Wonder (26 page)

On either side of the choir the apostles stand in groups of three, looking aghast and inevitably suggesting the three monkeys who see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Behind the altar rises a monumental wooden cross; the tortured Christ is flanked by Mary and Mary Magdalene, faces downturned, hands raised, apparently lamenting some tragedy that has occurred on the ground during the execution of the Saviour. Huge rectangular light fixtures hanging from the ceiling cast a cold light into the apse. Going closer, he notes a bouquet of red roses at the foot of the altar and he kneels in front of them: of all the things in this place, they alone are still somewhat alive. The paving under his knees is icy and when he gets up he limps a little.

It is on his way back down, upon turning onto a corridor, that he discovers Brother André’s tomb, an enormous black marble sarcophagus, perfectly plain, concealed in a peculiar semicircular room lined with brown bricks. He stops in front of the dark block, trying to imagine the body resting there, with a hole in place of the heart.

T
HIS MORNING, THERE IS A SMALL CROWD
outside Lili Lady’s house. She is being escorted by two middle-aged women who might be her daughters or social workers, she can’t guess from their manner, at once professional, efficient, and somewhat appalled. Each is holding one of the old lady’s elbows; Lily Lady is pretending to try to free herself but seems nearly happy at the attention.

“Martha!” she exclaims, spotting her across the street, “Martha dear, I’m going on vacation! On a transatlantic liner, no less. They’ve promised me a cabin with all the modern conveniences.”

One of the women slowly shakes her head while the other rolls her eyes. “Come now, just another few steps,” whispers the first one, pointing at the car that’s waiting, door open. The old lady gets in, smiling broadly, waves through the window with a small dignified gesture, fingers slightly curled, palm cupped, like the queen in her carriage. Just then there is barking from inside the house and
Lili Lady’s face contorts first in surprise, then in sorrow. She opens her mouth in a silent cry, rests her forehead on the window, and closes her eyes while the car moves off.

The door to the house is still open; a man comes out, moustached, carrying an attaché case and holding a leash with Lili at the end of it, straining, standing on her hind paws, struggling and producing high-pitched yelps.

“Where are you taking her?” she asks the man, who is busy locking up.

He looks at her for a moment, then says grimly:

“Where d’you think? A luxury dog hotel?”

“Not the dog, the woman, where are you taking her?”

“Are you a relative?”

“What difference does that make?”

“What’s your name?”

“You heard, it’s Martha.”

“Martha what?”

“None of your business.”

She holds his gaze. He has brown eyes and one eyelid that quivers faintly when he speaks.

“And the dog – where are you taking her?”

He stares at her without replying, furious, his moustache trembling; it’s almost as if he is taking pleasure in this exchange. She tears the leash from his hands and turns around before he can say a word. Lili, head down, obediently follows.

For the first time they are side by side facing the river, and being together in front of the promise of this immense expanse is both dizzying and reassuring. The wharves are deserted, everything is soaked in a fine grey rain that forms a ghostly halo around the huge rusty ships, some seeming to have been anchored there for years, looking like part of the landscape; the huge empty hangars; the nearby bulk of the old grain silo with broken windows from which flocks of slate-coloured pigeons emerge; and Île Sainte-Hélène where you can barely discern the outline of the condominiums piled one on top of the other with no apparent logic, like wooden cubes stacked by a child. The entire Vieux-Port is deep in the heart of a cloud.

The water laps gently, licking the low cement wall they are leaning against in the hope of spotting a fish she thinks she saw flash silver. But the river is murky, opaque as milk, and grey. They stay there for a long moment, now and then the haunting cry of a gull pierces the silence and gives a fleeting impression of the seaside. When they raise their heads the fog has cleared.

“The cloud has passed,” she notes, surprised.

“Or we have,” he retorts, surprising her even more.

The rain has stopped, leaving the asphalt gleaming like a mirror. In Old Montreal they take streets paved
with small, round, uneven cobblestones, walking past the Bonsecours Market, its silver dome, pierced with windows, resembling a stocky lighthouse, then they start the climb towards the mountain along St. Lawrence Boulevard, which begins at the river of the same name and joins the Rivière des Prairies at the far north end of this strange island where water is rarely visible. River and boulevard have been baptized in honour of an iconoclastic third-century martyr, abducted as a small child, then found under a laurel, the tree to which he owes his name. At the end of his life, laid out to be roasted on blazing coals by his torturers, instead of shedding useless tears, Lawrence announced after a few minutes that he was well done on one side, they could turn him over. Against hatred, stupidity, and death he set the quiet strength of his clear laughter, silencing his executioners’ hilarity with the fearsome laugh of the victim. In an irony so great that it can also be seen as a kind of homage, he was named the patron saint of
rotisseurs
. Be that as it may, in 1672 in this land of New France, they had actually named what was still just a modest dirt path “Saint Lambert’s Way,” not, as one might think, in honour of Saint Lambert – who had died in the year 700, with a lance through his heart, when standing at the altar in the chapel of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Liège – but rather in memory of Lambert Closse, who lost his life in 1662 while defending
Ville-Marie against an Indian attack, with the help of his dog, Pilote.

Since the eighteenth century, it has united and separated the city at once, just as the arteries starting at the lungs irrigate the body besides delimiting the main zones. Still today, Saint Lawrence Boulevard is the dividing line from which, going both west and east, street numbers are counted starting at zero, a kind of Greenwich meridian, Montreal style. That “Main” (for a time known as Saint-Lawrence-of-the-Main, which a particularly ill-advised translator of Mordecai Richler once rechristened “rue principale”) acts as the demarcation line between the two halves of the island: affluent Anglos on the west, perched on the hills of Westmount, and working-class French on the east, whose poverty spread in the past to inner suburbs similar to those described by Gabrielle Roy in
The Tin Flute
. Both territories are now mixed, hybrid, confused, though the border is still there, memory or warning.

