by John Metcalf
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.
He pottered about the Hill from statue to statue. Those made in more recent years, Diefenbaker, Pearson, Mackenzie King, George Brown, Sir Robert Borden, were stiff, awkward, lacked fluidity. The best statues were all by Louis-Philippe Hébert from Montreal and had been unveiled, Forde noted, either actually in the nineteenth century or within a year of it.
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 metal 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 sam
e 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,
Close to your centre!
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.
“I have thirty now. Two weeks ago there were twenty-five. Too many cats, that’s not too good. The houses, it’s good for twenty-four. They go in there to the straw, two by two. When I have more they can go four or five in each one. You can’t kill a cat with the bad weather. They get close together and they sleep good.”
Forde looked at the Outdoor Self-Guiding Booklet and read:
Parliament Hill has been home to stray cats for decades. However, it is only since the 1970s that volunteers have paid special care and attention to these animals: creating the “cat sanctuary,” maintaining its infrastructure and ensuring that the animals (cats, raccoons, groundhogs, squirrels, pigeons, chickadees and sparrows) are fed on a daily basis.
Maintaining its infrastructure! thought Forde.
Bizarre punctuation to boot, courtesy of the National Capital Commission.
The juxtaposition of the formality, pomp and ceremony of the Parliament Buildings and the modest cat sanctuary reflects the important Canadian values of tolerance and compassion.
The old man fell silent as families, groups, or couples walked on but started up again in a sort of soliloquy with each new passer-by.
“Maybe it’s time for me to retire. I put an ad in the paper once and nobody showed up. It’s volunteer, that’s why. When Irene Desormeaux, she died, I’ve been the Catman since that day. The government they don’t give me any money at all. But you know when you like something? Do it well or don’t do it at all. The cats they keep me young. Two weeks ago there were twenty-five. I have thirty now. People, they drop their cats. They’re not supposed to drop their cats. But they do it. If they get caught, they’re gonna pay a fine. But it’s hard to catch them. There’s a squirrel. If I put a peanut in my ear they jump out of the tree onto my shoulder here and they take it out. I call them all Charlie because they look the same. I know all these cats. Her—that one sleeping underneath the house—that’s Lapout. Lapout and Lulu, that’s two sisters. Their mother is Brunette. When I see them, I know right away their name. Fluffy now, Fluffy was here a minute ago. Fluffy, now that’s a nice cat. Fluffy’s got a long robe. His fur, it’s long. Big Mama—her sleeping under that bush—she’s big. And Cocoa and Brownie. That one just went in the house. That’s Princess. I had four grey but I see only two… Timin and Tigris. Here I have Bon Bon. I tell you! That Bon Bon! I bet you every day he’s in the bushes.”
He started working something bulky out of one of the plastic bags hanging from the railings. He set off with a plastic jerrycan to get water.
Forde drifted closer to the railings and stood regarding the scruffy cats, the squalid squares of carpet weighted at the corners with rocks. A plastic windmill on a stick. Among the paper flags, larger cloth flags on sticks were stuck into cans and toilet-paper cores, which had been worked onto branches as holders. Dozen upon dozen small pictures of cats were tacked to trunks and dangled from bushes, pictures cut from magazines or labels from cans or entire empty packages with cat pictures on them, Whiskers, Fin
icky Cat, Nutrition First, Iams, Fancy Feast, Friskies, Meow Mix, Pounce Minouche, No Name Beef and Chicken Dinner.
A raccoon toiled into the tiny clearing. Cats fled. It was hugely pregnant, its distended dugs leaking on the ground, staining the dust. Its fur was dull. It began eating from the nearest aluminum-foil dish. His presence did not deter it. From time to time it looked up at him with bleak eyes.
Forde stood staring.
On the tops of tree stumps, in rusted cans, wilting posies of flowering weeds. Scattered lids of opened cans. A plastic sunflower on a stick. Copulating flies dizzed on the crusting food and on the beaten earth.
LIVES OF
THE POETS
Not beguiled by fluorescent hum, not beguiled by the weepy whinging of country and western artistes, Forde stood in the Australia aisle. Bottles clinked as a wire cart clanked, font wheel baulking. Loose from their nightmare shacks in the dripping woods, scrawny men strutted, feral, seemingly without buttocks, their wallets somehow attached by long, looping chains. When they grinned their dangerous grins, black gaps, caries. In their wake toiled their obese and waddling women yanking impetigo toddlers.
Pastel elasticized pants.
Guts like growths.
Drifting into his mind the notion
Figgy duff
The thought of their gruesome matings, the wallowings, the squelch… His averted gaze played over Australian labels—Koala, Blue Gum, Shearers Shout Cabernet—cheery egalitarianism which depressed him. The vintners of Southeastern Australia, he thought, had another think coming if they imagined he was going to spend his pitiful mite on a shiraz called Hairy Belly.
*
He pushed the balding tennis ball onto the plughole in the bath, weighted it with the half-brick, and turned on the taps. He stirred through the garbage bag for the least soiled white shirt.
The three-month writer-in-residency paid $20,000, on which he had to pay tax, with which he had to pay rent and, as the application forms had put it, “alimentation,” and for which he had to teach two classes, make himself available to students and the general public, reach out to high schools, and give readings and talks in surrounding retirement residences, hospitals, palliative care hospices…