Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, May 08, 2004
MARKET DAY
Today, Saturday, we took our neighbor and went to Marche Jean Talon, where we like to shop, and which is pretty close to where we're living. Our neighbor works for Air Canada and is here form Calgary, spending four months in an immersion French program for her job. She is trying to speak only French, so that's good for us, and we did our best to continue that during our morning at the market. We began at Patisserie Moisson, bakers extraordinaire, who have a shop with breads, pastries, pates and gourmet items on the side of the produce market. We bought three fresh butter croissants, one piece of chocolate mousse cake to share (such restraint!), and three coffees, and sat at a little green marble-top table eating and talking happily for an hour. (At one point I looked up and realized that the two French guys at a neighboring table had been listening to our halting but sincere conversation, and were quite amused.) We spoke about how lovely the women look here - the French women have so much style, regardless of income, and are so effortlessly feminine. How I wish! Our neighbor, who comes from a family of cattle breeders in Calgary, seems like a Canadian version of a western American, and finds Montrealers as different, appealing, and enigmatic as we do; it's fun to compare our impressions.
The market today was bursting with color - the first vegetable, herb and flower plants are being offered for sale, along with all the produce imaginable. We bought strawberries, oranges, asparagus, tomatoes and beautiful fresh basil, tiny zucchini and red peppers, lettuce and cucumbers, and just-blushing pears, and barely resisted the grilled sausages and spice-encrusted chicken at the Moroccan shop where we puchased raisins.
J. is having fairly extensive dental surgery on Monday afternoon, so some of this food will be wishful thinking for a while, or made into purees. In spite of that - a kind of torture in this culinary Mecca - we are settling into a pleasant routine of morning work and afternoon prowling, and spend most evenings at home reading or writing. The close quarters don't seem to be a problem for us at all, perhaps because we have imposed a "no talking" rule during work time. I'm making gradual progress on the book - slower than I'd like, but I'm accepting it as the pace that nature intends for me at the moment.
Slowly, slowly, I can feel myself quieting down and entering the pace of this life and this neighborhood. Today was a lovely day that warmed gradually, with large white clouds and a sun that shyly emerged and retreated. In the morning I made French toast which we ate with pears and coffee, then I took a bath and did the laundry before settling down to work. There is a clever drying rack on the back balcony; four “legs” fold out from a central support, and coated wire-rack shelves flip up to lock onto the outer edged of the supports. You can either hang clothes from the wires with clothespins (pince a ligne) or lay them flat. I washed our things by hand in the sink, wrung them out, and carried them outside, where I took up each one and hung it to dry. I think that was when the sense of contentment began to come over me, but it is always present here, too, in the kitchen.
Our life is very simple, so much simpler than at home, and already I find myself, as I expected, questioning why and how regular life has become so complicated. Here we have a little wooden table, two old wooden chairs, four plates, four glasses, two coffee cups, four sets of silverware, a bowl, two pots and one sauté pan, a hot plate, a toaster-oven, a French-press coffee maker and a microwave. That’s it! You shop every day, and the produce, fish, and meat are extremely fresh. I bought eggs at the market from a farmer who had come in from the countryside; they are brown and have deep yellow yolks, and are delicious. I can feel the simple pleasure, sitting here at the small wooden table, of looking over at three perfect tomatoes, a bottle of wine for dinner, the tile floor, the yellow curtain at the window and the balconies of the apartments across the street. This afternoon, when I returned from a walk around the neighboring residential streets, I made myself a cup of sweet Arab coffee and sat drinking it on the top step outside. Little sparrows played in the tree, dropping down every now and then to pick up some bread crumbs. A young couple went by with their baby in a carriage. The old Frenchman with the craggy face who lives down the street passed by with his shaggy lapdog on a leash, two blue bows in her hair, and smiled up at me.
Later I went out to buy a bottle of wine for dinner. We’re beginning to do our usual reconnaissance of the neighborhood: where is the post office, the bank, the favorite café, the used-book store, the dry cleaner; which is the most interesting way to the metro; who goes to the park and what do they do there? What can you put in the grass-green recycling bins for the truck that come on Wednesdays? How do people manage their cars for the street-cleaning on Mondays and Thursdays? I watched as mothers picked up their children from the local elementary school, pulling the boys away from their soccer games in the paved, fenced playground, and bending down to talk to the little girls, arm around a shoulder, to hear how the day went. Lots of people ride bicycles, but there’s little overt exercise, American-style - except for the occasional skin-tight-jerseyed cyclist who looks as if he's about to enter the Tour de France - and almost no bottle-toting or high-tech fitness clothing. The neighborhood feeling is congenial, and entremely laid-back. And at five pm, there’s nearly always a big black standard poodle tethered outside the local market. He looks up eagerly when you say, “Bonjour!”
Today J. and I went to meet the dentist and have a consultation. I waited in the reception area, and when I heard him laughing I knew he was happy for the first time in this sorry dental saga. We went for coffee afterwards and he told me the dentist, who is Romanian, knew exactly what he was looking at as soon as J. gave him the x-rays, and had explained everything in great detail and made a firm recommendation of what he would like to do for the restoration of the three teeth in question. It was a very professional clinic, and interesting to me to see how the office ran and what the patients were like – although, of course, most of the conversation was in French. Everyone who came in seemed calm – that was a good sign – and the staff was both professional and friendly, all attired in starched white medical garb.
We’ve been coming to Montreal since the mid-90s, but much more frequently in the last three years. It’s not a beautiful city, not at all; the interest and beauty have more to do with the people and the mix of cultures. Observations from today:
-Everybody reads. A fancy, scrolling digital sign on the metro car we were gave, among other notices, recommendations by Montreal librarians of good new books.
