Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read online

  The first day I found myself in front of a machine, it took me a long moment to understand what was happening to me. In Haiti, the economic situation might have been disastrous, but I had a social status. My father was a journalist, very briefly the mayor of Port-au-Prince, Assistant-Secretary of State and finally diplomat. My mother was an archivist. My grandparents lived comfortably in Petit Goâve. And there I was in front of a machine designed to crush me (I almost lost an arm the first day), in front of all these people who believed it was the best thing that could happen to me. To them, my condition had never been better. I spent the afternoon in the factory washrooms thinking about my new condition. I was a worker, an immigrant and a black. Bingo! The bottom of the barrel.

  I went home. I was totally down. I sat in the middle of the room, in the dark. For the first time in my life I wasn’t thinking about a political, literary or philosophical problem, but about what was happening to me in everyday life. Real life, as they say in Quebec. The question wasn’t what I would become, but rather what I planned to do with myself. For the first time my life was in my own hands. It was both terrifying and exciting.

  I was alone in this city, the trunk of the genealogical tree—nobody before me, and no descendants yet. I was no longer the son here, but not yet a father. Only me. The tree would bend in the direction I gave it. The new Quebec friends I spent my evenings with in the bars came mostly from those spruce little suburban cities surrounding Montreal. They didn’t in fact travel too far from the family nest. From time to time, when things were going badly for them, they wouldn’t be seen for one or two weeks, and we would learn that they had gone to recuperate at the family home (in Repentigny, Sainte-Thérèse, Saint-Marc or Joliette). As for me, there was nobody behind me. Without a net. And it’s what saved me.

  19. If had left one culture, it wasn’t to throw myself into a new one. Wandering. Wanderooting, as my friend Jean-Claude Charles says. The best way to get to know a city is to constantly change neighbourhoods. A new metro station to discover, new faces. I remember the endless nights spent talking at La Scala. There I discovered dancers, photographers, musicians and poets. This night crowd contrasted well with the young workers with whom I spent my days. The workers talked of nothing but women, sex and hockey, and always in very vulgar terms. And at night I found these gentle dreamers, starving philosophers, dazzled musicians. I was trying as much as possible to reconcile these two parallel worlds. I made myself invisible. I observed. And someone, one night, turned towards me.

  “And you, what do you do?”

  “What?”

  “What do you do in life?”

  A pause. The whole table is watching me now. It is the first time they have really seen me. I have to say that I almost never speak during these meetings.

  “You must do something,” says someone else in a more friendly tone.

  “I’m writing a novel,” I finally answer.

  General surprise. They are writing short stories, poems, tales, but nobody in the group is writing a novel.

  “And what’s it about?”

  Again silence.

  “We shouldn’t bother him,” says a girl. “Some writers don’t like to talk about the book they’re working on. You see, I’ve known him a long time now and I didn’t know he was a writer.”

  “I’m not a writer. I’m writing a novel, that’s all.”

  From that moment on, they saw me differently. My silence gained a certain weight. I had a precise function in the group. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, someone would say: “Be careful, guys, the writer is taking down everything you say.”

  This was how I started writing down my friends’ conversations. To get myself into the atmosphere, I went to La Scala right after work. In the afternoon, it’s a traditional Greek bar with old Greeks telling each other stories about Greece. There were a dozen of them who bothered the waitress while eating souvlaki and overly sweet desserts. I sat in a corner, beside the window. And I wrote. Anything. Bits of conversation from the night before. Little stories of seduction that happened here at night. The story of that magnificent waitress we were all more or less in love with. She wasn’t really interested in anyone, but she was always nice to everybody. All the more inaccessible. Like Mount Everest.

  One night, a guy came in. He sat a little out of the way. And I saw her go crazy. She never stopped walking around him. Even so, you could tell she was trying to resist. She was doing what she could to avoid his corner. But she was helpless. The attraction was too strong. And she finally started to go over under more and more wacky pretexts. I was, I think, the only one to observe this game. There she was coming out of the washroom, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her wan face. The lightning had just struck her. She passed in front of me (as though a zombie) to go sit in front of the guy.

