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 15, 2004
It’s hard to believe we’ve been here two weeks already, and that the month is half gone! Today was a little rainy but warm; we lazed around in the morning, grateful that both of us are feeling better, and then in the early afternoon went to the new Marche Centrale. Eventually, we think, this area will house a large fruit and vegetable market but for now all we found were flowers – but what flowers! Large open air stalls stretching on and on, from one grower to another, filled with annuals, perennials, vegetables, houseplants. It’s a good thing I don’t have a garden to fill. After that we went back to our usual produce shopping at the Jean Talon market, where in addition to strawberries we found luscious, ripe peaches today.
I forgot to tell a story from yesterday. In the late morning there was a knock at the door – it was our landlady, G. “I’ve found something good,” she said. “But…” slightly apologetic, pleading look, “it requires votre voiture” (your car). “Ok,” J. said, “let’s go.” I said I’d watch Marie, and the two of them took off in the car. When they returned, thirty minutes later, they were carrying a big, comfortable chair upholstered in green imitation leather, with one big tear in the seat. “For the terrace”, G. said, beaming. Later J. told me when they had arrived at the point where she said she had seen the chair on the sidewalk, nothing was there. “Oh, don't worry,” she said, jumping out of the car and running over to the side of a nearby building, and triumphantly pulling out the chair from where she had hidden it beneath the fire escape.
Tonight G. and our neighbor have gone to supper at a friend’s. To go there, G. picked up a little car form CommunAuto, a car rental service that seems wonderfully practical – does anyone know of a service like this in other cities? You pay a yearly or monthly membership fee, make a reservation over the internet when you want to use a car, and pick it up from one of many, many parking lots located all over the city. For those who don’t want to maintain a car here, it seems like a very efficient solution.
Many people also ride bikes. Last night J. went for a long ride. There are beautiful bike paths throughout the city, connecting all the parks. He rode for three hours, through various neighborhoods, past the huge soccer stadium, past community gardens and local basketball games, all the way to the river that forms the northern border of the island, La Riviere des Prairies (the St. Lawrence is below it.) He came back wet, muddy, and happy.
Friday, May 14, 2004
It’s raining: a thunderstorm that’s been gathering for the last few hours. J. is off on an adventure on our neighbor’s bicycle, and I’ve just come in from a marathon drawing session with Marie. Her favorite things to draw are monsters and dinosaurs, which she accompanies with a noisy soundtrack. I drew her a fly (mouche) and an ant (fourmi); she happily walks around the back porch now naming all the various creatures depicted in chalk.
I woke up feeling horrible, went back to sleep, and woke up again at about 9:30. J. read me the comments some of you had left here, and I was so touched that I cried. They also made me feel much better, and as the day has gone on, I’ve definitely improved, feeling almost normal by late afternoon. A sore throat, still, and a stuffy head, but the body aches are gone, thank God.
My mother, on the telephone, said “It’s hard to be sick away from home,” but I said, “Oh, no, this is fine, it feels like home” – and it does. Strange. But this sojourn is teaching me a lot about what makes home home. I think, actually, that the definition has changed quite a bit for me over time, mutating from a collection of external places and objects and possible activities to something that I carry with me.
The last time I was ill away from home we were in a hotel room in London. I had gotten violently sick on some Chinese pork, and was up all night long, and into the next morning, when a doctor-friend who we had met gave me his last packet of Smecta, a suspected opiate he’d been prescribed when the same thing happened to him in Lithuania. It worked immediately, and in a few hours I had recovered completely; to this day I have a special feeling of gratitude for that spontaneous generosity. Here there hasn’t been a quick cure, but there have been other kind strangers, and the ongoing pleasure of birds eating below someone else’s trees, squirrels traversing someone else’s wires, leaves unfurling and magnolias and tulips blooming. And most of all, my beloved is here with me.
We think of “home” so much as “place”, the most poignant and particular of all, but I am beginning to see it more as a state of mind. Certainly there are places where we “fit” and places that are too alien or too jarring to us to ever feel comfortable. But if I am not home in myself, I’ll never feel at home anywhere, and if I do feel at home in myself, anywhere I am will be home, and will have the possibility of becoming a hospitable place for others. It’s one more example, it seems, of a search that leads back to the source.
