we · drank · cachaca · and · smoked · the · green · cheroot

Madame Bottomly and I began to be friends one day last spring when the air felt like a holiday: sun sniffing at pigeons, heavenly steam from the bakery, glitter in the drains.  She is a person who always puts her green box out for recycling at least two hours before the men come, and same with the garbage.  I had noticed she always did this herself, as I do, though I was aware she had a husband lurking somewhere in the house, because she mentioned him in passing.  I would pass, for example, on my way to Binos for a carton of mango juice and a flirt with the young butcher, and she would nod and smile as she brought a box down her steps...

            It is a long time since I sat on the harbour planks near the Russian ships and drank champagne out of my pink stiletto, but I have not forgotten.  So there was a rat on the planks - and there were sailors with a welding gun whose sparks singed my hat.  It was all part of the fun.  Now, we are older.  I am not talking here about the glorious silver paper crackly voiced state of ancienthood, but the less storied state of older middle age, which, if you are not becoming a Grande Dame, is an excruciating, slow death of the soul.  We are not going to go there.  We are going together, in this little tome, to the queendom of How to be a Grande Dame, instead of becoming the insignificant little old lady we sometimes fear becoming in the dead of night. 

slit bananas and a green hour,

wall of limes against a box,

Branco, knitting on his head

Boarder in the grocer’s O, a

pigeon is a graphite dove.  A

hundred cheeses and the song,

the din the sirens love to know

A single Chinese instrument of

wooden, clog-like parts and string

bows what Bach implored the rain

to tell him, but the rain declined

pink twilight

pitfalls of the stripmalls

outside Smith’s Falls where the strata

in Kanata has a big fight

with the starlight

on no account will a social

climber mount or count the cost

of the lost real diner

where the pie’s real & the skies feel,

booths like your dad’s old vinyl

recliner that’s la-z-boy

crazy boy things are getting hazy boy

where the ice cream & the

nice dream that you

were alive & not under the

impression you were meshing

with reality that has no lesson

no virgin cold first pressin

cause it’s less than a whisper

less than a vesper, getting real

desperate not to feel so

separate from anything real

that you’d give your kingdom,

sunset on the boulevard

put it on the Visa card

or the master of plaster

that dries ever faster

than tears on your fears

of forgetting the masters

Leonardo, Frida Kahlo,

Michelangelo & Pinocchio,

Juliet & Romeo, lost in

the afterglow of the

stripmalls and the pitfalls

in the distance, on a radio

suet, chops, potatoes – he was

never well but trod the miles

dejected while his sister baked

pies, bread, raisin cakes;

William walked in sleet and rain, from

violets and the mossy stone where

Coleridge lay, his bowels in knots.

Dorothy’s were wretched too:

flour, ham, beef, lard – how

Wordsworth wrote The Rainbow or The

Singing Bird with bowels that bad

I’ll never understand – I want the

romance of it, though:

pockets crammed with

mutton as they trudged for Letters or composed

The Leech-Gatherer or held a

melancholy talk beneath the wall.

Words, sheep, stones. Stars:

they named the largest Jupiter

no matter where it hung, and looked on

glow-worms, daisies, celandine; on ordinary

distances; as heroes come to cut them free

with swords of English light.

I want to call Constance Beresford-Howe and tell her I love her, now I’m on page 135 of her 1973 novel, The Book of Eve. In the novel, an invisible middle-aged woman, in the process of growing up to become a bag lady, visits Montreal’s Atwater library and takes out Middlemarch, King Lear and Madame Bovary. I realize, as I read, that I found The Book of Eve in the same library, and that it too has become a classic, though in an underground vein: that The Book of Eve sits on the shelves Eve visited in Canada’s oldest library; a place with gaslight fixtures and a second floor made of opaque glass and many-paned windows in which the glass has begun to flow and wobble and behave like the slow liquid it is. Somebody asks on the flyleaf, why hasn’t everyone in Canada read Beresford-Howe: what is the matter with us. It’s her name, I could respond: you think the book is going to be about how to make crustless egg sandwiches for the annual protestant picnic. You think that on page 147 Constance will have written some advice to young marrieds on how to scrub their pearls with one of the children’s old toothbrushes. When in fact, after waiting for a bus in air that "smelled of damp biscuits,’ Eve visits this prospective new apartment:
 
