Finding Again the World
Page 24
Forde pursed his lips, shaking his head slightly.
A hectic flush started up her neck.
“The only thing to do,” she said, “you’ll have to see a Personal Banking Officer.”
She opened the wicket and clacked across the marble to a doorless cubicle, in which sat a Personal Banking Officer.
“This gentleman,” said the supervisor, “has a complaint.”
“More of an observation, really.”
The Personal Banking Officer was short and had a ginger crew cut. A little, bulbous nose. He looked just like Josef Lada’s line drawings of the Good Soldier Švejk.
The three of them stood in front of his cubicle.
“You see? The top left corner. Says ‘No Fee’s.’”
The Officer nodded slowly and, after a long pause, said, “So what’s your problem?”
Forde launched into it again.
“. . . and therefore it’s simply incorrect.”
The Officer frowned.
“That poster,” said Forde, “must have been seen by dozens of people before it was actually printed.”
He shook his head to convey sorrowful amazement at this state of affairs.
The Officer seemed to inflate himself and said, “I have no idea what you’re telling me here. Why don’t you cut to the chase, fella?”
“I am attempting,” said Forde slowly, and with insulting pantomimed patience—deep breaths, slow hand movements—“to explain to you why your poster is illiterate.”
Again the Officer frowned.
“. . . a very bad impression,” Forde concluded.
And because he resented being addressed as “fella” by a little ginger prick, added, “You’re one of the country’s major banks. People—not I, of course—but some might think that if you can’t punctuate you might not be able to add and subtract either.”
“Listen, fella,” said the Officer, turning back into his cubicle, “I go with what I’m given.”
Forde rejoined the line. The Victory Bonds woman was still slumped against the counter. At the next wicket another woman was exchanging rolled coins for notes and paying some complex bills. An old man had forgotten his PIN number and lost his bank card and kept opening and closing his wallet in a distraught manner. The man with a business deposit had a cell phone that chirruped The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.
Forde did not feel like working—Sheila in her bathrobe, the radio, Pogo seeping, the dailyness of his ugly desk, the draining effort that had gone into Chamber Music. He decided on a stroll. He stopped at the corner of Waverly Street to read the densely printed poster in the window of the Nutri-Chem Pharmacy. The store had recently changed hands. Previously it had been an ordinary pharmacy stocking aspirin and Contac-C and toothpaste but now it had been made over into a Centre for Holistic Medicine. They sold elixirs, tinctures, infusions, extracts, and laxatives all derived from leaves and twigs and bulbs and bark.
The poster’s headline asked:
WHERE HAS ALL THE GOOD BACTERIA GONE?
Forde considered all the little bottles and boxes and the bundles of twigs and a saucer of cocoa seeds and some leaves gone brown and a big pod. He wondered who would be rash enough to swallow something called Slippery Elm on the advice of people unable to distinguish singular from plural. He thought of going in and trying to make this point to the girl behind the counter, but the ochre hair and the cluster of stainless-steel surgical clamps climbing the cartilage of her right ear dissuaded him.
He paged through some magazines in Magazines International.
He browsed in the bookstore.
He strolled on up Elgin towards Sparks Street. Outside the restaurants the chalkboards advertising daily specials offered the customary mangling of the words Omelette, Spaghetti, and Caesar. The chalkboards were also spattered with quotation marks, dishes being described as “famous,” “delicious,” “hot,” and “juicy,” daily examples of the conviction of the semi-literate that inverted commas act as intensifiers.
At the entrance to the Sparks Street Mall reared some fifteen feet high a sheet-metal grizzly bear, its mouth agape, just about to crunch the fish, presumably a salmon, held in its left paw. This travesty of sculpture always caused Forde both anger and cringing embarrassment.
Behind the sheet-metal grizzly bear hung an elaborately framed sign which read:
SPARKS STREET MALL
Great Shops—Services—Parking
ON CANADA’S MOST UNIQUE STREET
Forde thought, with great weariness of spirit, of trying to explain to urban planners, to representatives of community associations, to aldermen, to city councillors, to streetscape specialists, urban renewal specialists, Heritage specialists, specialists in acceptable and non-conforming signage, that the word “Unique” cannot be used with comparatives, that the word means that there is only one of something, that there cannot be more or less of singleness, that “Unique” comes via French from the Latin “unicus,” single, akin to “unus” meaning “one.”
