Balaguer was re-elected, the neighbours complained about the racket, and the jututo became a regular event. Now, on Sunday nights, Maelo gathers in the fruit of the family tree: his four brothers, three sisters, a dozen cousins, childhood friends and a few random refugees—stray Guatemalans or some Cubans just passing through. The merrymakers devour conches and shrimp, goatfish and giant mussels, kilos of rice and habichuelas, guandules, and yucca—all of it washed down with Concha y Toro, Brugal Añejo and mamajuana. Then they dance the bachata until the wee hours and remodel the world from top to bottom, with the Caribbean getting the bulk of their attention.
According to Maelo, an immigrant can be adrift, confused, shy, exhausted, exploited, unwilling to adapt, drowning in depression, wallowing in nostalgia. But he must never stoop to being an orphan.
Colmado Real
NOAH GOES INTO THE POST OFFICE, carefree, jiggling in the palm of his hand the small change he will use to buy a stamp. In the other hand he holds the envelope of miracles, adorned with his mother’s name, the General Delivery address in Ninga and a return address, a reassuring fixed point in the universe.
He stops suddenly in the middle of the room, completely stunned.
The air is suffused with the aroma of the thousands of post offices scattered over the plains from Winnipeg to Calgary. Crushed paper, elastic bands, rubber stamps.
Noah falters. Right at that moment he is catapulted three thousand kilometres away, thirteen years earlier. He blinks and looks around. What if Montreal was just one more General Delivery? He thought he was stepping onto solid ground when he left his mother’s trailer, but now that ground is slipping out from under him. At this point he feels nothing but rolling waves, choppy seas and dizziness.
He takes a deep breath and tries to think straight. What is a smell, after all? A pinch of molecules adrift in the atmosphere. Some vague stimuli circulating between the olfactory epithelium and the frontal lobe of the cortex. The crackle of electricity, chemical reactions, enzymes, neurotransmitters—a commonplace chain of events that nevertheless upsets the delicate balance of the neurons, disturbs the mamillary bodies and dislodges old childhood memories from the benign inertia where they have been hiding.
Noah buys a stamp, sticks it on the envelope, drops the letter down the chute and leaves the office without looking back. Altogether, seventy-five seconds without taking a breath.
He returns to his apartment downhearted, a lost look in his eyes, hands held behind his back with invisible handcuffs. Seeing him go by, Maelo feels his pulse accelerating. He recognizes that look, having seen it a thousand times on his cousins’ faces—the look of homesickness. The symptoms are pretty much the same for a Dominican as they are for a native of Saskatchewan. Ultimately, humanity is not as unpredictable as it’s often made out to be, and Maelo knows exactly what to do. With the firm authority of an old midwife, he intercepts his roommate.
“Noah, you have to take the bull by the horns.”
“Take the bull by the horns?” Noah repeats, without actually coming out of his fog.
“The first days are the hardest, but you have to rouse yourself. First, we’re going to get you a job. I would take you on at the fish store, but I’ve just hired a girl. Instead, you’re going to go see César Sánchez.”
César Sánchez, a taciturn Dominican forever chewing on cheap cigars, is the supreme helmsman of Colmado Real. Permanently posted in the window of his grocery store is a sign inviting applications for a bicycle delivery job. The cardboard sign is baked from the heat waves of many summers and warped by countless January frosts. Noah infers from this that Colmado Real delivery boys don’t hang around long enough to draw their pension.
With an extinguished Montecristo screwed into the corner of his mouth, César Sánchez X-rays Noah with his eyes:
“Do you know the neighbourhood?” he manages to ask.
“I was born on Dante Street,” Noah declares without batting an eyelash.
“You’re going to do a test run for me. Prepare Mme Pichet’s order and deliver it to her. ¡Dale!”
He thrusts an old notebook into his hands. On the top page someone has scrawled a half-French, half-Spanish grocery list.
“Do you supply the bicycle?” Noah asks as he rolls up his sleeves.
