Bilingual Being (29 page)

As for my scalp, it was too late. I had a lemon-sized bald spot on the top of my head for the entire year. It was, however, an anomaly that healed much faster than others in my life, only taking ten years or so to fully disappear. A haircut was apparently absolutely out of the question. That we couldn't do. It wasn't feminine to have short hair.

What we could do, though, was to manoeuvre the «chignon» creatively, so that hair from the other side could be brought over to cover the bald spot, and extra fabric flowers could be added to the daily arrangement pinned to its top to provide an additional distraction. In retrospect, I must have looked like a fusion between one of those balding men with long stringy comb-overs, and a deranged flower fairy.

MADONNA IN SORROW

My mother tells me that I'll inherit the freckle-less painting of myself when she passes on, but I don't want it. «Ça t'a jama' ersemblé» [It never looked like you], my mother confessed recently. «On ava' t'jours
dit ça, même dans l'temps.» [We all said that, even at the time.] I don't remember those justified critiques at the time, though. What I do remember were the compliments lavished upon my artist-uncle, and the plastic look of a girl that never existed.

The painting I want to inherit instead is the one that hangs in the hallway right next to it. It's great-grandmother Garland's (Granny's mum's) copy of
Madonna in Sorrow
by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, and it was brought from England by ship long before I was born. It's a canvas from a British museum sitting in the heart of modern Quebec, an Englishwoman's copy of an Italian master's version of a symbol at the core of the French understanding of Roman Catholicism. Eclectic in its very being, it's a mess of identities unto itself. It isn't a portrait per se, in that my great-grandmother Garland intended it as both a master's copy and a saint. But I love it far more than any other object in that house, my mother's house.

Its frame is a plain wooden one, dark and slightly golden on the edges, and it needs a good cleaning. But it's rich and full of light even through the dust. My great-grandmother Garland was one of the few painters of her time allowed into the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London – a “copyist” by special permit. There she sat for hours among the tourists to paint the masters, taking with her my tiny granny, her daughter, then a young girl. There's painful satire in my hanging right next to the world's most famous virgin like this, for I am no such thing at the time of painting. Ironically, the Madonna has a one-inch rip that's needed mending for years, ever since my mother tore down the hall to pick up a doctor's call. Her canvas is torn, but mine is intact. It should be the other way around.

In any event, my great-uncle George was wrong: I still had those freckles as an adult, fainter but etched in my face nonetheless, permanent. As a result, the painting truly has never looked like me – only a stilted, perfect me, “de-Frenched,” blonder than I really was by then, for my hair had already begun to darken. I'm dressed primly and properly in pink and white against a sky-blue background like a stock photographer's shot. I was never as innocent as he made me look in that picture. In painting me like this, he inadvertently highlighted the part of me that was the victim more than I care to see. In fact, he's captured
all of the adjectives that made me into such a prime target: feminine, blond, passive.

Am I really a collection of random adjectives, of features, like this? Only colours and lines in service of a brush? A composite rendered by what I and others make up as we all go along? An accident here and there, and a mere change of clothes, chignon flowers, and background? Is the image I present to the world only a layer, after all, an imposition, like my freckles? Is my face – reworked as it is by my family, culture, and setting – merely a mask that I can at any time remove, outgrow, ignore? And am I the subject or the object of this weird art that is my body, my life?

I can't be sure. But as a case in point, one summer in my infancy, according to the baby book again, my parents and I took a trip with my granny to the beaches of New England. It was long before the days of infant car seats or seat belts, so my granny and I loosely shared the back seat. When we arrived at our American destination, she was distracted getting out of the car, or else she thought I'd come out the other side, and accidentally slammed the car door on my leg.

It turned into the usual sort of hospital emergency, ten stitches across my left knee that left an inch-long scar that's still visible today. So I guess the cut was fairly deep. But my granny never mentioned it again, and my mother omitted the incident entirely from the record of that trip which she so meticulously kept. It simply reads: «Vacance à Hampton et York Beach pour 10 jours avec son daddy et grand-maman St-Onge et mamie, à 1 ½ ans, en juillet-aôut 1959.» [Holiday for ten days with her father, grandmother, and mother, etc.]

