My neighbours were a typically Canadian mixed lot. An old Polish woman, pale, wrinkled and bent over, who spoke neither French nor English, lived across from me. She was an alcoholic and touched with senility. In my bathroom I could sometimes hear her mutter and talk to herself. I brought up her shopping cart whenever I came upon her at the bottom of the stairs. I always wondered how long she had been waiting there for someone to pass by. At regular, infrequent intervals, a middle-aged man, her son, came to visit her. He was shy or surly, I’m not sure which; the odd times I happened to encounter him in the vomit-green corridors he never acknowledged me, not even with a glance. My one-time “Hello” went without response. He was a plumber.
I got the few facts about them from the caretaker, a voluble Haitian taxi driver who was always getting into minor traffic accidents.
Directly above me lived an Indian or Sri Lankan couple with a baby. Down the corridor, across, lived a young, Anglophone gay couple; we established good neighbourly relations, the stuff of greetings and small talk. A young man from somewhere in the Caribbean, Anglophone too, a short-order cook, lived around the corner.
And there were others, whom I related to with nods. A man with a handlebar moustache. A serious, middle-aged
Portuguese woman who always seemed in a rush. A retired couple, Greek, I think, with a husband who was fussing about something or other every time I saw them. A few nondescripts in their twenties and thirties.
Around us, the Plateau; that is, a neighbourhood where the store signs were in French but where inside one might hear Greek, Portuguese, Yiddish, Spanish, Arabic and others, in addition to French, and where the Volapük was often a functional, beaten-up English flavoured with myriad accents. The mix seemed easy between the variously integrated ethnic groups, the Anglophone university students, the hipsters, cool people and wannabees, and the Francophone Quebeckers. Or so it seemed to me. I could identify with up to three of those groups, which made me not so much a hybrid as a chameleon. Depending on the speaker I could change my persona, though unfortunately my Quebec accent has never been very good for having lived in France as a child, so sometimes, far from fitting in, I stood out all the more. On occasion, when I made the
faux pas
of addressing a nationalist Québécois in English and was replied to in French, which would bring out my French French, I went from being
une maudite anglaise
to being
une maudite française
. In chit-chatting in Spanish, as I did a few times at a nearby
dépanneur
, I delighted the older generation but affronted the younger, who probably thought I was questioning their ability to speak French. Such are the pains and pleasures of living close to borders.
One corollary of my slow-burning existential crisis (which I have mentioned only in passing — that monkey, remember) was the evaporation of any particular career path. It would have made me perfectly happy to devote myself to a body of knowledge, to have apprenticed myself to ethnomusicology,
say, or comparative literature, or science history, or Rome and Greece — anything but dentistry. Over the next few years I became a periodic, compulsive reader of university calendars, those Yellow Pages of civilization, taken in by their neatly numbered, highly synthesized pills of knowledge. “Classical History 205: International relations in the Greek world
c
. 500–146 B.C.”, “Cultural Studies 260: The making of the modern body”, “Economics 361: An economic history of the industrial revolution”, “History 472: A social history of medicine”, “Mathematics 225: Introduction to geometry”, “Sociology 230: Self and society” — each one seemed more interesting than the one before. I would attend the University of Toronto and graduate as an anthropologist. No, McGill, as a Russian literature specialist. Cambridge, soused in the Greeks. Or perhaps I would start philosophy all over again, but at Oxford this time, and all the way to a D.Phil on Hobbes. No. Mathematics at Canterbury, in New Zealand. Or playwrighting at Tufts. But these interests never lasted longer than a day or two. On my good days, I felt this scattered approach was extensive, nearly Renaissance; on my bad days, superficial. In real terms, the result was that I never went to school again and I never learned how to do anything.
I was left with writing — not the first item on my list, but the very last. The only thing that had never failed me.
The story I had started in Mexico and finished in Montreal was a brief fictional biography of a crown prince of Norway. Upon his parents’ death in a plane crash, he is seized by a sort of vertigo of agony. As painful as the death of his parents is, he sees with horrible clarity how much more painful the death of his children would be. He vows never to have any. But a king must have an heir. He decides that if he is to have
any, he will have many, thus diminishing the emotional weight of each one, he hopes. The king goes on to have children, via artificial insemination, with the women of Norway. Over the course of his reign he becomes father to some nine thousand children, strangers all, since such numbers make any degree of intimacy impossible. Then one day he is told that one of his sons has died in a horseback-riding accident. As planned, he feels no pain, and he is horrified.
