Bilingual Being (28 page)

We were left to look at the tank of fish he'd placed in the centre between our easels. By the time he noticed me, I'd completely filled the canvas, about sixteen by twenty inches, with one gigantic fish. Nose to back fin, it reached perfectly across. It was a really big fish, splendid, I thought. And I'd gone ahead and taken some creative steps to paint him with orange, white, and black stripes. I was delighted with him – right up until I looked at the three monolingual francophones and what they'd done.

They'd filled their canvases with the tank and had represented a few of the fishes and plants, making one of the larger fish be a kind of star in their paintings. All of them had a large tank of many fish with one fish hero. I had one really huge fish swimming on white paper. How could I have misunderstood like this? What had I missed?

«Je t'ai demandé de peinturer un des gros poissons, et c'est ça que tu as fait?» [I asked you to paint one of the big fish and that's what you did?] The instructor was incredulous. I couldn't blame him. I
asked myself the same question. But I see, some forty plus years later, my error. It was my understanding of the «partitif» [some]. He'd implied “one of the big fish here.” I'd understood it without the sense of “among,” without its context, without even water – just the big fish, alone.

And so it was that the painting went into my closet at home, and I guess my parents were told I was hopeless as a French realist because I can't remember going back. Just as well: I was missing Batman for these lessons, the original series. Pow! Blam! Zap! At age ten, my painting career as an «artiste» was over, but I could have cared less.

Besides, what did that instructor really know about art anyhow? How could he possibly understand more about it than
National Geographic
? For in November 1966, barely a few months prior to that painting lesson, my authority on absolutely everything featured a single giant fish spread across its front cover.
*
How I came to look to
National Geographic
for guidance about life is a whole other subject, as you'll see later. Suffice it to say at this point that there was nothing but the man's pretentious manner to challenge the magazine's unquestionable wisdom in my eyes. It's the most beautiful fish in the world, ample and bold against a non-descript background, just like mine. Nose to fin, it fills the paper from edge to edge, as mine did. There was no way for a minor has-been painter from around the corner to contest this eminent vehicle from the wider world.

EUCHARISTIC ART

I'd already heard these rumours about my lack of artistic talent – my English art teacher was of a similar opinion. A couple of years earlier, in 1965, I was given a book at school. Given a book! I couldn't have imagined a better day. It would add to my rather modest library, the dictionary in the linen closet and
The Cat in the Hat
in my brother's closet. (I could not, would not, count the textbooks borrowed from the encyclopedia friend year by year, that didn't smell right and with which
I had to «faire attention» [be careful] so they could be passed along to her next two daughters.)

But here was the most beautiful book I'd ever seen. It was small, about four by three inches, with a dark blue jeans-type cover, a fabric imitation. It was
The Blue Jeans Bible
. I think we were getting ready for Confirmation, but I don't remember for certain why I got it. I remember flipping through the foreign contents. The Bible in English? What an absurd idea – the Bible was a French or Latin text, of course. But I didn't care at all about what was inside, only that it was a book, and it was mine.

I remember that it was spring the day we worked to paint paper covers for our new books. A rare thing, painting in a religious school: the sisters didn't tolerate messes easily. Even spots from our obligatory fountain pens needed to be blotted, explained, apologized for. But this day, I had plain newsprint on my desk for protection, a white box of eight watercolours in a row, with a tiny brush beside, and a small cup with a half-inch of water in it. I was in the last row at the back, near the window, my favourite spot. The sister tried to put the project in a meaningful context for us. She explained how the American bread company Wonderbread had a package with coloured circles. She said the artwork on that package represented hosts. Hosts of many colours. Eucharistic art. She had no package to show us; she assumed we'd all been to the United States where she was from, and that we'd all seen it. It would be more than a decade before I'd notice a real package of Wonderbread and figure out what she'd actually meant.

That day, we were left to concoct a religious juncture between ourselves, our new Bibles, and our paints – painting for itself clearly considered frivolous. I began by painting my whole paper yellow. There would be no second pieces of paper, we were told, so we needed to be careful. I was done quickly, being handy with crafts, and the paint dried well, given my seat near the window. While I don't remember how long the period was, the sister was happy – Bibles for the masses – and more indulgent and patient than usual. So I had more time, a tiny rupture in the predictable cut-and-dry, move-it-along pace of my schooling.

I looked for a long time at the box of colours that day, that perfect day on which the sun forced its way through the window, there were
paints at school, and I was being given a book of my own. In my reverie, I couldn't imagine which colours from the box to exclude, which to leave out of the celebration. It was just too glorious a day for such sadness. So I decided to use them all, equally. I dipped my brush in water, then into one colour, being “careful not to dirty the paint box.” Then flick, flick, flick, I snapped a finger softly against the brush and sent spots of colour in all directions onto the yellow. Flecks of blue. I rinsed the brush, and tried another colour. Flick, flick, flick. Purple, red, green, orange, yellow, white, even black. Tiny splashes of every colour in every direction went onto the yellow. It was an impressionistic masterpiece, I thought, and I was in love with it.

“Where did you learn to do that?” the sister asked when she finally made her way to the back of the room. It wasn't an obviously kind tone. I looked around to see that everyone else had actually drawn
something
: butterflies, flowers, suns, trees, things like that. Instead, my paper had splotches – pretty, pretty splotches.

That's when I received a look from her that I can't really describe. Then many looks, this time from classmates. But I could take it all, didn't let it worry me one bit, because I got to keep the pretty paper and the book, and that's all that mattered to me that day. I folded the paper neatly onto the Bible, apparently following instructions somewhat better now. And I covered the paper in the extra layer of plastic with which we covered all of our school books. Then, best of all, I took it home where it would live, stowed away in the place where I kept everything really valuable: my right-hand vanity drawer.