 

...I stepped at once up to the eyebrows in darkness and a
smell of dog. Somewhere near by, a radio was blatting out a waltz.
...Gradually I made out the form of an elderly Scottie who seemed
to be wearing a white shirt and shorts. A minute later I could see
his outfit was made of a man’s long-underwear leg.
"He has eczema," explained Madame, when she finally
materialized...




The Book of Eve is about a recurring obsession of mine, which I suspect might be a leitmotif of womankind: the failure of the social contract to satisfy or even recognize the hunger of the soul. Eve, on a bus ride through her old suburban neighbourhood:

On your left, Ladies and Gentlemen, is N.D.G., a very neat
suburb of hell. Note those rows of bright, ugly, cheap shops - cleaner’s,
shoe-repair place, Greek restaurant, costume-jeweller, drugstore -
comments, every one, on how limited, after all, are the needs of the
human spirit.

Of course the writer means the needs of the human spirit are limited only by the countless ways we possess of smothering and defeating them. I have said The Book of Eve is an underground book, perhaps a forgotten book, given no one ever mentions it, and that might seem sad, but so much authentic life happens underground as a rule that this could be just part of the general loneliness of it all. Part of the graffiti in the secret Metro des Femmes.

I am going to the Atwater library tonight, and am wondering if Constance Beresford-Howe might still be alive. On the jacket, in 1973, she had one of those faces whose age you can’t decipher in a woman, which means, to me, that she is menopausal. She might be anywhere from her mid forties to her early sixties. She is, like her character, invisible, in that her face has no beauty; her vitality is diverted: it comes out in her writer’s voice. I talk to my daughter about her. I rave about this book.

"Maybe Constance," I say, "will be at the Atwater library tonight. Except I think she’s probably dead. I tried to find an obituary but I couldn’t find one."

"Look her up on Wikipedia." Esther says. "That’ll tell you if she’s still alive or not."

So I’m going to do that. But before I do it, while the possibility that Constance is still with us exists if only in my own head, I want to imagine meeting her, and telling her I love her. My window on Rue Cartier is open as I write this. A sound of church bells clangs: real, grand, clanging bells; not an insipid recording coming out of speakers; and the school across Rue Belanger has let its students out for their lunch break and under the bells is a racket of joyous shrieks and yelling and laughter. Are you here, Constance? Are you here in the city of Montreal, hidden, the way you inhabit the backstreets of literature? I’m a writer and I ought to know, and I’m going to know soon. But no matter what I find out, I’m still going to keep talking to you, because I have read The Book of Eve, and I love you.

In a political climate veering farther right, as federal Tories slash longstanding support to artists, writers, filmmakers and other cultural industry workers, the bicycle paths of Montreal give me consolation: an enlightened mind still lives behind the social contract, cognizant of the dignity of the soul. As I write this at Café La Maison des Cyclistes, where the Rue Brebeuf bike route meets Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine on its way downtown, the cyclists who ride past are not career athletes. They ride with guitars slung on their backs; children in chairs or wagons; baskets of bread or boxes of tomatoes or library books. I am not the only one who loves this. American feminist Susan B. Anthony in the 1890s called the bicycle "the freedom machine". In that same decade, Temperance fighter Frances Willard named her own bicycle Gladys, since it gave her a glad and hopeful view not just of her own freedom of transport, but of the political and social future.

The cyclists riding past this café are dressed not in athletic gear but in striped trousers and house dresses and work clothes and high heeled boots. They ride every day on their ordinary travels because the city includes them in its planning; last week Montreal papers announced over 100 km of new bike paths for St. Catherine Street and routes throughout the city. Montreal consistently ranks high on lists of the world’s most liveable cities precisely because its planners take individual freedom into serious consideration.

