As the summer of 1967 turned into fall and then into winter, Charlotte and her mother made clear that it was time I proposed. But I was in no hurry. I enjoyed Charlotte’s company, but recognized there was no spark, no passion, no love in our relationship. If we went ahead and got married, it would be a marriage of convenience. She was bored with teaching nursery school children and wanted to experience the life of a diplomat’s wife abroad. I was more attracted to Charlotte’s family and their lifestyle than to their daughter and hers. On the other hand, she understood the art of making up seating plans, arranging flowers, preparing menus, giving orders to servants, receiving guests, and knew which wine went well with fish and which one with game or steak. She could provide the social graces I lacked, build up my self-esteem, and help me deal with the nagging sense that I had been hired only because I was a Métis.
So it wasn’t until the early spring of 1968 that I took out a bank loan and bought a diamond engagement ring — a long-term career investment so to speak — and asked her to marry me. There were hugs and kisses all around at the family Sunday dinner when we announced the good news and she showed off her ring. The judge went down to the cellar and brought up the bottles of Dom Pérignon he had put away years earlier for the occasion. After the obligatory toasts, everyone wanted to know if we had set the date. Although she hadn’t discussed the subject with me, Charlotte said the wedding would take place before the fall so we could travel together to Colombia. And since the fall was only a few short months away, there was a lot to do: speaking to the archbishop to ask him to conduct the ceremony, reserving a time at the cathedral, organizing a high mass and full choir, importing a soloist to sing “Ava Maria,” reserving the ballroom of the Chateau Laurier Hotel for the reception and dinner, preparing her trousseau, going to Montreal to be fitted for a bridal dress, and preparing the guest list, among other things.
“And then we must prepare ourselves for life in Colombia,” she said. “I’ve already read up on what to expect and spoken to a few people I know who used to work at the Canadian embassy in Bogota. The Bogotános dress very conservatively and I’ll need four or five classic tailleurs for dinners and receptions. I’ll also need the right clothes to wear casually during the day and a different set to use when we visit the coast and another for our travels to Cali and Medellin in the valleys. I’m so excited. And Luc is excited too, aren’t you Luc?”
I did my best to smile and said that I was indeed excited.
“We will need china, silverware, tablecloths, candelabras — everything to entertain in style. The government will ship all this to Bogota, won’t they Luc?”
“Yes, of course anything at all, as long as they’re needed.”
“Then you might as well take the mahogany furniture I inherited from my grandmother which has been gathering dust for years in storage,” Madam Lefidèle said, addressing her daughter. “I was going to give it to you when you got married anyway.”
“Oh thank you mama! I’m so excited. And you’re excited too, aren’t you Luc?”
I said I was still excited and Charlotte and her mother carried on in this vein for the next hour, paying no attention to the others who shook hands with me, mouthed their congratulations, and slipped away. I tried to look happy but was beginning to feel that marrying Charlotte would be a mistake. Seeing my look of despair, Charlotte’s father smiled indulgently and told me to have another glass of champagne and cheer up. “It’s always this way. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to leave everything in the hands of the women and accept everything they decide.”
Eventually, Charlotte ran out of things to say and came over to join me on the sofa. Holding my hand, she told her parents we were now going to Penetang to see my family. “We need to announce our engagement and obtain their blessing, don’t we, dear?”
“Yes, of course, dear,” I said, doing my best to hide the sudden pain in my stomach that hit me when Charlotte addressed me as “dear.”
“Let’s go this weekend and surprise them,” Charlotte said. “That’ll be so much fun.”
“Yes, why don’t you,” said the judge. “And take the Buick; we’ll make do with the Studebaker for a few days. You should travel in style to bring the good news.”
Penetang is a long way from Ottawa and I hadn’t been home all that often since I joined the Department, but my family couldn’t have been more welcoming — at least initially. Everyone crowded around to admire the Buick and Charlotte’s engagement ring. Charlotte, however, didn’t reply when grandpapa asked her how much a judge earned and how much the ring had cost. She pretended not to understand when she asked where the washroom was and was told it was in the backyard. When she returned from outside and someone asked her if she had trouble finding it, she did not laugh along with the others. She seemed unimpressed by the framed pictures of Pope Pius IX and Louis Riel, which hung on the parlour wall beside a mounted moose head and an array of 303 rifles and shotguns. She sat uncomprehending through dinner as grandpapa, wearing a reversed baseball cap and old clothes at the table, put on a show, spitting food and waving his arms as he babbled on in a mixture of French, English, Michif, and Ojibwa about his youthful fur-trading exploits in the bush of northern Ontario.
Charlotte looked alarmed when mama summoned Stella, our old Labrador collie mongrel, from her usual place on a blanket near the stove in the kitchen and fed her food scraps from the table. A look of disgust crept across Charlotte’s face when mama placed her plate on the floor to be licked. Grandpapa compounded the damage by winking at Charlotte and saying the Cadottes always let their dogs clean their dinner plates with their tongues. “That way there’s no need to wash them.” Charlotte didn’t get the joke.