Forgetting about the incident was how my birthmark on the same knee – at least as large as an egg and hardly subtle – was scrubbed hard one night when I was about eight, as I protested insistently. «Bin voyons donc!» [Come on now (don't be ridiculous)], my mother exclaimed, as she kept on trying to remove it. For in forgetting about the scar, the birthmark was easily forgotten too.

At the time, it seemed a bit odd, almost funny, even. But in hindsight, it coughs up its moral philosophy onto the cold, tile floor. After all, in a culture that invests so much in silence – the cornerstone of forgetting – it was only natural that the unpleasant history of my knee
would be erased from the public record. My mother wasn't negligent in forgetting such things. She was being quite deliberate. She had learned how. Most cultures pass on their stories from hand to mouth. What was being passed down here, from hand to mouth, was the culture of silence. And my mother, like a typical woman of her roots and generation, had been raised to think that hushing «el mauvais» [the bad] was the essence of good living.

So effective was the instruction, the indoctrination, of the women of her times that even after the death of perpetrators, secrets were kept by wild women across the landscape – every last living auntie and third cousin, and out through tortured filaments from there. It was as if the living were never given their voice, and only the dead could speak, repeating their monotonous incantations, «Dis pas un mot à personne» [Don't tell a word to anyone]. So family legends of piety, merit, and fidelity to «la patrie» were honoured with a reverence that increased with each passing year. It was only late in the history of families, at the onset of the old age of a few of its foundational characters, in the absent-mindedness of a humble quasi-dementia fuelled by champagne or «digestifs», that a few choice bits of information contrary to legend might be retrieved from the bottom of the memory pot. Then, they spoke – but only because they forgot to forget.

In sum, it was a legacy where the best «raconteuse» was the one who could keep the best stories to herself for the longest. As a result, generations of women were not divided so much by the particular opinions that might be spoken on any given day between mother and daughter, or aunt and niece, about shoes, men, or sauces. Instead, women were separated from one another by irreconcilable differences in their views of silence. For what passed as «normal» to their female forebearers no longer did for the new generation – it required action instead, intervention, no excuses. «Bin, y faut bin essayer d'comprend'» [Well, we really have to try to understand (the times)], it's often said. But those multi-generational silences underwriting the myths are tougher to grasp than the myths themselves.

Ironically, the provincial licence plate in Quebec states point blank, «Je me souviens» [I remember]. It's a beautiful thought, and I wish with all of my heart that it were true – not just for my entire family but for countless victims of the crimes of the times. But my experience in those
decades was that precisely the opposite mantra grounded the local epistemology. That's why just reading the license plate turns me stone cold. “Bullshit, you don't remember at all,” I often find myself accusing those anonymous rectangles at traffic lights and mall parking lots, in English. But there's no point in saying it. It's not like they'd ever answer back. They'd be silent, as usual.

MA PATRIE

I've received deliberate instructions about silence myself: «Dis pas un mot à personne!» It issues from a haunting male voice, a white ghost that infects me even as I try to write about this, as I finally dare to tell. But despite all of that silence in its varied registers – suggested, enforced, implicit, explicit – I heard plenty. Felt even more. Realized early on that these older women and I were similar deep in our souls.

Maybe it's because we were victims of the same type of oppression – they in their time, me in mine. Maybe it's because in that multi-generational quiet, we actually shared something tremendously powerful. It was something that inadvertently enriched rather than depleted our collective cohesion. Foiled the best-laid plans of these men. My amateur's conclusion is that one can't stop transference – hearing and saying far more than what's consciously intended. That unconscious language is out of everyone's overt control, beyond the grasp of those who consider themselves its most powerful. Through the unspoken language of warmth and empathy, the human connection, the women found ways of understanding and helping one another between the imperatives that were set out on the misogynistic agenda.

