Nikolski (10 page)

“So tell me, Maelo, if I’m not mistaken, you come from the Dominican Republic, right?”

“You’re not mistaken.”

“And Miguel and Enrique, they’re from Cuba, right?”

“Right.”

“So why doesn’t your fish store have a Spanish name?”

“Because of the Irish immigrants who used to work in the Miron quarry at the start of the century. Every
Sunday afternoon, they would play lacrosse right on this spot. They called it the Shanahan Athletic Club. Over the years, the lacrosse field became a bus station and then the Jean-Talon market. All that’s left now is Shanahan Street. You see down there at the other end of the market? That’s where the fish store used to be.”

“And where have the Irish gone?”

“I have no idea. But the Miron quarry has been turned into a garbage dump.”

THERE ARE TWO SAN PEDRO DE MACORISES
.

The first is located on the southeast coast of the Dominican Republic, at 18 degrees north, 69 degrees east. The second occupies the eastern side of St-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, in a perimeter bounded to the west by Christophe-Colomb, to the north by an imaginary line running through the de Castelnau Metro station, and to the south by the Colmado Real grocery store, on St-Zotique Street.

Maelo was the founding citizen of this second San Pedro. He arrived alone in the middle of winter in 1976 and learned everything the hard way: the cold, the French language, the geography of Montreal, the bureaucracy, Radio-Canada,
pâté chinois,
unemployment and Guy Lafleur. He found this mixture hard to stomach. He soon considered calling the whole thing off and going back to his hometown, but while he was rolling some coins he was saving to buy his return ticket, a cousin, the first of many,
called to announce that he had arrived at Mirabel airport.

Maelo’s hopes were renewed. Reinforcements were on the way!

He had started out as a shy immigrant and became a colonizer. The bonds between San Pedro de Macorís and Montreal grew stronger, woven as they were out of enthusiastic letters, chaotic telephone calls, and Western Union money transfers. Family members began to pour in. Cousins invaded the airport, euphoric and shivering. Maelo played the role of the seasoned veteran. He housed the newcomers, found them employment, gave them food and drink and then released them into the wilds. And without intending to, he became the gravitational centre of this new community. He organized fiestas and
cenas,
meetings, lunches, get-togethers in cafés. And when there was nothing on the agenda, people went to lounge at his house as if it were the public square of some invisible city.

These gatherings culminated on the night of the Dominican presidential elections of 1986, when Maelo announced the holding of a great
jututo
—a meeting that involved the whole family protesting against the candidacy of Joaquín Balaguer, drinking rum and then quarrelling over the future of the republic.

Balaguer was re-elected, the neighbours complained about the racket, and the
jututo
became a regular event. Now, on Sunday nights, Maelo gathers in the fruit of
the family tree: his four brothers, three sisters, a dozen cousins, childhood friends and a few random refugees—stray Guatemalans or some Cubans just passing through. The merrymakers devour conches and shrimp, goatfish and giant mussels, kilos of rice and
habichuelas, guandules,
and yucca—all of it washed down with Concha y Toro, Brugal Añejo and
mamajuana.
Then they dance the
bachata
until the wee hours and remodel the world from top to bottom, with the Caribbean getting the bulk of their attention.

According to Maelo, an immigrant can be adrift, confused, shy, exhausted, exploited, unwilling to adapt, drowning in depression, wallowing in nostalgia. But he must never stoop to being an orphan.

NOAH GOES INTO THE POST OFFICE
, carefree, jiggling in the palm of his hand the small change he will use to buy a stamp. In the other hand he holds the envelope of miracles, adorned with his mother’s name, the General Delivery address in Ninga and a return address, a reassuring fixed point in the universe.

He stops suddenly in the middle of the room, completely stunned.

The air is suffused with the aroma of the thousands of post offices scattered over the plains from Winnipeg to Calgary. Crushed paper, elastic bands, rubber stamps.

Noah falters. Right at that moment he is catapulted three thousand kilometres away, thirteen years earlier. He blinks and looks around. What if Montreal was just one more General Delivery? He thought he was stepping onto solid ground when he left his mother’s trailer, but now that ground is slipping out from under him. At this point he feels nothing but rolling waves, choppy seas and dizziness.

He takes a deep breath and tries to think straight. What is a smell, after all? A pinch of molecules adrift in the atmosphere. Some vague stimuli circulating between the olfactory epithelium and the frontal lobe of the cortex. The crackle of electricity, chemical reactions, enzymes, neurotransmitters—a commonplace chain of events that nevertheless upsets the delicate balance of the neurons, disturbs the mamillary bodies and dislodges old childhood memories from the benign inertia where they have been hiding.

