A Writer's World (43 page)

So it goes in Ottawa – demonstrators given harmless leeway, police polite, confrontation avoided and free opinion maintained. The protesters went and chanted a few mantras outside the embassy door –
Reagan Reagan is
no good, send him back to Hollywood
– and, having made their point, rather effectively I thought, peaceably dispersed.

Can it be all, this common sense, this universal amiability? Surely not. One must remember that this is the capital of compromise – or of equivocation if you prefer. Canada is permanent compromise, it seems to me. Province must be balanced against province, languages kept in kilter, immigrants smilingly welcomed, protesters warily tolerated. After a few days in Ottawa I began to think that perhaps some recondite accommodation kept this city itself in balance – that some unwritten compact between the prosaic and the fantastic sustained its bland composure.

I suppose it could be said, actually, that the most interesting thing about Canada is its alliance, whether fortuitous or contrived, between the fearfully dull and the colossally romantic. I dropped in one morning upon the Supreme Court. The cases it was discussing were not very interesting, its judges (two men and a woman) said nothing pithy, the few spectators seemed torpid, the press seats were empty, the room was imposing without being exalting, and I was just about to leave when something astonishing happened. Suddenly the bench was bathed in an ethereal light, and simultaneously there appeared on TV screens ranged down the courtroom an attorney in Winnipeg, Manitoba, assuring Their Lordships, Her Ladyship, too, that his client was without a doubt, under sub-section 22 of the relevant act, entitled to an appeal.

I was witnessing Lex Canadiana – electronic justice, projecting the images of guilt and innocence, truth and falsehood across sixty degrees of longitude to this grey building on the Ottawa bluffs. It was a process, I thought, of truly imperial splendour, and it turned the judges up there, who had until then struck me as a fairly parochial kind of magistracy, into an almost celestial tribune.

So I swung here and there, between poles of ennui and surprise, throughout my stay in Ottawa. It was like being torn (in a considerate way, of course) between moods, and it may surprise the more abjectly diffident of Ottawans to hear that my visit ended most distinctly
con
brio
. This is how it happened:

I am by vocation a wandering swank – I love to walk about the places I am describing as though I own them – and it cannot be said that Ottawa is a town for swanking. Its Ruritanian aspects never get out of
hand, its peculiarities do not generally show, and altogether it is too well-mannered a city for showing off, even to oneself. Besides, when I was there the weather was unusually balmy, making it feel rather less than its most dramatic self, and so even less conducive to delusions of superbia.

But on my very last day in Ottawa the
Citizen
warned us to expect the chilliest day ever experienced for that time of year, in all the recorded annals of the capital's climate. Instantly I sprang out of bed, put on three or four sweaters, and hastened down to the river past the canal locks. Wow, it was cold! I walked briskly along the water's edge, climbed the steps near Queen Victoria's statue, and found myself standing before the central door of Parliament itself, surveying the awakening city before me.

The sun shone. The flag flew with an altogether unaccustomed flourish. The cold stung my cheeks and sharpened my spirits. And in the glory of the morning, there at the very apex of Canada, a mighty sense of swagger seized me. Down the wide steps I went in shameless pride, and the great building rose behind me, and the eternal flame awaited me beside the gates, and all along Wellington Street the towers and turrets saluted as I passed. Nothing seemed ordinary now! As I paraded that bright icy morning through the streets of Ottawa, whistling all the way and blatantly wiping the drips off my nose with my yellow face flannel, it dawned upon me that if this went on too long, and if I were not extremely careful, I might start getting sentimental about the place.

But fortunately I had to catch a midday flight, so it never came to that.

As I waited for my bags at the airport carousel, I considered the faces of my fellow-arrivals. They mostly looked very, very Canadian. Calm, dispassionate, patiently they waited there, responding with only the faintest raising of eyebrows or clenching of gloved fingers to the loudspeaker's apology for the late delivery of baggage owing to a technical fault, edging gently,
almost apologetically inwards when they spotted their possessions emerging from the chute. They looked in complete command of their emotions. They looked well fed, well balanced, well behaved, well intentioned, well organized, and well preserved. Sometimes they spoke to each other in polite monosyllables. Mostly they just waited.

But like a wayward comet through these distinctly fixed stars there staggered ever and again a very different creature: a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired, and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking, and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at those expressionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter. Often she dropped things; she got into a terrible mess trying to get a baggage cart out of its stack (‘You – must – put – money – in – the – slot'. ‘What is slot? How is carriage coming? Slot? What is slot?'); and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements – awful mounds of canvas and split leather – erupting on to the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow-work.

No, I have not invented her – touched her up a little, perhaps, as I have heightened the characteristics of the others, in the interests not so much of art as of allegory. I don't know where she came from, whether she was in Canada to stay or merely to visit her favourite married nephew from the old country, but she represented for me the archetypal immigrant: and she was arriving at the emblematic immigrant destination of the late twentieth century, Toronto, whose citizens are certainly not all quite so self-restrained as those passengers at the airport, but which is nevertheless one of the most highly disciplined and tightly organized cities of the Western world.

