Against the Wind (10 page)

I haven't thanked you enough for the money you sent. You bought me my first car. It's wonderful! I love my little Renault. It really came at the right time. I have a good salary, but I've had to spend a lot of money lately. I've begun a psychoanalysis. It's very expensive. I'll tell you about it.

As you can see, two weeks won't be too long for everything we have to talk about.

I have to leave you now. I have a lot of work to do and errands to run. Never an idle moment these days. In fact, I've written this letter in stages. I started it three days ago. I had so many things to write to you about.

Enjoy the beginning of the summer. I hope the weather will be good all over Quebec! And may you continue to be in good health! Stop worrying about me. Or about selling the house. I'm here and I love you. Hugs and kisses,

Joseph

P.S. I didn't mention the catastrophe. That whole story came back to me like a pack of ghosts, hitting me right in the heart. Just when I thought it was a thing of the past. Being a murderer – without wanting to kill – at the age of eleven and seeing my mother raped by a brute started me on a second life without my realizing it, an underground life to which I was never born. This thing is really hard to put into words – as if it happened in a place in the world where words no longer existed. It seems to me that we didn't talk about it enough, you and I, you and Papa and I.We must have been afraid it would hurt too much. Today I see things differently. We'll talk about that too. If you want to. A thousand kisses! See you soon! I'll wait for your call.

P.S. Here's a very beautiful sentence from a young philosophy professor at UQAM. It expresses better than I can how I've come to see painting: “From that place, when I was finally able to reach it and … to teach my eye the lesson of necessity, I understood that painting was a window, I pulled myself up, I leaned my guileless chin against it, I opened it, and I was illuminated.” Georges Leroux, text for an exhibition by Robert Wolfe.

Montreal, June 27, 1968

Dear Dena and Rebecca,

I'm sending you both the same letter – I'm in a rush – to invite you to our house on the first Saturday following Véronique's release from the hospital for minds. Probably this coming Saturday.

I want to have a nice party with just a few of our closest friends. I want to have a real sit-down meal. And the table only seats seven people comfortably. It's for supper – dinner, as you say. From appetizer to dessert, there will be seven courses, so don't eat a lot at noon. I want to prepare a gourmet meal (I've gotten out all my recipe books!), with excellent wines and champagne with dessert.

I'll call you with the menu and other details. But I wanted to send this note beforehand. We want to bring together the closest friends of each of us, who don't know each other yet. You're our only common friends, the only friends we have made together. This party will be very important to us.

In addition to the four of us, there will be my friend Denis (I've told you about him) and his spouse (they're not married, but I never know what to say anymore – friend? companion? girlfriend?), Michèle. She's very nice, a bit younger than we are (twenty-four), doing a master's in anthropology at the Université deMontréal, very intelligent and good-humoured, funny and as sweet as could be. The two of them really love each other. They have a two-year-old and they'll get a sitter that evening. Denis and Michèle want to bring the champagne.

There's Véronique's best friend, Louis. I think Véronique has told you about him. He's also a pianist, an excellent interpreter of contemporary music (the best in Quebec), and he wants to retire (in large part, at least) from the “concert scene,” as he says, because he's “fed up with all the jostling for honours and prizes.” He'll tell you about it. He wants to devote himself to composition and, eventually, to performing his own works. He's putting off any more public concerts. He's just recorded an album (we'll give it to you) of his interpretations of Schoenberg and Berg and his piano transcriptions of three of Mahler's symphonies. He's going to be the co-founder and co-director of themusic school for kids with Véronique.We don't know where he gets all his energy and enthusiasm. He's funny too.

It will be a very nice group, don't you think?

Oh, I almost forgot! … Véronique doesn't know. I want it to be a surprise. Keep it a secret. I'm only going to tell her Saturday morning. I don't want her to get all worked up about the shopping.

Her piano will be there. And another surprise: Denis and I took care of moving her things. I went to meet her parents one evening. I'll tell you about it. As it turned out, I got along quite well with her mother – it was a bit touchy! – and she was very cooperative and discreet. Her father didn't want to have anything to do with it and stayed in his den sulking the whole time I was there. Véronique will be very happy. I think I've spared her some painful scenes.

So we'll be expecting you and we'll welcome you with all the joy of the celebration. Anyway! You've seen us when we were pretty low. Especially Véronique – she certainly was a lot lower than I was. I'm so glad to see her regaining her spirits.With such courage and such patience! And so glad to be able to tell you both! That's why I wanted to write to you.

And I want to thank you again with all my heart. You were wonderful with me. And with Véronique.

See you Saturday. Until, then, big hugs and kisses to you both.

With friendship and affection,

Joseph

 

From now on, I will ask myself a single question, and nobody and nothing will be able to answer me. I will live the rest of my life not knowing the answer to that question. Neither love, as great as it may be, nor art – or beauty, or truth – will be of help. And if some light comes, sometimes, some consolation or even joy or pleasure – or even happiness! – the enigma will remain unsolved: unassailable, irreconcilable (with life), insurmountable. However, it can be examined (without challenge). One cannot confront it. And sometimes above the abyss, there are strange weddings. Then murmur and song are heard from the very depths of the Earth and, very far away, from galaxies yet unknown. One can try to relate that brief movement, those infinitesimal revolutions.