Overcome by the need for a beer, Forde seated himself in the small outdoor café situated between the sheet-metal grizzly on one side and another monstrosity on the other, a naked and seemingly anorexic family group capering in welded copper and entitled Joy.
The waitress offered him the Sandwich of the Day. Forde shrugged and then nodded. The sandwiches, he noted, were kept in a cooler. He read its packaging. It was a Chicken Tikha sandwich and contained, among many other things, gum arabic, sundry citrates, and Stabilizers E 412, E 415, and E 410. It was soggy and tasted faintly of chutney.
To one side of the sheet-metal bear stood W.E. Noffke’s main Post Office, its entrances flanked by elegant pairs of heraldic lions supporting shields. The crisp and vigorous carving always pleased Forde. One of the lions had been defaced some years before by a man with a hammer protesting something . . . Forde forgot what. The Royal Family, perhaps. English Canada’s domination of Quebec? Canada’s colonial status?
As he passed by on his way to the Hill, he glanced at the Second Empire façade of the Langevin Building, the decorative string courses dividing the floors, that horizontal emphasis invigorated by the vertical movements of the windows, large and rectangular on the ground floor but, pulling the eye upwards, smaller and arched on the second and third floors, the arches recessed and set off by flanking columns and capitals, charming little confections of polished pink granite.
On the gates across the tunnel leading into the building’s black bowels, an enamel sign presumably directed at chauffeurs waiting to pick up politicians or bureaucrats:
PLEASE SHUT OFF MOTOR’S
* * *
Adrift on the Hill. His mind churning. Wandering past the West Block. Stood regarding the black-and-white enamel sign:
RESERVED PARKING
FOR
MINISTER’S VEHICLES
Past the Info-Tent, where someone had dropped on the path Discover the Hill: Outdoor Self-Guiding Booklet. Forde stood staring at the seated statue of Lester B. Pearson. He was portrayed as sitting casually in an office chair with his left leg crossed over his right. It was—Forde struggled with what he was thinking about—it was, it had no life, it was not a sculpture but an illustration.
He consulted the Self-Guiding Booklet.
Originator of the concept of UN Peacekeeping forces, our 14th prime minister did much to foster the image of Canada as a peaceful nation on the world stage. Thank you, Mr. Pearson!
Pearson’s left shoe shone yellow.
In the Booklet he read:
People rub Lester B. Pearson’s left shoe for good luck.
Like rubbing the left breast of the statue of Juliet in that squalid courtyard in Verona or kissing the exposed brown toe of St. Ignatius in the cathedral in Goa. Though rubbing the left wingtip of a statue of Lester B. Pearson seemed to Forde desperately Canadian.
According to the Booklet, the young lady on the base of the statue of Queen Victoria is “an allegorical figure of Canada”; the young lady on the statue of Alexander Mackenzie “an allegorical figure of Probity”; on the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald the young lady represents “Confederation.”
Allegorical figures! thought Forde. Probity! It was obvious, simply, that Louis-Philippe Hébert had a liking for titty wenches and good for Louis-Philippe thought Forde.
But the more modern statues. It was the same thing he’d been thinking about all morning. The motionless frog in the slowly heating water. When had it become impossible to cast statues of public figures? And why exactly? The dates seemed to suggest the Great War. Those four years seemed to mark . . .
Louis-Philippe’s statues had all been cast in the great bronze foundries of Paris. International sculpture radiated from Paris. Hébert himself had trained and worked there. Most sculptors at this period studied under the same masters at the École des Beaux Arts. And later, in the world of contracts and commissions, sculptors worked as artisans for each other and shared their workmen.