In structure the story was similar to my dentures story, with brief chapters, each with its own title. It was published in a Prairie literary review.
I began work on a novel. Over the course of several months I collected snippets from Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Swift, Cicero, Lucretius, Horace, Dostoevsky, Galsworthy, Virgil, Chaucer, Gogol, Ovid, Byron, Aristophanes, Sallust, Gibbons, Epicurus, Aeschylus, Caesar, Euripedes, Owen, Erasmus, Seneca, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Pindar, Bacon, Aquinas, Pirandello, Turgenev, Aesop, Zeno (of Elea), Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Descartes, Proust, Blok, Milton, Hamsun, Heine, Henry James, Pushkin, Madox Ford, London, Emerson, Thoreau, Pascal, Herodotus, Tzara, Ball, Hulsenbeck, Schwitters, Gurney, Mann, Hawthorne, Hardy, Conrad, Spencer, the Bible, Hesse, Camoens, Sassoon, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Melville, Schopenhauer, Dickens, Chesterton, Quiller-Couch, Artaud, Kafka, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Shelley, Leibniz, Saint Augustine, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Abelard, Hopkins and Averrhoës, all of them dead and most in the public domain. I deliberately sought out phrases and sentences that were unremarkable. Not the royalties of literature — “Is this a dagger that I see”, “Call me Ishmael”, “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure …” — but the humble journeywords,
the J. Alfred Prufrocks that support but never star. These snippets — sometimes so commonplace that two authors penned them (plagiarism!), other times unique but nonetheless trite — I would crazy-quilt into a novel that would appear as smooth and uniform as a wool blanket.
The story I meant to tell was simple and domestic. In the summer of 1914, a woman’s adult son is very ill and she takes him to a seaside cottage to care for him. He dies. “Today, a few minutes ago, my John died.” She goes over his illness, his last weeks, and from there she moves backwards, year by year. The adult son becomes a sullen, rebellious adolescent, a difficult child, an eager toddler, a beautiful baby. The novel would end with his birth. “Today, my little John was born.”
I was moved by an anger against history. I meant to integrate the universal into the personal and then let it die, that is, wipe the slate clean. Thus it is only the mother’s words that are original, entirely my own. All my snippets went into the son — into his thoughts, his words, what he does, what he sees, what he eats. I was discovering the Dadaist writers at the time and much of what I read, especially Tzara and Ball, struck a chord. There’s no Dada in my novel — other than the Schwitters-like construction of the son — but something of its turbulent despair animated me in its writing. Now I wonder why I went to such laborious lengths to integrate a pattern that no one would see.
I worked on the novel consistently. There was no paralysis here. Day by day it appeared on the page.
At last I come to Tito, Tito Imilac. Before I even spoke of the boiling of carrots, of the comforting liturgy of laundry, of the food of eye fish, I wanted to rush ahead and get to Tito.
I met him in a restaurant. I was waitressing. It was my first time, my first shift, my
last
shift, I resolved.
I had bumped into Daniela, Danny for short. She had studied at Ellis too, same year, same college, but we weren’t close friends then. I think it was that we had never properly met. Busy as we were with the illusory concerns of our student lives, we had never had a devoted minute to see how well we got along. It had to wait till that chance encounter on St-Laurent, to that curious psychological happening, akin to an explosion, whereby one recognizes a face in a crowd. “Danny!” I nearly shouted. She looked surprised, and smiled back. Talk ensued, that important minute, and when we parted company, I to my German lesson, she to work, the piece of paper I held in my hand with her telephone number was not a token of politeness but something warm and precious, instantly memorized, a seven-digit poem. Danny was the first real friend I made in Montreal, the sort of friendship where a separation of time and space is merely a pause in an ongoing conversation.