Noah buys a stamp, sticks it on the envelope, drops the letter down the chute and leaves the office without looking back. Altogether, seventy-five seconds without taking a breath.

He returns to his apartment downhearted, a lost look in his eyes, hands held behind his back with invisible handcuffs. Seeing him go by, Maelo feels his pulse accelerating. He recognizes that look, having seen it a thousand times on his cousins’ faces—the look of homesickness. The symptoms are pretty much the same for a Dominican as they are for a native of Saskatchewan. Ultimately, humanity is not as unpredictable as it’s often made out to be, and Maelo knows exactly what to do. With the firm authority of an old midwife, he intercepts his roommate.

“Noah, you have to take the bull by the horns.”

“Take the bull by the horns?” Noah repeats, without actually coming out of his fog.

“The first days are the hardest, but you have to rouse yourself. First, we’re going to get you a job. I would take you on at the fish store, but I’ve just hired a girl. Instead, you’re going to go see César Sánchez.”

César Sánchez, a taciturn Dominican forever chewing on cheap cigars, is the supreme helmsman of Colmado Real. Permanently posted in the window of his grocery store is a sign inviting applications for a bicycle delivery job. The cardboard sign is baked from the heat waves of many summers and warped by countless January frosts. Noah infers from this that Colmado Real delivery boys don’t hang around long enough to draw their pension.

With an extinguished Montecristo screwed into the corner of his mouth, César Sánchez X-rays Noah with his eyes:

“Do you know the neighbourhood?” he manages to ask.

“I was born on Dante Street,” Noah declares without batting an eyelash.

“You’re going to do a test run for me. Prepare Mme Pichet’s order and deliver it to her.
¡Dale!”

He thrusts an old notebook into his hands. On the top page someone has scrawled a half-French, half-Spanish grocery list.

“Do you supply the bicycle?” Noah asks as he rolls up his sleeves.

“
¡Claro!”
the manager exclaims, laughing, pointing to a shiny, modified 1977 CCM parked outside the display window.

The primitive vehicle is equipped with the bare essentials: three wheels, two pedals, a basket. Noah feels himself going weak in the knees. He has never before mounted a bicycle. At the age when one usually learns the basics of bike-riding, he was sorting out old road maps while watching the schoolyards slip past.

Summoning his courage, he runs up and down the aisles collecting the items on the list. Then he checks the address written at the bottom of the list.

“Gaspé Avenue?”

He shrugs and goes out to load the bags into the delivery basket, discreetly grabbing a map of Montreal as he passes the cash register.

JOYCE IS VENTING HER ANGER
on some garbage bags, which she kicks one after the other.

In the street, people are working. A tired-looking man distributes flyers, some city workers bring down a hundred-year-old maple with a chainsaw, a pizza deliveryman climbs a stairway holding a steaming box. And Joyce grumbles as she watches all of them bustling about.

Since she arrived in Montreal she has done nothing but sell fillets of sole, prepare salmon steaks and smile at the customers. Any more of this and she’ll start to think she’s six years old again, cooking for her uncles and doing her natural history lessons like a good little girl.

The current situation would certainly displease her fearsome ancestor, the pirate Herménégilde Doucette. “What an idea, working in a fish store,” he would growl with his spent voice, “when all you need to do is go down to the harbour and get aboard a ship.”

“But Grampa,” Joyce would plead with her arms spread wide, “this is 1989!”

“So what difference does that make?”

How could one explain? This world is no longer like the old one. Cash registers, automatic bank machines, credit card transactions, mobile telephones. It won’t be long before North America is just a series of interconnected computer networks. Those able to handle a computer will get by. The others will miss the boat.

Joyce gives a cardboard box a solid kick.

She suddenly notices some guy hurtling toward her on a delivery bike, apparently more interested in the architecture than in where he is going. He jumps the curb, brushes past the garbage bags, misses Joyce by a hair and careens back into the street. She watches this Bronze Age vehicle move away and vanish down an alley.

“What about him?” she mutters. “Is he happy to be delivering grocery orders?”

She has stopped in front of a bundle of old newspapers. The top one carries an advertisement for
This Week’s Specials.
The featured item in this otherwise austere quarter-page is an IBM 286 with a 50 MHz processor, 1 meg of RAM, a 30-meg hard disk, a 1.44 floppy drive, VGA display, laser printer—all for $2,495 (plus tax).