Bilingual Being (12 page)

My sarcasm notwithstanding, I always considered an empty church to be my refuge. I could have harboured a sense of duplicity, I suppose. I was not a virgin, after all, and thus contaminated, or so the priests would tell us all from the pulpit every week, hypocritically extolling purity. But I remember my conviction that they often had no idea what they were talking about, and so I remained a young girl who enjoyed faith no matter what they – or those whose secrets I kept – ever said. As often as I could, I snuck off to the chapel of our school, downstairs, the same place where I was confirmed in 1965 at age eight.

I've continued to hide in empty churches whenever I don't want to be found or need to feel safe in a dangerous world. I understand the irony of my doing this, given that my perpetrators were pretentiously religious men, but the self exists somewhere beyond the mere words of men. And more than my tongue in those years, my silence spoke my culture. In fact, the Quiet Revolution was a non-violent rebellion not
in
silence but
against
it. It was a flat refusal to continue the vow of obedience the church had imposed on everyone by controlling everything from undersized children in their beds to oversized business contracts. So it's hardly surprising that in my personal revolution against the mutism imposed on and around me, I'd seek my voice elsewhere.

__________

*
Both my main perpetrators are deceased, and the timetable for legal intervention has long passed; information on the high rate of incidence of sexual abuse cases involving the Roman Catholic Church, both within and outside of residential facilities, is widely available.

Undershirt

Please.

Not here. Not now.

Not today, in this pretty place.

I feel sand tickling underneath my feet,

the sun in my long hair, a soft breeze on my walking legs.

A sense of peace begins to hold me, an unfamiliar fragrance,

a thread of self connects with new sensations, infuses hope.

It's such a lovely, different sort of day from life in town:

sweet cottages nestled up against the edges to our left,

open water on the right, waves teasing as we walk

along the beach: mother, brother, female,

her friendly son my age and size,

and me. Lac St-Joseph,

Quebec, summer,

1961 or '60.

Toxic cognitions

infect me long after

that day has passed:

I can't get a break.

It always ends like this.

Nothing ever changes.

Experienced in French,

but installed in English.

Thoughts I can't escape.

A big wave,

and the boy is wet,

but surely he's not cold – it's hot.

It's true I have an undershirt to share, and

we're both three or four, so it's bound to fit.

But I don't want to strip half naked in this open space.

Am I really so ridiculous to care, like you say, as you insist,

and I comply as always? What you don't know is that I do this

elsewhere, other times and spaces. (How come you don't know?)

Cold and grey outside now – the ocean, cottages seem distant,

faded. Feels like town again. If seagulls fly, I don't hear.

Just the sound of inner pleading, pointless:

not here, not in this pretty place,

not today, not now.

Please.

6

THE VIEW FROM HERE

THE WORLD IN COLOUR

My grand-maman's attachment to the French Roman Catholic Church was either an encouragement or an obligation, depending on whom you ask, of my grand-papa's own piety. That's why at twenty-seven years of age, after five children and her many illnesses, he attended a closed retreat at Jésus Ouvrier [Jesus the Worker] seminary outside Quebec, where he summarily took a vow of chastity which he was deemed to have kept all of his remaining years, of which there were almost sixty.

He spoke in solemn whispers, priest-like, his head low even when he pronounced the annual «bénédiction» over all of us every New Year at midday, as we knelt on the floor before him and he did the sign of the cross over our heads. A self-made craftsman, my grand-papa also repaired small tools, appliances, and miscellaneous things. This explains why he was willing, even eager, to encourage my father into what was then the cutting edge of technology, the “television business,” with himself and his only son, Roger, when my father married my mother.

The television store was located on the lower floor of the family's boarding house, and the first television programs to be broadcast in Canada were viewed in black-and-white on heavy, tube-based wooden consoles with a tiny screen. Later, my family would be the first on our block in the suburbs to have a colour television set, thanks to my father's burgeoning trade, and among the first to see
Bugs Bunny
in colour.
I remember musing how ridiculous it was that we'd someday be able to see even the news in colour. Who'd ever care about the colour of the suit some man wore while reporting? Ah, my narrow lens, never imagining the graphics of war in full colour.

