Against the Wind (13 page)

We do not know if our sons will be happier or braver than their fathers. We hope so, we hope so still.

Our daughters, without knowing where – that is why we are waking up – our daughters will have to go off the beaten paths.

Then you remember an old saying: To go to an unknown place, take an unknown path.

Henry Bauchau,
“La sourde oreille”

May 9, 1975

It makes absolutely no sense to write to a dead person, Véronique, my Absent Love, but I can't stop talking to you in the solitude of written words.

When I talk to you in my head, often during walks or even when I'm painting, it's as if the words were dissolving as I speak, eroded and swallowed up by images that carry them away and take me far from you. A halo surrounds them, and sensations and emotions envelop me and you vanish into them.

My writing to you brings you back to life in a way. I don't understand this and I don't want to. I prefer to leave it all in the shadows, and at least let you exist for a few pages.

I'm in the studio but at your table, which I brought up here, in front of the window looking out at the top of your maple tree. You wouldn't recognize the house. We've made big changes. It was David who, as naturally as can be, started the ball rolling. After gradually moving all his toys to your room, he said he wanted to sleep there, that it was his “favourite” room and that he would love it “always,” more than his own room.

We did some work – I spent the whole winter on it. Your piano is in the living room. Your bookcases have been freed up and repainted for David's room. His furniture has been moved there and we took the opportunity to buy him a “grown-up bed” and a little desk. His old bedroom has become his workshop, his “attic,” as he calls it. There he can be as untidy as he likes – he calls it “making a mess.” It's total chaos. Do you remember the room in
Les Enfants terribles
by Cocteau? It's something like that.

In any case, the change suits me fine. I had been starting to find your shrine oppressive, as if death swallowed me up when I went in there. I felt – and understood – that I had to resign myself to your death. That's what it is to mourn the loss of a loved one. To survive, you come to resign yourself to death itself.

I'm coming out of a season of great turmoil. It's as if the material changes have helped me bear the others. Everything is moving so quickly that it's hard to keep your bearings. A wind of rebellion (and revolution?) is blowing everywhere. At work, there are more and more strikes and protests of all kinds. Everything is constantly being called into question and overturned: authority, teaching methods, the definitions of our “disciplines,” everything! Subversive texts are circulated, “compulsory” meetings are held where all our established ideas are demolished – for example, there are theories on the basic principles of painting that explode everything. They even disparage the aesthetics of painting. They talk about “bourgeois art” and “petit-bourgeois art” and denounce the “egocentric individualism” of artists who go so far as to sign their works for profit and fame. Certain terms are banished from the accepted vocabulary –
work of art
and
beauty
are the most despised.

I have friends who don't dare paint anymore. Or they take part in collective “installations,” anonymously. Only groups are entitled to identify themselves by name.

There's another revolution that's sweeping away a lot of things in its path: feminism. Dozens of books and articles (and magazines and newspapers too) are coming out everywhere. I've read some of them. There seems to be no way to escape it. The “movement” carries you like a huge wave, a groundswell that sweeps over you and washes you up on a foreign shore. My most mild-mannered women friends all seem to be on a crusade. I don't recognize them anymore. We don't recognize each other. They have so many demands that you have no choice but to listen to them.

Couples are breaking up (and new ones forming) at a dizzying rate. It's as if our whole generation is smashing all values at the same time. Even Denis and Michèle are separating! Can you imagine Michèle and Denis not loving each other anymore? And running off right away, quite happily, to form new relationships?

What would have become of you and me in this tempest? I even wonder sometimes – forgive me, my love, forgive me! – if your death was what enabled our love to endure. I think again of all the inspiring literary couples that have shaped our conception of love. They were all separated by death or by inescapable circumstances that made their love impossible, and guaranteed that it would last.

I think of Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Don Quixote and his Dulcinea. Abelard and Heloise. Beatrice. Werther. The Portuguese nun. Ulysses and Penelope. Dido and Aeneas. And so many others. And Ophelia, my Véronique, whom you resemble in death as if she were your younger sister – death will keep you both eternally young and beautiful, age will never tarnish you; you are transfigured forever by your sudden disappearance from life, as if, rather than tumbling from the Earth into some inferno, you had flown away on the very wings of desire and were immortalized.

