Bilingual Being (11 page)

It was a funny, awkward, irreconcilable matter to have a boarding house full of priests, to frame and promote «el bon monde» [the good people] among them, all the while being cognizant and resentful of most of the others as «une gang de fous» [a gang of idiots]. And their hierarchy in general was otherwise known, in the streets and bars, as «les vra' voleurs» [the real thieves], in contrast to the local politicians, who were deemed «des amateurs» by comparison.

Such was my grand-maman's context one Friday when, unable to find a fish in her house for dinner, she pulled a chicken from the fridge and pronounced, with utmost solemnity, «Je te bénie au nom du Père, du Fils, et du Saint-Esprit. Tu es maintenant un poisson» [I bless you
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You are now a fish]. With a muffled giggle, she served chicken that night. It was evidently an evening when the priests had gone to some retreat, as they tended to do, for such lightness would never have passed otherwise.

Such was my grand-maman Dumont, all six feet of her, skin and bones, «une bonne femme qui a tellement aidé l'Église» [a good woman who helped the church so much] and who was, quite rightfully, eulogized as a near saint one wet day in April, when she was prayed for in the same church where she'd sat, veiled and humble, every morning of her life. A woman-saint. A blesser of chickens.

I remember her lying in her coffin as I walked past, near the end of a long visiting line that lasted for days. She was clothed in something loose and plain – I remember only the saintliness of the outfit. Her eyes were closed, her stern serenity permanently installed. Her face was immobilized by embalming fluid so that her smooth, white cheeks seemed fixed in wax. And her fingers, straight and firm, almost translucent, were placed humbly over a tiny cross. It wasn't in the least a horrifying scene, more a comforting one. She looked like a statue in the church she loved so much. The most beautiful one of all. One that would have made the priests pray to her, for a change.

EL P'TIT JÉSUS

In fact, a casual relationship with the church in Quebec, with «el p'tit Jésus» and «la bonne Vierge,» was commonplace and even a matter of ethnic pride. «Nous aut', on vient pas fous pour la religion.» [We (French Canadians) don't get/go crazy for religion.] «Pas comme 'es anglais.» [Not like the English.] It was a typical belief that the English could turn to madness given the right religious fervour, and the French could, at any moment, depose a pope or ignore a saint, or put some priest in his place just because he was «un maudit écoeurant» [a damned annoying/sickening person]. The French could handle their religion, make it or shape it, but keep the ground firmly under their feet, while the English tended to «exagérer» in all things religious. Or so the story went.

We have a huge reproduction of a poignant black-and-white photograph that my mother displays and her sisters hide, where the five
children – four girls and a boy – pose behind their house on an ordinary day, the photographer invisible to the purpose or time. The hem on one skirt is loose, socks are rolled up, and shoes are too large for various feet and heavily scuffed. A clothesline dominates the background, and there's a corrugated metal shed and more rundown walk-ups through the dusty alleyway.

Inside, my grand-maman scrambled to make meals for a half-dozen capricious priests and maintain her pristine demeanour, which she did impeccably. I have no memories of any humour or lightness in her, only common sense and good cautions. Drink warm water before bed, it's good for you. Study hard. She'd once been an apprentice French grammar teacher through a professional course following high school. She was «une femme sérieuse.»

So when my mother fell down one hundred stairs, from the top “porch” – a metal railing leading from the back door of the kitchen to that alley – down, down, down to the hard ground below, following a small lapse in one of the older sisters' responsibility for locking the gate, my grand-maman took it stoically as with all things. She took my mother's blindness in one eye from age four, and her being «coq l'oeuil» (slang for “cross-eyed”) as a result, as just another test – another way to «gagner ton ciel» [earn your way to heaven].

This idea of needing hardship to earn your salvation would become a permanent installation in my psyche. It was as if you had to have trials and tribulations to be saved, quite literally. A day without a problem was a day to be worried about: God forbid you should die that day. So you made inquiries among sick relations, double-checked bank accounts, mused on small bodily changes. Where would hardship come from next? You asked the question not despairingly but with genuine interest and curiosity. For you were ready, armed with «prévoyance» [planning ahead], a particular type of optimism and preparedness by which you could face the new problem – a problem without which you were quite effectively doomed.