  I could capture about ten stories like this in just one night (not all with this intensity). Separations. Reconciliations. Tender feelings. And the next day, I would write all this down in my notebook. Some time later, I would forget the names, the faces, to remember only the situations. It’s chaos, therefore a novel.

  20. I had a Senegalese friend who always came home at the beginning of spring. Nobody knew where he spent the winters. Winter is a time of profound privacy. People born here usually know how to face it, and there are even those who like it. Those who hate it make off for the south. I can’t imagine the south (where it’s warm) as a vacation place. I would lose any sense of origin. I come from the south. The south could never be synonymous with pleasure for me. The south doesn’t sing in my head—solemn place. The cold terrorizes me.

  I found out by chance that my friend generally spent the winter in a psychiatric hospital. He would regularly stand nude in the middle of the snow, and the police would come to collect him. He pretended to be a tree. The man was a walking tree without leaves. He never said a word about his stays in the hospital.

  Another friend, this one Haitian, spends the winter in prison, in Waterloo. It seems they treat people well there. He found this out by accident. He was arrested one day because of unpaid parking tickets. And in prison, a big bearded man explained to him that there’s this magnificent little prison where he was in the habit of spending the winter without being bothered too much. Don’t have to pay anything. On government money. One day, when my friend was broke, he tried (don’t ask me what you do to get in; I didn’t know you could choose your prison), and since then he spends winters there, reading Dostoyevsky. He’s crazy for Dosto.

  When you live in the city and you don’t have a chalet in the Laurentians, the only places really favourable for rest and reflection are prisons and hospitals. You still have to find a good one, though, like Waterloo.

  21. I don’t know exactly when I forgot the taste of sapodilla. Even in Haiti, you find them less and less. I remember that trip across the country with the writer Jean-Claude Charles, based in Paris. Just after Jean-Claude Duvalier left Haiti. We were searching feverishly for a sapodilla. The taste of that fruit literally haunted me. Charles found my obsession funny, but he took it seriously. Every individual searches for a lost smell or taste from his emotional environment. For me, it’s sapodilla.

  We asked at each place we passed if there was a sapodilla tree. The peasants smiled, shaking their heads no. Without the taste of sapodilla, I had the impression that Haiti was noticeably moving away from me. The irony is that sapodilla didn’t especially interest me when I lived in Haiti. Just like that, any time anywhere, a taste (or rather the nostalgia for a taste) can suddenly rise up from the depths of childhood.

  22. I still remember that, during that trip, I never stopped dreaming of Montreal, which had never happened to me throughout my whole stay in Montreal. When I was in Montreal by day, it was Port-au-Prince that occupied my nights. When I’m in Port-au-Prince, it’s Montreal that occupies my nights. Today, I’m in Miami, but I’ve never dreamed of this city. Instead, I have a rather strange dream: I see myself in Montreal, on Saint-Denis
Street, but the colours and smells are still those of Port-au-Prince. When I’m in a city, I live in it; when I’m no longer there, it’s the city that lives in me.

  Translated from the French by LEXique Ltd.

  Nino Ricci

  A PASSAGE TO CANADA

  WHILE MY OWN ENTRY into Canada was by that most traumatic of emigrations, birth, my parents, who arrived here a few years ahead of me, in 1954, apparently had a much easier time of it, cruising into Halifax’s Pier 21 aboard the well-appointed passenger liner Saturnia. To hear them tell it, they had the time of their lives on the crossing, dining and dancing and living it up, giving the lie to those images we were all raised on of the poor immigrant masses stumbling out of the darkened holds of rat-infested, cholera-infected death ships. By the 1950s, it seems, the days of lightless steerage berths and of fatal island quarantines had passed, and for about three hundred dollars—roughly what you could save in a year—any two-bit peasant or labourer could book a fairly comfortable passage to the New World.