It was right about then that I understood grandpapa and mama didn’t like Charlotte and would do anything to sabotage our marriage plans. Grandpapa had never behaved in such a boorish way before when guests were invited for dinner. And Stella, as loved as she was in the Cadotte household, had never been fed from the table and certainly had never licked a dinner plate. Later, over coffee and dessert in the parlour, I went on at great length about the warm welcome Charlotte’s family had accorded me over the past year, including me in family meals, excursions, and visits to their summer cottage. Grandpapa wasn’t impressed, and rendered the coup de grace to the evening when he smiled wickedly at Charlotte and told her she wasn’t the first girl I’d brought home. He went on to her about Corinne and what a wonderful person she was — even though I did my best to change the subject. After the others had gone to bed, I started to apologize to Charlotte for the behaviour of my family but she cut me off in mid-sentence and left the room.
The next morning I wasn’t surprised when she said she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to return home immediately. I was relieved when she handed back her engagement ring and said the marriage off when we reached Ottawa — although I felt bad about wasting her time and that of her family in a courtship that never had a chance of success.
Just before my departure for Bogota, in November 1968, Longshaft called me in for a final briefing, this time on Ambassador Joseph O’Connor, Canada’s head of post in Colombia. “There are three types of ambassadors in the Department,” he said. “Pragmatists who are in the majority; idealists like Burump, who are almost as numerous; and a handful of do-nothings like O’Connor. It’s a shame because O’Connor was once a competent officer who joined the Department after serving honorably in the navy during the war. He rose steadily through the ranks, making no mistakes but doing nothing extraordinary. Most people believed he would end his career as a deputy ambassador at a small embassy but nothing more. And then to the surprise of everybody, the government plucked him out of the ranks and sent him abroad as ambassador to Colombia. It turned out that O’Connor and the prime minister had been classmates at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal before the war, and the prime minister wanted to do him a favour. He’s only been in Bogota a few months and he’s done nothing but complain about the weath
er and play bridge with members of the social elite. He won’t like it if he finds out you’re reporting directly to me.”
“But aren’t you going to let him know what my real mission is?”
“Eventually. But for the time being let’s keep the special relationship between you and me. You know what’s expected of you. Send in your reports … he’ll never find out.”
5: Why Me?
I first heard the sound of an enraged mob chasing a gamine along the sidewalk in downtown Bogota late on the afternoon of November 18, 1969. I had just arrived to take up my appointment and was in the office the office of Ambassador O’Connor, introducing myself.
“The good people of Bogota are just chasing a pickpocket,” O’Connor said, seeing my startled expression. “Happens all the time — it’s our daily entertainment,” he got up and went to the window to look out. “Nobody can walk more than a hundred yards without some snotty-nosed street kid — they call them gamines down here — trying to rip off your watch or steal your wallet. The crowd will administer some rough justice when they catch it — maybe even kill it. I don’t blame them.”
“They’d kill a child?” I asked.
“It’s easy to see you’ve just arrived,” O’Connor said, turning and looking at me more carefully. “Come over here and take a look. You’ve got a lot to learn. That little delinquent isn’t a cuddly little boy or girl, much less a child like we’re used to back home. It’s a gamine, an outcast that survives by eating garbage when it can, selling itself on street corners, and picking pockets when all else fails. One of them even ran off with my briefcase when I was entering the embassy when I got here in the summer. They live in packs like stray dogs. They think like dogs — are no better than dogs. Decent people have to protect themselves by treating them like dogs.”
“See,” he said, after I joined him at the window, pointing up the street to where a dozen men were kicking a motionless child.
“Why don’t they leave it to the police?”
“The police have better things to do with their time. And so do I,” he said, pointing me back to my seat. “Now, what led you to request a posting to this godforsaken place? When your staffing officer put forward your name for the job, he said you were one of the top officers in your class. Said you could’ve gone to Washington, London, or Paris — anywhere you wanted. Said I was lucky someone like you wanted to come here. I should’ve been flattered but I was left wondering what’s wrong with you, whether you had something to hide.”
It was the first time I had heard I could have had one of the big posts, but I had no intention of admitting that to O’Connor.
“I didn’t want to be one of a dozen or more junior officers at the bottom of the food chain, working for a first secretary, who was working for a deputy ambassador, who was working for an ambassador. I studied Spanish at university and wanted to be responsible for managing a program of my own in a Latin America country in turmoil like Colombia. The Department told me there was an opening here for a second secretary to run the aid program, manage the consular section, and carry out general political and economic reporting. I put my name forward and here I am.”
“And so you are. But I still don’t understand. There’s only a few dollars in the aid program, and other than a handful of businessmen and a few pot-smoking CUSO volunteers — that’s the Canadian University Service Overseas, in case you didn’t know — handing out used clothes to the poor, there’s no expatriate community to speak of. Crime is so bad, tourists stay away. Trade is minimal. Nobody back home cares what happens here. I don’t know why they keep this place open.”
“I know what CUSO stands for,” I said, and shifted uneasily in my seat.