Thursday, May 13, 2004 Yesterday evening I went down with a slight fever. The infirmary is full. In the dormitory, there is a lot of noise, to which I contribute my unsuccessful efforts to breathe.
The terrible thing about sickness is that you tend to think you are sick. Your thoughts are narrowed down to your own little rag of a body. And you take care of her. My God, forgive me, I take care of myself too well to be a good Cisterian…
…This is a most peculiar disease. It pretends to leave you, but it only pretends. Actually it is only drawing back to take a good spring at you and claw you all over again…
This afternoon I finally stayed in bed for good. Why should it be a penance to stay in bed? I scarcely know. It is quiet, and pleasant, and you can pray. And yet it almost takes ropes to keep me there. For instance, I am not there now…
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, March 25-28, 1950
Today I gave up and didn’t go out at all, except to draw some pictures with fat chalk on the deck outside, where the little girl had been drawing. I wanted to surprise her, so tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, she’ll find a robin pulling a worm, some fish in a pond, and a flower. She had drawn a long pink creature with spines, that her mother labeled “Dragon”, presumably for our benefit.
J. is mending, and I am languishing, but I thought maybe if I could manage to lay low I’d get better faster. This, too, is a peculiar bug – neither a straightforward cold nor the flu, but something in-between, with cold-like symptoms added to body and joint aches. Today my head felt like it was exploding, but now I’m better, and hoping the thing isn’t just “drawing back” to take another claw at me in the morning.
Considering the state of things in both the larger and the individual worlds, I shouldn’t be as calm as I’ve been ever since arriving here, and yet, that is how I’ve felt. The other night I was lying propped up in bed; J. had already gone to sleep. With my near-sighted eyes I looked across the room at the rather blurry yellow curtain. The lights of the apartments across the street illuminated the fabric, and the window frames and partly-open French shutters made a shadow-pattern on it. Against the deep darkness of the room, this was very pleasing, and I looked at it for a long time, listening to my husband’s breathing and to the silence, suspended in a state of non-thinking. What it was, was acceptance of the moment just as it was; of myself as I was; the place as it was; my body as it was; and time as an illusion. It’s been a long time since my mind was able to settle down that much, and I was grateful for it.
Very slow this morning, after a restless night. Our apartment is turning into a hospital ship: J. has a mouthful of sutures, some of which seem to be pulling out, and I have a cold/flu that is causing a stuffy head, sore throat, and persistent body aches. It’s better today, but still fighting for the upper hand. I’ve invited it quite plainly to leave.
Outside – a beautiful day. The leaves are almost fully out now; light green and fresh as lettuce. We found out yesterday that the “horticulture” trucks come by twice a year to trim the street trees. “They cut quite a lot,” I said to our landlady. “Trop!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Too much!” Today another truck came through, watering all the trees.
So the news is full of more horrible pictures and revelations from Iraq. What gets me are the comments from America: “I don’t know how these people got into our military,” – this from a Congressman; and the inevitable “she seemed like such a nice girl” from the hometown folks. What the hell is the matter with these people? Are they blind? Or just moronic? We have a culture that glorifies violence and makes it available to our children, in all its perverse forms. The culture sends incredibly mixed messages about sex and sexuality, and yet, through its Puritanism, has never found a way to teach young people what constitutes healthy sexuality or healthy relationships. And we glorify “freedom” and “democracy” and “America” and send children off to fight in a culture they know nothing about, but which has been reduced to vilified stereotypes, put them into frightening and demanding situations for which they’ve had no training, and then expect them to know how to handle it – and are horrified when suddenly we’re forced to witness the pairing of sexuality and violence.
Frankly, I’m disgusted but not shocked by what I’ve seen and read so far, because I know that human beings are capable of unimaginable behavior, particularly during war. All you have to do is read history to know that. I know that power and sexuality and violence are a very volatile mix. What angers me the most is the righteous indignation among Americans at every level, and their apparent inability to understand the laws of cause and effect. And it also makes me crazy to come up again and again against this naivete: as if we are somehow morally superior to all other societies, and immune to deviant behavior. Who is kidding who? When are those puritanical scales going to fall from our eyes?
