by Robert Markland Smith.
One spring day, I happened to be in a huge Catholic cathedral in Montreal called Mary Queen of the World, on René-Lévesque Boulevard, attending mass, and had trouble concentrating on the mumbo-jumbo of the priest’s invocations and lithurgy. I looked up at the Latin inscriptions going around the ceiling in four foot high letters that read, ‘‘Damnatus est.’’ This was too much, it was the last straw.
So I got out of my pew and began to walk out of the building. It was a long timeless walk but the doors leading to the street were wide open. As I approached the portico, I saw an old lady trying to chase a dog out of the church. Her hands kept beating the air, but the dog insisted – he wanted to get into the building. Until he saw me.
Once the dog and I crossed paths, it turned around and began to follow me out of the cathedral, down the steps to the sidewalk of the busy downtown street in the business area. Or rather, I began to follow the dog. It definitely knew where it was going, and where it was leading me.
This intelligent animal and I had an understanding. He walked at my pace, on the inside of the sidewalk, and I kept up with its lead.
We walked and walked, out of the business area, leaving behind the skyscrapers, down into a poor neighbourhood called Little Burgundy, where there are a lot of black families. The dog had the lead, and took me down St. Antoine Street and St. Jacques Street. It wouldn’t slow down. So I figured it knew where it was going.
We came up to a subway station called Georges Vanier metro. Here the doggie stopped and seemed to pause. A mysterious young girl walked up to me. Obviously, here was my destination. She must have been nine or ten. She was wearing a beige dress down to her knees and seemed to come from that area. We began talking, in French, which was now the official language in this brave new world, and I asked her if there were a lot of suicides in this metro station. I told her I had seen records that there are five hundred suicides a year in the Montreal subways. You know, you are riding on the metro and suddenly, it stops. A loudspeaker tells everyone there is an incident and to be patient. Well, these are suicides, and I wondered if there were a lot of suicides at the Georges Vanier metro station. The little girl answered me, ‘‘No, not many suicides. Just murders.’’
This seemed like a revelation, out of the mouth of a seemingly innocent little girl. Meanwhile, the dog had disappeared and I thought of being a saviour in this time and place, but chose instead to go home. There had been many salvations in this province of Canada, but it always seemed necessary to control people and stifle the truth. This child candidly knew the score – so who was I to influence her in any way?
2013