The Strangers' Gallery (9 page)

“I'm afraid I'm going to have to invite you back,” he said.

“Always a pleasure,” I replied.

“You may as well come back with your guest,” he said, smiling, as he reminded himself of Anton's quest. “If he's regular, I can see him in a couple of days.”

He uncharacteristically threw his head back in a hee-haw gesture, but didn't laugh, just blew air out through his nose. I made the appointment with Mrs. Halfyard on my way out, though in the end, if I may put it that way, Anton had to be content with a less princely porcelain crown.

Part Two

October 1995

5. LA MALCONTENTA

In a house that has become for the imagination the very heart of a cyclone, we have to go beyond the mere impressions of consolation that we should feel in any shelter. We have to participate in the dramatic cosmic events sustained by the combatant house.…The isolated house furnishes him with strong images, that is, with counsels of resistance.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I
was on the
lecture circuit with Miles Harnett on the Thanksgiving weekend. No, not lecturing, hardly able to listen to the speaker. As usual, I was distracted by my fidgety and intense companion, who was temperamentally disposed to lecture the lecturers.

Miles was the bane of all public speakers, but especially expatriates, “expatiating ex-patriots,” as he called them, those who loved the place so much they had to live somewhere else, had to love it from a distance, but who sporadically returned home to dispense wisdom or advice, or, worst of all, make judgments—so-called tough love—about the place they had abandoned.

We love the place, O Lord
, in the words of what is believed to be the first hymn composed in Newfoundland, though perhaps not a hymn
to
Newfoundland. Perhaps they were longing for greener pastures as well.

Also high on the list of Miles's prospective victims were academics who strayed into the public forums (historians being enemy number one). On the holiday Monday evening, he had mystified, perhaps even embarrassed, one of these poor unfortunates—not a historian, however, but a scientist—rhetorically running over his presumption of innocence and the proffered benefactions and benedictions of science like an aggressive public prosecutor, a politician on the hustings, a riled-up opposition leader at question period.

The talk was in a historic venue, where many a politician had preached and prated—the Colonial Building, as most people still refer to it; but it is more circumspectly spoken of in Miles's presence, wild anti-colonial boy that he was, as “the House.” The last sitting of the Assembly in this particular House—the last one that Miles recognized, at least, the 28th General Assembly of the independent nation of Newfoundland—he had dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.” Elected in June 1932, and incorrectly numbered the 29th—one of Miles's many inauspicious, haunting Recognitions—by the Clerk of the House in the
Journal of the House of Assembly
, it had come to a sorry end in November 1933.

Miles had other, less flattering, names for our last House of Assembly: “the real Bow-Wow Parliament,” in reference to a British cartoonist's satirical depiction of our first legislature, elected a hundred years earlier, as an Assembly of Newfoundland dogs; or, “a Committee of the Whole Dog Pound, slavering and whimpering and howling, kowtowing and bow-wowing in unison”; or, “Lord Amulree's Newfoundland dogs,” referring to the man who, in 1933, had recommended, in a scathing moralizing report, the suspension of our democratic rights. On November 28 of that year, exercising what would have to be described as the ultimate democratic right and privilege, the legislature accepted Lord Amulree's recommendation. It voted itself out of existence, committed parliamentary suicide, so to speak, the only country in recorded history, according to Miles, ever to do so. Not that there weren't, as they say, extenuating circumstances, but there would be no 29th General Assembly of the independent nation of Newfoundland.

The House was now more of a latter-day Athenaeum, the iconic cultural institute that had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1892. It hosted historical, literary, and scientific lectures and conferences in both the Assembly Room, the former Lower House, and the Council Chamber, the Upper House, two high-ceilinged rooms of identical size and shape (Miles could tell you their exact physical dimensions), both on the main floor, side by side, but separated by a wall whose thickness (five feet, he said) symbolized the political distance between these chambers. The Council Chamber, where tonight's talk was being given, now housed the provincial government archives, but the Assembly Room was empty, the legislative tables and chairs stored in the basement, where the Newfoundland Historical Society office and archives were also located.

