September 29, Passing Through

Angela writes:

As soon as we got on the train it felt like we should do this more often. The seats were comfortable and unusual, yet not new. I assumed VIA may make new out of other companies' old holdings. Since we've been living in the country, we are not quite as fascinated by the countryside sites swiftly running by the train window. We took out our various writing tools and set out to do some writing.

Coming to Montreal is always a bittersweet experience. It throws me back almost three decades ago when I lived here for four years during my graduate training. Bitter because I was poor and wary of the future in those days, but mostly because I only knew the city in winter. In order to save on rent, and to spend time with my parents, I would leave at the end of every school year for Calgary, and came back to Montreal in fall. Nobody figured why I would do such a thing, why I would leave this cultured city precisely when things were poised to blossom. Yet those who know the hypnotic appeal of the Rockies will understand.

That is how this city, to this day, only presents itself to me under its most difficult appearance: windy cold winters with little sun and slush up to one's knees. I yearned for Alberta's solid, white-particle winter breath. For the infinite semicircular horizons, the white sun, the chinook's transforming incursions by which winter went into spring every few weeks. And, of course, for the premier Lougheed's largesse, that which had given me a scholarship to go to study in Montreal.

Whatever I got in Montreal, I had to wrestle out of it. The French language was not given, I had to insist that people speak French to me, rather than English, and it was not obvious why that would be so. Moreover, some things remained equal wherever I went. In Alberta, just like in Quebec, and later in Ontario, I was and am still taken, today, for a traveller. Une voyageuse. You are visiting? En visite chez nous? ask the more polite among those who enter the conversation. It would be easy for me to say yes, after all it was and still is true in a sense. Just like the French from France will not accept that I come from Canada but want to know where exactly, that is, originally, do I come from. Le sang ne se fait pas eau. Blood does not turn into water. They can tell that Canada is not quite blood where I am concerned.

When the time came to defend my thesis, I travelled to Montreal from Calgary, where I had gone back to live. I was honored, and it was an overwhelmingly pleasant surprise to have my friend Catherine attend the defense. She, who was never as blissfully ignorant as I, said nothing further about how this process usually unfolds. At the corner of the table, a woman, by all appearances homeless, took a seat. She sat in through the whole procedure and nobody seemed aware of her being there at all. As if she did not exist. Somewhere in the back of my mind, in spite and beyond the anguish such events are bound to produce, I thought she might be a ghost only visible to my eyes, an angel in disguise.

Years later I had to come back to this same university, this time as an examiner. And then I found rooms full of the friends and relatives of the defendant, all poised to praise publicly the accomplishments of their friend and kin. The defense, which in my case had been some sort of a disruption in the day of those supposed to fill the seats of yet another committee, could be what it was supposed to be. A celebration. Particularly when the blood is at home and not just visiting from elsewhere.

Of course when I got back to Calgary my mother organized a big party for me, and all our Romanian friends came to the feast, like they always did when she was inviting. They certainly and rightfully came as much for her as for me. But this was in fact a private, confidential celebration. My parents were convinced I had accomplished something important, without knowing what. Thanks to that, I had to believe it myself. If I received so little recognition from the public sphere - and years would have to go by before I would get some of that -, it was, no doubt, because I had chosen a particularly difficult group to call mine.