Between Enzo and the Universe Read online

  “You never answered me.” Peter cleared his throat. “Does God ever respond?”

  “I do not talk to God.” I sighed, a blue plume of smoke bursting from my mouth. “Not really.”

  “Who do you talk to?”

  “I talk to the universe,” I said, lifting my head, refusing to look weak or unsure of my answer. “Because all of this, all of these things,” I gestured vaguely, “life is not between God and me. It is between the universe and me. I do not pray to a singularity; I pray to all things. I call it God, but it is bigger than that.”

  “Something bigger than God?” Peter asked, no hint of mocking in his tone.

  “God is all things.” I shrugged. “I have asked the universe to be good to my family. To my grandmother, my father, my sister, my mother, and my brother. I have asked it to help me find my way in this life. I ask it to look over and guide those who need it. I ask it to be kind to everyone. That is what I do when I am praying.”

  For the space of several breaths, Peter just stared at me. We continued smoking our cigarettes, flicking the ashes into the wind so that they might be carried away from the entrance of the church. After a few minutes, Peter knocked the end of his cigarette off and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. He was shoving the cigarette butt into the pocket of his jeans as I mimicked his actions, making sure that my cigarette was extinguished properly before shoving the butt into my pocket. Finally, Peter looked over at me once more.

  “Have you gotten a response?”

  “I do not want to talk about this anymore.”

  The response was a little sharper, a little bit more heated than I had intended, but the intention was correct either way. Speaking about God with Peter was not something that I wanted to do after we had experienced such a nice dinner. Both of us had eaten until we were barely able to waddle away from The Lazy Duck, smiling and laughing, speaking of beautiful memories, on our way to the chapel. I did not want my religion or God to ruin such a good time. They had already ruined enough things for me. Before Peter could make a comment about my pointed tone and my lack of tact, I affixed a smile to my face and slid my hands into the pockets of my new coat.

  “Would you like to see the basilica?” I asked brightly, as though this would be the most exciting experience of Peter’s life.

  “The basilica?”

  “Notre-Dame?”

  “Like the one in Paris?” His head fell to the side, and he grinned oddly.

  “Non. Not exactly.” I laughed softly.

  “What is the difference?”

  “Geography?” I teased, and Peter laughed. “Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal did not become a basilica until near the end of the last century. It was merely considered a church for a very long time. Notre-Dame in Paris is much older, and it is a cathedral—Notre-Dame de Paris.”

  “Oh.” He frowned. “What does Basilique Notre-Dame mean, anyway?”

  “Basilica of Our Lady,” I said. “It is blessed in the name of the Virgin Mary. Just as Notre-Dame de Paris is Our Lady of Paris.”

  “Lot of Catholic stuff.” Peter gave an exaggerated shiver. “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  I smiled at his comical behavior. “It is very pretty at night. Even if you are not Catholic.”

  “Will you hold my hand while we walk?”

  Exhaling gently, I met his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  Peter crooked his head to the side sharply with a smile.

  “Then let’s go.”

  The Things We Are Forced to Forgive

  Montreal had been our new home for less than a year when I found myself searching my father out in our new house. Transitioning from French schools to Québec schools had not been nearly as seamless as my parents had led me to believe it would be. A shared language is not sufficient to consider two countries’ cultures all that similar. Maybe if I had been merely white without exotic-looking eyes, students at my new school would have more readily accepted me. There wouldn’t have been the whispers and snickers on the first day, or the elbows jabbed into my ribs, or the toes of shoes pushed into the back of my knee on the second day. I would have had friends to have break and meal periods with instead of finding a secluded area to avoid all human contact during those times. Other children—and even the teachers—enjoyed mocking the way I pronounced things in both French and English during classes.

  Teachers would do this under the guise of frivolity and creating examples of how we could all improve our speech. Fellow students didn’t depend on artifice to cover up their rudeness. They were proud of their bullying.

  French, though a language shared by both France and Québec (and other countries and provinces), has subtle—and sometimes even significant—differences in usage between the two places. Just as the people of Britain and the people of the United States pronounce things differently, even simple words like “water,” the people of Québec have molded our shared language to their own taste during years of separation from France. It is neither bad nor good that this has happened, it is just simply fact that a province that once belonged to a country, and separated by an ocean, will start to differentiate itself. Language is one of the first things that a province or territory will use in order to show its individuality.

  Language was one of the first reasons that the other students in my class did not like me, or, at best, ignored me. Being Caucasian, like a lot of them, was not good enough since my eyes told the tale of my differentness. Often, I would be asked when I was going back to “where I came from.” This would prove confusing at first since I had never known any other home besides France, regardless of what people saw in my facial features. I had never known the exotic landscapes or ecosystems of a country nearly ten-thousand kilometers from where I had been born and spent most of my life up until that time. Only two things connected me to my ethnic heritage—the part that was not strictly French and white—and that was my eyes—and my grandmother. One was something I had no say over, and the other chose not to do anything to provide me an education in my cultural and ethnic heritage. It was a frustrating thing, being “other,” but not knowing exactly what that meant.