I was dazzled by the display of colours that came on every morning when stations came back on the air, just before a graphic of a stereotypical “Mohawk head” with an official notification that the day was beginning. In those early days, there wasn't much to see. Three channels, one in English and two in French, were on air from 6
AM
to 11
PM
. The English channel mostly had news and animation.
Looney Tunes
cartoons weren't classics then, just shows. The Roadrunner getting smashed again and again. Hilarious. The only French character, Pépé, a smelly skunk. Still funny.

My father watched the English news on
CBC
, but in those days I watched to laugh. I saw flat black images moving fast, even the original Mickey Mouse strips with the off-key music. Meanwhile, in French, instead of animation there were people dressed up and puppets of all kinds, mostly hand puppets but huge ones on strings, too. I learned songs and stories with Marie Quatre-Poches and Bobino and became a major fan. My mother was partial to the French news on the local radio station. And there it was again: two parents connecting with the world on opposing channels.

In my baby book, my mother kindly observes that in my first years in front of a television as a toddler, I liked
Rin-tin-tin
and
Télé-Popeye
best of all. I realize now that both were mythological hero stories. The first was about a German Shepherd who saved people (mostly children) in distress – the second about a cartoon character who became miraculously strong eating spinach and saved one particular female, Olive Oil, every time she came to harm, which was often. Was I deliberately choosing imaginary rescue scenarios? Or did these shows just happen to be on when I was allowed to watch? Who knows. The contrast between reality and fantasy was pretty thin for me in those days. And television played right into the final blurring of whatever boundary there might have been.

Yet as I got older, I
did
notice more and more the contrast between languages, between the variant worldviews emerging on television. On the English news channel, soldiers died in Vietnam; Parliament
in Ottawa was in session; there had been a flood in Alberta. Absent was the local, the here, the now. On the French news channels, a local business had had a roof cave in after the last storm; a new highway was opening soon linking two communities; and some provincial politician had died. Absent was the national, the elsewhere, the other.

I also remember the first commercials on television. First in black-and-white. Then in colour. A famous one on the French channel featured a woman, Mme St-Onge, tired and in a plain house dress. She was having trouble cleaning her kitchen floor until she discovered Spic and Span cleaner. Since we were one of the only families in the phone book with that last name at the time – the others being my uncles – we got a lot of crank calls on our black dial telephone. «Oui, allô? Bonjour, Mme St-Onge. Est-ce que vos planchers sont propres?» [Yes, hello? Good day, Mme St-Onge. Are your floors clean?] Then laughter, giggling. My mother hung up, a bit angry, but never furious. Not my mother.

EL MAGASIN D'TÉVÉ

On special occasions, we children sat along the stairs from «el magasin d'tévé» [the television store] to grand-maman's kitchen, a few on each step, peering at dozens of televisions, feeling privileged. And then there was one peculiar day: Sunday, 24 November 1963. We gathered that day for one specific reason, to watch television together. Here we were, inundated by the horror on two dozen screens, as John F. Kennedy's body was taken to lie in state. Adults sat and stood, up and down those stairs, in aprons and sobs, as the events of the past forty-eight hours were retold and replayed. Murder in colour in a way my dim vision hadn't foreseen. Little did I realize then, nor for forty years forward, the symbolism of that day and place in the rupture of my innocence. Such is the magic of television. The illusion that crime happens only in other spaces. It would be an expensive delusion, one that began on the stairs of my grand-papa's television store.

My father bought out my maternal uncle when I was about six, and edged out my grand-papa when I was about ten. As he moved the shop to the suburbs, this Grade 8 graduate would make ample money for my mother to be «bin comfortab'» [very comfortable] in perpetuity,
even after he'd sold the whole works to a firm in Toronto around 1980, retired, and passed on. He plied his limited education for the greatest imaginable gain, not an easy thing to do on one lung. The other he lost to tuberculosis at age sixteen when he spent eleven months bedridden, hovering near death, followed by a year of incapacitation as water kept refilling the remaining lung. When he was given only days to live, his family consented to his being a guinea pig for an experimental drug called streptomycin.
*
The rest, as they say, is history.

