Against the Wind (14 page)

David asks, “Grandmama, where was I before I was in Mama Véronique's belly?”

Mama answers, “Very long before, forever-long before, you were in the thoughts of Our-Father-in-Heaven-Creator-of-Everything. You were there and so was I. And I loved you all that time.”

David: “What's death, Grandmama?”

Mama: “Come, my dear, I'll read you a story while we wait for Papa.”

David: “Was Lamby there in the Father-cat-of-everything?”

This almost menacing perfection – for it rests on the absence of life, the visible stillness of death – appears in stones so variously that one might list all the endeavors and styles of human art and not find one without its parallel in mineral nature.

Roger Caillois,
The Writing of Stones

August 22, 1978

This is the first time I'm writing to you from somewhere other than our house, Véronique. From far, very far, from your little table and from the earth where you rest. Between us there's the Atlantic, which I can see now from my window, and which I've touched every day, or almost every day, for over a year.

Now I see my Atlantic from the other side, looking westward, and it changes the patterns and the perspective and alters my view of the entire Earth, as if east no longer started at the same point, with the sunrise and sunset reversed. I've come back to the shores of Europe and I won't return to the shores of America for another year.

I'm in Brittany, in Belle-Île-en-Mer. Mama and David, who came and spent the summer with me, left yesterday. David is starting school again in ten days. He's already going into grade two! He's doing very well and had lots of fun all summer. He's left your music school, preferring drawing and games. He likes fooling around on the piano every once in a while. He likes to play his songs “by heart,” as he says.

This summer I turned forty. I can't believe I've reached that age, which once seemed the threshold of old age. We celebrated it here. Rebecca and Dena came and spent ten days with us. And Louis, who was on his way to Paris for a conference on contemporary music, stopped by for two days around my birthday.

I'll be seeing Louis again in October, at a concert he's giving at the Beaubourg. Among other things, he'll be playing work by a brilliant young Quebec composer you would also like very much, Claude Vivier.

Véronique, I miss you even more when I'm surrounded by beauty, the beauty of landscapes and stones, but also the beauty of things created by human beings since the dawn of time. On the walls of caves or cathedrals, in books or paintings, or in music that seems to come from mysterious lands and carries us to another place within ourselves.

I miss you through all the beauty I've been surrounded by for a year. And I long for you. I also miss writing to you.

I've spent the past few months travelling in this part of the world. I've been on sabbatical since June 1977. Around December, when I saw how quickly time was rushing by and understood that the countdown would soon begin, I decided to take another year, this time in the form of an unpaid leave. I've been happy since then.

So happy that I'm thinking seriously of leaving the university for good. I'm giving myself two years after my return, two years that I owe in any case, to pay back the sabbatical year, and then I'll give in my resignation. That life is too confining for an artist. Too full of bureaucratic hassles and petty power struggles for me to feel comfortable. I won't waste my life on that.

Financially, things will be a little tighter. But the freedom to create has to be paid for with a certain amount of insecurity. Anyway, I have complete confidence. I've finally exhibited my large paintings. I've sold some of them. There are also encouraging prospects with galleries in New York and Paris, and I'll soon be signing a contract with the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca (near Madrid). A gallery in Barcelona is also interested.

My exhibition was called “The Luminous Visible.” My university colleagues came, but reluctantly, and most of them slipped out quietly. The kind of art I practise, Denis told me, is not “formally outmoded,” quite the contrary, but the “class positions and attitudes” it represents are neither “correct” nor “appropriate.” I asked him to explain. He referred me to Mao's
Little Red Book
and told me that only part of my “class origins” – the poor part of my first family – were “valid.” Even my “class identity” was suspect. Those words (
origins
,
identity
,
position
,
attitude
) echoed in my head like so many insults. Fortunately, I'd had a couple of drinks the evening of my vernissage. (
Vernissage
is also a “a decadent, petit-bourgeois term,” Denis added – he'd also had a couple of drinks.)

In other times, I would have thrown down the gauntlet and prepared for a duel. But I couldn't bring myself to get angry. Although I was a bit hurt, especially to have to break with a friend, the inner smile won out, and I responded with scathing irony, until he withdrew into his political machinations.

But all that is tedious and pointless, and I refuse to rot in a cemetery of artwork.

