MY PARENTS MET at a lecture by René Dumont, the French agronomist who wrote False Start in Africa. My father, Julien, was studying philosophy, but he dreamed of a career on stage as well, and also considered working in Africa. At the same time, he wondered if law wouldn’t be more suitable, or maybe even the priesthood, but in a workers’ church. His idealism, his naivety, and his generosity were charming; so was his timidity. My mother, Rosanne, was leading the revolution in Brittany-style crêperies, and sometimes joined the demonstrations according to her latest encounter. She went from Marxist-Leninist to Trotskyist to Maoist to anarchist, according to the latest flavour. My father called her his Rosa Luxemburg.
The revolution was divided into two camps: the rigorous Soviet, Chinese, or Algerian, take your pick, it was prudish and stark. Then there was the revolución, cigars, machos, and pasionarias. The Cuban model always won over the other side. Change the world by fucking and drinking rum.
The revolution kept my mother entertained. Father listened to her ready-made slogans and formulas and started reading everything she hadn’t read but referred to constantly: Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao. Julien didn’t become a communist to win her over, but my mother believed that without necessarily wanting to, she had led him to that path.
He abandoned philosophy for political science. In her mind, the revolution was a form of escape, of entertainment, inebriation. She stopped being the bourgeois daughter of a woman who owned Montreal’s major arts production company. She was Rosa Luxemburg now.
Then came the proletarian period that my mother adored at first. Living with the exploited of Saint-Henri, discussions with the workers, the unemployed, people on welfare, the wretched of the earth. After his M.A., Julien left university and for a few months he dedicated himself to setting up a paper, the Worker’s Forum. He became a hard-core Marxist-Leninist. She didn’t understand anything of his speeches on building the avant-garde through infiltration. He began working at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital as a nurse’s aide. At six o’clock every morning, with a handful of comrades, he passed out leaflets at the factory gates. At the hospital, he set up a cell within the union and gave thirty percent of his pay to the Party. Their neighbours didn’t eat the way they did, they spoke a completely different language than theirs, and they voted for the most reactionary parties. But Julien kept on. Mother fell out of love with the proletariat. After three years of revolutionary practice, dead-ends, and disillusionment, my father announced that capitalism had won because the workers had become consumers now. It was time to join the system and improve it from within. Julien became a bureaucrat with the Ministry of Education. Rosanne was pregnant with me. Her mother-in-law helped them buy a duplex on Waverly Street, just in time for me to be born into a proper environment. My mother rediscovered her true nature, like a snake with a new skin that is just a copy of the old one. With renewed pleasure, she went back to her soirées, bought herself an elegant new wardrobe, and began to cultivate her garden.
She died five years after he did, in a car accident, dashing from one meeting to the next as she always did. My new status as an orphan didn’t change my existence much.
I was too absorbed in my studies and my research to notice anyone around me. That was just before Nathalie came into my life.