“¡Claro!” the manager exclaims, laughing, pointing to a shiny, modified 1977 CCM parked outside the display window.
The primitive vehicle is equipped with the bare essentials: three wheels, two pedals, a basket. Noah feels himself going weak in the knees. He has never before mounted a bicycle. At the age when one usually learns the basics of bike-riding, he was sorting out old road maps while watching the schoolyards slip past.
Summoning his courage, he runs up and down the aisles collecting the items on the list. Then he checks the address written at the bottom of the list.
“Gaspé Avenue?”
He shrugs and goes out to load the bags into the delivery basket, discreetly grabbing a map of Montreal as he passes the cash register.
Meet Your New Macintosh
JOYCE IS VENTING HER ANGER on some garbage bags, which she kicks one after the other.
In the street, people are working. A tired-looking man distributes flyers, some city workers bring down a hundred-year-old maple with a chainsaw, a pizza deliveryman climbs a stairway holding a steaming box. And Joyce grumbles as she watches all of them bustling about.
Since she arrived in Montreal she has done nothing but sell fillets of sole, prepare salmon steaks and smile at the customers. Any more of this and she’ll start to think she’s six years old again, cooking for her uncles and doing her natural history lessons like a good little girl.
The current situation would certainly displease her fearsome ancestor, the pirate Herménégilde Doucette. “What an idea, working in a fish store,” he would growl with his spent voice, “when all you need to do is go down to the harbour and get aboard a ship.”
“But Grampa,” Joyce would plead with her arms spread wide, “this is 1989!”
“So what difference does that make?”
How could one explain? This world is no longer like the old one. Cash registers, automatic bank machines, credit card transactions, mobile telephones. It won’t be long before North America is just a series of interconnected computer networks. Those able to handle a computer will get by. The others will miss the boat.
Joyce gives a cardboard box a solid kick.
She suddenly notices some guy hurtling toward her on a delivery bike, apparently more interested in the architecture than in where he is going. He jumps the curb, brushes past the garbage bags, misses Joyce by a hair and careens back into the street. She watches this Bronze Age vehicle move away and vanish down an alley.
“What about him?” she mutters. “Is he happy to be delivering grocery orders?”
She has stopped in front of a bundle of old newspapers. The top one carries an advertisement for This Week’s Specials. The featured item in this otherwise austere quarter-page is an IBM 286 with a 50 MHz processor, 1 meg of RAM, a 30-meg hard disk, a 1.44 floppy drive, VGA display, laser printer—all for $2,495 (plus tax).
Closing her eyes, Joyce divides the price by the minimum wage. This outrageous apparatus represents over four hundred hours of lopping off cods’ heads!
She sighs and lets fly a vicious kick at the nearest garbage bag. The plastic splits open and a half-dozen floppy disks tumble out haphazardly on the sidewalk. Joyce examines one of them. Under a small, multicoloured apple is a tantalizing invitation: Meet Your New Macintosh.
Joyce turns toward the heap of refuse, transfigured.
CCM
NOAH INSTANTLY FELL IN LOVE with César Sánchez’s old bike.
Standing on the pedals, with a firm grip on the rim of the basket, head down, he feels as though he’s sailing over the neighbourhood. The hazards of the road disappear. No more traffic, no more one-way streets, no more driving regulations. All that remain are the landmarks, stretched by speed:
the Jean-Talon market, the St-Zotique church, an elderly man sitting on his bench, the statue of old Dante Alighieri, the alternating butcher shops and shoe-repair shops, a tree-lined sidewalk.
The deliveryman’s job, which he initially viewed as dreary, suddenly seems to him like an ideal way to map out the neighbourhood. Riding his bike, he constructs an aerial view of the territory—squares, alleyways, walls, graffiti, schoolyards, stairways, variety stores and snack bars—and when he talks with the customers, he gathers intelligence on accents, clothing, physical traits, kitchen smells and bits of music. Added together, the two catalogues make up a complex map of the area, at once physical and cultural.