My current trip is divided into two legs, with a few weeks in Paris in between. The first leg was in the north. I will soon leave for Provence, Italy and Spain.

In the north, I first wanted to see the landscape marble around Cotham, in Gloucestershire, England. I'll also go see stone in Italy – the “landscape stone” of Tuscany. I spent two months in Gloucestershire. I was so fascinated by the naturally “painted” marbles that I set aside my own painting. I immersed myself in the images imprinted by time alone, the division of the space according to a stratified history whose purposes we cannot know.

In front of those accidental paintings, the profusion of random forms with the concreteness of representative drawings unequalled by the most advanced techniques, I asked myself all the questions I consider essential to my artistic quest: questions regarding verisimilitude and artificiality, truth and falsity, design and accident, perfection and chaos. I'm letting all this develop. I brought back a few stones from which I will most certainly draw inspiration. With what these striated, stratified fossilized forms suggest to me, I've recently been feeling like a kind of archeologist, classifying and cataloguing things with a view to stories I will eventually tell on my own canvases.

I take notes. They have replaced my journal to you and the story of my childhood, which I left in Montreal, having said what I wanted to. Writing my story was very good for me. It allowed me to finally turn the page on my distant youthful past. But does childhood ever really end? Let's say I let it flow like an underground river that's calm now.

This summer, I also followed the “painters' trail” in Cornouaille with Mama and David. It had been a dream of mine for so long, and I wasn't disappointed. We criss-crossed the whole region, from Quimperlé to Douarnenez-Tréboul, from Briec-de-l'Odet to Penmarc'h. David drew his travel journal. Mama wrote hers. I did a lot of sketches. I understood why some lands have inspired painters, how different the whole landscape of life looks in them, constantly asking to be recreated.

In the time just after your death, my eyes certainly could not have taken in so much beauty, so blinded was I by the disappearance of your beauty. But I must gradually be becoming reconciled to the loss, because I can feel wonder without you, my Absent One, I can still love life through all the splendours it offers, and I even have a desire to start living again through my own discoveries.

It is only now, far from home, during my journey, that I've become aware of the distance I've travelled since your death, and of a way out of my own death, toward which your Absence was drawing me.

Sometimes, realizing that my mourning was coming to an end, I was angry with myself, telling myself I had no right to reconcile myself to Nothingness,
your
Nothingness.

Other times, I was angry with you for being gone so long, for being indifferent to my pleas, my missing you, my need for you. I was angry with you for abandoning me for Death and I was jealous of your Death, as if it were an absolute ruler to whom you would forever be in thrall.

Sometimes, I was angry with myself for being angry with you. Those feelings desiccated me, leaving my eyes filled with sand, my mouth with gall, and my heart with spite, pointlessly.
But it's as if crossing the liquid space from one shore of the Atlantic to the other has cleansed me of all that bitterness. I continue on my way, soothed, thinking of you from time to time, but only in loving memory, waiting for the love that will perhaps come again and blessing life in advance for seeing fit to give it to me.

The day after tomorrow, I set out on my second journey, to the south.

I don't know when I'll come back to you.

I'm closing up the house and leaving Brittany, taking my notebooks and sketches. And this journal to you, which I'll continue at my own pace. Because writing to you still helps me live.

Very few genuine words are exchanged each day, really very few. Perhaps we only fall in love finally to begin to speak.

Christian Bobin,
The Very Lowly

March 4, 197

Back in Paris in the blessed solitude of a little hotel on Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, a charming haven where for two centuries writers, intellectuals and artists have been coming to rest, write, think or just dream. For the last two weeks, I've been at the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles and I plan to stay here until June. After that, I'll go back to Montreal to prepare to return to school for my last two years of teaching – I've decided, I'm going to leave the university as soon as I've paid off the debt for my sabbatical year.

In terms of politics, things are beginning to calm down. The causes are wearing thin and the vicious battles are subsiding. Revolutionary illusions seem to be dissipating everywhere, and the general atmosphere of defeatism is palpable. Things are turning around in western Europe, especially among the French “intelligentsia,” whose standard-bearers are slipping away one by one. I hear it's the same in Quebec, and that's not surprising. Most of the leaders of its combative left were educated by those of France.