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling," Susan B. Anthony wrote. "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance." In her time, the bicycle got women out of restrictive Victorian clothing and into the first bloomers, or trousers, simply because you couldn’t cycle if you were done up like a trussed turkey. A hundred years later, my daughter, studying women’s studies at Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, tells me she feels safe riding on her bike in the city at any hour, because of the bicycle’s speed.

"Velo," is the bicycle’s French masculine name, "bicyclette" the feminine: the bicycle gives men and women freedom. It represents gentle autonomy of the individual. It allows speed, finesse of direction, and improvisation: things we value in an enlightened society. A bicycle gives its rider independence that is economical in more than one sense; nothing is more affordable than a second-hand bike, and no form of mechanical transport offers as much efficiency with as little waste.

But more than that, the bike is part of an enlightened culture’s ideological life: that same life the federal government is systematically suffocating. The freedom of bodily movement on a bike; fast, quiet, elegant; mirrors the movement of ideas in the cultural sector of our socioeconomic life in Canada. This is an enlightened country, or it has been, precisely because we have built into our social and economic contract support for the intelligence and freedom of the individual, whether freedom of mobility or freedom of the mind. A controlling, regressive government removes freedom of speech and ideas one spoke in the wheel at a time. It is always a struggle to place these slender supports in the first place. To a government imposing its own repressive ideology, every form of enlightenment appears as a dangerous thing.

      “You are the only one,” Juliette tells me over hot chocolate, “who cares about balconies and stairs.”  Our chocolate is good chocolate from a brown tin.  I bought it at a corner bakery.  It is made of flakes of real Swiss chocolate.  You can eat them right off the spoon if you want to, but we have melted them in a pot of milk.  I talked in our apartment about how much I love the balconies and stairs of Montreal, then I wrote about it, and I guess I was talking about it some more and Juliette felt compelled to point out that it was a bit of a monologue.  We could be picking up dog poop with our blue rubber gloves on, or putting Draino down the bathroom sink, and I would suddenly ask, “Why doesn’t Toronto have stairs and balconies?  Do other cities have this many?  What is the origin of the stairs and balconies of Montreal?  I need to find this out as soon as I can.”  

       Sometimes I think a thing is exquisite and I just can’t shut up.  It’s as if the beauty keeps pouring into me and I overflow with it and I wish, so much, that I could share it.  There is a loneliness about this, and now that Juliette has pointed out that I am the only one who cares, the loneliness causes me to suddenly cry. My husband thinks this is going too far.  I used to feel like this in Paris, when I had no husband and no child. The geraniums, splashed against the darkness of open windows, might as well have been spilled blood.  I saw a woman and a man in a Paris doorway.  She had on a slip and he looked like the same man as my husband.  I am talking twenty five years ago here.  The kind of man who tears bread. You think if you find him you will never feel lonely again.

      How can you not feel alone on a bicycle?  Handlebars in front of you, a basket in front of the handlebars, then the pedals, the chain, the spokes, your flailing knees and bony wrists, riding through the avenues full of wrought iron, which is cold, hard, and made of thin, black lines.  Balconies, stairs, bicycle; everywhere diagonal lines intersecting, beautiful, yes, but you are the only one who cares.  You question how deeply you care.  What good is beauty held alone in your hand?  The only point of it all would be to make a person fall in love, and you’ve already done that, and it was a long time ago. 

      “Mommy, I didn’t mean to make you cry. The balconies are nice. And so are the staircases.”

      “Especially,” my husband does not like to see tears, “the staircases that go round and round. Those ones are beautiful, you’re right.”

      The next day he finds me a set of stairs and balconies under brand new construction on the corner of Rue Belanger.

      “It looks exactly like the old ones,” I say.  “I was worried they were all old and that no one was making them any more.  I was wondering what was going to happen when they fall apart.  I was afraid it was a lost art.”     

       My husband talks to the man painting the wrought iron black. He is always leaving me on the street while he talks to men who are working on buildings.  He comes back and says, “twenty thousand dollars.”

