Bilingual Being (39 page)

I can visit that spot. Every time I go home to Quebec, I find a way to do a drive-by. I go along René Lévesque or Holland in one direction or another, and as I near the corner, I slow down. I have a quick look at that door, say a little prayer for myself – for that little girl – feel thankful I'm alive, and keep right on driving. I do all of this thinking and praying in English. Even my
looking
, my drive-by, is in English. That's what my second language does: it lets me keep a safe distance from my past, a seat in the car on the road just outside my trauma.

In December 2010, though, I did something I'd never done on a visit home before. I parked the car. I didn't even get out, just parked in front of that house for a minute. Or was it fifteen? Thirty? I looked at it for a while, thought of Clown (my eternal testifier) and that memorable afternoon. And there I was again in the waking dreams that victims know too well. Not asleep, but not in the present either. Somewhere over there, back there. The imaginal at the forefront instead of being below or behind. For me, those memories happen in French. There's the tense voice, the rush around the stairs. And the French shushing. It stabs right through my patois, cheapens and degrades it brutally. And the French laughing. The cruel ridiculing of a little girl who thought only of her Clown through it all. The harshness-disguised-as-humour of a man who cared so little about me that he would not stoop to pick up a tiny cotton body that meant the world to me.

I'll skip ahead an hour or so, past the grief and terror that made it impossible to budge, to the grocery store where I took myself to reground, as I always do, driving and finding one, as I always do. That, or a second-hand store. Mismatched goods, colours, textures, looks,
sizes, words, pictures. And everyone too busy to notice the depth of sadness, the quiet madness, the internal rupture. Anonymity as a space of healing.

«C'est-qu't'étais?» [Where were you?], my mother asked when I returned an hour and a half late from a simple errand. I fudged the truth a bit myself this time, making up a fib that I was at Value Village. Seems I end up there a lot on trips home.

Where was I really? I was back in my mother tongue. And I only made it back from my mother tongue to my mother's house that night for dinner, to my lovely children who would know nothing of the moment, by getting into English and driving away. «Mon Dieu, t'es vraiment allergique à poussière, ehn? Gar'-donc tes yeux!» [My God, you really are allergic to the dust (in those stores), aren't you? Look at your eyes!]

Yes, I really am allergic to the dust of the past that infuses the atmosphere in my mother tongue. In English, there's air for me to breathe. A journey from the imaginal to the providential. That's bilingualism for me. Life.

__________

*
Simons is the most popular clothing retailer in Quebec City. It was founded in 1840, and its bright green packaging is iconic as «des boîtes de Simons.» The Simons family donated the 150-year-old Tourny fountain (from Bordeaux, Quebec's sister city) to celebrate the city's 400th anniversary in 2008.

Partridges

A funny story.

If you shoot one

on the top branch

of a tree with many,

the ones below

just watch it fall,

and don't even

try to fly away.

Every autumn,

my mother hunted

for small game

with my father.

Once, she killed

five partridges

in a single tree.

Laughing, she tells

how each bird

watched its family

be fired on and die,

tumbling right past

its open eyes,

and did not think

to move at all.

Moronic birds,

she says:
Des idiots,

des espèces de

stupides dums-dums
.
*

Imagine watching

violence happen,

harm approaching,

and doing nothing.

Imagine.

__________

*
Idiots – stupid, moronic species (creatures).

20

ON THE WINGS OF GEESE

MEA CULPA

Sometime during my early years, I started writing «un nouveau roman» in my little broken head. Clearly, to make up such an outrageous tale – an epic of courage and survival tellable to myself – another voice was needed. A language that wasn't my mother's or my neighbourhood's. One where I could think from my secret location about angels and fairy-tale characters getting me safely from one sign to another – a type of Mille Bornes game of the mind.
*
It was fortunate that English was hanging around the edges of my cultural world, because I could've easily ended up speaking the more difficult languages of delusion instead. At any rate, rather than pass through my culture properly, seems I by-passed it through the entirely undiagnosed, off-the-radar experience of infantile psychosis.