However it came to be, the women of my French clan communicated effectively «leur optique spirituelle» [their spiritual worldview] – literally, beautifully, “their spiritual light, or lens.” But it was far more like osmosis than explicit lessons in catechism. Just like those divisions of the world into “us” and “others” that snuck or wedged their premises into daily life, faith became wisdom worked into ordinary moments: dishes being cleaned, seams getting stitched, or husbands “sleeping it (alcohol) off” before the long drive home. Sense and sensibility were passed along like hand-me-down coats, as faith went rogue in the kitchen. But the women were speaking now, completely ex cathedra.
Scrubbing pots and darning socks by hand, they cathected meaning deep into the gaping holes that the men and the church left behind.

Through this sharing underneath the surface of things, the women of my matrilineal world ignored the strain and inconvenience of their narrow grounds, and claimed their potency on those same grounds instead. That's how it comes to be that I have a core deep within me where their foundational beliefs dwell – where resides my faith, my mother's faith, in hidden goodness. It's the anchor of my enduring spirituality and can be summed up as follows: belief in the spiritual dimension of life is an indispensable idea. That anchor still means something, everything, to me – holds me even as I drift away from French toward English. It's a faith founded on the prevailing idea that benevolence reigns, come whatever. And it produces a philosophical orientation that is optimistic, premised on the fact that good can be found in everything, though not necessarily in everyone.

So when the house floods, for example, we consider ourselves blessed that we're unharmed. Or that in cleaning up after a flood, we find a precious document lost a long time ago that we wouldn't have found otherwise. And there's unofficial prayer everywhere. Not just over chickens, as my grand-maman uttered, but over car engines that don't start, husbands at the door, the phone ringing, letters being opened, and so on.

Such unofficial prayers keep their sure but silent peace with supersititions and convictions rooted so deeply in the French-Canadian soul that even to name them, to describe them, is to admit to some distance from their voices. A bird in the house augurs death. A dropped knife, fork, spoon means a visiting male, female, or child. Intuition is the most decisive of your six senses. Always go out the same door you came in. Angels permeate every place and time. Touch wood.

And the dead live around us, and with us. Not like a haunting or a channelling or anything New-Agey, but just as nature. I was reminded of this recently by one of my aunts who told me in solemn certainty that on a Christmas morning past, a fine snow fell around her cottage, covering everything in white. She was then already eighty, and surrounded by the three of her four daughters who still live, the other having been lost to cancer some years ago. She explains that they were
all four women together in their pyjamas, watching the snow that quiet morning.

Suddenly, out of the edge of the woods, a beautiful buck emerged and nibbled on the grass right by their window. Unable to speak, they wept in silence – for the sheer beauty, for the blessing, and for time hanging so mercifully still that day. «Ergarde, c'est papa. Y vient nous dire Joyeux Noël» [Look, it's (our deceased) dad, and he's come to wish us Merry Christmas], the youngest, nearly fifty, whispered. And everyone believed her.

I can't relate this story without tears rolling down my own face. It's not about my believing that the dead uncle is a deer, which he isn't, of course. Nor do they believe that for a moment. Rather, it's about finding occasions for hope in nature, stillness, and the blessings of ordinary life. Such is the sense of the spiritual that I have inherited, and such is what I believe in to the core of my being.

“You can find hidden meaning in a stapler,” my then twenty-year-old child once said to me cynically, insightfully. Such is the faith of «ma patrie» which the women of my French clan have infused in me. «La patrie»: a unique word with no exact correlate in English. It is faith, home, belief, and land – rolled into one.

UN P'TIT PARI

For good or bad, I was initiated into my «patrie» before I was born. I take a moment to return to my baby book, that trusted reference, one last time. I struggle with it – fight waves of nausea and dashes to the bathroom. Even its smell is a trigger – dry mold. A page titled «Précieux souvenirs à se rémorer» [Precious souvenirs to remember] features statements of wagers, «des paris.» There's a general belief that I'll be a boy: «Durant l'attente du petit poupon, tous était convaincu [sic] de la venue d'un petit homme. En voici la preuve.» [During the period of waiting for the infant, all were convinced of the coming of a small man. Here's the proof.] My mother's words are a testament to the reality that will soon be mine. For a child's actual identity – or problems – are irrelevant to the common consensus. If «tous sont convaincus» [all are convinced] of something – however wrong it is – it must be true.
And it becomes so. From here, there's a pseudo-scientific demonstration that I'll be male.