Couillard's Spring Cabinet: Start with one Gutsy Lady de Santis and then another, and ..

Between Caffe Italia on Blvd St. Laurent and Caffe San Simeon on Dante mid way between St. Laurent and St. Dominique, there are about sixty footsteps. Most habitues of the one occasionally wander over for a chiacchierata with a buddy that's waiting for another buddy but likes the charm of one Caffe more than the other. These days however, the coffe-shops are filled with raucous and discussions of which Liberal MNA will get which cabinet post and, if you listen very attentively without closing in-some people may get the wrong vib, whether the Italian MNA-Rita de Santis will get anything.

In my opinion, de Santis is a gutsy lady. She showed up to the Party when most members were licking their wounds, tying new knots or fading into prehistory. As a junior MNA she assumed the role of Health critic and for most of the time was soft-spoken with little media visibility. According to many, that was the best thing she did. Glitter and glamour don't befit her. The lady has a Biochemistry background before taking her McGill Law degree and moving up the difficult trek at Davies Ward Phillips Vineberg to become a Partner. The rest is part of the profession's gilted secrets.

Do you give her a gender ministerial role? come on ragazzi, this is Little Italy, those days are gone.
Do we keep her away from Business? I liked that approach from a nonno, waiting for the nod, but the nod never came? My first reaction was -apart from Finance most roles in the area are junior. No Besinessss! said his cumpar  
Plug-ins as recognition of loyalty and deserving of merit: immigration, culture, and other elements in that subset. No!No! E piu ingamba! saith the Caffe owner.
Education? says the Mercedes owner. Some kid from Casgrain near St. Zotique who attended Concordia University a few years ago remembers her as a bit too intransigent: Fammi 'sto piacere..qualch'altro posto per l'Avvocatessa. 

Well, she's smart lawyer, intransigent (have a problem believing that), loyal, gutsy, ambitious,  perfectly bilingual, also speaks "I-talian" according to a Boston tourist that visits his mom every six months. From the corner table Virgilio throws out- e perche non Justice, Sante, Energie. She was after all, it seems, mentored by Me. Ciaccia- a former Bourassa cabinet minister for Energies et Ressources (1985-89). Virgilio has been around for a lifetime-according to some.  They brag that all he eats is rapini.  Now Energy covers big files and big issues and big business,and she's acquainted very well with the operations of Hydro Quebec.

Positions formed and conversations, sometimes monologues dragged on, tugging one way and the other. It had been a while that Little Italy had been so a-buzz with bickering. The last noise was, I think, Sunday morning after the Soccer matches. This time the buzz was pleasantly enjoyable. Uno !! NO, UNA dei nostri, piuttosto delle NOSTRE was breaking through, and from their perspective she was better than tutte le altre with the exception of one, according to un commendatore, (figuratively), a darling of Quebec and Canada-Marie-Josee Drouin, now Marie-Josee Kravis, from Ottawa, who unfortunately never ran for public office, and has since, like many others, left La Belle Province and le Pays du Nord for the world.

As for de Santis. I like Tullio's outburst. Justice! Ci vogliono cogl.... e lei ne ha! Some expressions get Lost in Translation.

Ministre de la Justice: sounds fine. Balance out the snickers- most modern jurisprudence has origins in Roman Law, and this should weigh in against the -phobes. But then she likes to travel the trade routes, the human right routes...her parliamentary Committee work is also the world at large to the US, Europe, the rest of Canada. Yet, I still think Justice is a good fit.

So is Ministre de la Sante et des Services sociaux: Big in the US, Big in Canada and BIG in Quebec. BIG Challenge for a Gutsy Lady. La Sante a good fit.

Bets? ummm...too early in spring.

PS. If you're lucky while strolling through Little Italy, towards Caffe Via Dante (another well kept secret for a good restaurant) and Patisserie Alati-Caserta (best Zeppole di San Giuseppe in the world) you may catch a glimpse of another of La Petite Italie's best kept secrets-Angelo Mingarelli -probably the world's best mathematician in his field, walking his infamous dog.

