Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  The bird nested on the roof and hung over the house like an ominous cloud. She swirled joyfully in the air through the uproar: Grandfather’s pitiful screams, the resultant howling and barking of Uncle’s dog, the shocked exclamations of the family as they came rushing to the kitchen, even the whine of the ambulance pulling up to the door. She followed to the hospital on the mountain, circling the ambulance all the way, cawing in rhythm with the rise and fall of the siren. She circled and pecked at all the windows until she found him lying in a public ward. And she sat herself down on the nearest window ledge, waiting.

  She caused a little stir on the ward, the nurses and other patients wondering at this marvel. Grandfather explained, “That bird has my eye.”

  “Oh yes,” said a nurse, smirking. “I see the resemblance.”

  Before the Quiet Revolution—when Quebec woke from the Great Darkness imposed by the Catholic Church, big business and the Duplessis government—the Royal Victoria Hospital was known as a good medical clinic. Afterwards, it was known as one of Montreal’s Great Anglophone Institutions, and climbed up the slopes of the mountain slowly. From the original red stone structure it spread into newer wings and outbuildings, aligning itself with another Great Anglophone Institution, McGill University, for which it became a teaching hospital. Now it served the larger downtown community of immigrants, Anglos and francophones without discrimination. But like so many other aspects of what was in spirit a late-colonial society, it failed to recognize the current place it held in the milieu.

  Up the hill to the corner of University and Pine avenues was the first and lowest of the buildings composing the complex—the oncology clinic; just above it was the original main building, now given over to general practice and administration; higher still, the women’s pavilion; and finally, hidden back and up behind a few stands of trees and sloping lawns, the Allen Memorial—the psychiatric unit.

  From bottom to top, almost as if on purpose, almost as if reflecting a moral hierarchy, the hospital mapped out a spiritual ladder. First and lowest: cancer, darkest and most frightening of diseases and swiftly becoming one of the most common. Then, only slightly more elevated, only slightly less horrific, came the bureaucracy no institution can survive without—literally the backbone without which it would all collapse into a shapeless, purposeless mass. Above this, the maternity unit, that place where all mysterious ventures either up or down start, where the shocking fact of Being begins in pain and fear, despite all the medical establishment’s desperate attempts to contain, control and neutralize the essential and primal nature of our births. Weighing down upon this, as if in warning, the Allen. The psychiatric unit. The mental hospital. Madness. Above birth, above the regulated normalcy of life, above the lurking of cancer; more frightening than all of these, hidden by its height and least understood, hardest to deal with of all human conditions because it denies all others validity.

  On the mountain only two things lay above the house of madness. First, the cemeteries, and then, above everything, the cross.

  Through the frosted glass the dark silhouette of the crow shuffled back and forth on the outer sill, protecting her perch from pigeons, and every now and then scraping away the frozen condensation with her beak—now to Grandfather’s mind so like a scythe—and pressing a single eye to the glass, reassuring herself that Grandfather still lay inside. During the night the scratching and shuffling could be heard throughout the ward, and occasionally a low, quick cawing, like laughter.

  Overnight began one of those snowstorms that visit Montreal several times each winter, and that people elsewhere find hard to credit. The clouds had rolled in without warning, against all predictions, but brought no lessening of the cold. The wind toppled trees, radio towers and headstones on Mount Royal and then swept down along Park Avenue, its natural conduit, and passed the Desouche house so quickly that it blew the hallway and bedroom doors closed. By morning it was clear the city was already paralyzed; the radio was announcing that all schools were closed, advising people to stay home, and pulling out weather data and statistics designed to amaze and awe their listeners: not since; surpassing even; in contrast to.

  By noon the wind was gone but the falling snow had not diminished. The Desouches happily opened the windows again to let in some cool air. It was impossible to see anything but an ever-changing, ever mobile, ever white expanse of snow drifting down to the street. Cars, mailboxes, even the other houses across the way were only vague outlines against the blank landscape. Vehicles large and small lay abandoned at odd angles in the street; trails where brave or desperate people had waded, waist-deep, were smoothing over and filling in; the iron finials of the Desouches’ fence, poking blackly out of the drift, seemed to slowly sink and disappear.

  Aline opened the kitchen window. She watched loose flakes of snow tumble inside and drift in the breeze, melting quickly on the sill. She closed the birdcage door, wondering where Grace had gone. She listened to an unearthly silence; the snow insulated any noise, and anyway there was no traffic or sound of neighbours, who were all locked in their houses. There was not much sound inside her own house either. Jean-Baptiste was back in his room as usual; Uncle was probably, and thankfully, in his with his dog; Mother was dazedly staring out the living-room window, perhaps thinking of Angus, perhaps waiting for another visit from her friends; Father was in the basement, but he wasn’t digging. Aline had never known real silence here; almost suddenly, she realized how empty the house felt: Marie, Grandfather and Grace were all gone.