Construction of the Colonial Building had begun in 1847, and the Newfoundland Legislature began sitting there in 1850. During their first eighteen years, our newly elected legislators had moved from place to place like rolling stones, like outcasts, like orphans. After a brief spell in the Travers Tavern, they were very unceremoniously ejected, like boisterous “strangers” in the public gallery. They moved to the Court House, which burned down in the Great Fire of 1846; then, appropriately enough, to the Orphan Asylum, but they had to vacate that place to make room for more orphans. Finally, they moved to a commercial building on Water Street. So it wasn't until 1850 that they had a permanent home of their own, though as early as 1836 the government had passed a bill authorizing “the erection of a Colonial Building in the town of St. John's.”

Irish stonemason and architect James Purcell had built the House, its plain exterior faced with the limestone of his native Cork. It was said to have been modelled after the great sixteenth-century Italian architect Palladio's neoclassical masterpiece, Villa Foscari, more commonly known as
La Malcontenta
. Built in 1555 on the banks of the placid canal Brenta, just outside Venice, and described by a twentieth-century travel writer as “a dreaming pile of stone and frescoed plaster,” it was, nevertheless, said to be haunted by a sleepless discontented spirit: the ghost of Francesca Magdalina, the great-granddaughter of the Doge Foscari. She had been imprisoned in the villa for dishonouring the family and perhaps had even died there. The famous fresco of
La Malcontenta,
“a lady with a most forbidding expression on her face,” was discovered under fading layers of whitewash on a wall panel in the interior of the house.

Last fall, at a lecture in the Assembly Room, temporarily furnished with metal chairs hard as granite, Miles had rather flintily taken on the expatriate Newfoundland geologist Dr. Eldon Piercey, who was giving the annual public lecture of the august Newfoundland Geological Survey. It had included, in what felt like geological time, a discussion of tectonic plates and continental drift, a comprehensive historical survey of all the stone quarries on the Island, and then a catalogue of the various types of stone in all the major stone buildings in St. John's, unfortunately with a bit of freewheeling politico-historical commentary mixed in. The wrong kind of mortar, you might say, not to mention, in Miles's view, at least, somewhat lacking in accuracy and a little too arrogant and patronizing in the aggregate. He informed our expatiating expatriate that there was no Cork limestone left on the House. It had taken the government thirty years to do it, but all of it had been replaced with “Canadian stone from your home province of Ontario.”

This too would disintegrate in time, I thought, and I imagined another fresco being uncovered a hundred years hence, under the layers of alien Canadian stone—a gentleman with a most forbidding expression on his face. Miles was even more finely attuned to the House's spiritual dimensions, to the sad iniquitous history of the place.

The speaker on Monday evening, a geneticist named Dr. Eugene Legge, had stepped down from the lofty heights of science to enlighten us laymen about what he called “the Genome Project”; but engaging and humble though he was, not patronizing in the least, he was obviously young and inexperienced. He would have been more at home in an intimate and congenial uni-disciplinary colloquium than in the larger and rougher public forums, where loose cannons, axe-grinders, shit disturbers, autodidacts, and self-styled debaters and disputers of anything and everything lay in ambush, along with other academics and genuinely knowledgeable laymen, wary defenders of other turfs, academic and otherwise, including
le turf de Terre-Neuve
.

From the very beginning of the talk, Miles began to mutter and sigh desolately, to bristle and stir uneasily in his seat. I half expected him not to wait until the end of the talk, but to jump up and interrupt right in the middle of it, or perhaps leave the room altogether. He held his asthma inhaler—his “puffer,” as he called it—on standby in his right hand, and seemed to be taking more than the usual number of inhalations as the talk wore on. Toward the end, in an attempt to help his lay audience visualize the mysterious internal world of the DNA molecule, Dr. Legge presented us with a rather fascinating analogy, fascinating for me, at least. He compared the cell, or its nucleus, to a library or archive—we were inside an archive ourselves, he reminded us—containing all of life's instructions: Primary Source writ large, or small. The chromosomes, containing DNA, are the bookshelves, he said; the DNA molecules are the books; the genes are chapters in the books; and the chemical compounds that make up our DNA are the words, the letters, on the page. There are only four, he said—A, C, G, T—representing the base (base!) organic compounds that make up our entire flesh and blood; but this mini-alphabet, repeated millions of times in different sequences of paired letters, contains the unique genetic makeup of every individual human being ever born.

