Against the Wind (6 page)

Those days in the hospital for minds – and that amazing new thing he was experiencing with Véronique, with neither one of them daring to call it love but each night bringing thousands of whispered
I love you
s – all those long days when Joseph was doing his time on his best behaviour, revealed this essential truth to him: he was cured for good of the unhappiness of being crazy. He was not crazy, and he knew it.

And so Joseph was slowly cured of the madness of the sorrow of living. With the help of Dr. Laporte, whom he found competent and sensitive and whose every word showed his understanding of the meaning of events, Joseph learned the benefits of recollecting and recounting his own life. Memories that seemed trivial or meaningless came up without warning, with great force and power of conviction, while others that he had considered extremely important returned to that shadow zone from which they never should have emerged.

Joseph recollected, classifying, sorting and discarding or keeping things for the life story – his own – that he was creating from scratch. In spite of difficulties concerning things he would sometimes have preferred not to see (certain dreams, fantasies or scraps of anecdote), he was fascinated by the direction his own story was suddenly taking. Joseph told Dr. Laporte (and Véronique that evening): “I am becoming my own autobiographer, and I like it.”

Not only did the discovery of his life put into words not prevent him from painting – something he had feared – but he saw himself becoming a
different painter
. His dream of combining concrete and abstract while preserving both finally began to be realized, taking shape on the canvases exhibited on the walls of the corridors, the day room and even the consulting rooms. It gave the whole ward a kind of festive atmosphere. Even the patients who were the most lost, the most absent, would sometimes stop in front of a painting, captivated.

Rebecca had asked for two paintings, one for her office and the other for “my living room at home,” she had said. And Dena, the occupational therapy “teacher,” as she was called, had asked for one to send to her family in Israel, where she had been born. Joseph had found that so gratifying that he had refused to take money. He had given paintings as gifts to Rebecca and Dena, but also to Véronique.

“It's strange,” Joseph said to himself, “that by rewriting the story of my life, I've regained my first real visions from adolescence.” He didn't really understand why, but that did not alarm him. He was so happy with the results, seeing the precise old forms emerge under his hand on the canvas to join the abstract ones in which he had long excelled. Joseph considered this recent marriage as successful – and as full of promise – as the couple formed by Véronique and him.

“A whole lifetime won't be too long for me to understand what is happening now,” Joseph said to himself. It was agreed that Joseph would continue seeing Dr. Laporte, but privately, after leaving the hospital. “I want to continue this journey,” Joseph had announced. “And I want to organize my first solo exhibition since coming back from France. I'll call it
Return of Visions
. And I want to get back to work.” As if that brief sojourn among the mad had given him access to a whole universe of inventions and unfathomable truths he had never dreamed of. “I'll go back to work as soon as I leave here.” Joseph was a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts, which would soon become part of the new Université du Québec network. He was part of the core group of teachers chosen for UQAM, in Montreal.

But all this, all this energy, all these beauties, did not keep him from suffering – and sometimes horribly – when certain feelings, certain images, certain phrases came to the surface. He had always seen the story of the catastrophe as finished, over and done with. But it had come back to haunt him, to gnaw at him as if it had just happened. He circled around it, came close to it, brushed up against it, fearing that it contained a dangerous burning centre like a volcano. He wondered,
How many times, how many more times will I have to plunge my knife in and kill the monster to free Mama and me of him forever? How many times?

There was no answer. Joseph resigned himself to letting the ghosts come, letting them move about and speak in their vague, enigmatic ghosts' words.

The only peaceful times occurred between him and his canvases, when he was working, completely enchanted by that subterranean world that sprang from his body, eye and hand in the silence filled with movement, as if his hand were thinking, but without words. And those times of peace and happiness when he met Véronique in the occupational therapy sessions, when she spoke very little and always in halting sentences, or when they ate a meal together – and especially, during those evenings and those nights when never again, oh never again, would they be apart!