Véronique, this groundswell that's sweeping over me and everyone around me has not cured my desire for my love who has been brutally torn away, nor has it altered my art. To you I write these words that I would no longer dare to utter.

Looking at your photograph staring unseeing at me (I brought it up here and put it on your table that's now mine), I'm surrounded by my paintings. They take me into another life that I could not abandon without becoming dead to life itself. I'm a long way from being ready to exhibit them, and I'm exploring new directions, proceeding at my own pace – which has become slower, given events. In all those spaces of forms and colours, where the abstract and the concrete now illuminate each other rather than cancel each other out, there have been added, through patient effort yet almost without my being aware of it, these sorts of petroglyphs, like illegible letters that stand out against the material magma, inscribed on the walls by a remembered fire that perhaps comes from that little-known part of my background, my Amerindian biological mother, whom I hardly saw, but who must be sleeping within me as I once did in her.

In any case, I go on. Through these seemingly blind times of a thousand shatterings, I move forward, timing my steps to an internal rhythm that delivers its most precious secrets in the form of paintings.

I heard David come back from his walk crying. But he's not crying with sadness, he's crying with fatigue. He'll probably be going for his nap. For a little while now, we've had a nanny, Mrs. Leblanc (David calls her Nana), who comes every weekday from nine to five. She's very nice and very capable. David adores her. Mama was too tired to take care of everything, and I didn't have the time.

Mama will be sixty-five in September. She isn't sick, but I want to protect her. Since she's had her new freedom, she goes out more, reads a lot and practises piano (on your piano, which now has a new life). She's made friends through her religious activities in Saint-Albert-le-Grand parish. She's still very religious, but she doesn't bother us with it.

Through her new friends and her reading, believe it or not, she too has become a feminist! Not violently so, but still, quite outraged by what she calls “patriarchal power.” You should hear her, I can't believe it! I've never seen her get so worked up. With her friends, who are quite a bit younger than she is, she belongs to a “consciousness-raising group”; they meet one evening a week in one of their homes. When the meeting is here, I vanish into the studio or go out.

I don't really know what these groups are about (there seem to be thousands of them), and secrecy seems to be required. I only know that according to Mama, they “always speak in the first person” and they reject all theories and demolish any they come across. In spite of her undiminished faith in God and her belief in the Church, Mama, like the others, vigorously attacks “phallocratic church power.” The other day, I looked up
phallocratic
in the dictionary, along with some of the other terms that roll off their tongues as if they've known them forever:
misogynist
,
sexist
,
machismo
, etc.

One evening, at the table, just before a meeting that was being held here, Mama even accused Léopold of being a phallocrat! Léopold, her beloved husband, and my Papa! That time, I reacted, telling her she'd gone too far, that “the dead should be left to rest in peace” and that “posthumous attacks are low.”

We discussed it for quite a while. She explained that “a phallocrat is not necessarily a misogynist” and said that Léopold had “liked women, and truly loved me,” but had been caught up, like all the men of his time and previous times, in “a
system
and a
history
that dominated, oppressed, exploited and subjugated women.” She emphasized all those verbs as if they gave her powerful knowledge and energy.

I let her talk as long as she wanted, and then said it was not really the fault of the males of my generation if all the preceding generations – assuming that was the case – had made the same huge mistakes. I think she understood.

We love each other a lot, Mama and I. I think she will eventually be less virulent about these issues. For my part, I'm thinking about all these new ideas. And when I can't take it anymore, I stop thinking about them and go on to something else.

I would like it so much if you could be here to experience all this with us! I need so much to talk about it with you!

Véronique, if living with you without desire would be a horrible absurdity for me, living without desire is unbearable. I don't really feel like talking about this, but I've had a few affairs, and they all began and ended in a more or less frustrating way. Maybe I'm naive or foolish (or romantic), but I am what I am: incapable of having sex just for sex. To truly desire – and for it to continue – I need to make love. Making love, for me, is a lot more than going to bed with someone and having pleasure. I mean, I really love sex if, in addition to sexual attraction, there's a great emotion between the two people. A great emotion: the intelligence of the heart, the spirit unfolding slowly in the whole body and through looks and words. Even when the words are silent.

