He walked streets with names like Henri-Julien, Cartier, Dollard. The city was alive with its ghosts, took special care to remember its dead, and surrounded itself above and below, on all sides, with the past, with corpses, with death itself. The invisible visitants of the Catholic spirit world haunted his every step, dogged him in all his travels: coming along St-Joseph he discovered St-Denis was blocked with construction, so he continued to St-Laurent.
From Ste-Agnès to St-Zotique, from Ste-Anne to Ste-Thérèse, the dead came back to life every moment of every day in Montreal, and poked and jabbed, laughed and derided the inhabitants ceaselessly, in every quarter of the city. There was no escape from their influence, from their judgment. Like the demons of a preliterate culture they swirled in the winds gusting down from the mountain, flipped hats from heads, inverted umbrellas, tossed leaves and garbage at faces. These imps of the past, ghosts of Montreal and gremlins of Catholicism, were a gang of adolescent troublemakers getting their revenge on the living for the direction they were taking, for paving their cemeteries, for toppling their statues and church spires, for the fact of not having died yet.
It all looked so shabby, like the home he was returning to.
Coming along Pine Avenue he noticed the darker smudge of smoke against the overcast sky and was conscious of foreboding. He turned down Park Avenue and saw one remaining red truck pumping water where his house used to be, and traffic edging its way around the obstruction. He saw neighbours and strangers hanging about. He stopped where he was. He saw Grandfather embracing Marie; he saw Uncle in his dressing gown, smoking and staring. He saw Father, and Mother—clearly awake, still in her nightdress—hugging each other, crying, laughing, so that he couldn’t tell whether they were devastated or overjoyed.
From this distance, when he looked at his sister, he saw Father’s features, just as he could see Uncle’s face in Father; he remembered looking in the mirror and seeing his mother’s eyes looking back at him, and how she’d always said he had Angus’s eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to move any closer. He’d been too long away to feel at ease with them now, under these circumstances. And he couldn’t bear to confirm that they’d all lost everything, that all his books, his poetry and scribblings and boxes of magazines, were gone. In a puff of smoke.
All he had now were the notebooks he carried with him, and the uncashed cheque. He turned about in the street, looking up the hill of Park Avenue, looking back the way he’d come, looking westward across the street. He looked at the papers in his hand, covered with his own messy scribbling. Patriotes. Rebels. Abortionists. Poets. It suddenly seemed too real, not historical at all, not even as fantastic as he’d feared. But how could he write any of this? What had happened when he dared approach the truth in his play? What good had come of it, for anyone?
It suddenly seemed so unimportant.
Jean-Baptiste had had enough of writing what he knew. It only caused trouble. He vowed he would never again write down a single thing in a realistic mode, because whether it had ever actually happened to him or not, whether he actually believed in it or not, everyone would think it was the literal truth. As if simply because they had absolutely no power of imagination, no one else had any either, and therefore whatever he put down on paper was talking out of school. Kissing and telling.
Enough. From now on he’d write only about other times and other places, preferably places that never really existed, and mix up all the times together whenever it pleased him. And he’d describe only characters who were complete idiots, because everyone who read his work would think they were wise, and therefore that he’d made them up. And events that were clearly impossible, fantastic things out of fairy tales, because people would think they were somehow metaphors for a secret truth.
There was only one direction open now. He’d tear up his notes, his scattered drafts, and begin again. He moved down the street to join his family. A string of words occurred to him:
Montreal, an island …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For various kinds of support over the years since beginning this book, I would like to thank the following people:
Bruce Basilières, Roy Berger, Tess Fragoulis, Barbara Gilbert, Denis et Raymonde Gilbert, Heather Marcovitch, Laurie Reid and John McFetridge, Lorne Stephens, Stephen Welch and Beany Peterson.
Many thanks to everyone at Knopf Canada, especially Noelle Zitzer, an excellent and tactful editor and the perfect foil for my extravagances. And thanks to Lena Sukhova, for reading the mail.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Arts Council of Toronto. If we don’t support our culture, we will lose it.
MICHEL BASILIÉRES grew up in Montreal with his French father and Anglophone mother. He now lives in Toronto, where he is writing his second novel.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2004
Copyright © 2003 Michel Basilières
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Basilières, Michel
Black bird: a novel / by Michel Basilières.
I. Title.
PS8553.A7858B58 2004 C813′.6 C2003–905690–2
http://www.randomhouse.ca/
eISBN: 978-0-307-36847-8
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