      “So they’re still making them.” The new one is even more beautiful than some of the old ones.  The wrought iron has double sections, parallel figures, and the balcony is made of wood that strawberry blond I never used to be able to resist on a boy.  But who can afford twenty thousand dollars for stairs and a balcony?  Not the old men bowling wooden balls in Parc Turin. Not the Concordia students with their bikes locked on the banisters. Here I go again, worrying about the end of the world while the midst of the world is all razamatazz around me.

      “Do you want,” my husband says, “to go to that little café on the corner of St. Hubert, for one of their red-hot café au laits?”

      He knows I do.  The coffee is strong.  I can see its layers through the glass.  My husband has done the best he can to reassure me that balconies and stairs are beautiful, I am not the only one who thinks so, and someone is still making them.  He tries, so hard, to be a good husband.  

All the while she cycles past the avenues filled with balconies and stairs, a loneliness greets her. It is a loneliness she has known before, in Paris. With every box of geraniums splashing red against the dark of an open window, there is loneliness for her, down here on the street. In Paris, when she was young, she imagined it was the loneliness of being single, of not having had her children, of not being with someone. She passed a doorway and looked in, and there was a woman, in a slip, in an embrace with a man who, if she compare the visuals, could not have appeared more like her own current husband if she had sent out a casting call. The same strap shirt, the same easy, large hands and stonemason’s chest. When she saw that couple she had not known she would never forget them.

Connections are never what they seem. She can go off the street of balconies now, and in her apartment there is an easygoing, beautiful man, but she feels he does not love her. Even when she lays down her writer’s mind and sits at their table with him and plays a game of cards, it is as if there is another woman, somewhere, who could be the one he should have married. It doesn’t matter that she goes to the open air market and buys three onions and two tomatoes and good bread. It doesn’t mean a thing that she makes a pot of peasant soup, or wears a short, baby-blue slip made of stretchy lace. She has come to the fundamental problem, and the problem is this: beauty is not love, and love does not exist.

Montreal is a city of balconies, and leading up to the balconies are stairs, and lashed to the balconies and staircases are bicycles; so many bicycles, balconies and stairs you would think all anyone ever did in Montreal is pedal, ascend, or sit suspended over the street behind a wrought iron balustrade. The wrought iron is ornamental, as if someone went over the whole city with a black pen and decorated it with ornate lines and swirls. Why have a plain street when you can cover it in what looks like music notation: treble clefs and lines and staffs and sixteenth notes written all over the avenues? The bicycles have the same lines as the wrought iron: slender, metallic, delicate yet strong. There is something aerodynamic about them, especially the ones whose owners faithfully carry them up three flights of stairs to rest on the highest balconies.

There are spaces between the lines; spaces for starlings, clouds, flowers and vines. A Montreal balcony, staircase and bicycle will never obstruct a view. Their raison d’etre is to expand a view, to extend vision into the distance.

My father practiced and taught metal work, and taught it to my brothers, so we had blow-torches blasting in the basement, and lengths of black iron glowing red, and tongs for bending and curling the iron, and barrels of water for plunging the hissing wrought metal back to coolness. No one invited me to the molten iron party because I was a girl: for me, my father blow-torched lengths of copper pipe, which we cut and hammered in ovals and kiln-baked into enameled jewelry. The person who gave me pieces of wrought iron (sinuous Ss from which I drape pots of ivy) was the brother of mine who is not a writer. I have always loved the idea of architectural calligraphy; ornamental iron work that drips over a city. It represents a surplus of aesthetic currency instead of a dearth; a generosity of the social collective. A departure from the tyranny of the straight line.

I once watched a bird making a nest, and understood how the circle (and by extension, the half circle, the spiral, the curlicue, and all the variations visible in wrought iron and other decoration) comes not from whimsy but from tender toil and a lust for survival. The bird stands in the chaotic mess of leaf and fibre, and it turns, standing in the same spot, its body a compass and its beak the point of that compass. The circle arrives though the bird does not think about making a circle. The circle is an unconscious result of standing in one place and turning around, just trying to make a sympathetic space to bring up your young.