I think of you when you were mute, in the hospital for minds, when your words spoke with such eloquence through your gaze that seemed to grasp everything, your hands barely healed, your beautiful hands moving, trembling, your body that almost spoke, your body so warm and so loving that would soon let the words unfurl from you to me.

I don't know if I will love again. For a while now, I've been hoping for it. I miss loving a woman and being loved.

Most of my friends, who have sex just for sex and seem to be completely satisfied with it, don't really understand the kind of man I am. Louis is the only one who's like me in that respect. And Louis is homosexual. Gay, as we say now. But Louis tells me that almost all gay men really like sex just for sex.

That's why I'm more comfortable with women. So is Louis, for that matter. I have more women friends than men friends. And my women friends tell me there's “something feminine” in my temperament. I think I understand, but, basically, all these questions are rather mysterious to me.

I almost forgot to tell you: Rebecca has finally left Nathan, her “depressive lawyer,” as she calls him. And she and Dena are now living together, with Dena's two children. They love each other. I'm telling you, times are changing. And we're all changing with them.

I see the two of them a lot. Sometimes they come and pick David up for the weekend. He considers them his aunts and that's what he calls them.

I have to go downstairs for I don't know how long. I love you, Véronique!

The month of February is the one when you stand up very slowly like a wrestler who has been thrown and who is going to win.

Philippe Jaccottet,
Pensées sous les nuages

February 18, 1976

I'm writing to you while listening to Vivaldi's
Vespers for the Nativity of the Virgin
, Véronique. The light is so pure here in the studio, so bright from every direction, from the sparkling white ground to the brilliant blue sky – which is only possible in the early afternoon of an icy winter day. The light is so “luminous,” as one of my old teachers used to say, that I couldn't not come and write to you. And after such a long time!

The last months have been rough. Trying. Especially January, which I would happily have deleted from the calendar. In addition to the strikes, the demonstrations and the uproar, a bunch of problems and complications have eaten up all my time and energy. As a result, I'm nursing a bad cold, and I've cancelled all my outside obligations this week.

I'm resting, taking care of myself in my own way. I'm sleeping ten hours a night and spending my days in ski sweaters and wool socks, eating when I feel like it, wandering around the house like an invalid deserving of every consideration, indulging myself (the biggest indulgence being peace and quiet). I take baths, dream, think, read and write a little (the story of my childhood – I'll tell you more about it).

And I'm getting ready to go back to the almost-finished paintings I abandoned six months ago. They're here. I glance at them furtively, waiting for things to fall into place, for an impulse that will let me see (or at least glimpse) what they're missing: other elements, other materials that will give them the right form.

This is the first series I've painted so slowly. And it's by far the broadest in scope, the most elaborate. That may be why.

Last week, I did add a few brushstrokes to the painting on the floor, in a clear yellow like the light of the noon sun (in July). I don't know what it will become, or whether I'll pursue the experiment on other canvases (all the walls are covered with them, there's nothing else between the windows). In any case, the next day, David came up with Lamby. The paint wasn't dry, and Lamby walked onto the painting.

At first, he stood there with his paws stuck to the yellow, and then, when he freed himself to escape from this alien territory, he left paw prints on the rest of the painting. I think I swore at him, but David went into fits of laughter at the scene (which was funny to me too in retrospect), he found the spectacle so hilarious, he laughed till tears ran down his cheeks, so I resigned myself and didn't make a big deal of it.

And I decided to leave Lamby's footprints there. The claws and fur created a drawing that looked like delicate ancient fossilized leaves in limestone cliffs once buried under a sea that long ago dried up. If I had decided to paint those traces of dissolved life, I would certainly not have chosen yellow. But on reflection, it's good that the brightest sunlight should shine on fossils, the only surviving memories, and bear witness to what has been.

Among the awful things that have happened recently are Mitchell's suicide – he finally succeeded, after so many failed attempts – and Mama's illness – she had her first angina attack. David was also sick this fall, with chicken pox and ear infections.

Mama and David are both better now. Mama is taking it easy and has changed the pace of her life. She's no longer taking part in the consciousness-raising groups. They had some disagreements, I believe. It was tiring her out and she says she “no longer needed them” anyway. Her doctor is monitoring her closely and she's taking good care of herself. Your mother occasionally comes to see her and does her “little kindnesses,” as Mama says. “It's nothing,” your mother says. They've become real friends, and David really loves his “other Grandmama,” as he calls her. She would like him to call her Mamie, but he doesn't want to. He has his own culture, with its language. Sometimes I find him so determined and sure of himself that I think adolescence is going to be “interesting.” I'm quietly preparing myself for it. Will I be able to handle it? Will I be a good father?