But at the same time, there was that letter he had received from Marie-Nicole, passed on to him by his best friend, Denis, to whom Joseph had finally decided to reveal the secret of his hospital stay. Joseph had read and reread that letter – he kept it in the inner pocket of his jacket, carefully folded in four – and it broke his heart. His thoughts (and his feelings) wavered between the pain of losing the woman he had long felt was the love of his life and a sense of deliverance at breaking with her, a great sense of freedom with regard to Véronique, whom he wanted more and more to be his. Because it was indeed a break-up letter, signed by Marie-Nicole, who had been his close companion for such a long time. Since that day in September 1961 when they had met while crossing the Atlantic on the
Homeric
and had fallen in love. They had become attached to one another and had taken the train together from Le Havre to Paris and had gone together to the Canadian students' residence in the Cité universitaire, where, the following year, they had married so as never to be parted again. Joseph was twenty-three years old at the time and Marie-Nicole was twenty-one.

Together they had gone through all those years of study and the discovery of autonomy in a world that seemed to belong completely to them and offer them a thousand guarantees of hope and success. Marie-Nicole was as much a part of Joseph as life itself, and until his return from Ireland broken and devastated, he had believed that was what love was: that life, easy, loving but without passion, he had with Marie-Nicole, his faithful companion and confidant.

After his return from Ireland, things had fallen apart between them. The last year in Paris and the return to Montreal by way of Italy and New York had been a nightmare, until Joseph's breakdown in the winter of 1968. Marie-Nicole had at first decided to leave Joseph for an entire year, “to take a break,” she had announced, “and to find myself. To see who I am. To take stock of my life.” Joseph had had no choice but to accept this decision, which was expressed with irresistible force.

With that “final” letter, which he knew by heart, Joseph was faced with a
fait accompli
. There could be no more discussion or delay. His faithful confidant did not even give the reasons behind her “irrevocable decision.” She had “suffered so much from the loss of your love.” She said he was “a dreamer caught between your allconsuming work and the painful memory of the impossible love of an Irish cousin.” Marie-Nicole “no longer loved” him. She was leaving him, walking out of his life. Joseph, who, without really thinking about it, had always seen himself as perfectly decent, was tormented by those words. Without Marie-Nicole, his life at first seemed to him like a huge chasm that he would have to cross on a tightrope suspended between two precipices. He felt a dizziness, a nausea in his body and his soul.

Then Véronique had come into his life like a miracle – a strange, disturbing miracle. Love regained had a previously unsuspected power that gave him giant wings, but it did not take away that dizziness of his whole being. One night when Véronique was sleeping peacefully in his arms, Joseph said to himself – and this thought calmed him –
If dizziness is my lot, I will take hold of it and conquer it, building my life on its power.

She was lying in her bed in a
nightgown in the morning
when they found her dead, her
eyes closed, her head on her bare
arm in the pretty pose in which
she usually slept. Just that, and
nothing more.

Georges Walter,
Les pleurs de Babel

Joseph had told Dr. Laporte – and then Véronique – his story with his Irish cousin Irene.

It had happened during the summer of 1966, when he had gone to Ireland by himself to meet the cousins on his father's side who had remained there. He had decided to reconnect with the Gaelic part of his origins, as he told Marie-Nicole, to “meet the hidden side of my destiny.”

At first, he had found the train trip across England fascinating, and southern Ireland, which was new to him, captivating. Then, after the initial images, he had discovered the extreme poverty, the misery of the villages in County Cork, where his cousins lived.

However, he had been received with an exuberant hospitality that was completely unfamiliar to him. On the first evening, they had all gathered at the little house of his most well-off cousin – who owned two cows, a pig, some chickens and turkeys, and a field of potatoes – to welcome the cousin from America, their arms laden with food and their spirits overflowing with affection, laughter, stories and songs. They had celebrated finding Joseph again with glasses of whisky and beer until the wee hours of the morning, and he had gone to sleep at dawn, drunk and euphoric. He woke up the next day lying fully dressed on an old mattress on the ground beside his bags, between the kitchen and the adjoining stable, which had no door, with the animals ambling around among the humans as if they owned the place. The smell was hardly bearable and the mingled cries of humans and animals had frightened Joseph and made him want to get back to Paris as fast as possible.