He tries to transpose his observations onto a map of Montreal, but two dimensions are not enough to contain the wealth of information. Instead he would need a mobile, a game of Mikado, a matryoshka or even a series of nested scale models: a Little Italy containing a Little Latin America, which contains a Little Asia, which in turn contains a Little Haiti, without forgetting of course a Little San Pedro de Macorís.
For the first time in his life, Noah is starting to feel at home.
Fishing for the Big One
JOYCE IS SITTING on the fire escape nursing a beer. In her lap lies a ragged Spanish handbook (retrieved from the trash bins of a language school); she is memorizing the irregular verbs of the pretérito. At her feet, a patched-up radio is tuned to the ten p.m. news.
There is trouble in Baie-Comeau: a handful of demonstrators are trying to stop a Soviet freighter carrying PCBs from St-Basile-le-Grand from mooring in the harbour. The toxic oil was denied entry by the port authorities in Liverpool, and now an attempt is being made to discreetly hide it away on the North Shore. The Sûreté du Québec riot squad and the citizens are battling for control of the pier, while the Soviets look on and curse.
The news report comes and goes, crackles and disappears. Between two magnetic storms, Premier Robert Bourassa discusses environmental management and the upcoming provincial election. Joyce yawns and kicks the radio off. She drains her beer and scans the immediate vicinity. All is quiet. On the opposite side of the street a cloud of phosphorescent plankton is drizzling around a lamppost.
The night is young, and the alcohol has blurred the contours of the cosmos. She decides to go fishing.
Where do old IBMs go to die? Where is the secret burial ground of TRS-80s? The charnel house of Commodore 64s? The ossuary of Texas Instruments?
These are the questions that are on Joyce’s mind as she picks through the rubbish of Little Italy. So far, she has salvaged a host of useful items—a radio, a fan, a work stool, vinyl records—but as far as computers go, her only bite has been an ancient, charred Atari. And yet people must somehow get rid of their old, obsolescent computers.
Behind St-Hubert Plaza, she comes upon a colleague ransacking the bottom of a trash container. His head dives down, bobs up, dives again, while his flashlight sporadically illuminates the surrounding walls.
Joyce approaches, coughing a little to make her presence known. The man lifts his head out of the container. He looks like a mad scientist: fiftyish, round glasses, a small white beard, and a scar shaped like a Möbius strip under his left eye.
“Is the fishing good?” Joyce asks with a look of innocence.
“Not bad at all. I’ve located a shoal of Italian footwear.”
“Anything else?”
“What are you after?”
“Computers.”
“Fishing for the big one,” he says, with a whistle of approval. “This isn’t the right area to get a bite. The best place for computer equipment is in the business district. The Stock Exchange, IBM, Place Bonaventure … Get the picture?”
“Not really. I’m new to Montreal.”
“Give me a second.”
The man scribbles some directions on the back of a business card.
“Here. And watch out for the security guards.”
She examines the card. On the front she reads, Thomas Saint-Laurent Ph.D: Department of Anthropology. On the back is a tiny treasure map with streets, alleys, underground parking lots and Metro stations.
Joyce smiles. The time is a quarter to midnight and she does not feel the least bit sleepy anymore.
Texas Instruments
IT IS EXTREMELY CALM at the corner of de Maison -neuve and Guy.
A few pedestrians hurry toward the Guy-Concordia Metro station, chins buried in their scarves. Away from the street, camouflaged behind a metal lattice and a row of decorative sumacs, is the service entrance to a building. The blandness of the place has been carefully thought out. There is nothing to attract one’s attention except for two signs: ENTRÉE INTERDITE / ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN AND ATTENTION: CETTE ZONE EST SOUS SURVEILLANCE ÉLECTRONIQUE.
Joyce slips inside, takes a deep breath and analyzes the situation. At the very back of the parking lot, near the loading docks, are three dumpsters. She pulls on her work gloves and advances, looking in every direction. No security cameras in sight. She lifts the lid of the first container and sweeps the beam of her flashlight over its contents.
A computer keyboard is jutting out from the rubbish.
