The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online

of a thriving black community before the Ville-Marie Expressway had been carved through it. Now it blended nondescriptly into St. Henri and Point St. Charles. St. Henri Alex knew about from his Grade 13 reading of
The Tin Flute
—in the original French, no less, a feat he couldn’t imagine now—though the place had changed a bit from its
Tin Flute
days. Great swaths of it had been torn down to make way for courtyard-style townhouse complexes, and many of the older streets sported here and there, amidst the peeling paint and rotting porches, the occasional façade painted over in blacks and grays or newly sandblasted, signs of the growing incursion of the bohemians and yuppies. On the side of an old warehouse near the on-ramp to the Ville-Marie someone had spray-painted, in brazen English, “Artists are the shock troops of gentrification.”
    St. Bart’s, run by the Anglicans, was in a little square around the corner from the Sally Ann. A youngish do-gooder named Milly organized the English classes there. She was the sort of minority rightist Alex had done his best to avoid in Montreal, where the so-called minority, fromwhat he could tell, was mainly a bunch of embittered Westmounters who still hearkened back to the days when their clubs hadn’t admitted French Canadians or Jews.
    The center offered English classes more or less gratis to refugees.
    “They don’t want to let them in in the first place,” Milly had told him, “then they make sure they’ll have to stay here by forcing them to learn French.”
    Unlike immigrants, refugees, being under federal jurisdiction, at least had their choice of official languages. But then because all the services were run by the province, they got streamed into French like everyone else. There, according to Milly, they got language labs, textbooks, professional instructors, everything state-of-the-art; the ones foolish enough to choose English ended up at places like St. Bart’s. Alex could vouch that there was nothing state-of-the-art about St. Bart’s: the instructors, all volunteers like himself and mainly short-term certificate students trying to log teaching hours for TOEFL , seemed to turn over weekly; the students, for their part, moved away, gave birth, lost interest, switched instructors, or had their cases decided and found jobs or were deported. As for materials, Alex generally had to manage with old handouts from his teaching days in Nigeria, photocopying them on the sly at the Concordia English office.
    “It’s better than nothing, which is what they’d get otherwise,” Milly was fond of saying, though it boggled Alex’s mind that this was the best his country had to offer its new arrivals.
    Alex had started a new class a few weeks before, a mix of Salvadorans and Iranians that had quickly become polarized, each group trading what were clearly jibes against the other in its native tongue that somehow managed to leap the barriers of language to create a mood of festering hostility. Alex, who could do no more than catch the occasional lonely word of Spanish, had imagined that some heated political dispute had broken out. But then one of the Salvadorans had befriended him, a slick character named Miguel.
    “Is jus’ sex,” Miguel had said to him, aping a North American idiom. “Is all jus’ sex business.”
    Apparently the Salvadorans had accused the Iranians of gazing covetously at one of their women, a diminutive and not even especially attractive peasant girl who always came to class in kerchiefs and longskirts. A whole series of insults had begun, communicated, as Miguel explained, in a language outside the official ones.
    “Is unibersal language. Language of the eye, of the face, of the hand. In Canada you don’ speak this language but in El Salbador we know it bery well.”
    Miguel seemed to take the whole thing as a joke, though the irony was that the most covetable woman in the group, whom the Iranians must have been blind to overlook, was