Je me souviens

Last week I found myself in the hospital emergency room of the Université Laval, in Quebec City. There was a certain irony to the proceedings as I had attended that university more than three decades previously, and this was the first time since then that I had been back to the lovely citadel city of the St. Lawrence.

My eleven-year-old daughter was choking. Not exactly choking, but in extreme discomfort. A piece of steak had lodged itself in her esophagus – thankfully not her windpipe – and she couldn’t swallow anything. Worse, she had to spit up saliva about once or twice a minute.

Her sister and I had tried everything. Sticking fingers down her throat. The Heimlich. Giving her a hot bath… Nothing doing, so here it was, one in the morning, and we were in Laval’s emergency room, a clean, spacious, efficient place, a monument, in fact, to socialized medicine.

The nurse who received us was a standard-issue French-Canadian sexpot. She sized up the situation, and before checking us in, told me to go to a vending machine and buy a Pepsi. Sometimes Pepsi works on these kind of things, she explained.

Now, for those of you not up on the arcana of intra-Canadian hostility, “Pepsi” is a very derogatory term used by Anglo-Quebecers to demean French Canadians, since the latter are supposed to have a love of the stuff. (The French, it should be said, give as good as they get: tête carrée, literally “square-head” or blockhead, is a term of non-endearment used for Anglos, in part due to their uptight, play-by-the-rules, straight, boy-scout, boring demeanor as viewed by the Latin, loose, sensual, fun-loving Québécois.) There are a lot of other epithets hurled back and forth between the two sides, but let’s not get Belgian here.

So the nurse told me to get a Pepsi for medicinal purposes. As cultural stereotypes run, this was akin to going to a Dublin hospital for psoriasis and being told to go buy a bottle of whiskey.

I spent a loonie and bought the Pepsi, chuckling. It didn’t work. Eventually a doctor came by and with breezy ease managed to induce my brave little daughter to upchuck. All was then well with the world.

Immediately, we then left the world of medicine and returned to the world of Quebec, which is to say, language: how is it, the doctor asked, clearly curious, that you three Rhode Islanders all speak French? Two nurses, obviously having bitten their tongues over the same question, came over to hear the answer. All three of us looked like week-old ratatouille – it was two-thirty now – so I skipped most of the biographical details and explained our connection to France, where both my children had been born and spent time in school.

It was the third time we had heard that question in two days. Ah, Quebec. And now, thanks to the doctor at the Université Laval, an unbidden memory came back to me.

When I was student at Laval, Quebec was living interesting times. A separatist government had just been elected, causing panic elsewhere in Canada and sparking the corporate stampede from Montreal to Toronto, which subsequently replaced Montreal as the country’s most populous and most important city. At the time, politics were dominated by two brilliant French Canadians: the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who shoved bilingualism down the throats of a recalcitrant English Canada, wrote a new constitution and repatriated it from Westminster and, in a nifty cosmopolitan move deplored by many traditionalists, switched the entire country to the metric system.

The other great figure was the dimunitive, chain-smoking, plainspoken, charismatic René Lévesque, the leader of the separatists and the premier of the province of Quebec. With these two dynamic Québécois in charge, la merde was invariably going to hit the fan.

So there was a referendum on Quebec independence in 1980. Then a federal referendum in 1992. Then another Quebec referendum in 1995. These campaigns and the French-language-only laws enacted in Quebec sucked all the air out of Canadian political debate; weary Anglos called the whole business: the neverendum. In both Quebec votes, the indépendantistes were defeated, but only very very narrowly. The hinterland, and Quebec City, voted yes in massive majorities, but the city of Montreal, with its Anglos and other ethnic communities, and, most important, the majority French-speakers worried about jobs and the cosmopolitan nature of their home town, voted no.

But all that still lay in the future when I was at Laval. At my time there, the entire country was walking on egg-shells, waiting for Lévesque to make his move. Hope and yearning could be seen elsewhere, on the larger stage: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were meeting at Camp David (speaking English, the Quebec press sourly noted), so perhaps, it was thought naively, this was an era of sea change. Perhaps Quebec would, indeed, become its own country.

