An important part of my own quest, through getting to know both Wolfe and yourself, is to ask what it might be that remains after one’s youthful illusions fall away. Forgive me for having looked into a few particulars about your recent past—I managed to glimpse the name on your library card at the Fisher, and, from there, I was able to find out about your military record in Afghanistan. I wonder how you manage at all, back from there, encountering a world that, for you, has utterly changed. I fear you find no loveliness here at all, though I hope there might be something in civilian life that can cheer your soul.
Tomorrow I plan to further explore your Plains of Abraham. My old friend Raymond, who lives part-time in Quebec City, walked the plains recently and calls them “desolate and beautiful all at once.” When I met my editor recently and told her I was getting to know Wolfe, she said, “Do you like him?”
I’m not quite sure how I feel or what has happened to me, as I have followed your story.
Tomorrow when I go and walk on the field where the culmination of Wolfe’s life and death transpired, the plains will be hemmed in by modern Quebec City. Last night, hungry after an afternoon of wandering around, I walked the lower town’s alleys and found them lined with little shops and galleries, and strung with fairy lights. It is late in the tourist season but couples walked the cobblestones craning their necks at this and that, their satchels and purses bouncing off their hips. I ate a hot little vegetarian pizza at ten o’clock on the terrasse of a gastropub at the bottom of the steep rise to upper town and heard a lot of English, though I’d expected to encounter mostly French. Tonight the moon, still nearly full, hangs like a festive lantern above the town.
I phoned home yesterday after checking into the hotel and my cat-sitter was watching a movie about time travel. He said the film made it seem as if we already possess, or almost possess, the means to travel back in time. It was that skillfully done. Later, sitting with my artichoke pizza that had a delicious charred crust and thinking about the Wolfe you and I have both come to know, the Wolfe who died in this same place two and a half centuries past, I thought, yes, we do possess the means. Through the letters of Wolfe, not via memory, as you seem to have experienced, but through a kind of listening through time—I’ve heard him. I know I have. Not in the way you’ve heard him, of course, after the desert, after your own war. But still, through reaching with all my inquiry into his words, I’ve met him, or I’ve met…perhaps through my having met you, Jimmy…his warm presence.
This morning I walked from Hôtel Le Priori toward the Plains of Abraham. I scaled the winding hill around the funicular, walked past the Chateau Frontenac with its extravagant architectural peaks and cornices, and came upon a monument thrust straight into the sky: on its side stretches the name WOLFE, facing upriver toward the plains and the colony. I thought: was it deliberately made in the ugliest possible British style, phallic and unadorned, without a swirl or any French curve at all? Then I looked at the other side, down which stretched the word MONTCALM.
I sidled up to eavesdrop on a couple standing with their private tour guide. “This monument,” said the guide, “is the only one in the world dedicated to two warring generals.”
Each general’s name occupied an opposing plane of the white shaft, sharing one pillar but never able to see each other, each facing resolutely away. Even an onlooker could in no way see both names from a single vantage point.
“There was a lot of debate about the language in which the plaque should be written,” said the guide. “No one could decide whether to engrave it in French or English. So they wrote the words in Latin.”
The marble plaque is yellowed, discoloured, as if someone has held to it a torch or stained it with urine.
Dear Mother, I see Wolfe writing in a letter he then crumpled and discarded, let me go.
Dear Mother Country of Britain, let me go to the beauty that is France.
Dear Old Mother, let me go to all that is France, all that is New.
I walked across grass looking for the Plains of Abraham Museum. I saw a toddler with a plastic shovel planting bulbs in a tulip bed, watched over by his mother, who wore a Parks Canada Staff uniform.
Over by the stone fortifications a man said into his cellphone, “Bar codes can be printed with a regular laser printer on any of your products.”
I heard jackhammers and beeping trucks backing up all around the plains, from the main road to the docks, and in the green centre floated conversations, bicycle bells, and odd, fluting notes of passerine birds.
Around the ruined stone citadel on the plains stretches a moat with signs: Chute: Danger of Falling. There is serious construction going on: men in hardhats with jackhammers burrow rubble out of casement holes. I had no idea where the museum was, its signs having petered out. The construction racket was horrendous and reminded me of what all the history books say about sound on these plains—that the battle was deafening. Was it? Is that something, Jimmy, that you know?
I encountered a couple who had ascertained there was no museum where I was headed: they sought it, too. We stopped near an interpretive sign about the Ross Rifle Factory, Cove Fields and Arsenal Laboratory. Then the man spotted in the distance the orange sign, Plains Museum!
The plains really are beautiful, as my friend Raymond has said. They are not flat, but designed with curved paths, and stretch over hills and rises with trees on them. There is not a feeling of stretched-out desolate flatness as at Culloden: this does not feel institutional, but feels like someone’s homeland. The land is feminine and hummocked and curvaceous, not angled, linear, masculine or English at all.
The lines of land against sky rise and fall, dip and breathe: it might be a battlefield but this land is still alive.
The land tells me the French were far from vanquished.
Can I say it’s almost as if Wolfe has never been here at all?