As for me, all these struggles I've observed from a distance have still upset and wearied me. We're coming out of a stormy decade and I have only one wish: to withdraw from every sphere where power grows (or diminishes, with anxiety about its loss, which is what you see in a lot of people, even Denis, who appears to have embraced depression the way some people embrace religion). To withdraw and not to give in on “my only desires,” to paint and to love. No longer to give in. To move forward, to create, to love. To be on the side of the life instinct in this world that's infiltrated by the death instinct from every side.

Living with your death also made you die within me, so much so that it's as if I no longer dare speak to you, Véronique, as if I'm talking to myself alone but thinking vaguely of you. Carrying you constantly within me as I did all those slow years finally became unbearable, as if I had to expel that death so that it would not become my own and swallow me up whole from the inside, to give birth to it as mothers bear children. But when you give birth to death – and not life – you must give to nothingness itself what you deliver yourself of. I have given you to nothingness, my unbearable dead love. I've ransacked my memory for recollections of you. I've detached myself from them fibre by fibre until my mourning was consummated forever in the sudden birth of another love, another budding desire as strong as the desire that once bound me to you.

I'm in love with another woman, Véronique, and I'm happy! Like the ever-present politics of recent years that, without seducing me, had such an impact on my way of being in the world, this love that once again delights me makes me feel as if I'm from another era and almost from another galaxy. Like an old-fashioned romantic for whom the desire to create and the desire to give oneself to another – and for that giving to be reciprocated – are finally the only true foundations of life.

Véronique, I was not burned alive in the desert that my life had become since your passing, I was not consumed, swallowed up by the ocean of sand and salt in which I was immersed. I carried you like a devouring fetus, while I was surrounded by a dried-up placental sea.
Patiently I waited, with the immeasurable strength given me both by the mysterious desire to create and the equally unfathomable desire for another love to be born.

The other day, Micheline, a friend you never knew, told me Jacques Lacan, a star psychoanalyst here – like so many of his devotees, she attends his seminars – says that love is giving what one doesn't have to someone who doesn't want it. How horrible! This kind of saying is circulating among people disenchanted with things political like a balm on invisible gaping wounds in the starry night of hearts.

Oh, Véronique, my own heart is at work loving! Creating in the moment, the moment when it's happening, life beyond all death.

The purest thing your death gave me (while tearing me away from pure desire) is the ability, without giving in to it, to recognize death in all its forms, wherever it's found, to recognize it. To flush it out. To distance myself from it. To not let myself be drawn into its greedy movements, its cylinders or spirals spinning like runaway satellites attached to nothing. Nothing living. To recognize death every time it appears, even in the most insignificant person, even in the most minute movement of thought. To seize the slightest sign destructive of life only to steer clear of it. To create elsewhere.

The word
death
is in the mouths of so many people, friends and acquaintances. You know how much I need conversation when I'm resting my eyes, when I'm not painting. I feed on the nectar of words, making my honey with certain phrases, returning to nothingness the bile of so many others. I need to understand, to understand so much, before everything dissolves again on the soil of what can't be explained in formulas and will be expressed in enigmatic forms on the canvas of a painting or a loving body.

People here are constantly making speeches and talking about death: the death of the symbolic, they say, the death of ideologies, the death of discourse, and just plain death. So many intellectuals and so many artists have death in their mouths, sowing it to the four winds of thought.

But real death has fallen silent, Véronique. The one I possessed when life took your loving body from me. The one that irrevocably dispossessed me of all others, pale reflections of that Dantesque lady, at the split second when it eternally separated two loving bodies.

And I love again! I've come fully back to life. My life has meaning again. I need to write it, to you my dead love. I need to write it to you, now that the real words have been given back to me, because now, as once was the case for you, so much speech seems vain to me, and when I listen to it still, it's to learn to detach myself from it.

Her name is Giovanna. As you may have guessed, she's Italian, born and raised in Naples, but I met her in Barcelona, where she now lives.

I was at the end of a journey filled with beautiful sights, through Provence, which I saw again as a pilgrim, and the Southwest, which was new to me (did you hear me in Toulouse, especially in the Jacobin church, when I silently cried out your name?), and Tuscany, where I had finally been able to contemplate such marvels as the landscape stones cut from living marble. I had just arrived in Catalonia, walking everywhere, and had stopped for a few weeks in Barcelona, which inspired all kinds of passions. I really didn't know exactly how I would use my remaining time of freedom, saying to myself each evening, “we'll see tomorrow,” and each morning enjoying the discoveries of peaceful wandering.

