A Tourist at Home
Montreal in the Year of the Plague
“…only the dazed silence…noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow.”
Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
We have no tourists in Montreal this season. So I decided to look more closely at our public spaces, to become a tourist at home. After all, we still have Les Touristes, a sculpture created by Elizabeth Buffoli in 1989 for Les Halles in Paris and loaned to Montreal for our 375th anniversary celebration in 2017, a summer of non-stop partying and cheerleading optimism that now seems very far away.
It was placed in the Jardin du Paris de La Presse, a park on the way to Old Montreal — the inevitable tourist destination — renovated to receive it.
The couple look like caricatures of fat, complacent, clueless white Americans, while the old man, pipe in pocket, seems a stereotype of a stolid geezer.
Only the child is excited.
What spectacle is the little boy pointing out?
What are the upturned faces of the man and woman in the center looking at?
Will the oblivious skater, head lowered, crash into them as the grandfather helplessly watches?
The dog seems interested in something completely different — perhaps other dogs that might be passing.
To me, the sculpture suggests ambivalence toward tourists. An underlying resentment directed at people who gaze at their surroundings with no idea what they are seeing.
Now, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Old Montreal is quiet and empty.
“It’s sad,” comments one of my friends as we walk along Rue St. Paul where many stores and restaurants have taken on an air of neglect or even abandonment.
For the businesses that cater to visitors: souvenir shops, art galleries, bars are all closed. Even the Jardin du Paris de La Presse is empty.
Only the white figures remain to evoke activities and possibilities that don’t exist, icons from a religion no longer practiced, everything seeming to recede into the past.