Montreal, April 12, 1973

Dear Rebecca,

I didn't want to phone you in Israel. I couldn't. The words wouldn't have come out. Rebecca, since March 20, only hoarse sounds come out of my mouth. Or monosyllables. I am barely beginning to speak normally again. Rebecca, my friend (tell Dena, read her my letter), on March 20, Véronique died. A car accident. She was killed instantly. Her brain, anyway.The accident happened at eight twenty in the morning, and they took her off life support around two in the afternoon.

I was with her at the time of clinical death. But she was alone for her real death, in her car on Metropolitan Boulevard, near the Rockland exit. She was going to her school, where she had an appointment with Louis at nine o'clock. She was changing lanes for the exit and she hit a truck. Maybe she didn't see it in time? The roadway was slippery, and there was blowing snow and drizzle. In rush hour, it's a wonder more vehicles weren't involved in the collision. The other cars all managed to avoid them. The truck didn't overturn and the driver wasn't injured. Véronique's little car folded like an accordion under the heavy trailer of the truck. It took them a good hour to free her. She had multiple fractures. Internal bleeding. Apparently her brain was already dead when they got her to the hospital. To Hôtel-Dieu.

We had just come back from the Laurentians, where we had spent three days with Mama and David. Véronique was in more of a hurry, so she had taken our Renault to go straight to the school without stopping at the house. I was driving Mama's car and we were taking our time coming back after closing the cottage. I didn't have any classes that day and wanted to spend it working at home in my studio.

We got the call from Hôtel-Dieu about eleven o'clock. I went there right away. Alone. The doctor on duty had only said she was “seriously injured and in critical condition.”

Oh, Rebecca – and Dena – I don't know how I can go on!

I'm in her music room. The piano is here. No one touches it anymore. The piano is like a tombstone in the house. I come here often. This room has become my sanctuary. My prayer room. But who do I pray to, if not Véronique? – the gods have been dead for a long time.

I'm at her work table, facing the window with the red maple tree. The window is open. It's spring and everything is alive, but the rustling maple sings of Véronique's death.

Her photograph is on the piano. It's looking at me with a gaze that is doubly dead – the gaze of the instant fixed in the image and the gaze of the interminable instant in which nothing and no one is seen anymore.

I look at Véronique's lovely face. In a fraction of a second on Metropolitan Boulevard, she went away to that non-place where nothing is seen anymore. I search, and nothing answers. I beg. I ask for signs. I plead with her to appear to me. To come back, even for a few minutes. She's been gone too long. Too long. I promise the impossible for a single sign. A single sign of her existence. Her existence someplace where the doors have always been closed to our imagination.

It is always silence that answers. And the cold Nothingness (like an infinite desert of black snow) into which I fell or was dropped with her on that afternoon of March 20. On that morning even, in that empty time when I didn't yet know that she was gone.

Between Véronique and me is now this emptiness, where we are in absolute non-existence for each other. I'm cold. I'm in pain.

Without little David, I would have gone that very day. Gone. Died. Died with her, better than being in this living death without her.

But David kept me here. No one else, nothing else. David was a ray of light shining from life. From that baffling and unfathomable mystery that is life.

Right now, I can hear him babbling, playing with his toys. It's a good thing Mama was there. She takes care of him a lot and she's very good with him. They adore each other. Some people say David looks like Véronique. Others say he's the spitting image of me. I see only David, who looks like no one but himself, a little guy whose vitality and sensitivity are incredible. He was my consolation. We consoled each other.

The first few days – and very often even now – he looked for Véronique everywhere. He would open doors and say, “Yoo-hoo, Mama Véro.” He would open drawers and closets and look for her behind the furniture, under the beds, behind the trees in the park, everywhere. When we went out, every time he saw a little blue-grey Renault, he would clap his hands and shout, “Mama Véro, Mama Véro.”

The other night, I had just woken from a nightmare when he started to scream and shout, “Mama Véro.” I rushed to his room and picked him up and rocked him – I was crying too – but he was inconsolable. I changed his diaper and his pyjamas, and washed his face, and said, “Hush, my angel, hush, David and Joseph, hush, it hurts so much,” and I made warm milk with honey for us.

I brought him to my bed, close to me, with the Babar book he likes so much. I read him the story, which he knows by heart, while he drank his milk from his bottle and was comforted. He had given up the bottle around his second birthday, in January, but he went back to it after Véronique's death and won't give it up. We let him have it.

While I read to him, he saw Véronique everywhere – behind big Babar (the father), under the mother's bed, everywhere. Then, pointing at the window, where Celeste stood, he said, “There, there, Mama Véro.” He was pointing at the curtain and smiling, and I realized that he was really seeing her, in Celeste's house, behind the lace curtain. He fell asleep with his vision. I would dearly have loved for my visions to return. But they vanished a long time ago.