“What’s the matter? Need a jolt of caffeine? If so, the coffee’s over there,” he said. After I lapsed into silence he gestured at a tray of coffee on a nearby credenza, “Don’t expect me to serve you.”
Glad to have an opportunity to collect my thoughts, I took my time pouring my coffee. The meeting wasn’t going well.
“Now tell me something about yourself,” O’Connor said after I returned to my seat. “Where you’re from, the university you went to, and why you really wanted to come here.”
“I’m from a town on Georgian Bay called Penetang. I went on to the University of Ottawa where I graduated with a four-year arts degree in history and romance languages, learning to speak Spanish in the process. I wrote the Foreign Service officer examinations and was lucky because I got a job offer. After that, with my academic background and interest in Latin American affairs, I asked for a posting to Bogota.”
“I’m glad you already speak Spanish. I don’t, and am too old to learn. I also know something about your hometown, although I’ve never been there. I served on a minesweeper that was built in the shipyard there. Come and see me whenever you want to talk,” he said, dismissing me.
I was on my way to the door when he called me back. “Take a seat,” he said, and I had scarcely sat down when the words burst from his mouth like water from a broken dam. “Sorry I was rude to you. I never asked for this post. One day last spring without warning I got a phone call from the prime minister. I’d met him at boarding school before the war but didn’t know him well. He told me he thought of me when he was looking at a list of ambassadorial openings. Said he saw that Bogota was available. Said he wanted to do a favour for an old classmate and was sending me there. Didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go. Just assumed I’d accept because it was an ambassadorial appointment and I was just a middle-ranking officer. But I wasn’t cut out to be an ambassador and never should have accepted. Didn’t speak Spanish … didn’t know the history or culture of the place … was too old to learn.”
He looked at me as if he was seeking my permission to continue. I nodded back and he carried on. “But you can’t say no to the prime minister, especially when he thinks he’s doing you a favour. My wife and I are still getting used to this place and it shows. Spent my entire career in Western Europe and United States. Safe and familiar … just like home. Here, there are earthquakes, kidnappings, traffic jams, honking horns, garbage, parasites, amoebas, dysentery, pickpockets, endless rain, pollution, people never smile, it’s so far above sea level it’s hard to breathe. One minute I’m overwhelmed by the misery of the people … can’t control my emotions and start to weep like a baby. Next minute, I say the most heartless things about those poor wretches who live in a misery not of their making. Don’t take what I said about the gamines as my real feelings. It’s just that I get so frustrated at sitting here day after day and have to listen to the terrible cries of the crowds chasing those kids, and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
Not knowing how to deal with his appeal for help, I muttered something reassuring and got up to leave, afraid he might lose control of himself again. “No, no, Luc,” he said, “stay a moment longer. I’m really glad you’re here. Really, really glad. You’re young and resilient and will get along fine. I won’t be able to give you much guidance and help, but you’re coming from headquarters and know what they want. Just go ahead and do your job.”
On leaving the ambassador’s office, I sought out Alfonso, the driver who’d picked me up in the embassy car at the airport earlier in the day. “I need you,” I said, and he understood from the tone of my voice not to ask questions. He put down the newspaper he was reading, pulled on his suit jacket, and followed me out the door to the sidewalk.
“I saw a crowd of people kicking a gamine out here,” I told him as I led him towards a figure lying on the sidewalk. But instead of a child, I saw what looked like a barefoot old man with a bloodied face, naked from the waist down and dressed in a filthy cast-off suit jacket many sizes too big for him.
“I thought I’d find a gamine,” I said, turning to Alfonso. “The ambassador said the people were chasing a gamine.”
“But it is a gamine, señor. It’s a child. A gamine child.”
I got down on my knees
to take a closer look, wiped some of the blood away from his face and saw that the person was no more than six.
“Go get the car, Alfonso. We’ll take him to a hospital.”
“Si, señor, whatever you say, señor. But no hospital will take a gamine.”
“Why not?”
“They say they’re dirty and they steal. And they have no money to pay.”
“But I’ll cover the costs.”
“And then what señor? If you persuade the hospital to take him, what will happen to this gamine after he’s released? He’ll just go back to the streets and start picking pockets again. It’s a bad idea to take a gamine to a hospital.”
I bent over the gamine who appeared lifeless. “He’s just a child, Alfonso. Where can we take him if the hospitals won’t accept him?”
“Señor, excuse me for saying so, but there are thousands of these gamines in the streets. He looks innocent and harmless lying there quietly on the sidewalk, but these children are dangerous. They roam the city in big groups, and if he learns where you live, he might come with his friends to rob or kill you. Even if he doesn’t cause you any harm, if you care for one, you’ll feel obliged to look after them all. Where do you draw the line? Take my advice, señor, forget this gamine. This is only your first day in Colombia.”
Suddenly, the gamine opened his eyes, stared at me in terror, and tried to hit me in the face with his little fist. “Don’t be afraid, I’m going to help you,” I said. But the gamine struggled to his feet, and sobbing uncontrollably, limped off to lose himself in the crowd. And to my shame, I let him go.
Exceptional Circumstances Page 6