In recovery, he ordered a self-study kit on home electronics in English, which he completed in lieu of formal schooling at St Patrick's High School. Incomprehensibly, his mother had visited only once during that hospital year, and his father and brothers, never. My father was sustained by only one regular visitor – a female neighbour roughly his own age – and his ward-mate, Jean-Paul Desbiens, aka Frère Pierre-Jérôme, aka Frère Untel, with whom he had daily philosophical discussions.
†

Sickly as my father was, he began to appreciate the potential of remote control devices to allow patients to have access to televisions in their rooms and manage them on their own, switching channels and adjusting the volume without the assistance of orderlies or nurses, just to pass away the hours. After his release, he used his new knowledge to design, patent, and produce hand-held “controllers” wired to televisions
he began installing in care facilities. Gradually he acquired television contracts for every hospital but one in Quebec City, and many hotels.

I remember countless visits to that television store, the family business – daily from infancy to school age, then weekly – as my mother occupied herself «à faire les comptes» [doing the books, the accounting] and my father sat hunched over metal carcasses on a workbench, smoke from the nearest ashtray wafting past his face, while he expertly fixed wires and tried to jump back quickly when tubes exploded. That's how our household moved from lower class to middle class within a decade.

The materials for assembling the remote controls were kept in our basement in the suburbs for many years. As soon as he was manually skilled enough, my brother made his pocket money putting them together. He painstakingly assembled the speakers on a metal plaque, then added wiring and plastic dials. The next step was to put the works into a plastic shell in hospital colours – white, beige, pale yellow, pale pink, grey, or black – add a curly telephone-type cord of the same colour to the bottom, screw the gadget shut, and glue on the company logo.

I can't remember how much money my brother earned for each, but it was more than I made ironing every week. I could have joined him, for my father was non-discriminatory in his hiring practices. But he was exceedingly fussy about the soldering, and I couldn't maintain his high standards with that frightening tool. So I stuck to making polyester shirts steamy and hot, a smell that induced a deep funk for no reason I could remember. And that's how my brother and I both ended up with a bit of loose change for candy at the «tabagie» [tobacco store] up the hill.

For my brother, those riches were always spent on Aero, Coffee Crisp, and Caramilk bars. For me, the preferred logos were MacIntosh Toffee, Cherry Blossom, and Kit Kat – my father's nickname for me. Candy labels were in English. I remember thinking that was weird. Why was there no French candy? No matter. At ten cents for a small one and twenty-five cents for a large one, we ate a lot. The candy almost made up for the fact that when that assembly business moved in, my brother and I (then aged about five and seven) had to give up our favourite room, our precious «sous-marin»: a half-finished space at the back of the basement where we randomly nailed things into two-by-fours.
From here, we planned to attack the known world and then, fully submerged in our high-tech submarine, cruise far away together.

CURLY BOWS AND CHIVAS

This would all be irrelevant to this story of bilingualism and biculturalism were it not for the fact that my anglo father couldn't have obtained permission for any hospital set-up – the foundation of his modest corporate empire – without my mother's family pulling strings, lots of strings, with the sisters. The French Roman Catholic Church establishment ran the hospitals in Quebec in those days, as it had for almost three hundred years in one form or another.

Negotiating these partnerships, business and church, allowed my father to route wires behind X-ray rooms and open up ceilings in high-security areas. This took a strategic amount of alcohol, which religious administrators politely accepted, certain brands only – «pas d'la cochonnerie» [not the junkie kinds (literal meaning: what's for the pigs)]. I wrapped the bottles myself, a prestigious task to which I assigned great personal honour because I was handy with small scissors and curly bows. Curly bows and Chivas for «les bonnes soeurs»: it wouldn't have been Christmas without that.