Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (5 page)

DESTINATION ITHACA

T
HE TROGLODYTES WHO
, along with the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, wandered into Russia across the Bering Strait; the ancient South Americans who (according to Thor Heyerdahl) arrived on the rocks of Easter Island and mysteriously erected the colossal faces of their abandoned gods; the Italian boy from Edmundo d’Amici’s
Cuore
who travelled from the Apennines to the Andes in search of his long-lost mother; the Jews who crossed the desert, following a column of dust by day and a column of fire by night; Aeneas who, with his father on his back, blindly sought to found the birthplace of the poet who would one day make him immortal; General Lavalle’s soldiers, who carried the rotting corpse of their heroic leader from the mountainous North to the plains of Buenos Aires, during the Wars of Independence; Nemo, who bore his anger twenty thousand leagues beneath the seven seas; Candide on his long peregrinations whose goal (he doesn’t know
this) is a garden; Monkey, Horse and Pig, who walked westwards to India in search of the sacred books; Eric the Red, who discovered America too early for the constraints of history; the brother and sister who left their house to find the elusive Blue Bird—all my childhood long, I was haunted by wanderers and their migrations. My books were full of them.

They fascinated me, these departures, partly because every excursion promised a flight from the confines of my days, and partly because the outcome of the adventure was somehow still in the future, where everything was possible. It seemed to me that no arrival was the true end of the story: Gulliver set off again after having returned from his travels, and Alice, after waking, passed her dream on to her sister, whose dreamer she had become. Something in the very roundness of the world suggests that every journey is always to be continued.

Even though I grew up travelling, the wisdom around me told me that I should stand still in one place.
“Kosmopolitt!”
spat out my grandmother, to insult a distant cousin who had never sprung roots in any of the cities in which he had lived.
“A Man Should Only Eat Bread from Wheat Grown on His Native Land”
was the title of one of the texts in my grade four reading book (this in Argentina, a country made
up of immigrants). And our national epic, the
Martín Fierro
, gave as advice to its readers: “Stick to the little corner / Where you first came to this earth. / A cow that keeps changing pastures / Will be late in giving birth.” But what was that corner where I first came to this earth? My passport said “Buenos Aires”; in my dreams I was not so certain.

My earliest memories are of a wild park of sandy dunes where bushes of pink and white flowers gave off a sickly smell, and where giant tortoises made their slow way to the hot sea beyond. Also: a garden with four tall palm trees carrying bunches of deep yellow nuts; a cool, dark basement nursery with stuffed animals and many books; a large white kitchen where the cook would give me chunks of cheese and baking chocolate.

My memories are memories of memories; repetition has sorted them out, chronologically, and dusted off the cobwebs. Now I remember an excursion to the salt mines of Sodom, where the walls looked like the inside of an icebox dripping frozen tears; a huge canvas depicting a sea battle on the wall of a Venice palazzo that reeked of honeyed wax; the donkey ride in the Luxembourg Gardens, while loud birds sang in the
trees; a train stopping at a small German station and a gift of tiny wooden animals painted in fierce bright colours; a walk up a mountain path following the Stations of the Cross and being told the story of Christ as if it were another of my gory fairy tales. Images of Buenos Aires are from much later, and lack the same intensity in colour, smell and sound; they begin when I was seven and my family had returned to the city. But by then I was conscious of remembering.

In order to migrate to a certain place, you must leave another. This truism is not as simple as it seems. Nothing tells you at what precise point departure ends and arrival begins; what goodbyes are forever, what street signs you are seeing for the last time, what doors you have locked behind you and will never open again. Once your back is turned, the landscape shifts, objects lose their shape, people take on other voices and other faces. In your presence, all change is gradual, almost imperceptible, as the minutes gnaw at the hours; the colours fade, the sounds grow fainter, so that the transformation itself becomes a familiar process. But in your absence, change is vertiginous. You believe you hold a place in your memory, fast and immutable, like those miniature scenes under a plastic
dome where nothing but the weather changes with a brisk shake of your hand; but the very instant the place is out of your sight it is no longer yours, the way you knew it. The place you think you remember melts and shimmers in your mind’s eye, like the ruins of a city on the bottom of a lake; while back where you left it the place grows, flourishes, sprouts feathers or tentacles, becomes unrecognizable. So while you think, with more or less certainty, that you are leaving a place, the place is leaving you too, receding into itself, drifting away from you, irretrievably, decisively, unfaithful at the very moment of farewell, long before you have admitted to yourself that this time, maybe, it is forever. You have not quite left, but you are no longer there where you once were, in that place you thought of as home. The place itself is now another.