I watched that first confrontation with sympathy for both sides: and though I lost sight of the lady as we passed through Customs (I suspect she was involved in some fracas there, or could not undo the knots on her baggage), I often thought of her as we both of us entered Toronto the Good in its sesque– sesqua– sesqui– well, you know, its 150th year of official existence.

There are moments when Toronto offers, at least in the fancy, the black and terrible excitements of immigration in the heyday of the New World. I woke up the very next morning to such a transient revelation. A lowering mist lay over the downtown city, masking the tops of the great buildings, chopping off the CN Tower like a monstrous tree-trunk; and under the cloud the place seemed to be all a-steam with white vapours, spouting, streaming with the wind, or eddying upwards to join the darkness above. Lights shone or flickered through the haze, the ground everywhere was white with snow, and the spectacle suggested to me some vast, marvellous, and fearful cauldron, where anything might happen, where villains and geniuses must walk, where immediate fortunes were surely to be made, where horribly exploited Serbian seamstresses probably lived in unspeakable slums, and towering manufacturers swaggered in huge fur coats out of gold-plated private railway cars.

The mist cleared, the cloud lifted, even the steam subsided as the first spring weather came, and it was not like that at all. Toronto has come late in life to cosmopolitanism – even when I was first here, in 1954, it seemed to me not much less homogeneous than Edinburgh, say – and as a haven of opportunity it is unassertive. No glorious dowager raises her torch over Lake Ontario, summoning those masses yearning to breathe free, and conversely there are no teeming slums or sweatshop ghettos, still less any passionate convictions about new earths and heavens. I heard no trumpet blast, no angel choirs perform, as I took the streetcar downtown.

The promise of Toronto, I presently realized, was promise of a more diffuse, tentative, not to say bewildering kind. On a modest building near the harbour front I happened to notice the names of those entitled to parking space outside: D. Iannuzzi, P. Iannuzzi, H. McDonald, R. Metcalfe and F. Muhammad. ‘What is this place?' I inquired of people passing by. ‘Multicultural TV,' they said, backing away nervously.
‘Multi
-
what
TV?' I said, but they had escaped by then – I had yet to learn that nothing ends a Toronto conversation more quickly than a supplementary question.

Multi-culturalism! I had never heard the word before, but I was certainly to hear it again, for it turned out to be the key word, so to speak, to contemporary Toronto. As
ooh
-
la
-
la
is to Paris, and
ciao
to Rome, and
nyet
to Moscow, and hey you're looking
great
to Manhattan, so multi-culturalism is to Toronto. Far more than any other of the great migratory cities, Toronto is all things to all ethnicities. The melting-pot conception never was popular here, and sometimes I came to feel that Canadian nationality
itself was no more than a minor social perquisite, like a driving licence or a spare pair of glasses. Repeatedly I was invited to try the Malaysian vermicelli at Rasa Sayang, the seafood pierogi at the Ukrainian Caravan, or something Vietnamese in Yorkville, but when I ventured to suggest one day that we might eat Canadian, a kindly anxiety crossed my host's brow. ‘That might be more difficult,' he said.

A whole new civic ambience, it seems, has evolved to give some kind of unity to this determined centrifugalism – I never knew what a heritage language was either, until I came to Toronto – but I soon got used to it all. I hardly noticed the street names in Greek, or the crocodiles of school children made up half and half, it seemed, of East and West Indians. I was as shocked as the next Torontonian, three days into the city, to hear a judge tell a disgraced lawyer that he had betrayed not only the standards of his profession but also the trust of the Estonian community. I was not in the least surprised to see a picture of the Azores as a permanent backdrop for a Canadian TV newscast, or to find the ladies and gentlemen of the German club swaying across my screen in full authenticity of comic hats and
Gemütlichkeit
. ‘My son-in-law is Lithuanian,' a very WASPish materfamilias remarked to me, but I did not bat an eyelid. ‘Only on his father's side, I suppose?' ‘Right, his mother's from Inverness.'

But multi-culturalism, I discovered, did not mean that Toronto was all brotherly love and folklore. On the contrary, wherever I went I heard talk of internecine rivalries, cross-ethnical vendettas, angry scenes at the Metro Guyanese political rally, competing varieties of pierogi, differing opinions about the Katyn massacre, heated debates over Estonian legitimacy, the Coptic succession, or the fate of the Armenians. There turned out to be a darkly conspiratorial side to multi-culturalism. I have never been able to discover any of those writers' hangouts one is told of across the world, where the poets assemble over their beers; but in Toronto I felt one could easily stumble into cafés in which plotters organized distant coups, or swapped heavy anarchist reminiscences.

But this is not the sort of fulfilment I myself wanted of Toronto. I am not very multi-cultural, and what I chiefly yearned for in this metropolis was the old grandeur of the North, its size and scale and power, its sense of wasteland majesty. Fortunately now and then I found it, in between the Afro-Indian takeaway, the Portuguese cultural centre and the memorial to the eminent Ukrainian poet in High Park. Here are a few of the signs and symbols which, at intermittent moments, made me feel I was in the capital of the Ice Kingdom: