Bilingual Being (3 page)

That's how my great “revelation” – the “confirmation” I've been waiting for, on and off, all of my life – finally arrives on 29 August 2010 as a simple phone call from my mother. «T'es-tu assis?» [Are you sitting down?] she asks. «Garde, c'ta …» [Look, it was …] And almost without a pause, she gives up the name of a close family elder – just like that. «Vois-tu, c'ta pas ton daddy. J'te l'ava' bin dit.» [See, it wasn't your father. I told you so.]

That's it. No tears. No apologies. She demonstrates only relief that the mystery can finally “close” with excuses to one paternal ghost while another takes centre stage. «Eh oui. C'ta' un pédophile,» she says, as if we're diagnosing an ordinary illness. «Dans l'temps, on parla' pas d'ces choses-là.» [Back then, we didn't speak of these things.] So a non-story then becomes even less of a story now. «P't-êt' binque, maint'nant, tu vas p'voir final'ment tourner a'page,» she adds optimistically. [Maybe now you can finally turn the page.] Trouble is, my book's just been opened. And it's silence itself that's the fable here.

A few days later, I get another phone call, this one from a maternal aunt. I can ask her questions about this affair she says, but only this once. Words as a limited-time offer. And yet there's a wall in her voice too, an impenetrable fortress of aggressive joy that allows nothing to come at her. She speaks about the art of moving forward «dans vie,» of living «sans regrets,» and of the importance «d'pas perd' une minute.» Then, she says flatly that she isn't willing to spend her last years thinking about it. Besides, as far as the elder's character is concerned, «dans l'monde des problèmes, c'ta' pas grand chose» [it wasn't such a huge thing]. Family and cultural myths invoked like lullabies. Ssshhh.

In the end, it's quite an unremarkable tale, then. There's nothing special here. It's about a French family elder who was known to be a pedophile and whose power was taken for granted. He kept regular
company with a second perpetrator, a Roman Catholic priest – enjoyed shared interests, one might say – safe inside a social and cultural space that had more than a tolerance for incest, child molestation, and child pornography. «Dans l'temps» – in that time, and in time – this environment of permissiveness would invite more aggressors. How could it not?

Enter number three, a male cousin on my mother's side in his late teens who was apparently my babysitter from 1957 to 1961, and who enlisted me in his covert experiments with sexuality. «Ah, y t'aima' donc bin» [Oh, he loved you so much], my mother recalls. Indeed. And later, number four, a francophone teen neighbour at our new suburban home who happened onto a preschool girl preconditioned by her pre-existing family drama – just another boy on a lucky street, I guess – with whom I played far too easily (and often) the games of «docteur» and «marié.» In turn, their eyeballs, noses, and hands would partly fuse in the odd record I've kept inside myself all these years, blurring the vestiges of some ghost(s) who took illicit photographs in at least two locations. And a few bit players who may or may not have participated, each in their own way, perhaps just by looking.

It'll turn out that I'm correct about many things. But I'm completely wrong about the first offender, the primary cause. Over the years, a ménagerie of potential perpetrators will offer itself for consideration: employees of my father's, other neighbours, family friends. But never this elder –
never
him. I could sense his powerful presence, but I couldn't materialize it in the least. Like a black hole, it was evident only because of a devastating emptiness, an inexplicable absence in my mental layout. He took me on one-way journeys: odd trajectories going into things but never coming out. I imagine he started small, with a touch. Then, with years ahead of him, he intensified slowly and prudently. So I got used to him when I didn't even have any words at all – not one. And then he taught me so well to keep quiet about it that I didn't even speak of it to myself. “Recovered memories,” they call them. Trouble is, I never knew they were lost.

