Sometimes at night, when I go to pee while half asleep, I have the impression of encountering the ghosts of my in-laws in the house they left to their son, but my cat Nanette wakes me up by sneaking between my feet, because it could make me tumble down the stairs. And there, in the silence of the picturesque Usher house, I pinch myself.
Not to chase away ghosts, but because I’ve been living here for exactly a year and I still can’t get used to the idea that no one can evict me. Neither an owner nor a bank. Not even the lover, officially co-owner after a visit to the notary.
Despite everything, every first of the month, I think about the rent, the conditioning of a life as a tenant. We now have to transpose the financial concern onto the rather hefty property taxes, and all the worrying little bugs of an old house that require repair in a neighborhood where heritage is closely monitored. That’s why it’s so pretty. And unaffordable, unless you are rich or an heir.
Perhaps I underestimated this anxiety of losing my apartment during the pandemic. I couldn’t sleep at night anymore.
I continue to scan the classified ads, like addicted to a series true crime, because it has become criminal, what is happening with renovations and the price of rent. I read every article about the housing and real estate crisis. They happen every day, the media doesn’t give up, fortunately. Despite their work, the Duranceau law has been adopted, evictions are increasing, we don’t care about the poor and the old, housing construction is stagnating and we do not see on the horizon the slightest hope of an exit from crisis.
My anger remains intact, to which is now added a feeling of guilt. We can believe ourselves to be safe under our roof, but certainly not safe when everything is going wrong around us. In my head, I hear Proudhon shouting that “property is theft” or Max Stirner asserting that the ideal society is an association of selfish people.
I have difficulty enjoying my new status as owner, probably because it came to me too late, and by death, in a particularly sinister period in Quebec, where it seems that everything is going to hell.
We forget something in the debates on trauma in this province, in my humble opinion. Here, poverty perhaps had a greater impact on people than religion or the survival of the French language; the latter were also seen, rightly or wrongly, depending on the ideological camps, as responsible for this poverty.
We wanted to get out of poverty much more than out of Canada, by choosing comfort and indifference, to paraphrase the young Denys Arcand.
It’s amazing what a few kilometers can change in our most intimate vibrations. In all cities, there are heights and lowlands, streets, bridges or railways which separate social classes, in a geography which has nothing natural about it.
“My mother was trembling at the thought of going down
even lower. One street south we
separated from drowning in the sweaty crowd
of a working-class neighborhood. The flowers she
planted around the house saved us
of social decline »
… can we read in A certain art of livingby Dany Laferrière.
In Port-au-Prince, the slums have a breathtaking view of the opulent houses in the heights of Pétion-Ville, and the last time I went there, in 2020, something had changed, which we felt even in the air we breathed. The large public space of the Champ de Mars and the Martissant district at the bottom of the city, usually filled with sweaty crowd, were deserted. A sign of the terrible crisis we see today, where armed gangs have taken possession of the city.
For a long time, I had wondered how Port-au-Prince managed to maintain this precarious balance between extreme poverty and indecent luxury, without citizens tearing themselves apart.
It couldn’t hold up, exactly. Who armed these gangs? Certainly not the poor.
On the show Everything can happen, Marie-Louise Arsenault recently received the poet Juliette Langevin, who is also a sex worker. In his first collection, Mean girl, she speaks of “the violence of rue Papineau”. Asked about this, she replied that it had nothing to do with prostitution. “It’s a melting pot,” she said. I had the impression of understanding everything in this short explanation and the impression that she was talking more specifically about Papineau Avenue south of Sherbrooke Street.
I lived in the Centre-Sud district for almost 50 years. When I moved north of Sherbrooke Street last year, I couldn’t escape the feeling of having left the “downtown”.
I heard this expression for the first time when I was little, after being complicit in a bad act at school with my friend who lived in Rosemont. She wanted to come to my house, we had made up a lie, that she had missed her school bus. That was the bad thing: wanting to be together.
Her mother, of course angry at having to drive her back, was convinced that I was a bad influence on her daughter, because I came from the “downtown”. Anyway, what did that mean? bottom of townand why was it said with so much contempt?
Caroline Dawson expresses it better than me in her book What are you:
“ Proximity explodes past Sherbrooke, the east coast is breathless for those who smoke next week’s money
With only a coffee in their stomach, instant, the ulcer of hatred that they carry prematurely
When you live in the South Centre, a stone’s throw is a ditch, a beatitude.
Since I moved, I see less poverty, I no longer get begged 10 times a day, I no longer have to climb over the junkies to do the grocery shopping. The lover lived for 25 years in my Center-South that I didn’t want to leave, and without wanting to hurt my feelings, he admits to me that he doesn’t miss it.
I discover that it was my normal, wondering how it could have inhabited me, and to what depth.
Rather than having a view of the Parthenais prison, it is Mount Royal that looks at me now, when I wander among the beautiful people from Saint-Laurent Boulevard on Saturday evening.
Why does Center-Sud continue to deteriorate? The businesses are closing, the Village is dying, it’s still just as scary in the area of Émilie-Gamelin. Is it because we get used to it? That elected officials know this and make more effort in nice neighborhoods where residents shout louder and have more means to defend themselves?
I understand things very late after so much will and energy devoted to seeing the beauty in miseries.