But I don't worry too much. If I'm good now, I don't see how I could lose my abilities along the way. And I say to myself,
We'll see
.

As for Mitchell, I hadn't seen him again since the hospital for minds, but I still found it painful. I so wanted him to get better. He was so intelligent, so nice, and as handsome as James Dean. Do you remember? I write “Do you remember” and I leave it, knowing full well you don't hear me (I'm reconciled to that). I leave these written words like delicate fossilized leaves that tell of former lives.

Mitchell had just been released from the Douglas after his umpteenth stay. He had left his bourgeois family in Westmount and was living in a miserable little room in the Centre-Sud neighbourhood. In the last few weeks, he produced pages and pages of rambling writing that were addressed to Dena. We weren't able to read all of it. He had become a megalomaniac and he saw himself as a writer of genius. He became enraged with anyone who didn't (or wouldn't) recognize his talent. He wrote in English, but switched to French when his fractured prose drifted into poetry.

His previous suicide attempts having failed, this time you might say he killed himself three times. First he swallowed a huge quantity of tranquilizers. Then he slashed his wrists on the Jacques Cartier Bridge. Finally, he jumped off the bridge. Three deaths, three violent deaths, and he was gone, taking with him the mystery of his unhappiness.

I went to the funeral with Dena and Rebecca. His family had organized a big ostentatious show, but everything felt so false and empty that the three of us took off before the burial. We ended up in a bistro, where we ate and drank for hours.

That happened in early December, and then, in January, my father died, so I went to Abitibi. It was the worst journey of my life. In spite of the storms that are always possible that time of year, and in spite of warnings from Mama and Mrs. Leblanc, I immediately decided to go there by car, alone. It was the eldest son, Jimmy, who had phoned me from the hospital in Amos.

I had to go to Lebel-sur-Quévillon (where I'd never been before), to my father Seamus's house. That's where the visitation was. He had decided in “his last wishes,” Jimmy had said, “not to take the long journey back to the valley,” and consequently, not to be buried beside his wife in Amqui. Not that he didn't love her, Jimmy added, but travelling was expensive and “he'd had his fill of it.”

So my father Seamus, whom I hadn't seen since the summer I turned twelve, would be laid to his final rest in the earth of Lebel-sur-Quévillon, which he had chosen in order to escape from misery, and which had enabled him to live in “honourable poverty,” as he often said according to my brothers and sisters, whom I still consider cousins if not strangers.

I left the next morning. Until Mont-Laurier, it wasn't bad, but after that, I felt I was going deep into a wasteland of dark forest and endless expanses of snow. I had wanted to take the time of the long drive alone to, in a sense, measure the huge – now infinite – space between me and my father Seamus, who had died in the place of his exile, and perhaps to get close to a part of myself I knew very little about. If I could have walked there, I would have.

At first, I was disappointed by the landscape, the absence of the striking beauty of the varied, rolling terrain of the Lower St. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence Valley and the Gaspé Peninsula. But, I gradually found myself captivated by a different beauty, intoxicated by the constant sameness you find in oceans or deserts. The white-black-white-black-white-black going by, endless and unchanging, mesmerized and delighted me. I entered a space made up of silent monochromes, where the slightest nuance, the slightest crack of a spruce tree or rustle of powdery snow became as majestic as the most imposing sphinx of Egypt.

But the road was icy, rough and barely passable. I cursed the governments to whom the lives of the people in this region seem to matter so little, given the mortal dangers involved just in driving here.

I arrived exhausted at my father Seamus's house, where I found the whole clan “sitting vigil” with the body, drinking beer and whisky. The whole clan of brothers and sisters, the “kept” and the “given-away,” as they called them, with their spouses and swarms of noisy children and adolescents.

It was Paul, one of the “kept ones,” in a police uniform, who greeted me, with one hand on the grip of his revolver and the other holding a beer, which he set down on the table to give me a slap on the shoulder that was so hard I felt my bones crack: “Hey there, little artist brother! If it isn't Joseph! Give him a beer, he looks like he's not doin' so good. Joseph, you're the last of the given-away ones to get here!”

