Black Bird by Michel Basilieres

grace that poured out of these French writers and laystill and tranquil on the page, as if warm in their beds, while the storm raged, impotent, outside.
    When it pleased him, he was so relaxed in the act of reading that he lost track of the words themselves. He didn’t see the printed pages but saw right into the action of the text, not as if looking at images or as if dreaming, but as if the pages were fields of space in which another kind of existence held sway; an existence that engulfed him as completely and convincingly as reality, and one subject only to the powers of the words themselves. Adjectives tumbled into one another, displacing sedentary nouns; modifiers soothed and slackened the sharp verbs; metaphors invisibly bridged the gap between pages; phrases and tropes ran circles around subjects.
    Briefly, a pang of guilt crossed Jean-Baptiste’s mind as he remembered he was reading English translations. Time and again he’d regretted not being master of his paternal tongue. Time and again he’d wondered if, as much as he identified with these interpreted French words, wouldn’t he be so much more consumed by them in the original? Ironic, then, that he was so close to and so comfortable with the English language that when reading its writers, he could spot in an instant, in only a phrase, in merely a few words of a sentence, all of the author’s conceits, all of the author’s frustrated hours poured into an attempt to look at ease and in command of the broad, swaggering, American tongue, but tripping over his own idiom by bending his tools to insignificant subjects and overworked commonplaces.
    No wonder it was so hard for his own works to find their way into American, Canadian or even local journals. For not only had he no desire to write in the acceptable North American manner, but he realized he had no desire to read those works either. That no matter how much attention these works received, no matter how highly they were praised, by no matter what authorities, they still seemed to him sterile, empty, somehow not genuine. It was as if all those involved in the enterprise—the publishers, the writers, the reviewers and even the readers—were somehow fooling themselves. As if they were all engaged in a mutual hallucination of meaning.
    What a funny, awkward place to stand, between two languages, as if he had one foot on each rail of a train’s track. He admitted: he disliked novels written in English, but he couldn’t read those written in French.
    Mother tongue English, father tongue French. Both solitudes. English was feminine, welcoming, mothering—but also guttural, Germanic, a precise and at the same time crude language full of words and phrases stolen from others to shore up its own metaphorical poverty. French was the father: always disappointed, always driving, always stern, always ambiguous, always fighting to beat down the Oedipus in the son—but at the same time, French was so fluid, so romantic, so Latin and Mediterranean, so sunshine and Eros.
    In the greenhouse, lost in
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, among the towering palms and lush undergrowth, with the rich, sweet smell of the earth and themoist, warm air enveloping him, he was sheltered from the Arctic winds battering the city, from the droning growl of the heavy plows, and from the cloying and musty smells of Aline’s heavy cooking.

Since it was now an established fact that Mother’s friends would visit several times a week, Father made the effort to put the front parlour into a condition to receive guests. The furniture was removed, the floor swept and washed, the imitation oriental rug unrolled after so many months, and the nesting spiders relocated into oblivion. Finally, the furniture made its return, in a new arrangement supervised by Aline, who swooped down upon this chance to make a mark of her own on the house and revealed a startling capacity for self-assertion. She even suggested a new renovation project, that a door