Against the Wind (11 page)

And in the yawning silence,
Time's passing is so smooth
That eternity, it seems, slips through
The shadow of nothingness.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau,
“Le silence des maisons vides”
May 9, 1973

Véronique, my love. I can't say “Véronique, my love” without shouting it to the universe, but inside myself, as if your death created a crater inside me into which my tears fall and are transformed into screams in all directions, very far, to the most distant planets, the most remote galaxies, the most undiscoverable elements.

Without you, I'm like an animal that has lost its territory and its most valuable natural allies, and is wandering aimlessly around a strange, arid wasteland.

Our David saves me from disaster, and so do friends and Mama – and sometimes, like a faint glimmer, the barely glimpsed prospect of going back to painting. But why paint (and how), now that my vision of the world has been torn from me, since you, my beloved, have been irrevocably torn from the world and from life?

I don't know anymore, Véronique. I don't know anything anymore.

My pain is so great, and my outrage – nameless pain and outrage, because they're directed at no one. Who can I direct my anger against? Who can I weep with? Since the fateful date of March 20, when you died (you are dead, Véronique! can you hear me somewhere crying to you through the days and nights?), since that day that should not have existed, it is here at your work table that I have most often found a measure of peace. It is the only place where I find some calm within me.

I look at your photograph, you're so beautiful, so beautiful. I look at your piano, it is never played now. I look at
your
maple tree, it's in bud these days, showing me that life continues, giving me a very strange feeling. A paradox: when I see the maple tree come back to life, knowing you are dead, I imagine you alive through it and believe that you are coming back in the opening of the leaves, but in a form that eludes me. It's crazy, I admit, and I would never dare to share this with anyone.

That's why I've decided to speak to you in a kind of journal that I will burn in the cemetery one day after I've finished it. I'll burn it on your grave.

I've often come here to your music room, close to you, since March 20, to dream, to think about you and to meditate, sometimes jotting a few words on scraps of paper. It's helped me, calmed me in a way. This morning at dawn, after a night of tossing and turning and disjointed dreams, I decided to convert those rough notes into a long letter to you that I'll bring you one day where you “rest in peace.”

But where did they get the idea that the dead were living and resting in peace in that earth dug with so many graves?

And why have billions of human beings, across all civilizations, regardless of culture, believed that?

What is death?

Where are you Véronique, if not within me, the one who is searching for you?

What is nothingness if you are more present in me than all the survivors?

I've talked so much to you since you've been gone, begged you so many times to come back, if only for a minute, to appear to me through signs, to give me some clue – even the tiniest, most fleeting one. I'm not demanding, I'm pleading – for some presence of you, somewhere, in some unexpected, unsuspected, place still unattainable by me!

I prayed to you, Véronique, I who have not prayed to anyone or anything for such a long time.

Sometimes I've even invented signs, clinging to my belief, blinding myself, refusing to be contradicted. I'll give you just one example: two weeks ago, walking on the beach on Long Island with Lois, with whom I'd spent the weekend, I prayed to you and asked for signs of your presence, and there at my feet, just when I was silently imploring you, I saw a stone like the ones you used to love, granulated ochre and pink, with a letter formed by fine veins of quartz, a perfectly shaped shining
V
.

I picked up the stone and I stroked it and warmed it as if your body were contained within it. Without saying a word, I showed the stone to Lois, who was coming toward me, looking at me, knowing, as she told me later, that something amazing was happening.

Lois saw the
V
, and she took the stone in her hands, meditated for a moment and, giving it back to me, said she was sure that your “spirit” was among us and that the stone was only a “secular sign” for poor humans who were incapable of doing without “tangible evidence.”

Lois, who's from a Jewish background but was raised in the total absence of religious beliefs and practices, believes, much more than I, and unquestioningly, in a life after death, a beyond (or other side), to which, she says, our words, our thoughts and our boldest imaginings have no access.

I brought the stone home. It's on your table where I put it. When the light catches the quartz, I look at the shining V, the first letter of your first name, you my first, you my love of the beginning and the end. The stone has become your living totem and my talisman. For you, Véronique, for this totem with the first letter of your blessed name, I am building a wild cathedral in my dark night. It is here, my love. In its sanctuary marked by your presence, I pray to you and cry out my love. As I was never able to do before you, and will never be able to do after you.

Here, Véronique, I will sing my love. Here, in my cathedral, I will bless your name. For all the rocks in the world turning into stones, and for all the stones in the world containing quartz, and for all the quartz crumbling into beaches of sand where I'll be able to walk, to think of you, to dream of you, mingling my song of abyss and misery with the sound of the waves and the wind!

I love you, Véronique, and will always love you, and I do not accept, and will never accept, that life has torn you away from me – what am I saying, it is death, not life, that came and took you – and I hate death and I curse fate.

I weep silent tears and shout mute cries, because I don't know who to address them to. I find nobody, nobody responsible, and you, the only one who would be able to really hear my pain and my anger, the only one who would be able to understand, to know this horrible condition down to the finest fibre, you are gone.

You are gone, Véronique, and yet I address my weeping and my cries to you in the form of words, because only words soothe me, I address these words written to the dead woman that you are.

I address them to you in a journal devoted to death, to Nothingness, through the fire that will one day consume them on your grave.

I am a desert that waits for the eternity of water. I want eternity to be given back to me, Véronique. I don't want the one I was given anymore. It has been cut off by death, right in the middle. I want another eternity. An eternity that would not be broken by death. It would be without end, flowing like the sea.

He looms very large in my childhood.
Today I see him very high on the cliff
Who enters into my death and my freedom.