There is something tender about the delicateness with which Montreal staircases cling to the sides of the triplexes of St. Denis and Papineau and all the other streets of the city: if you look at them from even a short distance, the stairs and balconies appear very fragile and slender, which adds to the feeling that the whole story of the street is about ascension. The whole street points toward the sky; the city wants you to rise up off the pavement and float in the air. And there’s another thing: a likeness, in the calligraphy of wrought iron, to the alphabet itself, as if the balconies and staircases were trying to write a letter to the person who is cycling or walking on the street below.

Dear one, says the letter, can you count the stairs, the balconies, of Montreal? There is no counting them, because they are part illusion. Do you really think a city needs this many balconies, this number of stairs? If you look away from the staircase above the patisserie on Rue Belanger, it disappears. Do you know who put it there, and why?"

The letter is torn here. A person can’t read the last part, because on this kind of calligraphy you have to walk, to get the meaning. You have to walk on the lines and curl your fingers around the ribbons and tails of the lettering. You have to become part of the text; fragile, ascending. Like the bird who draws her circle, you help create the beauty.

My friend Bonny suggests writing down what I would do with a sister if I had one.  Bonny works with what she calls Quantum Holograms.  This is the filtering of insights, energy, information and data that travel through space, psyche and time, to reach clearsightedness, or knowing; other words for clairvoyance.  She says if you write down emotional/relationship realities or visions clearly, it is amazing how quickly they will crystallize into reality.  I have done that with writing goals, and it has worked.  So here goes with the sisters.

If I had a sister we would laugh our hearts out on a sunwarmed bench outside an Italian store where they sell packets of scarlet runner beans for planting, and Italian soap, and coffee.  We would not need to explain or even speak the last halves of most of our sentences.  We would give each other energy.  It would feel like being in love.

If I had a sister we would phone each other when we were lonely, and we would never have to be lonely again.

If I had a sister we would sing in harmony.  We would learn new songs and we would harmonize songs each other had written.

If I had a sister there would be no uncomfortable moments about money, or rules, or boundaries.  We would know where the other stood and we would never have to move out of a wholehearted respect for one another.

Did I mention how we would laugh?  We would laugh belly laughs, but mostly we would laugh from the heart, and we would understand the stars.

There have been several kinds of French lessons since we arrived in Quebec.  The menu at the Kamouraska Diner, and the menus at a variety of cafes and resto-bars, list the French terms for all sorts of useful phrases; green beans, tuna, anchovies and chopped hard boiled egg atop my favourite Salade Nicoise; the words for all the herbs that can inhabit a tisane.  At the playground this morning, the small boys playing with Juliette and her cousin lit up when I asked them to give me a French test.  "The monkey bars," said Benjamin, "are un module.  The teeter totter is un balancoir a deux."

Next to Benjamin's and Sylvie's street talk, my little textbook is plain and wooden.  Even before I met my real life coaches, I chastised my textbook for being so pedestrian.  Why can't you have even a small piece of poetry in you, I asked it.  Why do you always have to be going on about the dry cleaners being two intersections past the traffic light, on your left?  Who cares about that?  I don't need to know where the toilet is all the time.  I do not want to name four parts of France where I think it will be windy today.  I do not fancy some cous-cous, and I do not care that they are eating before we arrive.  Who are "they" anyway?  Theoretical people in a textbook world full of stop signs and right turns that lead to the post office in Calais.

Yet I look at the little textbook for the use of tiny words peppered in everyone's talk.; words such as "Donc", "y", and "en". Sometimes all three of these words appear in a sentence, and I have no noun to grasp, no place on "le module" from which to hang at all.  The textbook also has, on page 53, a circle cut into pieces of pie that signify halves of sentences one can combine in various forms, like a book of dolls whose legs and torsos a child can interchange, so the librarian is wearing spotted clown pants, and the elephant has just performed the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy at the Russian ballet.  You must/take the plane, can become you must/go up the Eiffel Tower.  All you have to do is swivel the circle.