Talk about a story that can't ever be told – the absolutely unnarratable: a toddler with a psychic split. But I always sensed my injury. And now I see the soft, raggedy edges of my old wound, dare to name it: «une psychose transitoire» or «une psychose passagère,» the literature calls it – ironically, so beautifully. A psychosis I journeyed through, then
arrived from. A psychosis on which I rode for a while, like on a boat, a train, or a horse – like my beloved Gumby rode on trusty Pokey. A psychosis in which I was «une passagère» in transit from infancy to puberty. Quiet, calm, automatic, alive only in my mind. The accident was apparently unnoticed, other than frequent commentaries punctuating even my earliest years that I was, I am, «pas démonstrative.» A trait that would, ironically, become attributable to my becoming “English.” True enough, what emerged – the sequelae embodied – was someone who looked askance at her maternal family from across a broad chasm. From the place of mental repatriation I migrated to when my intimate space in French erupted, leaving only ashes.

It is 1961 or '62. I go to Paris – the Cinéma de Paris, to be exact, in Carré d'Youville, just beyond the stone gate on rue Saint-Jean. I carry a white, lacey plastic purse – «une p'tite bourse dent'lée» – where you can put des «p'tites niais'ries» [little nothings]. It's moon-shaped with two round handles that fit snugly around my wrist, and there's probably an orange two-dollar bill in it. It's a classic look for a pre-schooler, I'm sure – all the rage for «une p'tite mad'moiselle» spending the afternoon with the charming Elder. Isn't he helpful, when a father must work, and a mother must do the books at his shop, and Bébé is sleeping with Grand-maman, and I must be kept «occupée»? What better than a Disney movie on a Saturday afternoon and some Chinese food afterwards?

And that, I'll realize some fifty years later, is why I always time-travel when I drive along la Côte d'Abraham to la Basse-Ville – the lower-town area it leads to. Along «les rues d'la Tourelle, d'la Couronne, Dupont, Saint-Joseph, pis Saint-Vallier est» – formerly all part of «el vieux Quartier chinois.» Here was the Elder's previous home area and favourite haunt – though I'm quite sure he couldn't even have put China on a map. But it was a quick walk from the cinema, so I'll forever register China as the centre of the natural world. The issue of its most important symbol – the precise point that splits the universe into evil and good, dark and light, dualities seen and unseen – the
yinyang
. The place where it's decided whether you'll perish or be saved. Because somewhere between the fresh chop suey and the dry cleaner's kindness, I was pulled back from the abyss of a consuming fire. China as purgatory. Where children go when they die.

Inside the cinema, there are slips in memory where I can be in the past and present simultaneously, yet be absent from the scene – above it, not as me. In these spaces that are neither here nor ever gone, are five Disney movies, all released in the late 1950s and early '60s:
Bambi
(1957),
Cinderella
(1957),
Snow White
(1958),
Dumbo
(1959), and
Pinocchio
(1962). I don't remember them at all. Instead, what I've kept is of a divergent psychic texture entirely, so that their symbols are part of my inner world, informing my theories of mind and my notions of right and wrong – just like street noises and Chinese food have become code for “salvation.” Dumbo, whose story I can never keep straight. Bambi, whose picture makes me cry even now. And Pinocchio, the Rosetta Stone that explains how things get harder and longer with lies. From the wide world of Disney, then, comes the fractured world of me.

There'll be sleepiness, and I'll miss part or most of the movie. There'll be disgusting smells, indelible and non-negotiable despite the intervening decades: nicotine, tobacco smoke, wet polyester, fishiness, dusty oil, cold mold. And there'll be the clear sense of something in my mouth that feels like a banana outside with a hard inside. It pushes my teeth until it feels like they'll all fall out and I'll have just a set of bumpy gums. It's a sensation that'll haunt the rest of my life – soft teeth breaking for no reason, swallowing teeth, teeth being pushed into the wrong places, smashed teeth. And another, of not being able to find my teeth, of losing them. There'll also be the visceral imprint of being on the lap of someone big who's on the toilet, facing the same way he does, something dangling below into the basin. Of spinning like a tipping bobble on top of something hard and pointy, like a very big pencil. And of having a long drip of slow, hot liquid run down my right inner thigh, recalled as black mercury burning a trail in my skin as it fades at the knee. There'll be no new charms for those events on the jingly silver bracelet I'll wear for a decade – another fad of the «p'tites demoiselles» of my era.

