Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (22 page)

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.

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.

Translated from the French by LEXique Ltd
.

Nino
Ricci

A PASSAGE TO CANADA

W
HILE 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.