the plaza after rain [part iii]

The clouds collage before they break. Rainfall mimicks the footsteps of Plaza walkers, passersby with tightly knotted bags of food as much as with goods. I note my own grief for the Plaza that once was, utterly enchanted by it on first sight, its priestesses in ten-dollar gowns, a salsa class at the recommendation of a friend I made teaching language classes in shiny high rises by McGill, our hands clammy in a non-descript studio, stepping in time with strangers, at least learning to, hoping the studio with its six students and children on the weekends would survive. Diane and I used to meet for food court coffee between classes in the bowels of the Eaton Centre. She’d tell me she was fasting for Jesus. I was always struck by her beauty, you know how people say “struck,” but I felt it then, like her beauty had a physical force that would push me back, a hand grabs the gasping heart, wonder’s equivalent of a jolt. I remember when she said she spoke differently around me because I am white, and I was too young and naïve to understand. I may have even felt hurt. Then she took me to a store upstairs and picked out some five-inch suede boots for a winter poetry gala I was attending for the first time. She had immigrated from Benin, which she said was le plus beau pays du monde. How many times we feel this today, delight tinged with mourning, knowing the good things, the real things, are poised for destruction.

*

Benjamin is tired. We stop back in Lana Café. There’s a teenager watching a video on her phone in the corner. For once, he’s looking directly at me and fog is blooming in the rim of his glasses. He tells me that the arcades of Paris, renowned as images of 19th century industrial luxury, commanded a sense of wonder from their patrons as glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises.[1] It was a past become space in which the crowd saw artificial rain fall on the copper entrails of late-model autos as a demonstration of the quality of the materials, saw wheels turning around in oil, read on small black plaques, in paste-jewel figures, the prices of leather goods and gramophone records and embroidered kimonos.[2] Gladiators wearing orthopedic belts and bandages wound round the white bellies of mannequins, bookshops with manuals of lovemaking beside devotional prints in color, women at the hairdresser’s with petrified coiffures, and enigmatic nooks and crannies were among the features of intrigue evoked alongside even more, such as a dusty bridal veil, naked puppet bodies with bald heads waiting for hairpieces and attire, an empty store with only a printed bill which reads will purchase sets of teeth in gold, in wax and broken, and festoons of bootlaces resembling rolls of licorice.[3] When I first walked the Plaza on my way to a bad first date, I imagined enchanting as a method unique to repositories of unconventional objects and amalgamations of solemn, sequin-clad mannequins made all the more intriguing in their juxtapositions across store displays. I like to imagine, in the multiverse, that I left the bar soon after I arrived to continue to wander the Plaza.

In 2015, the Société de développement commerciale Plaza Saint Hubert (SDC), “tired of painting the posts which held up the awning,”[4] commissioned a group of forty artists to personalize one post each. Victor Varacalli won a prize of $400 for his painting of a colourful sea of people. He said he chose to paint an image of a crowd because of the Plaza’s multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.[5] These gently sloping bodies, tightly knit, and in bright garb are the Plaza’s flâneurs, moseyers all, whose fond ties to the strip create the Plaza’s sense of place. Friends of friends who grew up near the Plaza would talk about it like an old friend, how the merchants were like family, allowing patrons to run tabs, delighting at watching their patrons grow up. One of them, Maria whom I met one evening in a bar on the Plaza, even started to cry describing the “belle présence” of the gentle man who owned a jewellery store. But you can’t continue like that. They raised the rent after the renovations. I think in the news it said they had gone from $2000 a month to $8000 a month. What this painted post largely impressed upon the Plaza visitor, entering from Rue Jean-Talon, was the notion that this was not a solitary or singular space, that there was no designated patron. It also made for a stunning clash when future digital images made by the city at the commencement of the Plaza’s refurbishment project emerged of the pale ghostly bodies they envisioned as soon to be floating along the airy “transformed” Plaza’s walkways.[6]

I’d pass by the Jean Talon entrance to the Plaza each morning on my way to work when I used to rent in the neighbourhood, telling people I lived “near the Plaza” when asked which part of Montreal, now living a little further away, still drawn by the Plaza, making excuses to go there as much as possible, as if it tending to it, stoking it like a vulnerable flame, as if just looking at it will stop it from changing too much, will ensure it remains there for me to tread with my fussy notebook and pen, my too-big Narnia coat from its thrift store, as if the disappearance of spaces such as these could lobotomize our writing, kill art and with it our will to care or find interest in anything that might make us interesting… Am I paranoid? Am I holding the Plaza to too high a standard as the most interesting street in the world, the one that might save us?

Promoting its refurbishment project, developers came up with the slogan ma Plaza se transforme—literally meaning “my Plaza transforms itself.” For the poor translator, this slogan raises a question: Who gets to claim ownership over the Plaza and who is responsible for its transformation if it is indeed transforming itself? What collective perceptual and evaluative schemata are behind the Plaza’s refurbishment project that label it “tacky” and “dilapidated” or “mine” or “yours”—that select with their mouse in some city office what digital bodies will walk its glossy digital sidewalk? The subject area of an outdoor mall, such as the Plaza, might be a retail-oriented field ruled by neoliberal capitalist economic logic in which “growth” is measured as “wealth” which then qualifies what “demographic” of shoppers are wanted, how the different shops are used, how the deeply beloved and deeply loathed kitschy semi-arcade should be advertised, how accessible it should be and for whom.

