MY MOTHER ASKED me why I was now more interested in local news and less in international events. That was an excuse to talk; she followed this by asking me what I thought about my father’s mood. She didn’t mention his grey face, or the whiskey, or his silence, or the distance he created between us, as if he weren’t living with us anymore, but next to us, on a path parallel to ours, on the same street, but moving along the opposite sidewalk.
I replied that poverty begins at home, and to change the world, justice first had to come to our own country.
“What does your father think?”
“He won’t talk about it. He says it’s normal, that’s just the way the world works, and we can’t do anything about it.”
“Did you know that your father, before he entered the civil service…No, that doesn’t matter. I think he’s tired. You’re right, we have to change things here, but you shouldn’t forget people who are objectively a lot worse off and exploited than we are.”
Mother was a communications consultant, and press secretary to Robert Charlebois. She was invited to all the openings, she shopped at Holt Renfrew and Roche-Bobois, but used words like “objectively” and “exploited.” That must have been a mistake, a kind of slip due to the popularity of certain terms that become part of the landscape without anyone thinking about what they really mean.