  She was upset by what had happened to Grandfather not so much because she still cared for him—although it had proven to her surprise that she did—but because she was unused to any kind of violence happening in her world. Now here was the second act which had impinged on her personal life, after Angus’s sad end. And she was shocked that Grace could have been capable of it, even in desperation. Naturally, she assumed Grace had acted in self-defence. She was neither surprised nor disappointed that Grandfather had attacked the crow; it was hard for her now to be disappointed with a man who had proven so low after appearing so elevated. But at the same time it was hard for her not to worry over his injuries, which were after all considerable. They had left him in the hospital with his whole head wrapped up in bandages to hold the wound closed, and red gashes on his face and neck where claws and wing tips had done their less severe but still evident damage.

  Grandfather had quite rudely suggested that her vocal prayers were not only useless but annoying to himself, the patient. But she had prayed anyway, that some good might come of such a dark event; though she had done so only later, at home and in silence.

  Now, in silence, she took out a cookbook and absently leafed through its pages, looking for a recipe to match the few ingredients she had on hand.

  In one respect Grandfather had been lucky: he’d arrived at the hospital before the blizzard. By the evening the police were asking for the public’s help and commandeering snowmobiles for emergencies and sleds to be towed behind them. It was clear that even once the snow stopped, it would be days before the city regained its normal life. Although the streets and sidewalks would eventually be plowed, some of this snow would last until the spring thaw, turning to black ice, invisible and treacherous to drivers and pedestrians alike.

  And when the snow did stop, the clouds dissipating and the sun bouncing off everything in a dazzling and painful display, the cold set in with a vengeance. With the silence still largely unbroken by normal traffic, the Desouches were near enough to the slopes of the mountain to hear the trees snapping as if they’d been struck by lightning, with a crack not of thunder but of the ice in their trunks, and a horrible quick ripping sound just beneath the sharp report.

  It was at this time that Marie chose to return.

  Marie didn’t stay long enough to find the cause of the two things that surprised her: that Grandfather was missing, and that Aline was installed in her room. She didn’t stay long enough to be plied with questions about her absence. She
barely stayed long enough to observe that the other women’s meek expressions revealed their clear memories of which bed Marie had been found in. All those trivial things would have to wait for some other lifetime, one less consumed with the enormity and urgency of the work to be done. And at the moment, that work consisted of enlisting her brother’s aid.

  She knew he’d refuse; she’d told her friends so from the start. “He’ll never help you. He’s too much an Anglo for one thing, and too arrogant for another. He’s a poet, and thinks he’s above all worldly troubles. He’ll never consent to writing your articles for you.”

  Marie had always been troubled by the propagandistic strain in some of her friends. She was uncomfortable with manifestos, letters and proclamations of any sort, partly because she’d always had a tendency to turn away from her brother and his interests—so reading and writing impressed her as something only someone as goofy as he was could make use of—but also, truth to tell, because she had been raised bilingual, and that made reading difficult for her to learn. She had initially been unable to distinguish between the languages, because although her parents spoke to her in either one or the other, she and her brother had spoken them both interchangeably. Jean-Baptiste was already reading his mother’s English magazines before he was five, before he’d been sent to school. When Marie got to school, she discovered that much of the language she knew was not just unknown and unused, but actually discouraged. She was reprimanded for using French, and handed poor report cards and extra work. After only the first year she insisted to her parents that she wouldn’t return to school if she was going to be punished merely for speaking. She was sent to a French school. There, she did better, hated it less, but the unpleasant associations—words and letters, Jean-Baptiste and the English—remained, and she was never able to overcome them.

  Nevertheless the others convinced her that his help was needed, and she was sent to ask for it. And she couldn’t deny to herself that a brief respite from underground living would be a relief. Or so she hoped. The long walk through the snow and wind from the East End cold-water flat in which she was hiding with her friends (convinced they were known and hunted) actually cheered her. Even without proper winter clothes and boots—which she had left at home and now anticipated reclaiming as a benefit of the trip—there was a refreshing, cleansing spirit in the overwhelming quantity and purity of the snow. She took a lesson from the weather: that it was possible to remake the world, to purge it of its worn, decayed and corrupt face, and invest it with a uniform and absolute innocence, a zero-point from which to begin again, and avoid past errors. But this was only possible by an action that would catch the old, complacent order by surprise, leaving it inundated and defenceless. Something sudden, total and overpowering. Like a blizzard.

  How could it have been anything but awkward?

  “Where have you been?” asked Mother, not in anger but in sorrow.

  “With friends. And I’m going back. Where’s Jean-Baptiste?”

  “In his room, of course.” And as Marie mounted the stairs, “For God’s sake, Marie, don’t.”

  “Mother, it’s not what you think.”

  “It never is, is it?”

  And then, with her brother: “I’ve come to ask you to help us.”

  He snorted. “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Of course you do. And you know what kind of help we need, too. They want you to write the statements.”

  He put down his book. “You mean they want me to think I’m needed so they can use my press. Go away. The next time I see you will be in jail.”