Rebecca, your godson is doing well in spite of the terrible ordeal he has been through, which is our ordeal too. Come back to us soon. We both need you. And if you finally decide to leave Nathan and you have to let him have the house in Côte-Saint-Luc, you can live with us in the meantime. The house is big. And we love you.

If you only knew how much, in the great emptiness my life has become, my friends have rallied around and helped me. At first, I was blind to that kindness. I was so absent. David kept me from foundering. But so did Dr. Laporte, whom I started seeing again. You understand.

The days after Véronique's death are like a long dream, a vague blur. All I recall is a few fragments that have washed back. Bits of the funeral, for example. Because of the parents (especially Mama) and a lot of our friends and acquaintances, I resigned myself to a religious ceremony. Catholic. I didn't have the heart to fight over nothing. We chose the least bad solution. It took place at the Dominican monastery (Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road, not far from the Jewish General). They were decent, and were even very kind to me. To us. There were so many people there. That really touched me. Véronique was loved by everyone. Louis was in charge of the music. A lot of her colleagues played or sang. Some of our writer friends read pieces. They gave me copies. But during the ceremony, I listened to nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing.

I don't know where I was, Rebecca. After seeing Véronique in the hospital – it was her, but already, it was no longer her – I was in another place, where there's no thinking.Where there's no anything. Where things crumble as they form. You know, Rebecca, I haven't painted since. I'll go back to it, I know, how can I live without painting? My eyes have been torn out and my view of things and people. My whole body was torn apart when Véronique's body was torn from life.

Sometimes I write and I don't know why. I go into Véronique's music room, my place of prayer, I look at Véronique's face fixed forever and I write.

After the funeral service, Véronique was buried in Côte-des- Neiges Cemetery. Her parents wanted her “in our plot,” but without making a fuss, and almost without words, I opposed it. I don't know where or how I found the energy, but I acted. I bought a plot just for us: for Véronique, me and David (Mama has “my place in Amqui, beside Léopold”). I chose a beautiful plot close to a healthy tree, a maple like the ones she loved. When you come, the stone – a very sober one, as you'll see – will probably be there.

Why speak of these things that are so far from what Véronique and I have now become, forever apart?

There are two Josephs within me: the one who is gone forever with Véronique and the other one, the one who gets things done, who works in spite of everything, putting one foot in front of the other, saying to himself every morning,
another day without Véronique
, and every night,
if only this night took me to her, but where?
before plunging unthinking into sleep as if into the shoreless river of nothingness. Shoreless and without horizons.

I'm not capable of recounting to you – or to anyone – the hellish afternoon I spent at Hôtel-Dieu with Véronique all disfigured, mangled, intubated, plugged in. I held her two icy hands that were never warm again. I spoke to her constantly, but softly, in case in her place of absence, she could hear me. And I prayed – Joseph praying! – not knowing who to address, begging some unique and superior force of a possible eternal universe to bring Véronique back to life, asking for a miracle, making a thousand vows and promises if only my wish were granted. All in vain. The gods were silent, and Véronique had indeed disappeared into the darkness of time.

I think the doctors already knew there was nothing to be done. But they left me alone with her so I could get used to the idea. They would come back from time to time with words I didn't hear, until the neurologist in charge asked me clearly for permission – explaining why – to “pull the plug” and pronounce her clinically dead. It was two o'clock. I don't know why, but I checked the time before saying yes. The rest was an indescribable nightmare. No word on Earth has ever gone there.

Rebecca, Mama says to give you a hug. And so does David. I don't know if he remembers you, but he always says (looking up at the sky – maybe he has images of the airplane?), “Becca gone to Iz” – he can't pronounce Israel. He was so excited seeing your airplane fly away.

I go on with the rest of my life as best I can. I teach my classes like an automaton. Fortunately, the term is almost over. My colleagues, especially Denis, have helped a lot with the other tasks I was responsible for and that I didn't keep up with (various committees). And I've also been working (a little) on creating the Véronique Blouin Foundation. It was Véronique's colleagues (at Vincent-d'Indy) and friends who had the idea. And it's mostly Louis who is taking care of the concrete organization. He consults me on everything. I'll be the chair, that's what they want, and the meetings are held here. Louis decided to continue as director of the school, which will now be called the Véronique Blouin School of Music. By the way, Mama and Louis want to enrol David next year.

We would also like you to be on the board of the foundation, and Dena to be on the board of the school. We'll talk about all that when you come back.

But when will that be? I hope you'll come this summer. But we won't be going to our cottage. I've put it up for sale. I haven't been able to go back there. I'll have to find the courage to go clear it out. Mama, Denis, Michèle and Louis will come with me. We'll take a day or two in May or June. I'd rather not think too much about it.

A big hug, Rebecca. And give Dena one too. Write me. I hope you'll be able to settle things amicably. I'm sure you'll make the right decisions. I know it isn't easy. Break-ups never are. I'm thinking of you and missing our conversations. Be happy. Come back to us soon.

With all my friendship and affection,

Joseph

P.S. I'm going to New York on Friday (I'm finding it harder and harder to be the public Joseph). I'll call Lois. Maybe she'll have more recent news of you. See you soon!