I continued on, then, into the museum. An employee at the desk provided me with a little map that showed, on the far side of the plains, a path—the very path leading up from L’Anse au Foulon that was taken at night by Wolfe and his army to surprise and defeat Montcalm; a path that has remained obscured by rock and overhang and forest for the 257 years since Wolfe climbed it at four o’clock in the morning in silence and stealth. The path has been revamped, said the clerk, so that for the first time in history you can walk on it and see it for yourself.
“When did it open?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago.”
Jimmy, I walked to your L’Anse au Foulon path. In fact, I have walked all over Quebec City and have been persuaded to look at the history of this place in a mysterious new way, a way that moves me to tears.
My heart broke in the museum over the French colonial soldier’s overcoat. It has its tails turned back at front and rear so that the corners meet in a little bow-shape at the soldier’s sides. The coats were made of cloth woven in Marseilles. It had a blue collar and cuffs, but was mainly of greyish-white wool, with eighteen wrought pewter buttons down the front. Once he put on the coat, the French colonial soldier also donned a hat trimmed with silver lace. This did nothing to prevent him from being mistreated or killed by his own superiors if he complained, or his wife complained, about the bread made with ground peas, or the rancid horsemeat that he had to eat, provisions being scarce for all the ordinary men, though the French officers and corrupt governor Vaudreuil and his henchman Intendant François Bigot dined on roast game and brandy, imported Gruyère, goose legs, olives and honey.
But it’s those jaunty upturned coattails that sadden me, secured at such a proud slant at the thigh, as if the coat has been imbued with power to stride all by itself, untenanted, in a New France made for earnest young men, ever hopeful for their futures, ever starry-eyed about a soldier’s life and worth.
It came to me then, that every monument, every object in the plains museum, every rose and bleeding heart nodding its head in the Joan of Arc garden bejewelling the Plains of Abraham, every citizen and every ship a
nd bird and fish in and on the river, attest to the continued life in Quebec of the people of Wolfe and Montcalm, standing on the same ground but, like the names on the plinth overlooking the river, never seeing each other.
But enough of this. It is time to read myself to sleep. Last week, I went to Atwater Library and borrowed a battered green copy of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m sure, as a great reader yourself, you know that Remarque’s birth name is Erich Paul Remark. His protagonist, named Paul, draws on the author’s own story of fighting on the German side in World War I. There are scenes in this book, of loveliness or anguish, that I know will be seared in my imagination for all time. It is another firsthand account of war that has impressed on me the truth that we are in all time at once, that history is now, that we are in an eternal struggle with power and aggression.
Among the unspeakable horrors Erich Paul Remark makes speakable because of his precision and his humanity, he writes this about his soldiers’ camp on the moors:
But most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.
I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands. It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her. And here I have not much companionship, and do not even desire it.
He then goes on to describe the miserable pathos of the Russian prison camp adjacent to the moor, where the enemy’s starvation distresses him so much that he breaks his own cigarettes in half so as to slip them through the fence.
We both know how Wolfe loved birches.
With my warmest regards,
Genevieve (Jenny) Waugh
22 The Ravelled Sleave
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11.
LATE AFTERNOON.
Quebec City, Quebec
A SOMATIC WEIGHT HANGS OVER Quebec City as Harold, Veronica and I tumble out of the Volvo of our driver, a Mrs. Lovage who kindly allowed us to squeeze among several buckets of rhubarb and some sheet metal with which she planned to fix her chimney in Port-neuf-sur-Mer. I cannot, at first, understand how so much golden loveliness hangs over Quebec’s streets, it being the second Monday in September. There are no drifts of blossom and no new bright leaves—in fact the mornings came in cold all last week in Montreal, as I nuzzled cold-snouted with Sophie, chill creeping into our bones. But Quebec City, a day and a half before the anniversary of my battle, is heavy with sumac and late roses. I’ll have to undo my red jacket and tie its sleeves round my waist in order to walk my old hills.
Harold has paperwork: there is a health office on Boulevard Saint-Cyrille Ouest where an official is updating his medical care card, and he wants to visit the office of the registrar of births to find his mother’s death certificate which, he says, will let him access five dollars a day that he is not now receiving as part of his government cheques—it has something to do with his mother’s years of work as a teacher in La Beauce.
“All the government offices are here,” he says. “We both need to go and get our files updated.” He insists the government has not been paying me my due. He says I’m entitled to more than the pittance owed an uninjured veteran: three hundred dollars a month extra, which I have not been receiving. “You should be on the program called social solidarity,” he says, “for persons whose capacity for employment is severely limited—trust me, I know the ins and outs of that.”
In his notepad he has written down enough errands with stars jotted beside them to keep him busy for months, with a special Quebec City section. There’s a wool shop on Rue Saint-Jean where a woman he met three years ago in Tulsa promised to give him a skein of discontinued pea-green silk. He has a fourth cousin whose friend inhabits a cellar crammed in one of the higgledy-piggledy alleys between the Grande Alleé and Abraham’s Heights: Harold has scrawled the address in his notebook as constituting a possible couch to sleep on. Finally, he has a bone to pick with a program officer named Yvette Leblanc at la campagne sur la santé mentale on Rue Jacques-Parizeau.