Faced with a difficulty, then, you could afford to be stoic – «bin, qu'est-ce-tu veux» [well, what can you do] – since it was your ticket to heaven. So when my mother reproached me in adolescence because «tu cherches t'jours du troub' toé, t'aimes donc bin el conflit» [you're always looking for trouble, you love conflict so much] – irony, for
sure – she should have been happy with me rather than upset. Comforted that I had, in fact, absorbed the lessons that were put before me and the enduring philosophical edifice on which they rested.

Never mind how this periscopic search for harm, evil, and pain played into my chronic anxiety, my conviction (with good evidence) that danger was, in fact, waiting for me in the backroom darkness of family parties, unfortunate choices of babysitters, and quick car rides from here to there. If this worldview is correct – and perhaps I should hope it is, given my circumstances – then I should have a front row seat when I get up there.

J'AI MENTI DEUX FOIS ET D'MI

As I grew and we moved to the suburbs, I began frequenting the modern Roman Catholic church on the corner, St-Louis de France, where, tellingly, within less than a decade, my friends and I would hold beer parties among the trees behind the most prominent stained-glass window. But in the early days, going to church was something I often did on my own, in keeping with my father's profound atheism and my mother's avowed obedience to him. We went there together, mother and children, only on holidays.

Otherwise, I was normally there alone, making my way to confession every time. And being careful to be precise, too: «J'ai menti deux fois et d'mi.» [I lied two and a half times.] It's possible, you know: a half for the mere thought of it, yet not doing it, or so the rule went as I understood it. In retrospect, I find it fascinating that it never occurred to me to confess anything about the darker side of my life, acts too vulgar for this lovely chamber of carved wood and polished brass. This, even though some priests were pretty nosy: «Dis-moi, ma belle, qu'est-ce que tu fais avec les garçons …» [Tell me, pretty girl, what do you do with the boys …] I remained the perfect Catholic: trained to acknowledge small, polite, excusable offences and hold my silence on the large, unmanageable ones. Keeping one priest's sin from another.

After confession I'd sit on benches polished with lemon oil, sucking in the frankincense from the air, saying my rosary as ordered over the fragile, white plastic beads I still have, a gift from my grand-maman. I loved the peace I found there, the pretty colours on the windows and
the tapestries, and the miles of shiny floor. But even when young, I was sceptical of the saints and their cover charges, $2 for this one, $5, $10. «Celui-là, y est-tu meilleur? Y a-tu plus d'pouvoir?» I'd ask my mother. [Is this (expensive) one better? Does he have more power?] «Ssshhh!» she said tensely. And there was something I couldn't get at all: since a host was «el corps du Christ» [the body of Christ], why were we eating it? I once ventured, honestly trying to understand, «Comme 'es cannibales?» [Like what cannibals do (too)?] «Ssshhh! Mon Dieu!» and a hard gulp, as if we were about to be struck by lightning.

Today the church in Quebec is selling off properties, trying to stall parish bankruptcies, and coping with mounting sexual abuse lawsuits – which paradoxically exclude more than they include, neglecting the thousands violated outside institutional contexts (like me
*
) by those who claimed immunity by association or upheld self-serving perversions of ideology. And there's universal agreement on the streets and in the «brasseries» [local pub-type restaurants] of Quebec that the current pontiff, Benedict, is «un maudit pape, p't'êt même el diab' lui-même, on sait pas» [a damned pope, maybe even the devil himself, you never know].

Yet the candle-lighting business and a belief in «Notre Dame,» saints, and angels still thrives among the province's women at least, including me, their husbands notwithstanding. And religious artifacts are hot sellers at second-hand stores around the city. Recently I saw a cross just like the one at my grand-maman's at a Value Village store in Quebec, for only $4.99. The sad truth is, I almost bought it.

Saints among us and angels as lifelines: these cornerstones of faith far outlast «Monsieur l'Évêque» [the average bishop]. These days, of course, saints ask for different things, such as beer to be poured down the sink. My sister-in-law inquires of my mother with a grin, “Why not just drink it? After all, who'd know?” My mother loves her a lot so she mutes her comment that this is frighteningly sacrilegious. But another beer goes down the drain, this time for my sister-in-law.

