Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read Online Free PDF Page B

chronologically, and dusted off the cobwebs. Now I remember an excursion to the salt mines of Sodom, where the walls looked like the inside of an icebox dripping frozen tears; a huge canvas depicting a sea battle on the wall of a Venice palazzo that reeked of honeyed wax; the donkey ride in the Luxembourg Gardens, while loud birds sang in thetrees; a train stopping at a small German station and a gift of tiny wooden animals painted in fierce bright colours; a walk up a mountain path following the Stations of the Cross and being told the story of Christ as if it were another of my gory fairy tales. Images of Buenos Aires are from much later, and lack the same intensity in colour, smell and sound; they begin when I was seven and my family had returned to the city. But by then I was conscious of remembering.
    In order to migrate to a certain place, you must leave another. This truism is not as simple as it seems. Nothing tells you at what precise point departure ends and arrival begins; what goodbyes are forever, what street signs you are seeing for the last time, what doors you have locked behind you and will never open again. Once your back is turned, the landscape shifts, objects lose their shape, people take on other voices and other faces. In your presence, all change is gradual, almost imperceptible, as the minutes gnaw at the hours; the colours fade, the sounds grow fainter, so that the transformation itself becomes a familiar process. But in your absence, change is vertiginous. You believe you hold a place in your memory, fast and immutable, like those miniature scenes under a plasticdome where nothing but the weather changes with a brisk shake of your hand; but the very instant the place is out of your sight it is no longer yours, the way you knew it. The place you think you remember melts and shimmers in your mind’s eye, like the ruins of a city on the bottom of a lake; while back where you left it the place grows, flourishes, sprouts feathers or tentacles, becomes unrecognizable. So while you think, with more or less certainty, that you are leaving a place, the place is leaving you too, receding into itself, drifting away from you, irretrievably, decisively, unfaithful at the very moment of farewell, long before you have admitted to yourself that this time, maybe, it is forever. You have not quite left, but you are no longer there where you once were, in that place you thought of as home. The place itself is now another.
    I remember the shock of realizing, when I returned for a short spell to Buenos Aires a few years after leaving in the late sixties, that the house to which we had moved when I was seven, in which I had grown up while attending school for eleven years, where I had spent my entire adolescence and had celebrated my twentieth birthday, that this house had been torn down and nothing, not a trace of it remained. The cobbled street along which the soda-water vendor would rattle his horse-drawn cart,laden with blue and green glass siphons that glittered like ornaments on a Christmas tree, had been covered with smooth asphalt; the corner building, which was the signpost signalling arrival after the long bus ride home, had been turned into bleak offices; the pharmacy across from us, where a gargantuan nurse once stitched my knee after a nasty fall, had disappeared; the small bookstore down the way which sold the novels of Jules Verne in bright yellow covers, and notebooks in which I once wrote grandiose epic poems and tragic plays, was no longer there. I had been gone for only three or four years, barely long enough to wonder if I would ever return, and already everything was different, alien, meaningless, so that the question of coming back became irrelevant, since there was nothing familiar left to which to return.
    There was little to be done but accept: I too would wander, like those characters I had envied in my storybooks. There would be new faces, new foods, new vistas at the end of new streets, new