They’ve turned off the fountain and drained the lakes, so
the park smelled of fish and rotting algae, but the walk through dry leaves,
under the still-turning trees, was perfect on the eyes if not the nose. I crossed
through the center of the park and over the waterfall bridge, and then continued
on the upper walk, along the bike path, as far as rue Roi. Halfway to St. Denis
on Roi, I headed down through an alley where old garages and carriage houses
had been made into little homes, with lace curtains in the windows and red
geraniums still blooming on wrought iron balconies. Cats scurried under fences,
a dog barked somewhere inside. In a partially open upstairs window, a woman
leaned on her elbows, smoking, as she surveyed the alley from above.
It was still too early to meet my friend when I reached St.
Denis, so I stopped in a little French bookstore – a dark, narrow shop filled from
floor to ceiling with books, with a long table covered with other titles
running down the middle – and spontaneously asked the proprietor, a middle-aged
woman with short hair and glasses and wearing a tweedy, close-fitting sweater,
if she could recommend a good book for me.
“Un grand roman ou un livre de poche?" she
asked.
"Quelque chose un peu plus court," I replied.
"Un auteur quebeçois?" She glanced at me over
her glasses.
"Oui !" She looked pleased and went quickly to her shelves, chose two books, and
described them both to me in English that was marginally better than my French.
The first was a short novel, the second a recueil de nouvelles (collection of
short stories) called Les Aurores montreales by Monique
Proulx, about immigrants in the city. I chose that one, paid and thanked
her, and said I’d be back to tell her how I liked the book. She smiled: "bonne
journée."
At 4:00 pm the
tall figure of my friend -- always punctual, and always wearing the same reddish-brown
leather jacket, summer or winter – appeared on the opposite street corner. I
was already seated outside at Café Vienne, on the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Denis, where we’d agreed to meet, and he saw me at once. When he
arrived, he glanced at my book approvingly, and pulled a theological title,
recently published in France, from his briefcase to show me. Its plain, uncoated cream cover and black-and-red
lettering had the characteristic bare look of French intellectual publishing;
the title indicated the book was about the current debate between belief and
atheism. “You read French much better than I do,” I said, handing it back to
him after I had taken a look. We went into the mirrored, dark wood interior of
the old café he had recommended, and ordered an espresso for him and a decaf
cappuccino for me.
“Well,” he explained, “French was required in school, you see,
and we started at grade one and continued right through college. But we weren’t
taught to speak, because back then, the only place an anglophone would ever
need to speak French would be in Paris...” he drew out his words for effect: “…or so they thought.” I raised my eyebrows.
“Oh yes,” he said. “It was a different time. And the immigrants learned English,
of course, because they weren’t wanted in the Roman Catholic schools where
French was spoken and taught.” He gestured with one hand, over his shoulder,
toward the Latin Quarter below us, which used to be the
heart of French-speaking Montreal,
so-called because all the Catholic schools and seminaries there had taught
Latin. “So now we are blamed for the fact that the older generations of
immigrants don’t speak French.” He looked momentarily annoyed. “Well, that’s
all changed; the young people now are very well educated in both languages, and
when I hear them speaking to one another on the bus it’s quite impressive; they
carry on sophisticated intellectual conversations, moving back and forth
between the two languages. Indeed. But yes, I did learn to read quite well, and
I can speak the language, pas mal, but unfortunately I tend to get caught up in
complicated constructions. I should learn to speak in short sentences.” He sat
down, knocking against the rickety marble-top table with his long legs, and
the espresso spilled over onto its saucer. “Ach,” he said, making a face at
himself, and muttered, “Cochon.” (pig)
“Oh, no,” I said, “it’s the table’s fault.”
Pardoned, he allowed himself a grin,. “Just a petit cochon,
then!”
He’d brought me the program for the fall film series at the
Goethe Institute, across the street, and I’d brought a printout of the
newsletter I edit for the Anglican cathedral, for which he’d written a long historical
article on the history of pews. From my backpack I also pulled out a piece of
pear cake I’d baked the day before, unwrapped it, and set it in front of him.
“Excellent!” he said. “We must share this.” I cut a small piece for myself and
gave him the rest. “Yes, I often stop for a
coffee here before my films at the Goethe Institute,” he said, looking up from the cake, which was disappearing. “If I’m hungry I
go to La Gâterie, just up the street, you know it, yes?” I only did because it
was near the bookstore I’d just discovered, and I’d noticed the specials on a chalkboard sign on the sidewalk.