The evening went on like that. From time to time, following a signal I missed, they all went and kneeled at Seamus's coffin to say a rosary.

My sisters and female cousins – or step-sisters? – made lunch around midnight after the last prayers by the body. I would have liked to disappear, to go to the motel room reserved for me, but they were so insistent that I “stay until the end” that I let myself be persuaded, too tired to object.

I drank with them till the wee hours of the morning. Beer and whisky, a dangerous combination. The next day, I was hung over, which made me feel even more a stranger. They all seemed in fine form, and the party started again in the afternoon. I stayed with them for the last night of the vigil, which was as unrestrained as the first.

I felt as if I was in exile among my brothers and sisters, as if we came from totally different countries. So much so that I could easily have felt desire for one of the “given-away ones,” Marguerite, who was beautiful and who made eyes at me all evening, without the slightest incestuous feeling. But my mind was elsewhere.

I had one wish: to leave that place the next day right after the burial.

In the evening, Paul, the policeman, asked me – he was completely drunk – “Is it true yer a painter? I bet you really like to lay it on thick …”

Once again, I let myself get carried away by the rather violent celebrations. I had decided to go all the way with my father Seamus. I even knelt for the prayers. At least then it was quiet and I could have a last look at Seamus's face and try to gain some understanding of this stranger who had sired me.

That night, they sang for a good two hours. Country and western songs. Some of them had very good voices, especially my cousin Marguerite. Patrick, a “given-away one,” accompanied them on the harmonica. I was moved by all that wild beauty, and I sang “Un Canadien errant” and “Comme un petit coquelicot,” which they greeted with bravos and applause.

The funeral ceremony was very simple. At the burial, when I saw the austere new cemetery lying between two rocky fields in the middle of nowhere, with all the snow making the rocks and the gravestones indistinguishable from each other, I reflected that history is not the same everywhere. In some places, it's freighted with messages, decipherable traces. In others, it seems miserly with its lessons, as if it is inviting us to decode nature itself or the signs inscribed in the depths of souls.

I wasn't able to leave right after, as I would have liked. First there was a huge reception organized for the “given-away ones” by the “kept ones.” Then a terrible storm was forecast.

And terrible it was! I made it to my motel, towed by cables hooked to Jimmy's 4 ‘ 4, around nine o'clock in the evening. I slept to the sound of the gale. In the morning when I looked out the window, I could see nothing. No houses, no road, no hydro lines, nothing! All I could see was the raging white blizzard.

The wind whistling through the cracking walls of the horrible little motel seemed to come from all four points of the compass and the centre of the Earth at the same time. It was like a volcano of icy powder.

I was disheartened!

But Paul came by (by skidoo) a minute after I woke up, as if he had guessed my distress, his cheeks red, grinning from ear to ear. He asked if I wanted to go home with him. No, I preferred to stay quietly all alone, but I gave him a list of things I would need: a thermos of coffee, sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, juice, cigarettes, etc.

I told him I would use the time to read and write. He looked at me as if I'd just landed from another planet and, groping for the words, said: “Well, if that's the way you want it, I'll be back with your stuff within the hour.”

He came back half an hour later, very proud of himself, revving the motor of his big brand-new machine. I invited him in for a coffee, to which he added a shot of whisky from the ten-ouncer he left me “to keep you warm till I come and get you for supper.”

So, Véronique, that's how, in the middle of a storm in my father's country, in the middle of nowhere, I began to write the story of my childhood. Just to see. To understand. I'd had the idea when I left Dr. Laporte after my second installment, as he called it.

The storm raged for three days. I wrote, going out from time to time to get some air and admire that fury. I allowed Paul to bring me supplies and he seemed to take pride in his mission. In the evening, we'd all have supper together at the home of one of the “kept ones,” since all the “given-away ones” were stuck there – they'd come from all over Quebec.

I'll burn that part of the autobiography on your grave with the rest some day. With your journal and your letters. And with this journal I've been writing to you since you've been gone.

All these words that are us, Véronique, will disappear with the rest. Together, we will burn on your grave.

I leave you for today. I hear David and Mama talking at the bottom of the stairs. When they stand there, it means they're anxious to see me.