  Marie wasn’t surprised by her brother’s negativity, but she was surprised that she hadn’t discerned her comrades’ motives herself. As soon as he’d said it, she knew it was true. They would never think themselves incapable of the task; they had been carrying along writing their own pieces for years, and only now had they thought of outside help. What angered her was that they lied to her; they hadn’t the confidence in her to reveal their true motives. Which only showed how badly they’d read her, how poorly they troubled to know her. She would never have been reluctant to use her brother; she had only resisted being in debt to him. She slammed his door behind her and marched to her own room—Aline’s room.

  She was turning out the closet in a fury, searching for her boots and winter coat. Aline, hearing the slamming doors and marching steps, knew immediately where Marie was. She left her boiling stewpot and hurried up the stairs.

  “Marie, forgive me. Now that you’re back, I’ll find another place.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, no. I can move my things, it’s your room.” And she began to gather up her clothes from the bed.

  Marie emerged from the closet with her things, flung them onto the bed and pulled off her shoes. “Forget it. I’m leaving.”

  Aline was silent as Marie pulled on her boots.

  Mother had followed Aline up the stairs and stood in the doorway watching. “Stay for dinner,” she said, “at least.”

  Woken by the noise, Uncle had come out of his room and sleepily made his way to the water closet, pausing long enough to say, “I guess it’s not dinner she wants. Unless her brother’s on the menu.”

  Marie looked up, aghast. “Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Baptiste,” she yelled. “That’s all you can think of, so you think it’s the same with me. I’m not the sick one. It’s not me. You have those thoughts, not me.”

  Her yelling had set off Uncle’s dog, who barked behind his door. Now Jean-Baptiste appeared. “I’m trying to read.”

  Marie pushed her way through her family and ran down the stairs. “Fuck you all,” she yelled.

  They stared over the banister as she ran out the front door, slamming it in her wake. Father entered from the kitchen, where he’d come up from the basement. He stood in the hall, looking from the door up to the landing where the rest of them gazed down. “Was that Marie? I missed her.”

  Outside, the snow began to fall again.

  At the library, Jean-Baptiste returned some American novels that had only depressed him, and exchanged them for novels from France. He had bad luck with the Americans, who despite the lavish accolades printed on their back covers, seemed somehow false, precious; so strained in their attempt to be literary that only other Americans could fail to see that the emperor had no clothes.

  He sat at his leisure in the library’s greenhouse, daylight filtering through the snow-covered glass roofs and the extravagant, enormous leaves of the tropical palms down onto the pages before him. As soon as he began to read—Flaubert, Camus, Voltaire—he was comforted, soothed and cheered by the ease and the grace that poured out of these French writers and lay still and tranquil on the page, as if warm in their beds, while the storm raged, impotent, outside.

  When it pleased him, he was so relaxed in the act of reading that he lost track of the words themselves. He didn’t see the printed pages but saw right into the action of the text, not as if looking at images or as if dreaming, but as if the pages were fields of space in which another kind of existence held sway; an existence that engulfed him as completely and convincingly as reality, and one subject only to the powers of the words themselves. Adjectives tumbled into one another, displacing sedentary nouns; modifiers soothed and slackened the sharp verbs; metaphors invisibly bridged the gap between pages; phrases and tropes ran circles around subjects.

  Briefly, a pang of guilt crossed Jean-Baptiste’s mind as he remembered he was reading English translations. Time and again he’d regretted not being master of his paternal tongue. Time and again he’d wondered if, as much as he identified with these interpreted French words, wouldn’t he be so much more consumed by them in the original? Ironic, then, that he was so close to and so comfortable with the English language that when reading its writers, he could spot in an instant, in only a phrase, in merely a few words of a sentence, all of the author’s conceits, all of the author’s frustrated hours poured into an attempt to look at ease and in command of the broad
, swaggering, American tongue, but tripping over his own idiom by bending his tools to insignificant subjects and overworked commonplaces.

  No wonder it was so hard for his own works to find their way into American, Canadian or even local journals. For not only had he no desire to write in the acceptable North American manner, but he realized he had no desire to read those works either. That no matter how much attention these works received, no matter how highly they were praised, by no matter what authorities, they still seemed to him sterile, empty, somehow not genuine. It was as if all those involved in the enterprise—the publishers, the writers, the reviewers and even the readers—were somehow fooling themselves. As if they were all engaged in a mutual hallucination of meaning.

  What a funny, awkward place to stand, between two languages, as if he had one foot on each rail of a train’s track. He admitted: he disliked novels written in English, but he couldn’t read those written in French.

  Mother tongue English, father tongue French. Both solitudes. English was feminine, welcoming, mothering—but also guttural, Germanic, a precise and at the same time crude language full of words and phrases stolen from others to shore up its own metaphorical poverty. French was the father: always disappointed, always driving, always stern, always ambiguous, always fighting to beat down the Oedipus in the son—but at the same time, French was so fluid, so romantic, so Latin and Mediterranean, so sunshine and Eros.

  In the greenhouse, lost in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, among the towering palms and lush undergrowth, with the rich, sweet smell of the earth and the moist, warm air enveloping him, he was sheltered from the Arctic winds battering the city, from the droning growl of the heavy plows, and from the cloying and musty smells of Aline’s heavy cooking.