  For my parents, that passage had its origins in my father’s year of army service, when, stationed in northern Italy far from the mountains of his native Molise, he gazed for the first time on the beautiful flat green fields of the Po Valley. The sight made him wonder why he and his family had been wasting their time on the few craggy acres of hillside they scrabbled a living from back home; it seems it had never occurred to him before then that elsewhere things might be different. Not long afterwards the chance arose to come to Canada, and he was quick to take it. The flat fields that greeted his arrival here, however, were a far cry from those of the Po: windswept and snow-covered and bleak, they seemed the last out-reaches of the habitable world. Coming from Italy, where even the dog houses had walls of foot-thick stone, he and my mother were made somewhat concerned by the rickety wooden shacks that seemed to form the primary residences here, and by the tiny, even more rickety ones out back that they feared might be the workers’ quarters, though one whiff of them would quickly have explained their function.

  As it happened, my parents’ first home in Canada, in the small farming town of Leamington, Ontario, was not so far removed from those rickety outhouses: set off the barn of a farmer who had sponsored them for their first year of work here, it was essentially a refurbished chicken coop. A couple of my brothers were born there, and afterwards my parents remembered the place fondly enough; and indeed an uncle of mine, Luigi, subsequently took it over, and stayed on for the next thirty years working at the local Heinz factory and living the bachelor life before finally returning to Italy to the wife and son he’d left behind there. We used to visit him sometimes Sunday mornings after mass and he always seemed so settled and self-sufficient and in his element in that elfin habitation, with his army-sized cot and his stoop-shouldered Kelvinator fridge and the little shot glasses he’d bring out for a glass of Tia Maria or anisette. It was a kind of shock to me as I grew older to learn that he had this completely other life across the sea that he would be returning to, and that everything here—his blackened espresso pot, his tiny sloped-ceilinged rooms—was merely provisional, a way station. I had not quite understood then this dual-sidedness of immigration, how there was always an absent reference point that the present stood against, and that could make the present’s nuts-and-bolts everydayness and permanence suddenly appear the merest shadow.

  By the time I was born—the fifth of seven children, though one, a girl, had died as an infant back in Italy—my parents had purchased a small farm and our household had burgeoned to include a set of grandparents and my father’s two unmarried sisters. In some important respects, the world I arrived into was not so different from the one my parents had left behind: the language we spoke was the dialect my parents had brought with them; the festivals we celebrated were the local ones of their hometowns; the people we saw were my parents’ siblings and cousins and neighbours from back home. My mother’s hometown of Villa Canale, which had a population of about a thousand just after the war, eventually, in a kind of mitosis, lost some half of these to Leamington; and so it might have been true to claim that those who left ended up no less at home than those who stayed behind. Indeed, I often heard it said that fellow villagers got along much better in Canada than they ever had in their hometowns, where they’d had centuries of feuds and old land disputes and the like to divide them, and where everyone had been careful not to let their neighbours know their business. In Canada, on the other hand, at planting time, every paesan and third cousin from back home would show up in your field to help you out. Some of my best memories from early childhood are of those days in the fields, the jugs of Kool-Aid I’d lug around to people while they worked and the mid-morning breaks we’d take with coffee and biscuits and slabs of cheese and salted pork passed around on the tip of someone’s jackknife.

  Often enough the cheese and pork would be of our own vintage; we used to hang them to cure from the rafters of our barn, with shields fashioned from Unico Vegetable Oil tins positioned above them to keep off the pigeon droppings. The pork came from the hog that we slaughtered every year in mid-winter: it would show up in our basement one day grunting and heaving, live and primal and real, and be sausage and tripe by the following night. This yearly slaughter, which had always to be during the waxing moon or the meat would go bad, was accompanied by a party, for which the relatives were invited over and sheets of plywood were laid on sawhorses in the living room for tables, the windows fogging up with the heat of cooking and talk. All of these things, of course—the pigs in the basement, the parties, even the Unico tins in the barn—seemed perfectly normal and inevitable to me when I was small, not because they recalled customs my parents had had in Italy, which in any event I knew nothing of, but simply because, not unlike my father back in Molise, I had never realized that elsewhere things might be different.