It was there in Barcelona, in that carefree, open mood, that I met Giovanna. Love took its time to announce itself to us, we were both so afraid of it – we understood this later – each for our own reasons. I, because of the crater of sorrow your death had dug. She, because of the unhappy love that had marked her life until then.

Before embarking on the adventure of desire, we saw each other for weeks, courting as people must have done in former times, letting our bodies speak first with words – and we never ran out of words. We speak French to each other; Giovanna lived in France for twelve years. We talked about everything, everything we care about: art, politics, our childhoods, our studies and our work (she works in a bookshop in Barcelona), books and paintings, countries we've visited, music, our families, religion, history and philosophy. And we talked of our dead loves.

It was in the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca, in front of paintings by Tàpies, Viladecans and Sempere and the magnificent living paintings of the ochre cliff framed by the windows, there, in front of Sempere's
Seasons
and in Giovanna's luminous gaze – and I was filled with the keen remembrance of
your
gaze, Véronique! – that desire burst forth between us, marvellous, after all those weeks of intense friendship, never to leave. At the end of that day in December, it carried us to its joyous shores rocked by a sea that had long been at low tide, sometimes tumultuous and sometimes calm.

When I tell you we often cry in each other's arms like children for all our sorrows and all the sorrows of the world, it will hardly surprise you – you remember the two of us, do you remember us?

When I tell you she's beautiful, as you were, that won't surprise you either. Can you imagine me loving other than through beauty?

I want to tell you as well that another series of paintings is beckoning to me, quietly, but eager to be expressed as soon as I get back in my studio in Montreal. But I can't describe anything about them, because what's brewing inside me, as usual, demands the movement on the canvas before I can express it in words. Or in thoughts.

Concretely, this love will not be easy. I sometimes catch myself appealing to you, in what I feel is your unfailing generosity, to watch over our destinies. Giovanna is forty-two and she has a career and a house she can't leave just like that. She has two adorable little girls, Sofia and Beatrice, whom she's responsible for and takes very good care of. We'll have more time together when they go to their father's house in France for the holidays.

And I have David and Mama, the house, my work and Quebec, from which I'm not ready to exile myself, for better or for worse.

We will deal with all this, stealing time for ourselves from regular time. This has already begun. Our imaginations are inex­haustible when it comes to being together. Love is good, Véronique! (I wish I were in the Middle Ages so I could believe that you're still alive in heaven, ecstatic with joy.) It's so sweet and so profoundly real that, through it, people and things around us lose their opaque shells and are revealed to us in all their truth in sudden and lasting splendour.

I was supposed to spend Christmas at home with David and Mama and all our friends, but Giovanna held me here. I hope I didn't hurt anyone. I haven't said anything about this love. I want to be careful. Sensitive. Considerate. And to take my time.

I've sent heaps of gifts to David. Including all the little Smurfs. He's becoming a collector: comic books, little cars, soldiers, maps, etc., and it's very cute. It's an interest I never had, and I'm fascinated by it. Oh, if only you had been able to watch him grow up with me! He sends me lots of drawings and words in “printed letters,” as he calls them. He's happy. Mama is fine. Mrs. Leblanc is still there, full of incredible energy. And Rebecca and Dena, the two protective godmothers. And Louis, my only real male friend, whom I see regularly in Paris. He's going back to Montreal in a few days.

Last fall, Louis gave a brilliant concert at the Beaubourg with the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec. He dazzled us with the perfection of his interpretation of
Shiraz
, by Claude Vivier. After that concert, people saw themselves (and heard themselves) differently. You could not fail to believe in life.

It is a Joseph overcome with happiness who's writing to you today, my Véronique.

It's dusk in the little garden, and with the evening come birdsongs and harsh sounds from the street. You can hear the footsteps of people strolling by in the fog that blankets the city. I'm going to go out and melt into the hum of the night, dreaming of Giovanna and her imminent return, mixing your name with hers, my Véronique of whom I dreamed so much through the arid days when I called to you constantly, in vain.