Bilingual Being Read Online Free PDF Page B

serious. This is happiness for him, I can tell. Being far away – gone.
    My mother is seated in the middle of the boat, casting in the opposite direction. They have to coordinate quite a lot and watch the wind if they cast at the same time so the lines won’t get tangled. If they do, my father’s fury is unleashed with the most menacing surprise. But my mother’s very good at this sport – an award-winner among their friends for being able to land a fly inside a target – and she knows my father better than anyone. Besides, she’s learned from the lessons of her heritage to negotiate the difficulties of men and survive on her own terms. So most of the afternoon is pleasant enough. Of course, unlike my father, who wears a sensible checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a fishing vest pricked with lures, my mother is topless. «Pourquoi pas?» she says. «El Bon Dieu a d’ja vu toute ça.» [God’s already seen it all.] No doubt her breasts do much to prevent my father’s fury, to tame him like a savage baby. But like I said, she’s an expert, much better at this game than I’ll ever be.
    Unlike my father, my mother’s hardly silent as she chit-chats with the fish, calling them silly or handsome, luring them with her promises, «Viens-t’en, gard’ donc si c’-tu une belle mouche, ça!» [Come on, look at what a beautiful fly this is!] It is, like all things for her, an opportunity for festiveness. And she thinks nothing of the mosquitoes that land on her. «Y m’ont tellement piqué d’ja qu’ej goûte p’us bon. J’ai d’l’immunité.» [They’ve stung me so much in the past that I don’t taste good (to them) anymore. I have immunity.] I actually think she’s right about her hard-won immunity – and that there’s a dark truth here.
    For myself, I have a disgusting sense of those big breasts. My poor mother. She’s got a beautiful body – generously top-ended, in the style of her rivals for my father’s admiration, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren. In town, her look is surprisingly like my Barbies, with identical proportions and hair-dos. And here she is just being free and sexy, after all, a real woman of the Sixties. Yet all I care about is that those breasts won’t come near me, that they won’t accidentally touch me. I try to keep my face turned away so I won’t notice when my father touches them “accidentally” when he reaches for the tackle next time. The giggles give the gesture away, though.
    Meanwhile, here I am with my knees crunched up at the bow, keeping company with the Javel container, top cut off and filled withcement, that I can barely see twenty feet below us at the end of a long horsetail rope. I’m reading again – Nancy Drew, teaching myself to be a detective. Or else I’m running my fingers in the water to make rows of tiny Vs. By this point the Elder has moved to the country, the Priest and the Cousin are living near Montreal, and my neighbour has left for post-secondary studies. But it really doesn’t matter to me what they’re doing because I’ve already forgotten almost all of it – or else given up thinking about it. And as the years pass, what faint hold this material has on my reality slips further into the watery depths of my unconscious. Nothing comes of it except at the absolute back of my mind and in my dreams. Then, from about eighteen to forty-two, I’ll recall nothing – not a thing – about being younger than nine or ten. I’ll become a quiet girl, withdrawn and studious, as the true self recedes and goes to sleep somewhere deep inside. Sleeping Beauty with no prince.
    My job in the boat today is to unhook the fish as humanely as possible. I think I’m pretty good at it, though the fish might say otherwise. Later, it’ll also be my job to slice them open with a