She worked at a posh greasy spoon that served sumptuous breakfast specials and fancy-shmancy burgers with
haute couture
fries. The burgers were open-faced and had proper names — the California, with avocado and alfalfa sprouts, the Romanov, with a red wine and mushroom sauce, and so on. Atop each serving of fries, which came with a choice of ketchup, mayonnaise or a four-pepper sauce, was a tiny flag of Belgium, which the overwrought waitresses planted with a febrility equal to that of the American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The place was blessed with plenty of light and
a je ne sais quoi
to the decor that made people want to linger and then come back. It was a great place to eat, hell to work in. The owner, Alain, was a genial roly-poly guy who knew he
had a good business going and knew how to keep it humming. He was easygoing and considerate with his waitresses.
One mid-morning in winter Danny called me and said they were in a pinch and why didn’t I give waitressing a try, instead of staying cooped up all day writing. I said, me?
Waitressing?
But the closest I’ve come to that is serving myself from the fridge.
No matter, Danny said. You’ll make a great waitress.
And so, on a lark — telling myself that my parents’ blood money wouldn’t last for ever, delighted to have a firm reason to leave my apartment and my novel, wearing a black skirt that was Danny’s and a white shirt that was Alain’s, totally stressed out — there I was in a busy restaurant, asking customers to repeat themselves, writing everything down in longhand, getting everything wrong, serving things from the wrong side, and I asked this one customer — casually dressed, English-speaking — how he wanted his chickenburger — sorry, his Louisiana — done. He looked up at me as I looked down at him, ballpoint to pad. He smiled. A nice smile, I noticed mechanically, angst nipping at my heels. “Blue,” he said.
“Thank you. Yuck,” I replied, as I hurried to deliver the piece of paper and fill somebody’s empty glass. I think he was waving to get my attention as I turned away, but I told myself that I’d get back to him in a minute. It’s amazing how difficult it is to be not a
good
waitress — heavens, my aspirations were never that high — but merely a competent one. What with the man who wants you to check what oil the fries are fried in, the kid who wants
honey
on his hamburger, the lady who wants her Romanov without a patty (“It’s just
so
fattening” — and then she orders the chocolate cake), the two guys who are more interested in looking than in ordering, the high-powered-full-of-himself
exec who wants his bill pronto, the couple who are tapping their fingers waiting to order and when you’re at their table they hesitate and change their minds after you’ve written it down, the guy who wanted it
without
tomatoes, not with extra tomatoes, it’s a chaotic activity, full of hurt, anger, anxiety and rudeness, like war.
My first impression, as Danny leisurely served the few coffee-sipping, newspaper-reading customers while showing me around and telling me what was where and how to make cappuccinos, was favourable. What a great, easy way to earn money, I thought.
Then the minute hand jumped only a few millimetres and it was noon and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there were a hundred working burghers all clamouring for burgers. Where was Danny, I asked myself in an increasingly panicky voice. But she was off doing her own insane running around. She had no seasoned waitress’s wand that would slow down time or make these people go away. It was me against Them. I thought I would burst into tears.
Next time I was in the kitchen, as I was planting Belgian flags, the man in white said to me, “Hey, yo, Mary-Lou, what’s this? The guy wants his Louisiana
raw
?”
I looked at the order. “Tell me, do they eat chicken raw in Italy, Luigi?” I asked.
“No, we eat it cooked. My name ain’t Luigi.”
“Mine ain’t Mary-Lou. And
of course
the guy wants his chickenburger cooked,
but with a beer on the side.”
“Oh.” He peered at the order again. “You’re supposed to put alcohol on the other side.”
“To err is Canadian, to forgive is Italian,” I said, as I went about balancing two Canadians and two Romas on my arms.
As I came out, my future true love and I made eye contact across the restaurant and we both smiled. I noticed again, this time less mechanically, that he had a nice smile. When I was by his table, I said, “Sorry about that.”
“Not at all.
I’m
sorry. It was a silly joke.”
I tried to have another look at him as I served other tables, but our eyes met every time.
When I brought him his Louisiana, I said, “Fresh out of the kiln.” He laughed.
After that, not much. The unfailing shyness of humankind. Looks and smiles. A lingering coffee. A mathematically precise 15 per cent tip. A slow, hesitating but irrevocable exit amidst the bustle.