Henry Bauchau,
“La sourde oreille”

October 13, 1973

Véronique, a great silence has kept me far away from you. As great as the one in my childhood, just after the catastrophe, when I was about to leap to another cliff, that of my life as a man, which I glimpsed but did not yet have words for.

It was in that in-between place where you're preparing to jump but you don't know toward what, holding your breath to control the dizziness, scanning the surroundings, the emptiness, the uneven terrain – it was in that perilous passage that I found myself all summer. Everything is still so uncertain. I only know I mustn't turn back, I've got to go on, though I don't know what will come next. It reminds me of the story of Lot we used to talk about. But everything reminds me of you now. Everything around me and everything within me.

I'm at your table. My first sheets of paper were left in the little drawer. I didn't reread them. The maple tree is there, fiery red in the afternoon sun. It's totally silent in our house. Mama has taken David for a walk. David is also coming out of an in-between place.

He gave up his bottle last week, one morning, just like that, and never asked for it again. David has found his bright smile again and his complete little sentences are like pearls.

And he talks about you happily, no longer crying or looking for you, simply declaring between two activities – he's always very busy – “She's gone beddy-bye in heaven, Mama Véro,” pointing to the ceiling or the sky.

But I'm not David, and I lost his Grandmama's faith so long ago that I barely remember all the images of heaven of my early years.

Sometimes I become irrational and imagine we're back on March 19, and I experience again that magnificent last day together and believe, but only for a very short time, that I'm having a terrible nightmare from which I will soon awake.

Or I believe, but very fleetingly, that you appear to me in the form of signs, which I interpret in my own way, preparing for your sudden return in places and forms still unimaginable.

At these times, I pray to you as if, somewhere, you hear me; I imagine that you're listening to me, following me everywhere I go and reading my thoughts, that you have supernatural gifts I don't have access to.

But most often, it is outrage that takes hold of me, outrage and pain and the unfathomable emptiness around me and within me.

And sometimes I have such amazing dreams that you're alive that I enter completely into them, not coming out even with waking, so much more real do they seem than the reality around me.

Last night, I dreamed this dream. And it's probably only because of this dream that I come back to you today. You were standing, statuesque and proud but very alive and beautiful and warm – very near yet very far – above a travertine terrace overlooking the sea (which was like the Aegean Sea as I imagine it), on the highest gallery, of pink and ochre calcite as smooth and shiny as marble. And you were speaking – without looking at me, but it was me you were speaking to. You had the gift of languages – you were “beyond Babel,” you said – and your words reached all languages and planets, all galaxies and all creatures, animal, vegetable, mineral. Your words were inscrutable to me, but that didn't bother me. It was as if I had the gift of what Bauchau calls a “deaf ear” (these were the words in the dream) and I followed your words anyway. After that intelligent, enchanting tour of the world without moving from our setting, I begged you to look at me, if only for an instant. I thought I could make out your head turning slowly toward me, but I wasn't sure, it all happened so quickly. You suddenly dissolved into the elements and into the darkness of a black so perfect that it shone, a brilliant, luminous black. And just as suddenly, your smile appeared, a huge smile that broke through the black screen from horizon to horizon.

Véronique, it was that stunning smile that took me from sleep to the wakefulness in which I've been immersed since then. I found myself sitting bolt upright in my bed in wonder, crazy with the sorrow of leaving the dream. I tried to stay as close to it as I could all day. But the days kill dreams and drag us into that murder.

I came here to your room several times today, walking around and dreaming of you, circling your table as if circling myself, going to the little open drawer, to the sheets of paper in my hands and to the pen moving constantly, in vain, to reach you.

You see, Véronique, beyond your smile, although it will always cover me, is your great silence that grips me and pulls me down, that interminable silence on which all living words shatter.

And there is that absence, your too long, too great absence that plunges me into a nameless suffering so strong it almost extinguishes every other presence. Even mine.

Because I am becoming absent to myself without your body, Véronique, and your mouth and your arms, without your words and your eyes, I've missed you so much for so many days and nights that I'm losing myself, becoming cut off from myself, a stranger to myself. A stranger who has become a prisoner of that other self I am without you.

I feel myself becoming double. Because sometimes Joseph is there for everyone, without anything showing. As if the “prisoner” had been granted a leave of absence and was enjoying a holiday. That happens all the time, with David, Mama and friends, and at work, as if that zone of myself where the recluse has no home is quietly invading all the other zones, although they still exist. Do you understand?

There are even times when the liberated zone seems to exist all alone, by itself.The strongest of them was that evening in July when we celebrated Rebecca and Dena's return. Mama, Michèle and I prepared the dinner. Denis and Louis were there too. It was supposed to be a commemorative evening. For you. And for Rebecca and Dena, who were not with us at the time of your death. It was a party, Véronique, a really beautiful party! We ate and drank, raising our glasses to your memory. We talked, told stories, cried and laughed.We read the texts from the funeral ceremony for Dena and Rebecca after dinner, sitting in your music room with your photograph displayed. And we looked at photos and talked some more, and I did not die, I did not disappear with you into the darkness of time, can you imagine?

I even drank more than my fill. I was drunk, and drunkenness made me laugh and sing. We even sang, Véronique! Joyful songs – or sad – and I did not vanish like the splitting of atoms and dust into the nothingness where you are.

Slowly, we moved toward your piano. And Louis played. Afterwards, Mama played her old-fashioned waltzes. And Louis played again. Pieces from his repertoire and yours. For the first time since your death, living sounds came from your piano, surrounding us and energizing us. I felt you alive through your piano, and I drifted off to sleep in the wee hours of the morning in the big burgundy velvet armchair,
your
chair, lulled by Louis's music and the words around me, with little David asleep in my arms, cradled in my slumber.