  Never before our move to Montreal had I daydreamed of a land I had never known, but upon starting school in my new homeland, I found myself falling off into reverie multiple times throughout the school day. The library was a respite from the cruelty of school because there I could read about this almost mythical foreign land. Then I could daydream about mangrove forests and coral reefs, rolling plains and seagrass beds, lowland and upland mountains, monsoons and marshes and moist forests populated by exotic birds and reptiles. In my daydreams, my grandmother and I traveled Cambodia together, carefree and barefoot, mud sinking between our toes and local street food in our bellies as we held hands and breathed the thick, humid air. Somehow, I always skipped over all of the information about upheaval and strife in the country’s history when I learned and dreamed about this land that somehow had a significant role in my life but also meant almost nothing to me.

  Asking a person to personally connect to a cultural heritage that they have been separated from by distance, time, and silence is tantamount to torture. It leaves a person feeling half-fulfilled, half-realized, and perpetually confused about their place in the world. It is a cruelty of the highest order, expecting someone who has been denied an education about themselves to connect to that thing an education would have provided. It is like having a limb removed but never knowing that you had that limb at the beginning of your life. You just know that something is…not right.

  My grandmother’s funeral was to be held a week after she was found…not awake…that morning I held her hand and prayed. A few days after that morning, while preparations were still being made for my grandmother’s services and interment, I found my father in his study. He was sat at his desk, a book opened on the desktop before him, his head in his hands as he stared down at the pages leafed open before him. Without asking, I knew that he was not actually reading the word
s. In fact, I was certain that he was not even seeing them. This was a moment of quiet reflection, a respite from the poorly timed gleeful screams of Ila, the nervous hand-wringing of Noe, and the sad sobs of my mother. Mostly, he was probably avoiding my stoicism. My non-reaction to what was going on around me was most likely the biggest thorn in my father’s side.

  “Papa?” I did not cross the threshold into his study.

  My father didn’t even jump. He merely sighed.

  “Entrez, Enzo.”

  Cautiously, I shuffled through the doorway of my father’s study, as though I was afraid he would leap up from behind his desk and throttle me for having disturbed his quiet moment of reflection. Ignoring the armchair in front of his desk, I came up alongside it, choosing to stand and look down at my father. I could easily make my exit if my father became angry with me.

  Before my grandmother had even died in her sleep, not long after we had arrived in Montreal as a family, my father had become withdrawn. He did not participate in family activities with any enthusiasm or commitment. He did not approach Noe or Ila for any interaction that was unnecessary, and, after a short while, he started to avoid me as well. I knew that his new job and salary were not what he had expected. My mother hadn’t so much as said so, but she made allusions that this new job was not as well compensated, it was more stressful, and my father had become embittered by our move to this new country that none of us cared for in the least. Quickly, I ascertained that my father’s new job was his version of my new school.

  I wondered if he had any friends.

  “Papa,” I said, “I was wondering…I was thinking that maybe we could take Mamie to Mantes? She would have preferred to be buried there. Next to Pépère. She would have liked that, Papa.”

  For the longest of moments, my father just stared up at me, his head still cradled in his hands. My hands began to sweat, and my spine seemed to be sliding down my back and trying to find a way out of my body through my behind. My father, so quiet and severe, made my blood turn to ice. I expected him to round the desk and cuff me on my ears, to shake me and call me a “stupid boy” or some other insult. Instead, he laid his hands on his desk, his fingers interlocking as he stared across that infinity of inches between us.

  “I never wanted to be a father.”

  “Puh-papa?”

  “My mother loved you more than anyone in this family.” My father stated evenly, emotionlessly. “Including me. I will never forgive you for that, Enzo.”

  As though I had actually been punched, my stomach muscles constricted, physically causing me to hunch for the briefest of seconds as all of the air left my lungs.

  “Your mother has cancer.” My father said dismissively. “And I am not well. We do not have the time or money to take your grandmother to Mantes. She will be buried here. Dans cet enfer.”

  In this hell. That was what my father thought of Montreal. Our new homeland. Or maybe that was what he thought of our new home. I had neither the strength nor the desire to ask for clarification. My stomach was threatening to convulse again, but do more than make me hunch over.

  “Yes…papa.”

  I turned to leave, my father’s words ringing, not just in my ears, but through my entire body, sinking into my soul. Approaching my mother immediately with questions about what my father had said about her health was out of the question. Thinking of how my father hated me for his failure to nurture his relationship with his mother was all I could do. Now that his mother was dead, there was no rectifying an egregious oversight on his part. So, someone had to take the blame.