As a tête carrée, I kept a low, timid profile. My French was good enough to understand lectures and do the required reading, but my Anglo trap remained firmly shut in classes where all the other students were voluble Québécois. Only once, I should say here in fairness, was a beer poured over me for being from Ontario.

In January, I had a meeting with my professor of a Nouvelle France history class, a very prominent French-Canadian historian who, for reasons that shall soon become clear, I will not name. He was a youthful forty-something who rather bewilderingly led our conversation toward the founding charters of the Université Laval. He reminded me in florid French that Laval was the second-oldest university in North America (after Harvard), but, he added, its charter had been amended many times.

What the hell is he talking about, I thought.

Eventually, it became clear. Laval was officially a bilingual university, he said meaningfully. I want you to hand your essay into me… in English.

What the…?

It took some hemming and hawing, but eventually he issued a version of the professorial complaint that has echoed through the halls of academia since professors were first invented. His variant: I want to see if you, an English-Canadian, write as wretchedly in your mother tongue as my French-Canadian students do in theirs.

And, he warned conspiratorially in this Trudeau-Lévesque egg-shell time, you mustn’t let the other students know you’re writing your essay in English.

In the emergency room, as my saved-from-strangulation daughter finished off the warm Pepsi, I even remembered what the subject of the essay was: mariages à la gaumine. These were a ploy that frustrated the Catholic Church in New France. All that was needed to make a marriage legitimate was the blessing of a priest. So, canny, penniless peasants working the farmland of seventeenth-century Quebec, who were unwilling to shell out money to the church (and were anticlerical, in any event), would stand up at the end of Sunday mass, just as the priest turned toward the congregation and blessed it, and then hurriedly recite their marriage vows and – voilà! – they were wed.

What’s not to like?

So as we got into the taxi outside the hospital, I thought about how I had researched that paper. I loved the subject. To hoots of disbelief, I told my friends about it. They were all Senegalese exchange students, as foreign to the Québécois of that time as I was. I spent a lot of time with my African pals, hanging out, drinking O’Keefe beer (we called ourselves les philosophes O’Keefe), eating couscous, and talking, when women weren’t present, about women. There were lots of cultural hilarities: “Stephen, is it true that at the sports center locker room, the men walk around completely naked (tout nu)?” Yes. “C’est pas possible!”

Another arose from the weather. Some time in mid-January, I realized that my Senegalese friends had, since early December, not gone outdoors. An explanation is required here: although I hailed from Ottawa, the second-coldest capital city in the world (after Ulan Bator, Mongolia), even I was shocked by how absolutely polar a Quebec City winter coud be. The Senegalese, like most of the student body, kept to the asbestos-lined tunnels linking all the buildings of Laval’s windswept suburban campus. They didn’t dare go out.

But one evening, at their dormitory, we knocked on doors and moved up and down floors, in a scavenger hunt for hats, gloves, scarves and coats. The Québécois who lent us their clothes laughed and, none too discreetly, admired the stunning Dakar beauty who had been wisely delegated as our spokeswoman.

So a dozen of us stood in the lobby at midnight, all bundled up, a kaleidoscope of wool and color. It was a starry, moonless night, perfectly still. The temperature was about thirty below zero. I warned my companions to take shallow breaths only. And to feel the hairs in their nostrils freeze. That’s when you know it’s really cold.

I took them outside. A white plain stretched before us. Eyes opened wide, incredulous. Brilliant white smiles. Peals of laughter. “C’est pas possible! C’est pas possible!” The beautiful girl took off a glove and ran her hand over a snowdrift. And then shouted in triumphant disbelief. Her friends gathered around her and did the same.

They might as well have been on the moon.

And we were all of us so utterly foreign, in this strange and wonderful place.

The taxi flashed by the main campus of the university. My daughters were slumped together in the back seat, already asleep. We arrived at our hotel.

A few days after the moonwalk, the professor came over to me after class in the hallway. There were a few shaggy students hanging about, smoking listlessly (this was back in the day, remember), casually appraising us.

“Remember, Monsieur O’Shea,” he said in French. “In the language of Sadat and Begin.”

I nodded and he smiled. The others looked on, uncomprehending.

Vive le Québec.