All this was much in Forde’s mind because his reading lately had been almost exclusively in the art history and biography of this period. This international language, as it were, of sculpture was silenced by World War I. But the tradition was under attack, too, by the dominance of photography, by surrealism, Dada, Deco, movements away from realism, Rodin, Jacob Epstein, Maillol, the beginnings of modernism, Ossip Zadkine, new ways of looking. And at this time, too, sculpture had split into two camps, monumental sculpture and studio or gallery sculpture, and it was studio sculpture that proved more vital.
Forde was contemplating a novel involving dubious authentications, a corrupting art-dealer based on Lord Duveen, and a scholar based on Berenson. All in a brooding villa like Berenson’s I Tatti, replete with wife and mistress, secretary, and a sexually ambivalent protégé, the whole seraglio indirectly prompted years earlier by his reading Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman.
It was the Berenson-figure he was relishing, patriarchal yet petted, cosseted, food fads, enemas, pompous with precepts and prejudice, a ridiculous little man but at the same time something of a genius being lured onto the perilous lee shore of Duveen’s dark intentions. The Berenson-man had an ebony cane with a silver pommel in the shape of a skull. He was rarely parted from it. Two half-turns of the pommel released a two-foot blade. The cane was called The Blogue. Forde could hardly wait to get his hands on him.
The cane had transported itself from a biography of Sir Arthur Evans, an imperious and theatrical little man, who all his life carried a walking stick called Prodger.
But The Blogue?
He turned away from it. It was a perfect detail, a gift. He did not want to pick at it. He luxuriated in this welling up, the swimming in of detail.
The Blogue. Unexplained. Inexplicable.
Perfect.
But these figures, these statues, his mind worrying at the matter, these neoclassical figures of Louis-Philippe Hébert—he glanced up at the dominating figure of Queen Victoria—they were at the end of the tradition, which had flowered in France in the seventeenth century. He thought almost with anguish of the loveliness of the radiant figures in the sculpture courts of the Louvre, bronze, marble, terre cuite, nymphs, warriors, satyrs, bacchantes. Louis-Philippe’s work was at home inside that tradition. The rest of the statues were not.
Degenerate—no, that wasn’t the word he was looking for—debased, that was more what he wanted. The more modern statues were debased—as coinage becomes debased by lowering its gold or silver content. As tribal sculpture becomes debased when it is separated from its people and purpose.
* * *
Forde stood behind the cannon’s cascabel, running his fingertip over the Broad Arrow cut into the metal. He patted the sun-warmed bronze and walked around the cannon, looking at the touchhole, trunnions, quoins, and tompion, revelling in this antique terminology. This was the kind of thing he had been taught.
This gun, a nine-pound muzzle-loading ship’s cannon, had been cast, the Booklet said, in Wales in 1807 and had been used in the Crimean War in the siege of Sevastopol. The British Army presented the cannon to their garrison in Canada as a trophy and commemoration of the Crimean battles.
Far below on an outcropping of bare rocks in the middle of the river, a white myriad of gulls ceaselessly screeched and fluttered. Across in Hull, federal office buildings now dominated the view, sterile hives looking as if they had been stuck together by an unlikeable child. Forde could remember the vast hoarding belonging to the E. B. Eddy Company pulp and paper mills, which from Hull, had faced the Parliament Buildings—a hoarding advertising White Swan Toilet Paper.
In 1698 a law was passed imposing harsh penalties on anyone found in possession of naval stores or other goods marked with the Broad Arrow. Government rope was marked by a coloured strand woven in, a strand called the Rogue’s Yarn. In the main dockyard roperies, a yellow strand denoted Chatham cordage, a blue strand, Portsmouth, and a red strand, Devonport. This was the kind of thing he had been taught.
The cannon with its Broad Arrow, the statues of Louis-Philippe Hébert, the Gothic Revival buildings behind him, all spoke the same cultural language, all belonged to the same world, a world for which his education had groomed him, a world now as relevant as potsherds and shell-middens.