He had eaten eggs and bacon with coarse black bread, toasted, and tea, and was quietly preparing his exit. But in the afternoon, something extraordinary happened, and Joseph, in a state of shock, no longer had thoughts of leaving. That shock arose from meeting his cousin Irene. Irene O'Sullivan, who had not been there the night before, was just back from Dublin, where she had gone to shop. It was love at first sight between Irene and Joseph, instantaneous and mutual, for the first time in their lives. Irene was thirty-six, with abundant curly red hair, aquamarine eyes, sparkling white teeth, a laughing mouth and a body that was sumptuous but well-proportioned. She was “woman personified, grace in the flesh,” thought Joseph, who could not take his eyes off her beauty, captivated by her gaze, her full lips. He wanted only one thing: to press his mouth to hers, to melt into her and lose himself in an embrace of her whole body, right away, now.

Irene had also felt a powerful passion for Joseph. With his tall, romantic body and slender hands, his perfectly sculpted head and dark, languorous eyes, she thought him “the most handsome man in the whole universe,” as she said to him often, taking his head between her strong hands and adding, “Oh, Joe, darling, you're such a beautiful boy and I love you so much! Oh, my dear, tell me, are we going to die from this great but forbidden love?” Forbidden because Irene was married and a mother. She had two daughters and a big peasant husband, to whom she had come a virgin at their wedding and sworn absolute faithfulness.

So Joseph and Irene loved each other madly for a whole summer, hiding and sneaking about in fields and barns and the inlets of Cork Bay. They loved each other with an impossible love, and with the wrenching guilt of Irene, who would say, “Oh, Joe, my dear, I'm faithless to my husband and girls. Heaven will punish me. Oh, Joe, dear, I love you so much, I'm happy for the first time in my life and so guilty, darling, so desperately guilty.”

Joseph said, “Come to Paris with me. I'll adopt your daughters. Bring them with you and we'll go back to America, where divorce is allowed and new beginnings are possible.”

Irene could not accept that. She said breaking up her marriage and leaving would be her ruin and the ruin of her whole family, even her two daughters, whom she would no longer be able to look in the eye and love with that simple joy with which she had always loved them.

It was Joseph who decided, with a heavy heart and an aching body, to go away one night, leaving on the kitchen table for his hosts an envelope containing a letter of thanks and farewell to all and a hundred American dollars he had brought to give them.

Back in Paris, Joseph shut himself away with his broken heart. He confided in Marie-Nicole, not suspecting the disastrous effect it would have on her, making her “sick with the loss of your love,” as she would repeat many times over until her final letter.

Some months after his return to Paris, Joseph received a letter from Ireland, written by his cousin the priest, who was educated, informing him of Irene's death. Irene, cousin James wrote, had died of sorrow and gone to “join the Eternal Father,” swallowing an incredible quantity of barbiturates one night in November. But first she had confided in him, James O'Mahoney, her first cousin, and had even confessed her transgression. That was why he believed God would forgive her the final sin of despair, because the despair of love was “the least serious of all forms of despair in the eyes of our Heavenly Father.” He had written this paragraph, which would forever remain etched in Joseph's mind in letters of fire: “She was found in her bed that morning as if asleep, but she was dead, her eyes closed, her head on her beautiful bare arm, dressed in her white nightdress like a young virgin. Just that, and nothing more.”

And cousin James had blessed Joseph and implored him to return to the bosom of “our Holy Mother Church,” because he knew that Joseph, like many of his compatriots, had strayed far from “the holy paths of our universal Church, the only one recognized by our Heavenly Father and Sovereign Lord.” At first, Joseph had felt nothing. He had read the letter from cousin James and felt as if he had been turned to marble. Icy marble encased his whole body, with the words about his dead lover etched in fire in the unreachable depths. Until the day in the hospital for minds when those words had come back up from their buried source and flowed out in a torrent of tears with Joseph's story.