We agree to meet at eight thirty on the morning of my anniversary, September thirteenth, on the stools at Dépanneur Bonenfant where coffee’s fifty cents and the toast is complimentary. Harold and Veronica will sleep at the flat of his fourth cousin’s acquaintance and I will sleep on the plains.
I meander downhill after Harold leaves me, ending up in the lower town, the centre of which holds the chapel that stood when I arrived to lay siege: Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. It sits humble and handmade by the people, not by a pope or by powers that have made church a thing I mistrust. In 1759 I nearly destroyed it. But now I stand in its vestibule and weep.
A Spanish saint, Genevieve, stands in the chapel holding a basket of loaves no bigger than my baby fingernail. These breads, offered for a dollar to pilgrims, have an unexpected effect on my emotions. It’s as if, stumbling into the sanctuary almost by accident on a tide of weariness, I have collided with a holiness I denied all my days as a soldier. It is not a holiness in which I can believe, but in which someone else might.
In the nave hangs a time-buckled painting of a fishing barque, crude and small on the sea: Mary, Joseph and child-Jesus float over it in a glowing cameo I’d normally dismiss as unsophisticated, but the tenderness here in Old Quebec’s central square unravels me—where is Harold with his knitting needles? The Holy Family trembles.
I run out, and into a shop that sells knobs of bread and salami ends labelled loup-marin, which I remember as the locals’ name for preserved seal meat. I buy a slice for old times’ sake and move into the square to eat it under the bust of Louis XIV. I am hoping to revive myself, but Louis’s onyx curls cascade over the cobbles. His youthful grace taunts me with the reminder that, contrary to Mrs. Waugh’s observation, I have never been a young man.
In this centre of the jewel of Quebec I’m stabbed by a longing to see my death-mate, the French counterpart to my generalship, the beautiful, sad Marquis de Montcalm, but I do not know where his body has been laid down. Last time I saw him he was leading the charge that would end in his own death. Surely he must lie in a vault within walking distance.
It has been my custom to ask a taxi driver for this sort of information in any strange city, and Quebec certainly feels strange to me now, layered with scenes of war and peace.
I glimpse—peripheral, fleeting—my Highland warriors, collapsed on the ground like fruit fallen among the living, who yet dance lithe up the narrow streets.
A taxi halts to let two old women out into the square and I slide into the back seat to inquire after Montcalm’s whereabouts.
The driver has not a clue of whom I speak.
“Montcalm, the Marquis…”
“Qui?”
“He is famous—died in battle here above us on the plains two hundred and fifty-eight years ago this week, surely you know?”
“He is dead?”
“Surely there are plans to commemorate that very battle here—the day after tomorrow? It’s…”
The driver regards me with barely concealed irritation. He does not know what I am talking about. I depart his cab and vow to ask someone in the streets what has happened to Montcalm.
Montcalm was more beautiful than I am: he was like his name, calm mountain. I secretly compare my nervous, starved spirit—hungry wolf, lone wolf, scrawny and smart, quicker than the calm mountain but not held in nearly as much affection by my country or by his.
Part of me loves Montcalm.
I turn u
p a lane whose name I recognize—Rue du Sault-au-Matelot. The afternoon sun is too bright and I keep to shaded parts. I pass an exquisite jeweller whose windows display filigreed silver, moonstones and sapphire. I linger at the window of Jacques Vaillancourt, Ébéniste, to admire a chair carved from cherrywood fluid as a glass of Guignolet. I pass geraniums in window boxes identical to geraniums whose petals fell like drops of blood in my hair in Paris. I finger hand-tooled boots on a sill, and want a mille feuille and a pain au chocolat.
The hill turns laborious. I see from below that the plains have been planted since my battle with numerous copses of many kinds of concealing trees.
I feel a familiar exhilaration as I climb, passing the funicular and the grand and monstrous Chateau Frontenac and the very cacophony of construction that Mrs. Waugh referenced in her letter, to where the plains’ main gates hang open on the Grande Allée. Young men kick a soccer ball on the grass. The plains museum bears canary-coloured banners.
I see that the plains have been incorporated into the life of this place—I had not expected that they would become part of the poetry of daily living in Quebec: in the sunken garden named after Joan of Arc, two lovers slice tomatoes releasing musk in the air and the juice runs down the young man’s forearm, which he licks. A bowl of silence lies in this garden, around which noises of the city rumble and push. Someone—a man named Fred whose bust bears a gossamer-glittering web spun from his nose to his ear—has redesigned the plains, so they lie no longer sere or even flat, but undulate: warm hills planted with every manner of beech and willow able to grow in New France. For this is New France: nothing British thrives here—unlike Montreal which has succumbed to so much British influence, an influence I have been trying—god help me—all my born days to outrun.
I come to an apple tree under which two marmottes share small, rosy crabapples with gentle, animal goodwill, oblivious to me, in the spot where a young Redcoat fell—I see the youth crumpled there now, white-faced and bloodless, his hair the russet of mine, as was the hair of so many young Jacobites. It was for them I stopped covering mine with the white wig.
Lost in September Page 19