His hand on the warm bronze, he stood gazing up the river towards the Chaudière Falls. He remembered standing in the gun embrasures on the parapets of Malakhov Hill and looking down into the harbour of Sevastopol, the sea a strange, almost turquoise green with dark-brown patches further offshore. He remembered the Two-Headed Romanov Eagle on the cannon barrels, the tumbledown revetments, the glacis overgrown with scrub and bushes. Behind the cannon, black painted garlands of shot. Sevastopol had withstood siege for eleven months, during which a hundred thousand Russian soldiers and residents died. Malakhov Hill fell to the French in 1855. It seemed to Forde not long ago.
He remembered, too, the battlefield at Balaclava. The valley was planted now with vines, the leaves limp and yellowing along their wires, fall mists wisping. He had walked along the Causeway Heights to Redoubt No. 4, overlooking the North and South Valleys. The guns Lord Cardigan was supposed to capture were some British-made cannons captured by the Russians from the Turkish redoubts further down the Causeway. They were being hurried away by Russian troops in the South Valley. Lord Lucan, misunderstanding Lord Raglan’s orders, instructed Lord Cardigan to ride, not against those skirmishers and stragglers, but against the dug-in positions of the Russians at the head of the North Valley.
After receiving the orders, Lord Cardigan rode out some yards ahead of the first line of cavalry and said, at conversational volume, The Brigade will advance.
Later, up on the Sapouné Heights where Lord Raglan had dithered, Forde had overlooked both Valleys. The advance down the North Valley looked to be about a mile, maybe more. What an eternity it must have seemed as the Brigade walked their horses, bits jingling, then trotted into the increasing barrage of nine-pound shot savaging the thinning lines, the crackle of musketry, the bruise-yellow banks of gunpowder smoke, acrid and blinding.
As the pace of the charge picked up, an excited officer rode up alongside Lord Cardigan and Cardigan barred the flat of his sword across the man’s chest and called,
Steady! Steady! The 17th Lancers.
Behind him, as the men and horses fell, the squadron commanders, preserving the mass and weight of the charge, shouted repeatedly against the roar of the guns,
Look to your dressing on the left!
Close in!
Close in!
Up on the Sapouné Heights, high above the battle, General Bosquet watching the slaughter, murmured
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.
Riderless horses bolted out of the smoke, the whites of their eyes wide in terror. Troopers forced forward with knees and rowels as horses baulked at bodies on the ground.
Close in!
Close in to the centre!
Lowering his sword in the signal to charge, Lord Cardigan unleashed into the Russian gun emplacements a thunder of red uniforms, the charge subsiding into individual actions as the horsemen worked their mounts around guns, carts, water butts, fascines fallen from the breastworks. The Russian gunners struck at the cavalry with ramrods or tried to hide or run but were quickly sabred.
Some three or four hundred yards distant, the Russian army was drawn up, but the ranks watched in silence and made no move to engage.
The Light Brigade had suffered some two hundred and twenty killed or wounded. Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan, and Lord Raglan were all variously incompetent, arrogant, petulantly vicious, or doddering, but no one, thought Forde, could deny the magnificent, imperturbable courage.
He glanced down at the Booklet.
From 1869-1994, the cannon was fired at noon to allow all postal employees to synchronize their watches, thereby regulating and ensuring the quality of the postal service.
Christ! thought Forde as he gave the bronze a farewell pat.
* * *
For some time Forde had been aware of a voice behind him. The speaker was French Canadian, his English heavily accented. Forde turned from the gun to look at the old man, who was talking to some obvious tourists.
“Me, I’ve been here coming on fourteen year. The Catman, they call me. Every day I’m here. Never missed a day. That’s a long time.”
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” called one of the little girls.
Forde moved closer and looked over the ornamental iron railings at the patch of bare earth spread with squares of filthy old carpet, the wooden hutches raised on bricks, the paper Maple Leaf flags and Stars and Stripes stapled to little sticks—tongue depressors, possibly, or popsicle sticks—and tied to branches and bushes. Two ginger cats were sleeping on the roof of one of the wooden boxes. Their faces were so fat their tongues stuck out. Pictures of cats hung from branches and wires strung overhead. The biggest pictures were of the cartoon cat, Garfield, and looked as if they’d been trimmed from the covers of comics.