Rodney Whitaker: The Main

Montreal, November

Evening on the Main, and the shops are closing. Display bins have been pulled back off the sidewalks; corrugated shutters clatter down over store windows. One or two lights are kept on as a deterrent to burglary; and empty cash registers are left ajar so that thieves won’t smash them open pointlessly.

The bars remain open, and the cafés; and loudspeaker cones over narrow music stalls splash swatches of noise over sidewalks congested with people, their necks pulled into collars, their shoulders tight against the dank cold. The young and the busy lose patience with the crawling, faceless Wad. They push and shoulder their way through, confusing the old, irritating the idle. The mood of the crowd is harried and brusque; tempers have been frayed by weeks of pig weather, with its layers of zinc cloud, moist and icy, pressing down on the city, delaying the onset of winter with its clean snows and taut blue skies. Everyone complains about the weather. It isn’t the cold that gets you, it’s the damp.

The swarm coagulates at street corners and where garbage cans have been stacked on the curb. The crowd surges and tangles, tight-packed but lonely. Tense faces, worried faces, vacant faces, all lit on one side by the garish neon of nosh bars, saloons, cafés.

In the window of a fish shop there is a glass tank, its sides green with algae. A lone carp glides back and forth in narcotized despair.

Schoolboys in thick coats and short pants, bookbags strapped to their backs, snake through the crowd, their faces pinched with cold and their legs blotchy red. A big kid punches a smaller one and darts ahead. In his attempt to catch up and retaliate, the small boy steps on a man’s foot. The man swears and cuffs him on the back of the head. The boy plunges on, tears of embarrassment and anger in his eyes.

Fed up with the jams and blockages, some people step out into the street and squeeze between illegally parked cars and the northbound traffic. Harassed truck drivers lean on their air horns and curse, and the braver offenders swear back and throw them the fig. The swearing, the shouting, the grumbling, the swatches of conversation are in French, Yiddish, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek—but the lingua franca is English. The Main is a district of immigrants, and greenhorns in Canada quickly learn that English, not French, is the language of success. Signs in the window of a bank attest to the cosmopolitan quality of the street:

And there is a worn street joke: “I wonder who in that bank can speak all those languages?”

“The customers.”

Commerce is fluid on the Main, and friable. Again and again, shops open in a flurry of brave plans and hopes; frequently they fail, and a new man with different plans and the same hopes start business in the same shop. There is not always time to change the sign. Retail and wholesale fabrics are featured in a store above which the metal placard reads: PAINTS.

Some shops never change their proprietors, but their lines of goods shift constantly, in search of a profitable coincidence between the wants of the customer and the availability of wholesale bargains. In time, the shopkeepers give up chasing phantom success, and the waves of change subside, leaving behind a random flotsam of wares marking high tides in wholesale deals and low tides in customer interest. Within four walls you can buy camping gear and berets, batteries and yard goods, postcards and layettes, some slightly damaged or soiled, all at amazing discounts. Such shops are known only by the names of their owners; there is no other way to describe them.

And there are stores that find the task of going out of business so complicated that they have been at it for years.

The newspaper seller stands beside his wooden kiosk, his hands kept warm under his canvas change belt. He rocks from foot to foot as he jiggles his coins rhythmically. He never looks up at the passers-by. He makes change to hands, not to faces. He mutters his half of an unending conversation, and he nods, agreeing with himself.

Two people press into a doorway and talk in low voices. She looks over his shoulder with quick worried glances. His voice has the singsong of persuasion through erosion.

“Come on, what do you say?”

“Gee, I don’t know. I don’t think I better.”

“What you scared of? I’ll be careful.”

“Oh, I better be getting home.”

“For crying out loud, you do it for the other guys!”

“Yeah, but…”

“Come on. My place is just around the corner.”

“Well… no, I better not”

“Oh, for crying out loud! Go home then! Who wants you?”

An old Chasidic Jew with peyiss, shtreimel level on his head, long black coat scrupulously brushed, returns home from work, maintaining a dignified pace through the press of the crowd. Although others push and hurry, he does not At the same time, he avoids seeming too humble, for, as the saying has it, “too humble is half proud.” So he walks without rushing, but also without dawdling. A gentle and moderate man.

Always he checks the street sign before turning off toward his flat in a low brick building up a side street. This although he has lived on that street for twenty-two years. Prudence can’t hurt.

“The Main” designates both a street and a district. In its narrowest definition, the Main is Boulevard St. Laurent, once the dividing line between French and English Montreal, the street itself French in essence and articulation. An impoverished and noisy street of small shops and low rents, it naturally became the first stop for waves of immigrants entering Canada, with whose arrival “the Main” broadened its meaning to include dependent networks of back streets to the west and east of the St. Laurent spine. Each succeeding national tide entered the Main bewildered, frightened, hopeful. Each successive group clustered together for protection against suspicion and prejudice, concentrating in cultural ghettos of a few blocks’ extent.

They found jobs, opened shops, had children; some succeeded, some failed; and they in turn regarded the next wave of immigrants with suspicion and prejudice.

The boundary between French and English Montreal thickened into a no man’s land where neither language predominated, and eventually the Main became a third strand in the fiber of the city, a zone of its own consisting of mixed but unblended cultures. The immigrants who did well, and most of the children, moved away to English-speaking west Montreal. But the old stayed, those who had spent their toil and money on the education of children who are now a little embarrassed by them. The old stayed; and the losers; and the lost.

Two young men sit in a steamy café, looking out onto the street through a window cleared of mist by a quick palm swipe. One is Portuguese, the other Italian; they speak a melange of Joual slang and mispronounced English. Both wear trendy suits of uncomfortable cut and unserviceable fabric. The Portuguese’s suit is gaudy and cheap; the Italian’s is gaudy and expensive.

“Hey, hey!” says the Portuguese. “What you think of that? Not bad, eh?”

The Italian leans over the table and catches a quick glimpse of a girl clopping past the café in a mini, platform boots, and a bunny jacket. “Not so bad! Beau pétard, hein?”

“And what you think of those foufounes?”

“I could make her cry. I take one of those in each hand, eh? Eh?” In robust mime, the Italian holds one in each hand and moves them on his lap. “She would really cry, I’m tell you that.” He glances up at the clock above the counter. “Hey, I got to go.”