Joyce stifles a cry of victory. She tries to pull out the keyboard but the power cable is snagged somewhere under the garbage bags. She clamps the flashlight between her teeth, jumps inside the container and dives up to her belt in the leftovers from a department meeting: rotting pastry and sodden paper cups. An odour of sour milk leaks out of the bags with a whistling sound.
Joyce swallows her saliva and plunges her hand below the trash.
At the other end of the cable she can feel the cold edges of a computer. The stench of sour milk grows stronger. She holds her breath and sets about clearing a path through the bags. After a long while, the machine emerges from the plastic like a slippery fetus.
Joyce takes a firm hold and hauls it up to the surface. She is exhausted, and lets herself drop back into the garbage so that she can catch her breath. She feels nauseous from the excitement and the methane, but it does not matter—she has finally caught one.
She lifts the computer out of the dumpster and, down on her knees on the asphalt, inspects it more closely. It’s an old, battered Texas Instruments 8086 with neither a cover nor a hard disk. Not the big jackpot, but a good beginning.
“Stay where you are!”
She turns around. A paunchy security guard is coming toward her, stroking the handle of his nightstick. Without giving it a second thought, Joyce leaps to her feet. The guard attempts to block her way, but she easily gets around him and dashes toward the exit. Bad luck: another gorilla is in position there—tall, thin, truncheon-wielding, twenty years old, aggressive-looking.
Joyce stops cold. Behind her, the paunchy guard is closing in at a fast trot.
Laurel and Hardy, armed and dangerous.
Joyce’s brain is operating at full tilt, every circuit abuzz with electricity. In a few seconds she will be pinned face down on the asphalt, a knee pressed into her back, and duly handcuffed.
She swings around 90 degrees and bolts toward the wire lattice. A Frost fence. Good—she knows how this thing works. She grabs the steel mesh and scrambles up as fast as she can. Too late. A pair of hands are clutching the cuffs of her jeans and pulling her down toward solid ground. She tightens her grip and kicks out blindly. The young, aggressive guard howls with pain and lets go.
Suddenly released from his grasp, Joyce describes an elegant arc over the grid. Sailing head down through the air, she wonders how this is all going to end.
She lands on the grating of the building’s ventilation system, the tepid breath of fifty floors of office space: dusty carpeting, overheated plastic, ozone, carbon monoxide, minute particles of paper and keratin. She shakily gets to her feet and yanks off her glove. She has gashed three fingers going over the top of the fence. In the middle of her blood-soaked palm, her lifeline and her fate line trace out a scarlet π.
She inhales deeply and darts toward the street. The
metallic echo of her boots ricochets through the depths of the ventilation system five floors below. She hops over a parapet and into the decorative sumac in the flowerbed, comes out on the sidewalk and collides with a vagrant who is pushing a shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.
The vagrant straightens his Toronto Maple Leafs tuque, gives Joyce the once-over and, without saying a word, continues on his way, as solemn as a judge.
Joyce makes off in the opposite direction.
An hour later, sitting on the tile floor of her bathroom, she swabs her wounds with iodine and draws lessons from tonight: she’s got to be more careful about surveillance cameras, blind spots and emergency exits.
Another dab of iodine, and no time for tears; her next fishing expedition will take place tomorrow night.
She sticks on one more adhesive bandage and glances at her watch. Two-fifteen a.m. Time to get some sleep. Her workday at the fish store begins in only a few hours.
Thousands of Kilometres
THE CLOCK ON THE MICROWAVE says four a.m. Noah, who has never experienced insomnia before, is discovering this new phenomenon with the same eager excitement he has felt ever since arriving in Montreal.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he writes a letter to Sarah.
His first letter came back yesterday afternoon with an Unclaimed notice stamped across the envelope. Strike one. He unceremoniously chucked it into the garbage and immediately sat down at the table to write a new chapter in his new life. He explains that his room is far too large, that he eats fish every day and sleeps among starfish every night, that he is learning Spanish from Maelo and exploring the neighbourhood on an old modified CCM.
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