It is 1961 or '62. Turning left through the huge, carved doors to the grate that guards the balcony, the Elder grabs a skeleton key from the ring on the long string tied to his pants. His left hand holds my right, tight. We turn
left, south, walk a bit. I think: «Ça encore? Pas ça encore.» [This again? Not this again.] Then up some stairs, turn north, up a few more, reach another door, and walk directly east across the dark polished wood floor. I see the golden top of the altar on my left, way down on the main floor, and the big organ next to me on my right, that disgusting metal monster. Small brown birds live in the rafters further on the right, just before the squat brown door at the southeast corner. «Viens-t-en, ma belle.» We open that little door and walk into the bell tower. I get to try to reach for the wide horsetail with my fingers. I look up at the huge brown-black bell, and down into the well of darkness. Through the arches, I see blue sky, some bigger white birds flying by. A coat's on the ground now. «Tiens. Assis-toi.» [Here. Sit down.] Scratchy wool on bare legs. A little brown glass bottle, like dark caramel. Pressed-in sides make it flat, a black cap. It's a picnic in the sky. I think, this is what it feels like to be a princess.

The record stops.

It's 1964 or '65. A cousin my age who's an altar boy prepares for mass. I see him fussing about with the vestments as we exchange a look of recognition – a “You too?” or “You – here?” Inmates crossing paths. But holding the Elder's hand, I walk right past him in my shiny black shoes, through the sacristy, to the door that opens onto the rectory at the back. We walk up the stairs at the northwest corner, then down a long white hallway lined with lots of square windows on the left, facing north, every few steps. I see the tops of trees, the grey sky. There are doors up and down the right side. When we reach one near the end, we knock softly. «Ah, bonjour, ma belle.» «Bonjour, mon père.» I curtsy. It's a narrow room, not well lit. A desk and chair are to the right, and a bed is to the left. There's a white wall ahead with a picture of Jesus, and a blackish rosary on the same nail. The Elder and I sit on the bed. The Priest sits on the chair and offers us «des petits biscuits» with a glass of something pink. My hands are in the lap of my short frilly dress.

The record stops.

Yet everyone's so close by, right across the street. My father is downstairs at his store, smoking and fixing. My mother's with him, counting and phoning. And Bébé is upstairs there, eating and sleeping. But here I am on another errand with the Elder to a weird world I'll never (be able to) tell them about. And we reach the part of this story I'd have rather
not
shared: that I didn't do enough to stop it. That I let myself
get hurt again and again – I failed to protect. Rationally, I know the odds. But I still can't excuse my stupidity.

ON S'COMPREND PAS

At any rate, around the age of twelve, puberty – by which time I viewed myself as a little anglo girl stuck inside a French world – something inside me began to shift, like a turning over. I don't know how else to describe it. By then I remembered only gaps in time, bodily discomfort and pressure, pretending to sleep, distinctive odours, and a bizarre collection of pictures – bits of body detached from the rest of the owner. That, and a lost clown who had a story he'd eventually tell. The one certainty I had, though, was that the “troubles” had gone on, and on, and on. Not a one-shot deal, that's for sure. A matter of years, as recalled by my height relative to furniture, the colour of a dress, the position of a bed in regards to a window, the pet we had at the time – that sort of thing. So it was right around then, equipped with the fine logic of a teenager in full hormonal bloom, that I began obsessing with the question of who could possibly have had access to me over the course of so many years.

Unsurprisingly, that's when I made a decision to make my father my number-one suspect – the one who'd done the most, or the worst. It was a position I'd hold, on and off, beyond his death. I thought it would explain why we never got along and why I more than anyone triggered the dangerous anguish that marked his later life – his trademark stress that slid quickly into emotional and verbal violence. Sadly, the frequency of his lethal moods did much to obscure «ses si bonnes qualités,» as my mother puts it. For he was an animal whisperer who could fix or build anything, and his work ethic left men half his age in its dust. But over time, he experienced a downward spiral that defied both his daily medication and his occasional psychiatrist. So while I lived with him, I never said a word to anyone about suspecting him of the abuse. My silence was routine, organic – entirely embodied. Thus it was that the Elder remained successfully hidden deep within my psyche all my life. Under his inspiration or their own, my aggressors took me when and where they could: in the back rooms of family parties where little ones are laid to rest; in cars on drives from
A
to
B
; in the
brand-new tunnel car washes; and during countless afternoons, evenings, and weekends of babysitting. Eyes, hands, tongues, penises, promises, and threats where they definitely should not have been. Knowledge rammed hard into the psyche.