-My winter sloth is rapidly receding; with a goal of walking four miles a day, I am already getting into better shape.
-A feature film is being shot in the local park, complete with huge carbon-arc lights, Panavision camera on rails, cranes for overhead shots, and 50’s vintage cars and costumes. It was fascinating to watch.
-People here are thinner and seem to eat less, especially less meat and processed food, but what they eat is very high quality – especially the fruits and vegetables, bread, and cheese. I am a voyeur when shopping at the markets; it’s fascinating to see what people are putting in their baskets…ummm…panniers.
-People smoke a lot more.
-In the meat section of the supermarket, there was ground cheval next to the ground boeuf, and cut-up lapin next to the chicken.
-Diversity is everywhere, and people generally seem quite aware of each other. The crime rate is quite low. A group of four young guys, all clearly close friends, got onto the metro tonight: a black kid with braids wearing a hip white pile outfit with baggy pants and bomber jacket; a Muslim guy wearing lather jacket and a crocheted white kufi, a white kid wearing a Yankees cap and passing around an MP3 player to the others, and a jovial white French Canadian guy with a hockey bag. In New York I would have been cautious. But here the hip-hop guy looked around when he got on the train, immediately gave his seat to a well-dressed older man who was reading a book, and smiled at me.
Monday, May 03, 2004
There’s a monthly gathering of Montreal bloggers tonight at a bar up on St. Laurent, but I’m getting cold feet thinking about going by myself, even though the organizer, Patrick, told me I’d be most welcome and that people there speak both French and English. I’m managing pretty well in the language, and find that people switch into English less immediately with me than they used to. Every day brings both a little success and a little confusion. I have trouble with spoken numbers, for one thing. Yesterday, at the local grocery store, I thought I gave the clerk, a young woman with black hair streaked with crimson, the correct change but she asked me for something that sounded like “penny”. (You have to understand, when the French speakers speak English, you are hearing it with a French accent, so there is a double chance for misunderstanding.) Assuming I must have made a mistake, I finally handed her a penny, with a quizzical look. She reached out her hand and said the same word again, but this time I finally got it – she was saying “pannier” and reaching for my plastic shopping basket. I tried not to blush.
Today I wrote in the morning, made lunch, and then took a long, mostly-brisk walk in the neighborhood. It’s cold today, about 50 degrees with a strong wind, down from over 80 degrees the day we arrived. On one street, I went into a dimly-lit shop selling Moroccan antiques. The owner was just setting up his wares, and a sign in the window announced that a Salon du The would be opening soon next door. I browsed quickly though a dark maze of mosaic tile tabletops, carved wooden mirrors, leather footstools, metal trays and hanging lamps - all the real thing, not tourist reproductions. The owner was a thin, handsome man with a polite, shy Muslim demeanor. As I was leaving, I quietly said, in English, that he had beautiful things and I would be back with my husband. He smiled, poising his towel on the mirror he had been polishing. “Quoi?” he said. I was surprised again; of course most North African speak French, but I've gotten used to immigrants here who speak English nearly as well.
“Ah!” I said. “Je reviendrai avec mon mari.”
“Ah, merci, Madame,” he said, understanding, and I went back out to resume my adventuresome walk.
Now I’m back home. The woman staying in the mirror-apartment to ours, next door, works for Air Canada and is from Saskatchewan. She’s taking a three-month immersion French course, and leaves early every morning. When she arrived, she said, four weeks ago, she didn’t know a word of French. For the first two weeks, she came home every night and cried, but now she is beginning to be able to speak and understand. The three of us will practice together.
Our young landlady, Genevieve, has just hung her laundry out on the clothesline in the back, so there are white sheets flapping in the wind. Everybody has clotheslines; in fact the fronts of the buildings give very little clue about the vibrant life that happens in the back gardens and alleys between rows of attached buildings on two parallel streets. There is a huge tree in back of this house. The leaves are just coming out; I think it may be a butternut. It’s inhabited by a large grey squirrel, and when I lie in the bathtub in our apartment, I can watch him deftly navigating his route through the branches and along a big telephone cable that runs the length of the alley. I learned the French word for “squirrel” today so I can ask Genevieve’s little daughter, Marie-Mousse, about him – it’s ecureuil.
This is our street in Montreal; the green house is where we're living, in the upstairs apartment on the right.
We're settling in, and it feels very good. We're going extremely slow, for us; didn't even leave the house until 3:00 pm yesterday, and until now I've barely written a word. I don't think either of us realized how tired we actually were.
After going up to the huge public market yesterday afternoon, we came back, had some tea, took a walk in the neighborhood, bought some fish and a couple of local beers, and then made dinner together (olives and marinated eggplant and French bread, then artichokes, broiled Atlantic salmon, and salad with delicious fresh tomatoes, avocado, and tiny Armenian cucumbers.) We’ve spent quite a while today just sitting quietly or lying on the bed, listening to the wind and the occasional gull, or flock of geese flying overhead. The apartment is generally quieter than our house at home (although there is a good party going on right now in an apartment across the back) and I can feel us unwinding for the first time in a long, long time.
I told J., as we were listening to the voices coming from the party, where there was a small grill set up on the balcony and people going in and out, that here home life seems much simpler, and lived on a smaller scale, because so much of life happens outside one’s apartment. At home in the country, because there are so few outside resources, one ends up expecting one’s own home to be a park and a laundry, a gourmet restaurant serving multi-ethnic cuisine, a spa, a movie theater… and being steeped in old, hippie self-sufficiency, we’ve always done or fixed most everything ourselves. “And we do a pretty good job of it,” I said, lying on the bed, listening to the wind in the big tree behind the apartment, “but, my God, it’s exhausting.”