I remember the shock of realizing, when I returned for a short spell to Buenos Aires a few years after leaving in the late sixties, that the house to which we had moved when I was seven, in which I had grown up while attending school for eleven years, where I had spent my entire adolescence and had celebrated my twentieth birthday, that this house had been torn down and nothing, not a trace of it remained. The cobbled street along which the soda-water vendor would rattle his horse-drawn cart,
laden with blue and green glass siphons that glittered like ornaments on a Christmas tree, had been covered with smooth asphalt; the corner building, which was the signpost signalling arrival after the long bus ride home, had been turned into bleak offices; the pharmacy across from us, where a gargantuan nurse once stitched my knee after a nasty fall, had disappeared; the small bookstore down the way which sold the novels of Jules Verne in bright yellow covers, and notebooks in which I once wrote grandiose epic poems and tragic plays, was no longer there. I had been gone for only three or four years, barely long enough to wonder if I would ever return, and already everything was different, alien, meaningless, so that the question of coming back became irrelevant, since there was nothing familiar left to which to return.

There was little to be done but accept: I too would wander, like those characters I had envied in my storybooks. There would be new faces, new foods, new vistas at the end of new streets, new words in languages other than those of my childhood, new references to histories that were not mine. I had wished for novelty, change and adventure. Saint Teresa warns us against fulfilled wishes, Blake against nursing unacted desires. Both are right.

In a certain sense, I was already prepared for a
nomadic existence. For the Jews, accustomed to a life of expulsions and re-establishments, the immutable centre is the Bible, which is fixed in time, not in space, and which means (we are told) not “the Book” but “the books,” in the plural. Books were for me too a home, a safe place to which I could return no matter where I was taken. In strange bedrooms in Cyprus, Rome or Montevideo, when voices I had not heard before spoke in whispers outside the window and odd scents and curious lights drifted across the newly painted ceilings, my books (from which I would not be parted) would fall open on the familiar pages that told the story of the Seven Swans, of Till Eulenspiegel, of the clever Odysseus, of the Wishing Chair, of Gerda and Kay, of Sindbad and of Mowgli. My eyes followed the words but I knew the texts by heart, even though, from time to time, a new line would appear as if by magic, an unexpected detail would reveal itself in the memorized illustrations, as if (like my body in the mirror) my books grew with me from night to night, faintly but surely, faithful to my end.

A story I enjoyed as a child was that of Puss in the seven-league boots, which allowed the creature to
wander the earth regardless of seas or borders. Looking back, my journey (like that of the booted cat) seems surprisingly clear, step after seven-league step.

After Buenos Aires came Spain, because the ship (the cheapest way of transport in those days) stopped in Algeciras; an invitation by a stranger who had (he told me) known Kafka, led me to Paris; from Paris, London seemed like the obvious next stop; austere immigration officials forced me to leave London and return to Paris; a translation of a Borges story into English prompted an invitation from an Italian publisher to come and work for him in Milan; the opening of a bookstore in France took me back once more to Paris; a client buying books for the Tahitian branch of Hachette offered me the chance to leave Europe and settle in the South Seas as a publisher of travel books; the closure of the company, many years later, forced me to decide between setting up in Japan (where a printer had offered me a job), San Francisco (where the Tahitian company was planning to reopen) and Canada (where for aleatory reasons a book of mine had been published). Since I no longer wanted to work in an office but longed instead to try and make my living as a writer, I chose Canada. I was thirty-four years old.