  When I started school, however, a lot of what we did suddenly began to seem not so normal. There was the homemade bread my mother used for our sandwiches, thick-crusted, spongy stuff that she’d fashioned baking pans for from those same all-purpose Unico tins and that did not resemble in the least the white, perfect, store-bought bread of the other kids; there was the patched, old-fashioned, hand-me-down look of our clothes. It was as if I too had set out on a ship and arrived in another country, where people did things differently, so that suddenly everything about my own little domain, the closed autonomous world I’d been raised in until then, seemed makeshift and shabby and low. This, then, perhaps, was my true passage to Canada, out of innocence and sameness into difference, and like any child, I did not like the experience of difference one bit, and sought every means to mitigate it. Thus all things Italian became anathema, and the two worlds I lived in, at home and at school, were kept cleanly separate and distinct, so that the former should not in any way compromise my standing in the latter. In this way I sailed more or less happily towards assimilation, which seemed the good and proper course for someone of my clearly questionable origins.

  In the summer of 1971, I made my first visit to Italy, as part of a family trip that lasted six weeks and took us to every corner of the country. That trip transformed my relationship to my parents’ homeland: from an Italianness that had meant shabby clothes and spongy bread, I discovered one that included instead such marvels as the Colosseum and Saint Mark’s Square, which even the callow twelve-year-old I was then could not help but be impressed by. Indeed, Italy, in its excess, seemed precisely designed for twelve-year-olds, since every sort of wonder could be found there, from skeleton-filled catacombs to vast marble monuments and endless miles of sand-brimmed sea; and I immediately fell hopelessly in love with the place, with exactly that achy, adolescent intensity I had begun to feel by then towards the opposite sex. The Italy I fell in love with, however, was not the one my parents had left behind. In fact, in most of the places we visited they were as much tourists as I was, and were laying eyes on them for the first time. Thus what we were discovering together was precisely the Italy that my
parents had always been excluded from, coming as they had from the barbarous south, where feudalism hadn’t been abolished until the 1850s and where Mussolini, who had been the first to introduce there such extravagances as hospitals and schools, was still considered a hero.

  It was a bit of a shock to me, then, to arrive at this other Italy, that of my parents’ little mountain villages, and to find there an entirely different world, of abandoned houses and questionable plumbing and animal shit in the roads. What in the rest of Italy had seemed venerable and ancient here seemed merely backward, and my first reaction was a wish to flee back to the elegant apartment blocks and terraced inner courtyards of my sophisticated Roman cousins. I remember the supper we had our first evening in my grandfather’s house in Villa Canale, the flies everywhere and the stable stink from outside, the gobs of spit on the hearth where my grandfather had hawked towards the cooking fire and missed. We had penne with tomato sauce for supper, but I could not eat a bite of them, so much did the place turn my stomach. Seeing the bathroom, a crude addition to the place from the early sixties, when indoor plumbing had apparently still been a great novelty, I was relieved to learn that one of my uncles had recently built a new home down the street with somewhat more updated facilities, including the luxury of a water heater and a bathtub.

  I cannot call up now what I had thought my parents’ birthplace would actually be like, based on the mythologizing anecdotes and commentaries I’d heard from them until then. But surely I had not imagined it as anything quite so unsettling and strange, so real, as what actually confronted me. There was so much texture to the place, so much taste and sight and smell, that it seemed an affront—the hot days and cold nights, the smell of animals and smoke, the dwarfish aunts with rotted teeth and the grandmother who did not rise the long day from her chair and who did not speak, so that the flies made a home in the folds of her copious overgarments and shawls and I could not have told if she was living or dead. Every morning my mother used to send me across town to buy a jug of milk from a woman who kept a cow there, which now, of course, conjures up images of the pure peasant wholesomeness of things fresh from the source; but at the time, fetching that milk still frothy and warm from the cow like that, in a stable that smelled like one and that was thick with those ubiquitous flies, I could hardly bring myself to drink the stuff.