“There can come moments of evening-afternoon when it seems that the only task remaining is the gleaning of fragments, the only function remaining that of an elegist for all the fine things that have gone to ruin and are being ruined willfully still, to be the attentive student of belatedness…”
- Peter Davidson, Distance and Memory
Tree-lined street in Cote St. Paul, late March. Falling light, evening coming on. Rows of Victorian terrace housing with winding staircases and balconies overhead. Storefronts mostly empty except for a pizza-by-the-slice spot. Fog rolling down from the mountain.
Across the street there’s a church. Once Catholic, now Orthodox. Present congregation aside, this church wears its Catholicism heavily. A gold-colored statue of Jesus stands above the entrance, arms outstretched, as if welcoming the generations of immigrants that used to worship here but aren’t coming back anymore. A Latin inscription, venite adoremus, is carved into the stone just above the doors. In a tower there’s a circular window with glass broken in two panes. A pigeon flies out. It’s a Saturday evening — mass should be on — so I walk up the stairs and try opening the doors, but they’re closed. I imagine the ghosts of the thousands of immigrants that prayed, married, and died here, washing past me, dressed in Sunday best, heavy coats and fur hats for the winter.
Walking home, I think of the last time I was here with my grandfather, in the middle of the green summer, ivy still creeping up the walls and goldenrod — not yet flowering — growing in the cracks in the staircase. He came to show me the old church and fire station, both grand, shabby, sad buildings. “This used to be an industrial neighborhood, but its changing now…” he said. Still, the gentrification of the surrounding terrace housing hadn’t yet touched the church or fire station. There was always a grandness to the old immigrant churches of Montreal (especially the Catholic ones), as if matching the hopes of their congregations. “The glass in this church was very beautiful, made by an Italian artist” my grandfather explains, “but it looks like they’re running out of money now”.
For me, these old churches and old terrace houses with their winding staircases have always brought on the deepest feelings of home. My mind turns to a letter I had found earlier that day, from my grandmother to my grandfather, written shortly after they had met in 1964. “Amore mio. I’m back in Rome now,” she writes, “I’m surrounded by all these beautiful buildings and history, but I miss Canada and can’t wait to come back. Not because of Canada per se, but because I miss you…”. I think of how this place, that for me has always been the purest expression of home, was for my grandmother, very new. There’s an indifference many immigrants feel towards their adoptive country. Moves made for work or family connections, but not for any particular love of the place.
Canada, especially, is a land populated by immigrants that would have rather been elsewhere (usually, their home), had they been given the chance. The displacement of Indigenous peoples was mostly driven by people that didn’t want to be here in the first place. Once the fur trade stopped being profitable and minds turned to settlement, Canada became a land of reluctant immigrants. Scots displaced by the clearances, Irish displaced by famine, English fleeing industrial poverty, Jews displaced by pogroms, Italians displaced by la miseria. The displacement continues, of course, with later waves of immigrants, but my family enters the picture here.
I think of my great grandfather Giuseppe. A man from Southern Italy constantly exposed to northlands, from the Russian front in WW2 to postwar Montreal, where he worked at the top of a crane loading coal off boats in the canal. Those old Montreal winters, regularly hitting 40 below, wind picking up as my great grandfather worked the night shift. He dealt with the cold more steadfastly than most, a 1943 letter from Russia talking about how his “ear was a little frozen but it’s really no matter, they looked after me in the hospital…”. It takes a few generations to make a home, and for that generation home was made by transplanting of whole villages from Italy to North America. Still, as much as Canada would provide opportunity, home remained elsewhere, fading connections maintained by floods of airmail, phone calls, and trinkets exchanged. I think of a card I found in my grandparents’ basement sent by my uncle in Italy, three olive leaves taped to the inside. A world of associations and longings grafted onto that olive tree.