One day, at the National Library, hunting for Plaza-related literature, I came across a slim volume called Les Rêveries de la Plaza St-Hubert by Nicolas Lévesque. I read it on a train and copied out many of its lines into my pale blue notebook. “Je rêve d’une nation sans nationalisme qui rendrait possible le pluriel, d’une identité qui permettrait de perdre tous les repères familiers. L’avenir de l’illusion. C’est la fiction, l’artifice de l’identité, qui ouvre la possibilité à l’homme de vivre dans l’inquiétante étrangeté du dehors, tel un isolant, un manteau d’hiver un jour de grand froid. Paradoxalement, c’est en renonçant à un vrai soi, à une identité pure, que naît un Moi ou un Nous fabriqué, conscient de son aspect fabriqué. Et l’étrangeté a besoin du familier. Pour habiter le monde.”[7] I dream of a nation without nationalism that would make plurality possible, of an identity that would allow us to lose all familiar landmarks. The future of illusion. It is fiction, the artifice of identity, that opens up the possibility for humans to live in the disturbing strangeness of the outside, like an insulator, a winter coat on a very cold day. Paradoxically, it is by renouncing a true self, a pure identity, that a fabricated ‘I’ or ‘We’ is born, conscious of its fabricated aspect. And strangeness needs the familiar. To inhabit the world.  I would later meet Lévesque outside the Plaza’s café-cum-curiosity shop tying up my bike, and also find myself “struck” by his youthful vigour, his kind smile. His long, clean hair gave him an adventurous look and I felt like I was meeting someone who had perfected himself for travel. A philosopher’s son. We discussed his Rêveries over coffee, his dream of a Québecois nation without nationalism, the Plaza as the Rorschach he meandered through on his lunch hours that inspired this thought experiment. The waitress knew me by now. Whenever I pulled out my recorder, she asked enthusiastically if I was making a podcast. Lévesque’s gaze flared at the idea that the street could have been an arcade. Imagine, an arcade for Montreal. He showed me photographs of an arcade in Brussels he had just visited on his phone. It’s not every day you meet someone who loves passages. We could put quotes from Walter Benjamin on the walls.

These days, sleek, pseudo-Scandinavian storefronts set themselves in Plaza like jewels in a crown. Shops aimed at “wellness” and “self-care” settle in the ruins of the dug-up street. An herbal cosmetics store, a zero-waste pub, an artisanal grocery store. The new Plaza conjures an exalted cosmetic aura—one which lauds a permissible secular spirituality—with no visible marker of its followers. Is “reasonable accommodation”—Bill 21’s successor in setting limits around who is deemed worthy of inclusion in the public service sector—perhaps the reason the digital bodies of the Plaza bear no headscarves or turbans, though I see them around me, saw the tail of a hijab of a woman I passed, who looked my way, wearing Playboy sweats, catch and float in the wind?

Of the veiled woman Baudelaire locked eyes with as she passed him in the crowd on the streets of Paris, he asked, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité? Will I see you no more before eternity?

Benjamin describes this moment as the urban poet’s predilection for love at last sight 

If I were a geographer and not a poet, I might write we need a way in which the transformation of our city spaces is not one of gentrification but rather one of self-sustainability, and this needs to happen at the level of social ecology first and foremost. The Plaza is a unique place of magic and wonder, but also a place that is transforming along the predictable lines of global neoliberal capitalism. As the neighbourhood gentrifies, the Plaza loses its uniqueness, its ability to enchant and to love. As the CAQ effectuates laws that place limits on people’s rights, fostering an intolerance reflecting and reflected by the world at large, a drop beside a drop, or a drop in a pool, the pool a parasite of drops, a flooding apparatus in which we may drown, the “my” in “my Plaza transforms itself” loses its dimensions, becomes a flat pale stone at the bottom of a cheap aquarium. One of the risks of the ongoing system of capitalism is that people become domesticated, boring, even, according to Guattari. We are fed images of normalcy, fed even our subjectivities, by mass-media, and start believing in a “we” or “my” as opposed to considering how this also defines what we are not.

Benjamin sighs. Has one last thing to say to me, before he leaves me forever. Looking up at the Plaza awning after rain, you may as well be looking at a million tiny crystal balls, each harbouring a hideous future. Like Mallarmé, try to “follow their light,” enter their silk architecture to ponder the type of crisis we find ourselves in.

Let’s be plain. As plain as the semiotics of the Plaza awning, its style, colour, texture and structure, its aloof positioning away from the Plaza shops, its hostility to pigeons. It impresses upon a Plaza meanderer the feeling of being both somewhere and nowhere at all. And this is precisely the point. But what if it weren’t my Plaza transforms itself, but the Plaza transforms what is between us? I’ll apply for citizenship to this utopia, part Lévesque’s, part Benjamin’s, but mostly belonging to the veiled woman who once glanced at a frazzled poet in a shabby coat in a long-lost crowd, not long ago

[1]     Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 873.

[2]     Ibid., 871.

[3]     Ibid., 872.

[4]     Mike Parente, phone call with author, December 10, 2020.

[5]     Anne-Marie Luca, “L’œuvre publique de Victor Varacalli remporte les honneurs,” Journal Mobiles, November 23, 2015, https://amecq.ca/2015/11/23/loeuvre-publique-de-victor-varacalli-remporte-les-honneurs/.

[6]     “La Plaza St-Hubert réaménagée comportera une marquise plus plate et de larges trottoirs.” Photo by Ville de Montréal, accessed November 23, 2020, https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1090666/Plaza-st-hubert-reamenagement-marquise-travaux.

[7]     Lévesque, Les Rêveries de la Plaza St-Hubert, 19-20.