THE OLD CITY itself was an enclave, walled in fortifications, the modern reminder of the military garrison of the French forces in North America until their defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. On the second street after coming through St. Louis Gate, you arrived at rue Ste-Ursule, the street of the Ursulines, a steep-banked two-block-long road coming down from the Plains to rue St. Jean. At number fifty-two, you entered into a tunnel, fifteen metres long, into a courtyard, where we dwelled. At the other end of the tunnel, from our vantage point, we could see the outer wall of the Ursuline convent. At the top of the road was the “bunker,” the political arm of the Parti Québécois, the faction sworn to tear off a massive, tectonic chunk of Canada to form a new country under the symbol of the fleur-de-lys, the ancient ensign of the royal houses of the Sun King.
Rent was easy, $42 per month. Alongside the exodus of “smart money,” another silent exodus, intra-Quebec was underway, parallel to and sometimes coinciding with the other gap in their society. This one was from the Catholic Church, as the Québecois, pretty well overnight, left the Church in droves, something amazing when you consider that only a decade or two earlier its nationalism was built upon the bedrock of a Catholic priest’s philosophy — Lionel Groulx’s Revanche du Berceau, or “revenge of the cradle.”
But the priests hadn’t figured that youth would have its own ideas on how to dispose of its new sense of power. The new, smart, educated and completely disillusioned population, after the referendum loss, turned their energies to culture and education, and a whole new class of urban planners, architects and engineers was born. Churches were being converted into condominiums and swimming pools that were becoming the set pieces, first for the gentrification of the old neighbourhoods, and also for the colonization of areas of Montreal and Quebec City by the gay community, antecedents of the hipsters. Quebec turned completely secular.
Everything was dirt cheap, and you could find a cottage in the countryside for $20,000 or even less, and farmland for $100 per acre in the Eastern Townships. But Barnes and I were hacking it out in our ten-bucks-a-week flat in the old city. Somebody we’d met, an Anglo girl from Upper Canada named Janice, had said there was a language institute up the road taking on professors with zero qualifications, run by a man named Henry Abbott, who Janice had described as a serial pervert. The next day, I awoke early, showered and bused to a nondescript ground floor office inside a sixstorey grey concrete building in the suburb of St. Foy.
Abbott looked the part of serial pervert — a slovenly, half-bald skinny dude who combed the last strands of hair on his side over the scalp, with a disagreeable leer, and a pantomime Clouseau accent.
Within a month, I was teaching forty-three hours per week. Ninety per cent of my students were aged between twenty and fifty, with a sprinkling of a few older ones. Most were professionals sent and paid for by their company — munitions companies, accounting firms, schools. To break the ice, I’d always ask them about their home town, their background, and their families. Most of them had one or two children, many none at all. But, if you pried a bit and asked how many brothers and sisters they had, the answer was between five and twenty-five.
One of my students was a munitions worker named Jean-Yves who came from St. David-de-Falardeau, in a class of half a dozen workers from a munitions factory, all men. It was a good class and you could talk about things we had in common — the Montreal Canadiens, the beer they drank, their jobs. His co-workers came from large Catholic families, so I put the question to him.
“So, Jean-Yves, how many brothers and sisters?”
“At last count, twenty-five.”
“Not your clan, your brothers and sisters.”
“I’m telling you, twenty-five. Same mother.”
“Well, how did you survive?”
He laughed.
“Yeah, survival, sure, we were good at that, weren’t we? I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“Good, so tell me, what did you do during the long winter months with so many children?”
“Yeah, man, what’d we do? Played in the fucking barn, OK?”
I glanced at the other students, who looked morose. One of them, a middle-aged man, spoke up.
“Leave him alone.”
“Sure, no problem.”
The class went on, uneventful. After the class, Jean-Yves approached me, speaking in French.
“Nothing personal. I don’t like talking about my family.”
“That’s okay. I don’t like talking about mine either.”
“I’m just a loser making bullet casings. It’s what I do. I don’t want trouble.”
“But, the Canadiens is your hockey team, right?”
“Sure, Guy Lafleur is my hero.”
“Okay, we’ll stick to hockey from now on.”
“Thanks. You don’t want to know about the games they play in St. David-de-Falardeau, hostis.”
“So, I’m just a loser teaching English, right, un hostis de bloke. And you don’t wanna know about the games the Christian Brothers of Ireland played, do you?”
I was starting to get the hang of these people, and I had a feeling I knew where they were coming from, the same social tundra as me.