Canada existed nowhere in my imagination before I got here. Canada had drifted, faint and
unpretentious, through some of my reading: an Atwood story, an essay by Northrop Frye, a chapter by Saul Bellow, or even more clearly and yet still unobtrusively in the Jalna saga that delighted my aunts or the biography of Graham Bell that sat in my father’s library. But unlike England or Polynesia, Japan or France, Canada had failed to conjure up a solid landscape in my dreams. Like one of those places whose existence we assume from a name on a sign above a platform, glimpsed as our train stops and then rushes on, the word “Canada” awoke no echoes, inspired no images, lent no meaning to my port of destination. Canada was the place in which my publisher had her office—nothing more.

I arrived with my family at Pearson Airport on the twenty-second day of October of the year 1982. My son had been born six weeks earlier. As if to rid himself of any small past he might have carried inside him and to begin afresh in this new world, his first act upon landing was to vomit on the carpet outside the immigration bureau.

Our first apartment in Toronto was on George Street, off Queen Street East, opposite a garage that a few months later suddenly burst into flames. It was a tiny place on the second floor of a narrow house, with a cabin kitchen, a small living room, a single
bedroom in which the three children slept together, and a minuscule mezzanine that doubled as a second bedroom and my office. Through the children’s window they could see the blue
M
of the Bank of Montreal Tower lit up at night so as to lend my eldest daughter the illusion that our family initial was emblazoned against the Toronto sky.

Slowly we began to claim the city’s geography: the seedy yet welcoming second-hand stores on Queen Street, the (to us) impressive shoppers’ mosque of the Eaton Centre, the tree-lined streets of the Annex (which reminded me of my own street in Buenos Aires), the wonders of Harbourfront and the islands, and Riverdale Park with its inner-city farm full of cows and chickens who would, a couple of years later, become our neighbours, once we had moved to Geneva Avenue, a few steps away from the ravine.

The city in which you grow up grows with you: the height of doors and windows changes as you change, and through the years you continue to know, even if you no longer see them, the cracks and patches of colour that were once at the level of your eyes. There is one system of measures for the room in which you stepped out of your shorts and into your long trousers, where you graduated from games on the floor to games on the desk, where you were promoted from early
bed-hours and allowed at long last to stay awake and have dinner with the grown-ups—and a different one for that other room which you enter fully formed, past all true transformation, an adult in a world of adults. (When I managed to buy the house in Cabbagetown, after signing the papers and holding in my hand the document that apparently proved that the place was truly mine, I stood for a long moment in the living room, as if seeing my books and pictures and bits of furniture for the first time, feeling that they were, like myself, strangers in a strange land. Then, somewhat self-consciously, I crouched down to the eye level of a child and looked around me, after which I lay down on the wooden floor and looked up at the empty ceiling, and remembered how many times, when I was four or five, I had done exactly that, in order to see my room upside down with nothing in it, a blank to fill with whatever I wanted, whatever I loved or whatever held my fancy.)

We all took to the city (and to Canada) in different ways. My daughters, who had spent their first years in Tahiti, scuttling barefoot along the beach with packs of other children, would stubbornly kick off their unaccustomed shoes in a snowstorm, and still, from time to time, wear flowers behind their ears. My son, however, when he was old enough, took almost immediately to baseball in the summer
and, in the winter, to making snow angels or riding down the ravine slope on a large plastic disc, and later, of course, to hockey. I missed the café life I had known in Argentina and in Europe, the political discussions, the adventurous uncertainty of the economy (which in those days, in Argentina, produced an inflation rate of 200 percent), the late dinners and loud streets. Perhaps I did not really miss these things. Perhaps every newcomer senses the need to feel nostalgic, to lay before himself a photo album of that which he believes he has left behind. The faces may be hazy, the names only vaguely remembered, the voices dim, but he still thinks: “Things are not as good as they were under the reign of Cynara.”