This bit in the toilet will become over-determined, repeated often on days I'll not bother to count, when the Elder – ever gracious – takes me shopping around the neighbourhood. «Y f'sa' toute pour aider.» [He did everything to help (everyone) out.] Ah yes, a real hero. On a familiar street, my hand in his, I'll need to use the bathroom again. Seems I always need to. Asking clerks to use the stockroom toilet: «Ma p'tite
fille peut pas attend'» [My little girl can't wait]. «Mais oui, monsieur.» I'll see messy shelving and stacks of different kinds of boxes – shoes, gadgets, who knows what – on different days. Relief, as always, is only in the safety of the outside world and its strangers.

So incoherence becomes my only guarantee in those days when things happen to me that don't happen in speech – those years of living the inexplicable, the untellable. Back home, discomfort is negated by warm, innocent hugs. The stench in my nose is overlaid by rising bread. The Elder oils a creaky door hinge. And I'm rushed off to join cousins for supper. If there was ever a time to speak of it, it passed years ago. Seems it's a routine by now, hardly worth reporting. Besides, my thoughts are easily drowned out by the gaiety of four generations of women putting «du beurre mou pis a'salière» [soft butter and the salt shaker] on the table as they talk about whose husband «court la galipote» [runs around (cheats)] and whose is «binque trop branlant» [too hesitant (lacking ambition)]. Learning about the speed of men is key here. Prey talking about their predators. The kitchen as the war room. If there's another way to be a little girl, I don't know it yet.

But somewhere in there – between the laughter and the thunderous bells across the road – I'll fall out of rhythm with my own people into a disconnection akin to autism, through so many moments I'll never lose and yet never find. The lesson I extract from it is simple enough: «Y'a bin des genres de monde dans l'monde.» [There are lots of different kinds of people in this world.] So we have two choices. Everyone does. Become a suffering soul, saying «'mande-moi pas c'q'm'a faire a'ec ça» [don't ask me what I'm going to do with this knowledge, problem, etc.]. Or, «fa' queq' chose pour t'aider» [do something to help yourself]. It's just that we're born into a long line of thoughts that eventually becomes a long line of ways. It's called culture. And our job, as far as I can see then, is to survive it.

In your mother tongue, your mother teaches you about your culture – first at her breast, then on her knee, then in her kitchen. How does she learn it? From her mother, from precious tips found «dans l'fin fond d'une boîte» [at the very bottom of some random box]. It's a bit like putting on lipstick and your best dress when you feel like crap, only a little more complicated. But only a little. And how does your
mother know exactly how you feel? Because the Elder knows her, too – just as his elders knew hers. Because it goes on and on and on. And I'm afraid that out of due respect for the living, I've already said too much.

But the art of forgetting sexual abuse here will make «des chefd'oeuvres» [masterpieces] out of «des p'tites oubliettes» [little lapses]. Of course, the family Elder's been witnessed with his fingers up little girls' vaginas, and with girls on his lap while his pants are open. But he works so hard – and at least «c'pas un courailleux» [he isn't an adulterer] … And of course, the priests fondle everyone they can get their hands on, but they're a harmless joke, really – «rien q'des m'mères» [only whiny, feminized men] … And of course, big boys like to experiment, they're just trying out their manhood – «c'est normal» … In my Quebec at mid-century, such unpleasantness from older males was a mere ritual of childhood – «une bebelle» [a trinket] in the grand scheme of things.

So my “aha moment” arrives in the fact that there's no “aha” here at all. Everyone merely learned how to get along «dans l'temps qu'les hommes f'sa' bin s'qu'y voula'» [in the time when men did what they liked]. First, we know no better. Later, it's a given. Even later, it's forgotten. It isn't talked about simply because it's so terribly ordinary. That's how trauma becomes culturally relative.