Here in Montreal, there is a sex industry, and it is far more out in the open than what we’re used to in America. I don’t know a great deal about how it works, or what the State’s involvement is, but there are sex clubs and sexual services intermixed with retail businesses on St. Catherine Street and in other places, and when you open any of the “what’s on” arts newspapers, there are ads in the back for just about anything a person might want, accompanied by nude pictures of beautiful young women with strategically-placed “stars”. This makes me sad – if I had a daughter I sure wouldn’t want to see her in those pages – but it doesn’t offend me, because I know that sex is a human need, and the idea that we can stop people from trying to get it, or sell it, is hopelessly naďve: again, look at history. And I also think honesty about human behavior is preferable to living in a bubble.
A day of lying low. J. has a swollen jaw but not much pain, and hasn’t complained, even about the thin, room-temperature chicken soup. His reward was a chocolate milk shake in the middle of the afternoon. I feel crummy but, all things considered, I’m not going to complain either – I didn’t have my jaw hammered, sawn and drilled, or whatever they did to him.
So it was a day of watching out the window, mostly; working on the computer, reading. Around noon we noticed “No Parking” signs – sandwich-board style – being put on the other side of the street. When we looked more closely, they read “Horticulture”. Hmm. Then a big City of Montreal truck with a lift and bucket came down our side; it was two men trimming the street trees. They carefully did their work, left the branches on the street for the garbage collectors tonight, and went on down the street. We’re amazed at what people leave out for the municipal garbage: mattresses, logs, rocks, chairs, lamps – today I even saw a bureau. Much of this gets set out a day before, and picked over by neighbors; it seems to be a system. Our landlady said a lot of the furniture in our apartment came from the street.
She got two deliveries: a pile of topsoil which was dumped against “garage” – a door leading to an unfinished space just big enough for a car, and a pile of rolled turf for a new lawn in her back garden. The latter came this morning and we worried all day that it would dry out before she got home, but with the help of friends, she got it laid before dinnertime while her daughter played in the mud with a toy wheelbarrow.
Monday, May 10, 2004
J.’s surgery took a little more than four hours and was tricky, but successful. He’s home, icepacks on both cheeks, beginning the recuperative process. When I went to pick him up, the doctor came out to greet me and give J. some final instructions, very polite, “Bonjour, Madame.” He has a round face and big, dark Eastern European eyes. “Try not to smile too much,” he said, and added apologetically, “and no red wine.”
I had my own adventures today: it was my first time driving alone in the city, and that was exciting. But it was nothing like New York, or Boston, or LA – people here are so polite and the pace is really pretty sedate; the main deviation from orderly traffic is the swerving to avoid potholes, which are an inevitability in this climate.
The other new experience was purchasing prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Like most things here, there is a “way” it’s done. In this case, you give the prescription in at one window, even though there were no other clients waiting, and pick it up at another. The pharmacist, a young woman, was extremely attentive as she filled out a file for my husband, and then told me I could wait and it would be ready in “five to seven minutes” – which it was. When I picked up the prescriptions, which had been placed in a small plastic bin, she first asked what other medications he was taking and checked each new drug against that one in the computer. Satisfied that there weren’t any adverse interactions, she then spent a long time going over each of the prescribed medications in detail; this “conseil”, or “advice” is apparently a major part of the pharmacist’s job, but this was more thorough and more attentive than I’ve ever received. While waiting, I browsed around the store; there are a lot more homeopathic and herbal remedies here, as well as the usual shampoos and deodorants, and over-the-counter medications. Make-up and skin care are also bigger and more extensive, with a number of different lines, even in a small local pharmacy, and many products for applying and taking off one’s cosmetics.
One of the most fascinating aspects of living in a different culture is trying to figure out things that are confusing and unexpected. The other night, as we were leaving the apartment, a square-shaped, orange-colored van came around the far corner of the block, ringing a bell. We looked at each other in astonishment – could it be a Good Humor truck, caught in some sort of time-warp from our childhoods? The sound was absolutely identical. But when it got close, we saw the hand-painted script on the door: “Aiguisage” – “Sharpening”. It was a sharpening service, which must visit the neighborhood periodically. “Just like Damascus,” said J., amazed.