He’s fifteen years older than I am, but doesn’t look it. I think his
father was English or Scottish, but his mother was of Huguenot descent; I like listening
to his stories about Montreal and its history, told
from an English point of view but very sympathetic to the French, and always
liberally punctuated with his wry sense of humor.
Beyond the café railing, at my elbow, the city’s inhabitants streamed by: an old couple
arm-in-arm; a homeless man wearing a black sleeping bag over his head and
wrapped about his body like a shroud; a punk kid with skateboard, chains, and pink hair waxed into
impressive spikes; teenage girls in hot pink sweaters, little ruffled skirts
and striped knitted leggings. Behind us a lone man in a black beret sat and
smoked a cigarette, and then, when I looked again, he had disappeared.
We talked for an hour, about the changes that have been felt
among all of Montreal’s religious
groups, including the Jewish community, about which my friend knows a good
deal; he described a trip he had taken to Israel.
Then he caught the Sherbrooke bus
and headed back downtown for a dinner meeting with an elderly friend, while I
walked up St. Denis, past the metro station, across Cherrier, and up to the
corner of rue Roi where I waited with the rest of the pedestrians for the bike
riders and traffic to clear.
--
There was a slight breeze and it lifted the red pashmina scarf
I’d bought for next-to-nothing on Canal Street in New York last month, and blew
its softness against my cheek. My walking settled into a rhythm, and I gradually
became aware of the same happiness I had felt one day in London, many years ago, walking
down the Strand and then along the Thames toward Westminster, when for the first time realized
that I – a country girl -- was free and anonymous and happy not in spite of,
but precisely because I was in a city. On that day I had felt myself inhabiting
my own particular period of time and my own particular place in London with a new awareness, and yet I also felt the city’s life stretching far behind me,
and past me into the future. For the first time I had slipped into that flow of
urban human consciousness that makes great cities what they are, and bonds their
inhabitants to them. It was both revelation, and liberation from a limited view
of myself I’d had up until then. Now, fifteen years later, in this grey but
exuberant city on the other side of the Atlantic, there
was another revelation: I was no longer an urban visitor, or an immigrant
trying to settle in. It was finally home here; I was home.
A sign caught my eye and I stopped and walked up a set of
stairs and into a small second-floor shop that sold beads. It was run by a
Chinese family: a young man at a desk who said hello to me in French as I came
in, and a woman seated near him at one end of the desk who looked like she must
be his mother, and a young woman who was talking in Chinese to someone, a
relative perhaps, on the telephone. They were all very neatly dressed. There
were a lot of beads -- glass and stone and wood and metal -- arranged carefully
in small bins or hanging by strings against the walls; there were jewelry
findings and wire and cords, supplies and tools. I wandered around the shop
seeing what there was, while the young woman carried on her phone call,
sounding a bit agitated. When I had gone all the way around the shop and
reached the door again I turned and spoke in English, which I guessed might
actually be their second language: “Thank you, it’s a lovely shop,” – and at
the first sound of my voice, the young man and his mother both got to their
feet and stood facing formally in my direction. “I don’t want to buy anything
right now, but I will come back,” I told them, which was not just politeness,
but the truth. “Thank you very much,” they both answered, nodding and smiling.
Behind me, the young woman interrupted her phone call, saying, “Thank you!” as
I turned to go out the door.
The cafés on St. Denis were full of late afternoon patrons
enjoying the gift of these last warm days; old men drank dark beer; two young
men hunched over an outdoor chessboard; pensive dark-haired women in
turtlenecks sat with books on the tables in front of them, their hands on the
handles of white cups. There were witty window displays of clothing-as-costume:
blue and green knits draped onto a mannequin to resemble a mermaid with tail; a
blue-and –white nurse; a dominatrix policewoman; feathered masks hung with
expensive handmade jewelry; translucent wooden lamps that imitated pumpkins.
On Duluth I turned right and headed east, down the cobbled
street with its planters full of tumbling overgrown coleus and sweet potato
vines, past the early diners in the busy multi-level corner restaurant, and the
wall where the Italian restaurant used to be before it burned down, now covered
with posters for concerts and exhibitions, and then walked up another alley to
rue Rachel so that I could stop at La Tricoteuse and buy a ball of purple alpaca
to finish a red-and purple hat I planned to knit before the first snow.
I’m very lucky, I thought. Perhaps someday I’ll know enough
about this city to write my own story about it, in American English: another
immigrant finding her way among its streets, the tendrils of its wrought iron
staircases, its multiplicity of doors.