At age eight, my painting career as an American contemporary artist was apparently over, but I didn't care about that either. It was only another example of how I'd misunderstood something, somehow, again. It was a familiar feeling by now. Confused and alien in both my tongues, I held a vision of life that fit neither.

__________

*
Cover 850,
National Geographic
130, no. 5.

Crafts

I went from paint-by-number sets at three

or four, learning games with strict rules,

and few chances for getting out of line.

To carving handmade pipes from acorns

hollowed out, and toothpicks skewered

right through, when I was six or seven.

To making life-sized rag dolls from

discarded cloth, when I was nine or ten,

the kind you throw down on top of beds.

To binding scraps of recycled fur to

make rugs, when I was fourteen to eighteen, tying

worn flesh with a twisted leather rope.

To sewing quilts from cotton shreds,

fragments of disjointed colours, when

I was twenty, trying to make the patterns fit.

To stripping furniture by hand, when I

was twenty-five, scraping to get past the years of

paint to reach the real wood underneath.

To building fragile lamps from rice paper,

when I was thirty to thirty-five, so that even lit, each

form looked opaque and multi-layered.

To drawing animals nursing, at forty-five to fifty

– from bats to bears to pigs – for a kids'

book on motherhood I never published.

I swear I am not making up this list of

fifty years of products I have crafted.

My core was talking through my hands,

but my eyes were never really listening.

15

INHERITANCE

NO FRECKLES ALLOWED

Regardless of semi-professional opinions on my talent, or lack thereof, I liked to draw and to paint, just like a proper English girl, or so I was told by my Granny St-Onge. And I drew proper English subjects too, or so it was said: pastoral images, insects, flowers, trees – all settings, no people. «Ah, y'a jamais d'monde dans leu' peintures, c'est ça q'j'aime pas» [Ah, there's never any people in their paintings, that's what I don't like], my mother remarks in a sweeping criticism of the dozens of artworks now in her home by my granny and my granny's mother.

She's correct, actually. There are no people, not even animals or birds, no signs of life other than landscapes, homes, churches, and barns. I have several in my possession: one of the lobby of the National Gallery in London, another of the inside of my great-grandmother Garland's home in London, and countless scenes of village life where there is, somewhat oddly I suppose, no life, no people. Yet they're lovely, strangely so. They feel peaceful and open without people to clutter them up. Silence on canvas. I love them, hoard them.

This absence of people, it would turn out, wasn't without its symbolism. For I'd discover early on, in fact, that the world of my Granny St-Onge, and the world of my father, was founded on a paradigm that was more scientifically informative than spiritually fortifying. A kind of linearity based on predictable dichotomies of us and them. What was
good, acceptable, normal versus what was not. Good old boys and their families, versus those who weren't. Simple systems. Things like that.

The realization came courtesy of my great-uncle George Garland, who was an illustrator of some fame (some would say notoriety) in the United States and who, unlike his sister, was quite fond of painting people, women especially, with or without clothing. Painting me at ten, he refused to add my freckles. He told my mother that they'd vanish, a comment I pondered for years. He'd clearly assumed that the origins of my freckles – the French-Canadian heritage by which my mother and her sisters have a ruddy, almost Spanish, complexion, and my mother's arms and face are covered in brown specks – would be cancelled out, inevitably, in the marriage to my father. He not only symbolized but articulated, then and there, the flagrant aspirations of Global English. The ease with which he presumed it, and the cold tone in which he delivered his prophecy to my mother that day, left us both speechless. My mother giggled sociably and laughed it off, but he wasn't laughing.

It was a good thing that he finished the painting when he did, though, because my “look” was about to take another turn. It was September 1966, the Sunday afternoon before the start of a new school year. I was polishing my school shoes for tomorrow, Grade 5 – a central part of the uniform that I was re-using from last year, same small feet. I had at my disposal the electric shoe polisher, that consummate symbol of modernity bought from the door-to-door Fuller Brush man. It was in my right hand, and one of my black leather oxfords was fitted loosely round my left. I turned on the power.

What was ten seconds felt like ten hours. My hair was breast-length by then. As I leaned forward to begin my polishing, a hanging strand caught the edge of that whirling carnivore. Faster than an ant-eater's tongue, my wisp of hair was drawn into the engine, wound around and around, closer and closer to the root of my hair, my scalp, until I finally had a gadget the size of a telephone receiver bouncing hard off the top of my head, ripping enough hair to hurt violently, yet leaving enough attached to hold on for dear life, smashing and burring.

My scream was loud enough to bring my father flying up the stairs from his workshop at the farthest end of the basement. He was a smart man, and he ventured a good guess that I was being electrocuted. He grabbed a wooden spoon from the kitchen counter and smashed it
down on the electrical outlet – one sharp swing, hard, like a samurai sword. The cord popped right out. The noise, the banging, the whirring, the screaming stopped – but not my crying.

For hours that night, I sat in front of the television as my mother tried to save what hair she could from the motor my father had meticulously disassembled. As I sat watching
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour
, with its great promises of technological advance in the age of full spectral glory, I humbly begged to differ. I had a growing sense that technology was conspiring and sinister – a feeling I struggle to shake even today. I think it might have been then when my neo-Luddism officially began – my anti-technology orientation. My history with modernity was already pretty uncomfortable. Whatever my series of unfortunate encounters might really have been, I was starting to think that «c't'a' pas jus' une maudite run de bad luck» [it wasn't just a damned run of bad luck]. Irons created the problematic smell when you pressed them against polyester armpits. Soldering irons spilled burning drops of ugly silver-black metal in all the wrong places until it caused a perfectionist father to reach his frustration threshold. Cameras were clearly beyond any hope of reconciliation. And now, the shoe polisher had become a tool I'd never touch again.