenge has been posed, and the mystery as well.

A playwright and theatre director from Montreal, Julie Vincent has been rehearsing her play with a Uruguayan cast for three months and it’s set to premiere in the Teatro Victoria in Montevideo. That’s all I know, but it’s enough to set off the alarm of the unusual, which gets my curiosity going and shoots out questions like darts. Who is this woman? What’s she doing here? Why is she installed in this icy room where you can see your breath and where it’s colder inside than out in July and August? What is a play called La Robe de mariée de Gisèle Schmidt all about?

An hour and a half later, the answers are on the tape recorder, along with another story I never would have imagined: every day, when she took the Metro in Montreal, Julie would see a homeless man who was always in the same spot. One afternoon, in search of inspiration, she went into a café on the Rue St-­Denis and began to write about the loss of urban beauty through the eyes of a cast-­off of society, whom she imagined as a forgotten architect. She let herself be carried along in a hazy state of automatic writing. At the table next to her, an elderly man was reading a book of Rilke’s poetry with the French title Chant éloigné, surrounded by various open dictionaries.

Are you a writer? she asked him. The man’s response — with his eyelids like venetian blinds half-­closed over his eyes — astonished her.

I’m an architect, he said, but you might take me for a bum.

It was just as she’d imagined from her walk from the Metro, but in reverse. The encounter would change her life, opening a bridge between the still, frozen North and the humid, windswept South. As Julie continued her story and told me about the incredible series of unexpected events that had led her to the Río de la Plata, I began to understand that Montreal and Montevideo shared much more than the first four letters of their names.

We left the restaurant just as a winter rainstorm was breaking. Her umbrella was useless in the wind and by the time we arrived at the Punta Trouville Hotel, where she usually stayed in Montevideo, we were soaked. We’d already shared an experience and become friends, and she offered me her umbrella as a present.

The man she had met, with sad eyes and a weary gait and melancholy saturating every inch of his hunched humanity, was of Italian origin. Francisco Antolino was the name of that life that had been split in two.

He’d spent the first thirty-­five years of his life on the shores of the shifting, turbid Río de la Plata, which one day was filled with the serene, gentle waters of the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers, and the next with the turbulent brackish green of the Atlantic. His past belonged to the place where he’d learned to walk, read and love: the city where he’d become an architect and from which he’d fled just in time, before the military kicked in his door.

His second thirty-­five years took place along another river, the Saint Lawrence, a much calmer watercourse, cold and transparent, silent and introverted in winter, swift and lively in the summer. This universal ambassador of nostalgia was living proof that life is like a river’s flow.

A social services investigator wouldn’t classify Francisco as a marginal, but dining with him in a Montreal restaurant was enough to ascertain that he basically lived like one. He hardly mentioned his professional achievements or the recognition he’d received. They embarrassed him, and he said he didn’t deserve them. His belongings would fit into a van: just clothing, a few books and other things that might be worth taking from one apartment to another. He was an authentic solitary man, whose memories pained him, yet he’d transformed them into a vital fuel. Although he didn’t publish his writings, he lived like a poet. His long, profound existential reflections as he sipped a glass of bring-­your-­own wine with me were those of a poet who still had the strength to change the world. His path was by translating Rilke and Juan Gelman.

His story, which he told Julie in the course of dozens of conversations in that same Montreal café, prompted her, like a female Don Quixote, to travel to Montevideo. There she dove into recent Uruguayan history and immersed herself in images of Montevideo from the National Library, the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad de la República, the theatres, streets and parks and the promenade along the shore, the beaches and the rocks at Trouville.

Between her conversations with Francisco and her trips to Montevideo, Julie learned about José Gervasio Artigas, the Colorados and the Blancos, Delmira Agustini, Felisberto Hernández, Mario Benedetti and Juan Carlos Onetti, the Sorocabana railway and El Sportsman magazine, Sara Méndez, Elena Quinteros and Carlos Liscano.

Julie Vincent found that Uruguay was a faithful mirror