We were shown a slide of a free-standing, twenty-three-foot-high model of the DNA molecule, the double helix, made up of five hundred encyclopedias symbolically depicting the vast amount of archival information contained within. Scientists were already inside the archive, he said, working away. They had broken the genetic code, had learned the language, were busily mapping our genes, and would ultimately decode all three billion pairs of letters in the so-called language of inheritance, life's blueprint, the human story. It would not take very long, he predicted.

Miles's legs began to shake, piston-like, and his entire body seemed to emit a high-voltage emotional current, a hum of adversarial intent. I could tell, however, that he was not having a seizure, a stroke, or a heart attack in response to Dr. Legge's rather innocent analogy, not even an asthma attack, but rather what we archivists had begun to call, in mock reference to Heritage Canada's soupy Heritage Moments on television, and even before the main features on the silver screen, a major archival moment.

When the talk was over, beneath a gentle shower of polite applause, I sensed an inauspicious stirring beside me, and Miles, with athletic alacrity and a thundery look—
Drop down dew from heaven above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness—
was on his feet with his hand in the air, but was not recognized by the chair. (I didn't recognize the chair myself, though he looked familiar; he had forgotten to introduce himself before introducing Dr. Legge.) A man, still seated, but with a loud, metallic voice—and a British accent, of all things—had beaten him to it. He was fascinated by the Genome Project, he said, and wanted to know if they had found the colour-blindness gene. Dr. Legge said no, that “mapping,” as he called it, had really just begun. Finding genetic flaws was a difficult task, and even after they did find a flawed gene, they would still be a long way from finding a cure for the disease that it caused.

Though he was still on his feet, Miles was ignored by the chair for question number two in favour of a starry-eyed young student in genome heaven.

“That goddamn Murray,” I heard him say under his breath, and then I recognized Mr. Murdoch Murray of the Newfoundland Historical Society.

She had just made a “career choice,” the student announced to Dr. Legge, who looked even younger than she did. He assured her that the field offered enormous opportunities and that she wouldn't be disappointed in her decision.

Miles had remained standing during this sweet fatherly exchange to make sure that he would be recognized by the chair next time. He was—and in more ways than one. I remembered that Mr. Murray had chaired the geology lecture last fall.

Miles was surprisingly restrained and magnanimous, however. “Brendan Harnett here,” he began. “Mr. Murray…I have a few questions for Dr. Legge, Dr. Eu-
gene
Legge.”

This elicited a few murmurs of laughter from the audience, and a benign smile from the doctor himself, whose name undoubtedly had been the object of levity on other occasions. Miles was not looking in his direction, however, but, smiling himself, looking directly at the chair.

Chairman Murray had good reason for ignoring Miles. He knew, as I knew, that Miles wasn't actually going to ask any questions. He was going to lecture Dr. Eu-
gene
with some answers—riding his historical (and sometimes hysterical) hobby horse on his usual exasperating roundabout route, down the highways and byways of what his spiritual mentor, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, in his “magisterial”
A
History of Newfoundland,
published exactly one hundred years ago,
he had informed me on the way here, had called the “strange, eventful history” of “this ill-used and down-trodden Colony.”
It was a history that was a classic example, Miles felt, of what Edward Gibbon had said about history in general. In
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
“the Great Gibbon,” as Miles always referred to him
—
I always picture a great ape intently focused on picking nits from the Great Head of History—had famously remarked that history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”