  Though, I suppose that this bothered me little compared to his nonchalant statement about never wanting to be a father. Certainly, this stung for me, as his only biological child, but it hurt me more to realize that Noe and Ila had still not found two parents who wanted them. I could have marched into my father’s study once more, demanded to know why he had bothered to have me if I was expected to be such a burden. Then I could have demanded to know why my mother and he had continued to add to the family by choice if it was not agreed upon by both parties. I could have demanded many things. I could have kicked his desk, shoved over his armchair, swung at him wildly, demanding to know why he mocked my pain by contributing more to what was becoming an insurmountable mountain. Instead, I silently closed his study door, letting him steep in the bitterness he had surrounded himself with like the many books on his shelves.

  Sometimes, the only way to repay unnecessary cruelty is by letting a person fester in it. To let it dampen their spirits and poison what little joy they may possess. Cruel people are often most cruel to themselves…so they do not need others’ help.

  When my father died, not many months later, my mother and Ila were sick at home, both in their beds, trying to rest through their own respective pain. Noe and I were at my father’s bedside in the hospital instead. Noe sat in the corner, staring, wringing his hands. My strong, warm hand clasped my father’s weak, cold hand, and I stared into moist eyes as he stared back into my dry eyes. I didn’t allow myself a single tear. But I forgave him, though he was unable to indicate that he had heard me. I didn’t forgive him because he deserved it. I forgave him because it was something I believed I deserved. For, without knowing it, I had taken on some of my father’s bitterness myself. I had allowed his anger and sorrow to shroud my memories of my grandmother in a veil of uncertainty. That was an unacceptable thing for me to allow to continue. So, I let go of it. Just as I let my father’s limp hand slide out of mine after telling the universe that I hoped he would see my grandmother now.

  In the span of a family’s history, there are secrets and lies. Hidden jealousies and angers. Fears and frustrations and bitterness. And they remain hidden until a catalyst, usually loss, brings them to light. One family member, for fear of exposing themselves as human and vulnerable, will not say the things they need to say, to ask for the things they need to ask for…for whatever reason. A son may not ask his mother to be more affectionate towards him. A mother will not ask her son if she has been a good mother. A son won’t tell his father that one sentence decimated his soul, which could only be rebuilt over years of practicing forgiveness. The reasons for these things do not matter. The fact that they are done does. My father allowed his soul to be destroyed because he had been unable to tell his mother that he felt he was not loved enough. My soul was provisionally destroyed by my father verbally striking out due to his grief. The details of why the timeline of a family includes these landmines are lost in the shrapnel and smoke left by fractured souls. Reasons and details will not fix anything. Forgiveness will.

  I made sure—demanded—that my father would be buried next to his mother. It was my first big step toward forgiveness.

  Hopefully, in the grace that comes with death, Heaven had two people who were beginning to repair any fractures that remained in their souls. And, maybe, a new pair of feet learned to love being dirty.

  Basilique Notre-Dame de Montreal

  The basilica was lit up, Gothic Revival towers looming down from either side of the building onto Notre-Dame Street West as we stood at the corner of Saint Sulpice Street. Stained glass windows depicting religious moments in the history of Montreal were lit cheerfully. One of the first things Peter had mentioned as he stood before the basilica, finally getting over the grandeur of it all, was that the scenes in the windows did not appear to come from The Bible stories with which he was familiar. Explaining that the scenes were the religious history of the city, as opposed to those depicted in The Bible, he accepted this at face value. Varying shades of blues, reds, purples, silvers, and golds sparkled out at us as we stood there, both of us with differing thoughts about what the basilica meant to us. For Peter, it was a historical and architectural wonder. For me, it was the grace of God, though I felt the pull less and less the older that I became.

  “Jesus.” Peter sighed as he looked up at the towers on either side of the building, then realized what he had said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
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  “All Catholics do it.” I chuckled. “We just have to act like we are offended when others do it so that we are still good Catholics.”

  “Well?”

  “How dare you?” I gasped.

  Peter laughed.

  Our hands were still clasped, our fingers laced together as we stood outside of the basilica, though I knew my religion would not approve.

  “Your hands are cold,” Peter said.

  He moved so that he was standing in front of me and grabbed my other hand with his, then brought both of mine to his face. Peter cupped my hands between his and leaned forward, blowing hot air into that bubble of flesh he created. I stared down at Peter, unsure of what to say as the warmth of his breath took the ache from my fingers. His eyes were on our hands as he began working on making me more comfortable, but soon, his eyes were on mine as he blew against my hands and began rubbing them with his own. There was something in my gut, and maybe in lower places, too, that twitched as our eyes connected. Peter stopped blowing, then brought my hands to his face, pressing his lips against them briefly, an ephemeral kiss before letting go of them.

  “You,” I stated hoarsely, then cleared my throat, “you are very handsome.”

  “Not as handsome as you.”

  I had to look down so that the flush of my cheeks was not on full display.

  “Do you think somewhere nearby sells coffee?” Peter asked, letting me have my dignity. “I think you could use a warm drink.”

  “There is a place there.” I pointed awkwardly in the direction of a shop further down the street, my eyes still down. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Coffee would be amazing right now,” Peter said. “What better way to view the basilica than with a hot cup of coffee, right?”