I have turned down the corner of page 53.  But on page 54 the book returns to a wooden litany on the verb avoir.  I am hot.  You are cold. I need some money.  I am right.  You are wrong.  we are hungry.  "Save me from this," I shout, and am about to fling the textbook on the floor and head out to le bar laitier, when the pages flip open to a haunting mystery; a brief introduction to the subjunctive.

"The subjunctive," says my textbook, in an uncharacteristic whisper, "is a verbal form.  it is a different mood, not a different tense, and is used to express wishes, regrets or uncertainty.  The subjunctive is never used to express tangible reality."

"What?" I ask.

It is a brief aside on the part of my textbook, which reverts immediately afterwards to discussion of a campsite farther away from the road.

"What was that about a different mood?  Wishes?  Regrets? Uncertainty?"

"Never mind about that," says my textbook.  "Let's move on to the phrase, it is necessary that I should leave immediately..."

"What was that about never expressing tangible reality?"

But the next page is Chapter five, Looking for a Flat.

I will have to ask Sylvie, next time I see her, what that glimmer of intangibility was, to do with the subjunctive.  "It's what I am all about," I will tell her.  "Mood.  Wishes.  Regrets.  Uncertainty.  The expression of intangible, not tangible, reality.  The subjunctive is me and I am it.  Let's walk together among the cafe tables and talk about that."

My brother Michael once went to a masquerade dressed as a question mark.  Next time I go to one, I will dress as the subjunctive.  I wonder what she wears.  Tears.  Clouds.  Bits of poem torn out of Beaudelaire.  I don't know.  And that's the thing.  The subjunctive is uncertainty itself.  She has made friends with the veil and the cloud.  This is my first French lesson.

So many parts of what we call our infrastructure appear as concessions; we forego beauty in the name of function.  Bridges are not like this.  From the tiny concrete bridge over a smalltown stream; a bridge that might have 1967 stamped in it; to a swinging pedestrian bridge like the one in the abandoned settlement of LaManche on Newfoundland's southern shore; to a bridge that is gateway to a city like Montreal; the ruling principle is graceful strength.  On one side stand old trees and mountains.  On the other, a city, or the dream of a city.  Because as you approach the connection, the city rises behind it in receding ribbons of rose, then mauve, then blue.  The water underneath is the imagination sleeping between the two realities.  The water is the mother of the dream on each side, and the bridge is her daughter.

My heart lifts every time I travel over the smallest bridge.  Here is a moment, longer than a moment; a span.  Around me rise the beautiful lattices and rails the designer dreamed into being; a kind of protection from the rest of the world for this span of time that exists without seconds or minutes.  The span of time and iron exists as an unbroken bar of gold, of light.  For there is light over and under and around; the bridge is filled with sky, and underneath the bridge is the breath of the water, the light of the river.  Twinkling, flickering, and insubstantial.  I would love to stand on a bridge even if there was no destination on the other side.  Just for the airborne dream.

Yet there is another side.  And for us, the other side has spires, and markets, and churches.  It has a new language we will have to learn, and all the nuances of meaning that go with that language.  Language contains more than the definition of its words.  It contains the gesture of my husband as he talks to an old friend about tomorrow's construction holiday; the start of a two week break for everyone in Quebec who might build bridges or any kind of building.  The words mean build, and hammer, and truck, and scaffold.  But the sounds of the words include other meanings: five a.m. coffee with the crew before work starts, size twelve boots that climb a scaffold like cats' feet, the three loaves stuffed with olives in the lunchbox of Gaetan, and how he will also eat a full box of creme glace.

The other side of the bridge has botanical gardens.  Knots of bread filled with almond paste in an Italian grocery. The oldest library in Canada. Bicycles for sale on the porches of Mile End.  But not yet.  The bridge is a span of time and space before these things.  Like the map we studied before we saw the spires, the river, the biodome; the bridge is an abstract intersection of lines and angles of vision.  The map was made of paper, the bridge of steel.  Yet they are each still part of the realm of imagination.  Perhaps the city itself is as well; who can know the real city, since every city is the product of the collective imagination.  This will be harder to remember, once we pass over the bridge, but for now, we hang in air over water, and everything glimmers.