Bilingual Being (10 page)

It would turn out to be a problematic combination, my calm compliance and this playful photographer. My brother shared in an email once, “I bumped into him a few times in the last twenty or so years, but it always seemed weird because he was asking about you the way someone who knew us very well would, while he was actually more of a stranger to our household.” Weird, it was.

Nonetheless, in my brother's letter, there's an essential truth about my first language: his patent literacy in English endures despite the predominance of French for all fifty-two years of his daily life. It seems the mother tongue's power has its
limit
. But in my mother's description, there's an opposite linguistic truth, that the mother tongue's power is
limitless
. For in her neatly scripted caption, the local flavour of spoken French and its norms of conduct are neutralized, standardized. Its grammar is dressed up for company, just like me. So Mr X's contribution to my young life actually sounds civilized, hiding its darker meaning as the earliest recording of a small girl seen through the eyes of men who love looking at small girls. Not only innocence but guilt is inaudible here. My baby book is easily the scariest book I own.

And my already complex world would thicken still. Within a few days of that Kodak print, I'd be found floating upside down, naked, in a splash pool on a lovely July afternoon, behind the home of the Elder, who was an associate of the photographer's. I was saved by the quick actions of an aunt with a knack, even today, for serendipitous timing, who suddenly arrived by car. Apparently, I'd been left in the care of «une bin bonne femme» [a really good woman] while my parents were away for a day or a weekend – the details are not well recalled. It's been, like many things, politely hushed.

My mother records the incident in the baby book as follows: «Bains de soleil, observations: juillet 58, joue dans un bain d'eau au soleil.» [Sunbathing observations: July 1958, plays in a water bath in the sun.] She isn't overtly hiding the truth – she truly believes there's no sense in remembering, or discussing, the bad. Life's hard enough, and we don't
need to stew over negative things. Turn the page, let it go. Best foot forward. After all, only the choicest adjectives will do for the grand narrative.

OPENING MY EYES

I guess I wasn't as intuitive about mathematics as I was about language, because I didn't put two and two together until far too recently. I spent my life, from adolescence onward, unable to open my eyes for flash photographs, a reflex that foiled even the most expert professionals. I was afraid of swimming and uninterested in physical games, unplayful. My mother noticed it by my seventh year, for under «les sports,» she's written «ne semble pas très sportive» [doesn't seem very athletic]. My physical inhibitions were a mark of the past on the present, a kind of neurotic haunting I learned to live with, work around, and move beyond. Why these problems waited for adolescence to surface, though, I can only muse about. Some sort of hormonal reboot, the psychological deck being reshuffled.

«Ah! Mon Dieu! Tes yeux sont ouverts!» [Ah! My God! Your eyes are open!], my mother and sister-in-law exclaim together in reference to a recent photograph. It's the first time in more than forty years that I've managed to do that. Every other indoor photo they have of me has slits in the middle of my face. Open ears, then open mouth, then open mind, then open eyes: that's been the sheer power of knowing about the abuse. Of making it conscious.

At any rate, it's evident from that baby book that by eight months, the engines of my social construction as a French-Canadian «bonne femme» of the 1950s and '60s were already set in motion. I was well on my way to hosting my own fancy parties with curly vegetables. The question remaining was, which sort of «bonne femme» would I turn out to be? The docile games player? The coy doll on show? The well-intentioned, absent-minded female? The most popular prototypes were continuously paraded and rehearsed. But I don't remember making a conscious decision about it one way or another. What I
do
remember was my definite realization at the age of four, a few days into the first school year at my English school, that there were two entirely different
worlds in the world. At school, I didn't have to be a «bonne femme.» It wasn't even something anyone there wanted.