The extent to which I've collapsed several incidents into one in memory, or taken one incident and remembered it as multiple, remains an enigma. But in all, the troubles I endured at «leur discretion» would span the first nine or so years of my life, beginning prior to my first birthday. Their rights to me had apparently been granted «à 'source» – at the head waters, the point of origin of my personal geography – long before I was born. It had nothing to do with me, in a way. But it would come to have everything to do with me.

The indelible marks these “troubles” left in my mind gave rise to some strange coincidences where my life seems to be a bitter echo of the times. For example, precisely as «La Grande Noirceur» [the Great Darkness]
*
was ending in my province, my own great «noirceur» was just beginning. The subtext of my life would become a hidden shadow as I was subjected to a pathological secrecy that took my voice and then my tongue. The whole experience left me completely «décrochée pis déracinée» [unhooked and unrooted]. I remained essentially mute on these troubles for more than forty years, other than a half a conjecture or a weakly formulated question every decade or so. The story of my troubles lived entirely in the dark, where I even hushed it myself. I ciphered scraps of sense strictly on the walls inside my own head. I learned to move on.

Finding out for certain in 2010 was surreal – a corroboration
half a century
after the fact. If I sound curiously abstract and impersonal in relating this, rather than justifiably enraged, it's because that's precisely what, and who, I became. That's the dominant personality that's emerged through years of internal struggles during which the attached
affect, images, smells, and sounds remained largely indecipherable, like hazy bits of evidence. A trail of breadcrumbs in my psyche concretized by a few anomalies and some scars I've learned to ignore. Learning that I was right all along delivered a strange sort of relief, a reduction in the pressure compressing so many memories. Well, if that's right, then this is right too. The domino effect, the unravelling, began this story, made it possible. But it also triggered a colossal rupture that provoked me to revise and reinterpret my whole life – to self-edit the countless moments by which I've come to, and through, such a profoundly uncomfortable tangle of crime and denial. It was, in short, the unsettling of everything. Paradigms started to rumble hard under my feet. Knowledge became an emergency.

I freely admit that I'd like to just relax and live well instead – pursue happiness and experience life fully. But that's where the sticky business of my languages comes in. It arises in the fact that, reacting on instinct for my psychological survival, I fled French into the waiting arms of English. It resides in the conflict between English and French that's framed my life and the life of my family as a result. And it remains in the confession that I've used both of my languages to survive – for better and sometimes for worse. So as I witness the bilingual spectacle around me in my new teaching roles in French Immersion, I can't help but be aware of the bilingual spectacle that's
in
me, that
is
me. What is this conversation about bilingualism it's drawing me into? And am I its subject, its object, or both?

I'm a French-Canadian female, a child of the 1950s, of eligible age just in time for the election of the PQ to provincial power in 1976, the first election in which I ever voted – but too far gone towards the edge of the world, in every way, to come back to Quebec from Victoria, British Columbia, twenty years later, to vote in the critical provincial referendum of 1995.
*
And in another one of those metaphorical echoes of self and state, just as Quebec passed its famous Charter of Human
Rights and Freedoms,
*
I used my own freedom to flee, joining the exodus of anglos who dispersed into other provinces.

I'm «une fille d'la souche» [a girl of the root], descending along several lines from the first French arrivals to Quebec four hundred years ago. The regional patois is actually derived from a language called Saintongeais, originating in the former French province of Saintonge.
†
And my family crest is three yellow fleurs de lys and a white bishop's mitre on a blue background. You can't get much more French than this. Yet I've not spent more than five days in a row in Quebec in thirty years. Aimless wandering around is what happens when you lose your bearings – emotionally, psychologically, and geographically. Then again, my aristocratic French heritage ironically comes courtesy of my bilingual father and what I came to know as the “English side” of my family – from a father raised by a British immigrant, my beloved Granny. A father who'd speak exclusively English to his mother and siblings. And who'd read, write, and watch television in English rather than French. His non-news favourite?
The Flintstones
. Clearly the confusion runs deeper than just me.