At the corner of de la Gauchetière, lacquered ducks, red and glossy, hang by their necks, heads falling gracefully to the side as if they were asleep. In the windows are stacks of small wooden and porcelain cases, flasks and flagons, roots, dried leaves, powders, balms, and ointments whose mentholated odour spreads to the street. Crates of oddly shaped fruit, some with brown spots, others bristling with sharp spines, are unloaded at the
doors of shops that sell blue-and-white teapots, dried shrimp, bubble tea, and smoked eel.

Beyond René-Lévesque (which, a few kilometres west, in Westmount, is still called Dorchester) is a new country, no more than a few blocks long, where only yesterday the Frolics, then the Roxy, the Midway, and the Crystal Palace were established; now all that is left to bear witness is the Café Cléopâtre. As early as 1819, this section of the street counted twice as many taverns as grocery stores. Girls teetering on high heels, some of them not exactly girls, will spend the night in the doorways of snack bars where hotdogs,
steamés
or
toastés
, are cheap, waiting for a car to stop near them, hearts pounding from withdrawal and fear. Inside, the leatherette banquettes and the orange tables where people sit to eat poutine are bright under the fluorescent lights; outside, the street is grey where shadows glide.

Sometimes, at dawn in those alleys a girl will be found, covered with bruises, left there among the plastic cutlery, abandoned syringes, and sticky condoms. At this time of day the street is practically deserted. A homeless man sitting in the entrance to an
ATM
is petting his dog, lying curled up at his side; teenagers run up the slope to Sherbrooke Street. Farther away, they pass without a word into the realm of bling, of exorbitant restaurants and bars where every evening long lines of people stand,
stamping their feet as they talk on their cellphones and where, some claim, just the night before, they saw Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio. In parking lots resembling second-hand luxury car dealers, brightly shining cars with sparkling chrome will line up; from them will emerge long-legged girls, girls who could be the sisters of those glimpsed, staggering, a little lower down on the street, in the doorways of greasy spoons reeking of rancid oil, accompanied this time by thick-haired men with heavy steel watches who laugh loudly and seem when they speak to be addressing an invisible audience. The restaurants will fill up; against a background of deafening music people will be served dishes with complicated names that will include chorizo, gravlax of something or other, and Kobe beef, often on the same plate, sometimes impossible to tell apart, served by statuesque but thoroughly morose models. At this hour, however, their windows are empty, black, and blind.

It was there on this thoroughfare that more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Guilbault’s Botanical and Zoological Garden spread out in all its splendour. Its spectacular grounds first opened in 1840; the various attractions (greenhouse, an area planted with fruit and forest trees, gymnasium) could be visited for the sum of precisely seven and a half pence. According to the proprietor, gathered together there was “one of the largest
collections of live wild Animals, rare Birds and Natural Curiosities in North America.” Depending on their inclination, visitors could take home a horticultural or avian souvenir, because “dahlias, roses, poultry, birds” were offered with equanimity.

As for feathered creatures, store fronts in the Portuguese neighbourhood proudly display multicoloured pottery roosters at their doors and restaurants that serve up golden, spit-roasted chickens, whole fried fish, and good strong coffee; just a little further up and set back slightly from the street, there is a tombstone company; another that’s been selling cut-rate shirts for decades; cabinet-makers and second-hand stores that are to some degree the memory of this boulevard that is itself the city’s memory. Designers’ studios, vintage clothing boutiques, and everything in between (recycled, mended, new clothes made from old rags); a vegan restaurant where butter is replaced by sesame paste and bacon by seitan; farther north, a bar without a name or sign, its logo a little bird drawn on a slate with chalk that Anglos call “Sparrow” while for Francos it’s “Moineau.” Nearly across the street, another restaurant called Lawrence in honour of the boulevard, where you can eat
bubble and squeak
as if in an English cottage; a brick building that is home to hundreds of twentysomethings in fair-trade cotton T-shirts and Converse sports shoes, busy creating video games, while
across the street is a bright café with big windows where one can drink tea peacefully in the afternoon surrounded by plants. It is there that they leave the Main, which continues on its way to the tip of the island, stopping only when the street finally finds water again.

T
HE MOUNTAIN IS COVERED NOW WITH A TENDER
green shadow, scarcely more than a shiver, a shimmer at ground level and at the tips of branches, a shadow that spreads from day to day until the mountain is totally enveloped. Clusters of miniature seed pods, nearly translucent, hang by the handful from maple twigs, dazzling tulips have opened in the undergrowth – how they got there no one knows – forming bright red bells on the dark earth.

The summit this morning is bathed in a fine mist that might be rising from the earth or falling in a drizzle from the clouds. The sky is the grey of felt, and the droplets look like a thousand cold needles. All that’s visible of the Saint-Germain church is the pointed tip of the verdigris steeple. One can’t even hear the birds that are taking shelter from the rain, nestling near the trunks of the most verdant trees. She is alone in all that fog, along with the soaking wet dogs and their dirty paws.

Not until she is getting ready to go home does she realize Damocles hasn’t rejoined them. She calls once,
twice, three times. Lili, who hasn’t left her side for days, pricks up her ears and looks at her, distraught, then spins around and races down the path, kicking up arcs of mud behind her slender paws. She turns immediately and follows the dog, at first briskly, then at a trot, ultimately running as fast as she can, whistling, calling again. She can no longer feel her legs, feels almost as if she is flying, and all at once it seems to her that there’ll be no end to this descent. Finally she spots the heavy shape lying on the edge of the path. He tries awkwardly to get up as she approaches but, too feeble to hoist his body on his long legs, the animal falls back on his knees and chin, only able to wag his tail.