In the years of progressive anglicization that followed, I would become increasingly academic and decreasingly sensual, securing the highest grades every year despite borderline anorexia and an ever-evolving list of allergies and psychosomatic issues. But as I headed off to school in those early years, through the woods between my mother's kitchen and my classroom, I journeyed from my sensory world to my intellectual world easily still. I remember breathing deeply, checking on beloved patches of «muguets» [lily of the valley], and searching for treasures. I once found an ox skull, perfectly preserved. Who knows how old it was – fifty years? A hundred? It was about the size of a man's large shoe, whitish-grey with a long snout and two huge eye sockets. I thought it was spectacular, and it gave me an early desire to be an archaeologist. It's a wonder to me now that I had such a childhood in «la banlieu» [the suburbs], walking deep into swamp grass full of frogs, past trees with mushrooms up and down their bark like silver shelves, to the special place where there was a small clearing with wild strawberries. It was the most perfect consolation, and it entirely satisfied my need for goodness and grace.

Not only that, but I was able to do it all on my own. For in this age of ignorance-as-innocence, there were fewer concerns for the safety of children, and little was suspected or spoken about the sexual crimes of random men – least of all, of those men close to us. The invaluable solitude left my daily canvas beautifully blank for fantasy, fairy worlds, and happy endings. So I delighted in it each morning, taking in all its possibilities before entering the tidy yard that led me towards my school. Almost always, I was seated at the same back corner of the classroom, so that not only were the
SRA
s close by me but the window was beside me, beckoning. A few hours and I'd be walking there again …Would a squirrel have taken the nut I left for him? Would the pretty design of stones I built still be in its place? What story would be waiting for me today?

My English school was my professed destination – my home the prior limit of my origins. But it was in the woods on the borders between my languages, and between the forces that pulled me, that I
talked to myself in a timeless language that nurtured my core. It was an instinctive language beyond words, beyond French and English, where there was always peace. And that core self spoke decisively about survival – assured it, in fact. So I believed it willingly and fully.

Sacrilege

I run my hands on the well-worn wood.

I go along the edges with my tiny fingers:

up, left, right, up, down, right, left, down,

back to the bottom, where I started from.

I touch the cool metal body all over,

so smooth, and hard, and golden, and

feel across the undulated chest to the face –

the long hair, spiked crown – down each arm

to the spread hands with the holes in them,

then past the short, wrinkled loincloth

to the lanky legs and punctured feet.

I feel the four brass tips, like scallop shells.

Then I turn it over and open its back door.

I slowly pull out the «rameaux»
*
from Jerusalem,

about four inches high, yellow-green and dry,

and move my fingers carefully along each

fine, sharp, vertical edge – crisp petite blades;

touch the shred of prayer in blue hand-written ink

that's not allowed to come out at all – «jamais»!

And I slide the little wooden door shut.

Sliding, I open and close it, again, again.

Grand-maman wouldn't take it down like this,

that's for certain! She'd never let me fondle the

armpits of Jésus Christ with my sticky fingers.

This is a treat that only the Elder allows

because, he says, I am «une fille très sage.»
†

Where did that cross go when the house where it all

began and ended was flattened into a bank parking lot?

It used to hang right over the main entrance to the

living room – the fancy «salon» with two ways in,

plastic on the chairs, a piano, and peculiar games.

I asked my mother last year, but she had no idea.

Funny, but I could never imagine forgetting it myself –

invaluable, encrypted consolation – my coded message:

a naked man lying dead, covert doorways in and out,

obscure treasures hidden deep within a private casket.

Jesus with the confounding secret I always kept.

__________

*
A palm frond, of special value in Roman Catholicism, in particular during rites around Easter; my grandparents had apparently obtained it from a priest, a family friend who'd been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

†
A very well-behaved girl.

5

SAINTS AND SINNERS

PENETRATING THE HOLY OF HOLIES

My parents' first home, where I lived until the age of four, was an apartment on St-Cyrille Avenue in Quebec City, a street now renamed Boulevard René Lévesque courtesy of some politically inspired rebranding. It was at the corner of Holland Avenue, a ten-minute walk from l'Église du Très-Saint-Sacrement, under whose auspices my brother and I were baptized – a huge Roman Catholic church poised atop the second most dangerous hill in town (the other is in the walled city itself), overlooking the vast expanse of land and people it dominated.