DES 'ERTAILLES D'HOSTIES

At holiday time, for a special treat, my mother and I headed downtown to buy «des 'ertailles d'hosties» [communion wafer cut-outs] – thin, flat sheets the size of computer paper with holes where the hosts have been cut out for the prayer service. Made only of flour and water, and pressed thin, they taste like unsalted matzoh, my favourite breakfast food for the past five years. The sisters had a budding business making communion hosts, delivering them to the priests each week, and then selling the cut-out sheets in handmade packages wrapped in brown butcher's paper with a tidy knot of cotton twine.

We often went to the Augustine sisters on Grande-Allée, though the sisters selling these changed over time. We lined up in front of a plain white wall with a small wooden sliding door about chest height for an adult, a foot square, with a ledge under it about ten inches deep. A little sign told visitors about the preferred manner of knocking softly – once, twice, three times – to call a cloistered sister to her post. Within a few minutes, so discreetly, the sliding door would open, my mother would put her coins on the ledge, the sister would put out the corresponding number of packages, and the sliding door would close. Not a word was exchanged, for the sisters were sworn to honour silence and invisibility as the essence of their vows. And so it was that at a «guichet» not entirely unlike those at racetracks and casinos, we traded our silver, nickel, and copper for the currency of faith.

They charged twenty-five cents a package but we always gave more, a few dollars, since the «bonnes soeurs» [good sisters] were fundraising for «leurs missions.» Alongside their sale of «'es 'ertailles d'hosties,» volunteers managed a little shop in the main entrance that was open to the general public. There were a few glass cases with historical artifacts, such as the order's original property decree, or a page from the founding mother superior's diary, or a piece of the cross that had been erected atop their initial facility before its first devastating fire, and so on. There were also tidy tables set up with pictures of current charitable projects where direct donations were invited. And there were impeccable handmade socks, baby sweaters, and doilies for sale, most made by the volunteers, and pictures of saints ornamented by the sisters: $2,
$5, $10 again. But at least this time I could see the reason for the cost difference – the frames.

Since the church business has taken a big hit in recent decades, host cut-outs are now being sold at the «dépanneurs» [corner stores] for two dollars a pack, with holes punched out where we're supposed to imagine the hosts used to be. They're displayed right alongside the beer and wine – a kind of do-it-yourself communion. These fake church snacks are the relics of an era, its language degraded to an illicit trade in swear words. People use religion on the streets now to talk about everything from «une hostie d'belle fille» [a host of a beautiful girl] to «un hostie d'trou d'cul» [a host of an asshole].

I actually received some «'ertailles d'hosties» as part of a “Christmas box” when I was living in British Columbia, my universe of complete disconnection. A neighbour, a high-functioning heroin addict and former English Catholic, looked at me as if I were the devil incarnate, eating host clippings like chips. Maybe I am. Then again, perhaps I'm French after all, a bit irreverent, whimsical towards faith, appropriating it for my own ends.

My mother still makes sure to pick up «des 'ertailles d'hosties» at the dépanneur every Christmas. There's one package for every family member, from herself down to the grandchildren, each bearing our names. «Ah, mais c'est binque trop cher astheure» [but it's too expensive now, overpriced], my mother says. «Pis el gout, c'pas pareille» [and the taste isn't the same]. I have to agree with her on this, absolutely. We all miss the sisters' authentic homemade ones. They tasted like crisp flatbread that had picked up some of the fragrance of the ovens they were cooked in, the careful hands they were bundled by, and the sincerity of purpose for which they were made. These new ones are like thinly crafted styrofoam sheets with unpredictable hole sizes – oftentimes far too large – as if correlating them to the original is not even meaningful anymore, a token undertaking.

We eat a few sheets, almost superstitiously, like making sure to have a bite of someone's birthday or wedding cake just to avoid damning the moment. Perhaps we're still hoping for more of these Christmas seasons together. Then we throw out the rest. As for the dépanneur, it keeps them stocked pretty much year-round, though sales are briskest
around the holidays, I hear. I guess that's when nostalgia for church symbols, and for church as a communal memory, comes back to grab even the most cynical souls as they head off to the dépanneur for a pack of gum and a bottle of wine.