MONTREAL: La Petite Italie/ Little Italy

A few weeks ago, after picking up 'un po di scarola e romana'  for my mom au Marché Shamrock, now called le Marché Jean Talon, I ventured southwest towards la Frutteria Milano on Blvd. St. Laurent (where DiStasio is an habitué-we love her for that) in Montreal's Little Italy. Then fifteen steps south I hopped into Caffè Italia for 'un freddo'. Paolo, a Bruin's fan and bartender, asked how two of my kids were, and we exchanged a few words concerning the hockey season. During the conversation, the bartender signaled that someone was trying to catch my attention. I turned around and after a few embarrassing moments recognized an old friend. He invited me to his table swamped with some papers and a PC, a buttered toast and a cappuccio. The casual setup of shifting and moving chairs and tables makes 'Italia' like most other cafes in the area ideal for dabbling about anything and everything, regardless of the next table's proximity. So we tried (one always forgets the details) to update each other on our lives, shuttling between three languages that somehow we had never mastered, amidst the raucus that makes "Italia" unique for most of Little Italy's habitués and turisti, and among the turisti  include those that escaped years ago and now show up amidst the glimmer and the trend, the rattle and hum- i tipi di spiaggia.

He commented on federal politics, we talked about some cherished laughs and a lot of art. In the end, he ventured onto his health which he claimed was failing. He enjoyed the elder years more than he had imagined. He scrolled his worst and best in that order, and nostalgically mentioned a blog he had started but abandoned about eighteen months ago. Although short-lived, and rarely commented, he had achieved some satisfaction from the political and economic monologue he authored. He never signed it, choosing the anonymous, and to his own amusement, regarded his own authorship cynically. Yet the nostalgia of 'letting-it-go' irritated him as much as the 'acouphene's' stress while he wrote and proofread it.  After 'un po' di tutto e di tutti', he tossed the offer: "...you want to pick it up. I'm done. It's all yours" That intrusion was short. We moved on to reminiscing again about 'Tizio e Caio' about so-and-so and 'remember that guy..what the hell- is- his- name-? to how much time left to finish reading Balzac's la Comédie humaine. As the bleak mood dampened, I was reminded of Philip Larkin's Audabe, and felt the eerie shiver of a second reading of those morbidly beautiful lines:

                                The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

                                —The good not done, the love not given, time  

                                Torn off unused...

Yet memory is sometimes the best of friends. Like an enzyme: it can, when the need be, act as repressor, catalyst and liason; but this time there was no creative biochemical challenge to the dire mutant that dark Larkin had spliced, only consolations and devastations. 

From Donne's rationalized inspiration to Dylan Thomas Death shall have no Dominion, and Do not go Gentle into that Good Night,  the consolation is meagre and impoverishing. Memory only unravels sympathy and empathy for Larkin. Larkin's deep and shattered voice was his own; not the voice of another for another. Indeed Larkin's confessional is grueling intake.

We exchanged email addresses.

And after twenty dollars of 'cappucci e cioccolati caldi' and twenty of buttered toasts, he silently got up. I felt like Coleridge's Wedding-Guest in the Ancient Mariner as I watched him walk away.   

 

I checked out the blog and yesterday night- I took him up on the offer. I asked that he sign off with a final post. He refused the demise: his output was in the blog's archive.  Hopefully I will try to improve on my language triathalon. 

 

In passing, if you want to try another good Italian coffee, go down towards Dante and St Dominique and step up into San Simeon's-it's famous for its terrace, and then browse into Venditelli's Ferramento Dante, ten steps east (la Quincaillerie Dante) made famous by the hardworking V sisters and brothers at a time when DiStasio was still too young to cook. And if you keep apace on Dante Street, you'll probably meet the best kept secret in the country walking at a hurried pace, a passionate jazzman: Giorgio Serafini-

Une excellente seconde lecture- Carolle Simard, Cette impolitesse qui nous distingue, 1994, en dégustant 'un cappuccino'.

Enjoy Little Italy now; it's being smothered by condos and turisti.

 

To Larkin, I say, scuff the talk- take a walk with your kids, their mom and your grandkids. Especially on a rainy and overcast Halloween!

This is my entry post to Classic Indeed.

er nolano