Across from the church was the three-storey my grandparents owned, with a commercial space and bedrooms in the basement, a kitchen, living room, and bedrooms on the main floor, and an upper floor of guest rooms. My grand-maman Dumont ran a boarding house here for priests and Laval University students. She went to mass every morning, spoke in muted tones, and hung images of priests in every room. For his part, my grand-papa was a carpenter who specialized in repairing church bells.

By all accounts, my mother's family was poor. My grand-maman was raised on a farm in St-Isidore de Dorchester, one of thirteen children of a single mother. Her father died in the Rivière Chaudière one cold November day. A tall man, he'd stood to work his way along the river's
edge and tipped his «chaloupe» [wooden rowboat], turning his wife into a survivor, a family legend.

Emilie Blais née Brochu dit Raisin – Gran'man Raisin, as we called her – was everyone's favourite. She gathered up the children after dinner, when the other older people at the event were being «bin ennuyant» [very boring], she said, to play «Poisson» [Fish] with us around a metal folding table with a burgundy leatherette cover. We gambled dangerously with wooden matches while she sipped brandy, the same kind she kept under her pillow in the care home along the Chaudière where she spent her last months at eighty-five. My grand-papa, for his part, was also raised by a single woman – his sister Blanche – when his mother, Amanda, died birthing her fourteenth child. The first stepmother, Célamire, also died in childbirth, and his father forged a new life with a third wife and more children still, leaving young Gérard in the care of his eldest sibling.

My sense of religion evolved and merged with my languages. I often walked through the church with my grand-papa, up to the bell tower or through the «sacristie» – the Catholic version of the Holy of Holies – to visit priests in the adjoining residences. On other days, drives that stretched from sunrise to sunset, I went to the monastery at Oka where they make that world-famous cheese we always had on the table, to bring small gifts to priests my grand-maman had befriended. She worked until the 1980s, her five children sometimes sharing a room or sleeping in bathtubs. Such was the way «d'arriver» [to make ends meet] during the Depression, and the good habits of industry and frugality stuck.

I was christened with her name, Cécile, as one of my middle names. My other, Marie, was automatically given to every French Roman Catholic girl of the era. In hindsight, it strikes me a bit like Jane Doe, a generic name stripped of identity, ominous even. I passed much of my early youth in my grand-maman's calm company, watching her cook, bake, and clean for the boarders. My favourite object in her home was a heavy wooden cross about a foot high, with a hidden compartment behind it. It hung over an entranceway as a kind of door within a door. It was my important clue about a secret world, and a useful reminder of the constant surveillance. After all, grand-maman always said, «El Bon Dieu y veille su' tout l'monde.» [God watches over everyone.]

A BLESSER OF CHICKENS

My grand-maman Dumont spoke not a word of English other than “hello.” She could certainly not get past hello to “glad to meet you.” But then there was no need to. Her world, her universe, was unilaterally francophone, and she moved in small circles from the butcher next door to the drugstore. Milk was delivered, produce was delivered, and «la messe» was barely one hundred feet away, in full-blown Latin every day. It was a self-contained world in which she contented herself dutifully, fully, religiously.

The only hint that there was ever any other side to her comes in an anecdote my mother shared with me just last summer, which I never actually witnessed. It was a Friday, apparently, and «l'Église» – a general catchall word for religious authority in Quebec – had fairly recently decreed that everyone should eat fish on Fridays. «Ah ça,» she said, «c'ta'in arrangement a'ec les maudits commerçants d'poissons pis 'es syndics, laisse-moi t'el dire.» [Ah, that was some shady arrangement with damned businesses and the union bosses, let me tell you.]

It must be said that a true Québécois is always willing to tell you the truth about the church, and my grand-maman was no exception. Everyone knew and believed the corruption. And yet they went to mass nonetheless, they gave nonetheless, and it held them together in ways they couldn't verbalize, beyond the priesthood and «les maudits prêt'» [damned priests] and – except for the years of John Paul II who was, in their books, «un ange» [an angel] – all the other «maudits papes» [damned popes].