Last night he called me over to the window around dinnertime: “There’s a cock outside,” he said, and sure enough, there was a small car with a cheerful-looking, lighted rooster on the roof and a sign “Au Coq”. We figured that it was take-out food delivery, but of what? Omelettes? Only the yellow pages yielded an answer: not even fried chicken, but rotisserie chicken from “Au Coq Roulant” (“Chicken on Wheels”, basically) billed as “le meilleur poulet” in Montreal.
People put out bread for the birds, and someone even leaves a saucer of cat food outside her door for a neighborhood cat – maybe the striped tabby that suddenly appeared in our apartment last night, having somehow gotten into the back garden and climbed up the stairs to the second floor.
I’ve come down with a cold, which I hope, hope, hope will stay small and not communicate itself to my husband, since he is supposed to avoid sneezing and coughing, as well as red wine, food, and smiling. The weather has been crazy: 80 degrees again yesterday, cold and rainy today. All of our friends back home as well as many people here have colds, so it’s no wonder but unexpected and annoying, all the same.
Last night some of our friends from home came to visit – Shirin and her husband, her father-in-law, and his friend. Shirin loves Montreal because there is so much wonderful Middle Eastern and Persian food, and her husband was teasing her that they had made one stop after another just to pick up different food items for her. At our apartment, after dinner, we sat around and ate fruit: apricots, strawberries, and oranges and gave Shirin two sweet lemons that we’d bought at the market. I’d never had one before, but she peeled the slightly lumpy fruit that looks like a small orange-sized lime, salted the segments, and gave them to each of us. It is a strange taste – sour but sweet, and not very lemony but definitely citrus. Shirin says in Iran they are considered medicinal, particularly good for people who have colds.
Today we met them for lunch at an Iranian kebab place in the section of Montreal called NDG. It took me a long time before I learned that NDG stands for Notre-Dame-de-Grace. To get there, you drive west through the downtown city-center and then through Westmount, the ultra-Anglo area of Montreal. There has been animosity between the Anglo and French citizens of Montreal forever, and both groups have created “zones” which are particularly theirs. The city is divided east-west by a main street called St. Laurent. East of it, and essentially east of the “mountain” (Mont-Royal) itself, the city is French. To the west, it is Anglo. The most French section is the Plateau Mont-Royal, where we are living, typified by residential neighborhoods of lace-curtained, wrought-iron balconied two-and three-story attached buildings and French-speaking shops. The most English area is Westmount, which looks like an English boarding school – spacious lawns, Gothic architecture, a conservatory and even a bowling green prominently placed close to the main street. Signage in Quebec must be in French, so in Westmount everything is in two languages: “Books” and “Livres”, which must irk the ultra-Anglos no end.
But beyond Westmount is NDG, with a lot of ethnic color. We met our friends at Marche Norooz, run by an Iranian family where the kebabs of spiced meat are grilled to perfection and served on warm pita with grilled onion and tomato and fresh herbs, and there is a bottomless pot of self-serve tea. Some of us drank dukkh, a sour, fizzy yogurt drink that I can’t stand but many Middle Easterners love. After lunch we ate most of a tin of a sweet that is a specialty from the holy city of Qom; it’s a not-very-sweet confection, less crunchy than peanut brittle and more so than halvah, flavored with saffron and pistachios.
My French triumphs and defeats for the day? Asking for salt in the supermarket and having the entire conversation in French without the stockboy switching into English. Listening nearly blankly to a fifteen-minute monologue by our landlady’s three-year old daughter, whose rapid-fire French became more and more earnest as she gradually realized these big dumb adults weren’t responding according to plan. I understood, finally, that she was telling a story about the neighbor’s dog, when she held her hands in front of my face, made a fearsome grimace, and said “GRRRR!”
Tomorrow J. is having his dental surgery in the afternoon, and then, after a few days of ice-packs and painkillers, we hope to be on the road to recovery.
9:25 PM
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