Against the Wind (12 page)

This quality, this nature as a pure element, a silver candelabra, this foundation, this vertical majesty, this scope, this mastery, this combinable web like a low bank, this internally useless thunder, these things in the confusion that precedes bodies, this just in order, this palpable in the thickness, this grumbling, these paintings armed with a disarmed face, this phrase in the direct mode of a story of the world told with such detachment that one would swear it could only be done in the indirect mode, this uncomfortable, this intact wear, this dismissal of dimensions, and the perpetual orphan look and the size, there are twenty possible and impossible equivalents of this stunning painting.

Pierre Lecuire,
Voir Nicolas de Staël

July 27, 1974

Véronique, my love! I haven't written to you for nearly a year now. Yet I've often come here to your music room filled with your presence, you my Absent One, I've meditated here many times and followed the seasons of the maple tree and the sky that were yours.

But you see, this written silence hasn't stopped the words I say to you in secret. It's because of the return of painting to my life or, if you wish, a new encounter with paintings – an encounter with myself, no doubt, with and in paintings. That, as you knew (and perhaps still know? or know better?), demands, at least for a short time, that formulated words fall away, be banished to the shadows, disappear.

It happened without my realizing it. One day, I found myself in my studio, where the light had created its natural paintings. I saw virtual canvases on the walls, and envisaged easels and frames. I looked at the materials piled up gathering dust, and took out tubes, brushes and tools. I organized, sorted and arranged under the impetus of preparing for what suddenly seemed imminent. As always in these situations, time passed without my being aware of it, but I felt myself leaving on another journey. I knew I was going to paint again. That it was only a matter of time and circumstances (internal and material).

I was happy, Véronique, I was happy for the first time since your passing, but it was a strange happiness that left the pain of losing you intact. That day, before I went back downstairs from the studio, I faced the brightness of the setting sun that was so alive on the snow before being extinguished, and I prayed to you and I cried for this strange happiness I found myself feeling.

I hadn't cried for months, going on blindly with my life as if I was covered by a thick blanket of gloom.

Why paint, Véronique? Why this recreation of the world in as many visions as there are eyes to decipher them?

Recently, I was reading
On the Heights of Despair
, by Cioran (paradoxically, it's melancholy books I find most encouraging). He writes: “I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.” I could not say more (or better) about painting: “I paint because …” I imagine it's the same for writers. For musicians (and you knew this), it must be different. “Music is in the air,” said Schubert. Music is in the air, and there are those who hear it and transcribe it, and those who don't hear it.

I've spent all my spare time in my studio these last months. And I've stolen time from regular time and converted it into time of freedom. I've dropped many tasks (at the university and at home) that are most often done just to fill the emptiness. I've worked as never before, and it's far from over. The studio is a huge workspace, and the size of my canvases has quintupled. The walls are covered with them – and even part of the floor. I work on them all at the same time, although each canvas explores its own subject, uses its own motifs and calls for its own organization. They're different, but they go together – how can I say it? – they make up a kind of egregore.

I hardly think when I'm painting. I can't even say I think of you. Or of myself. I dream of you and carry you along and I dream of us and carry us along in the big, swift movements of my body toward the canvases, through the colours the brushes and spatulas study by themselves, through the movements of my hand obeying my eye, my eyes that suddenly see, drawing on everything, forgetting you and me, reserving the ultimate right to control what will emerge and what will exist.

First I worked on the colours. A lot. The textures of the colours. On my last trip to New York, I brought back hematite, malachite, azurite, vermilion, lapis lazuli, orpiment, realgar and charcoal pigments. Other iron pigments, too. And cement, titanium and chalk pigments. I even have a magnificent polishing sand of cerium oxide. The mixtures with the oils were prepared in Denis's studio.

Except for David and Mama, whom I sometimes allow in, no one has set foot in my studio. To me, the unfinished paintings are fragile, as if they could disintegrate if seen by intruders. I'm waiting before showing them. I'm waiting for them to find their final form, although the forms explored in them will mostly remain without fixed borders or stable contours. Some forms come alive through the play of microchromy. Through them, I learn the silence of light. I don't know how else to put it.

Véronique, you see that I am living. You see that in spite of your unbearable absence, I'm alive to the extent of aligning details that seem so vain, so futile in the face of your essential, inescapable death. Yet – and this is such a great mystery – these impossible details make life possible for me again, and the finitude of each painting allows me to endure the absurd infinity into which I was thrown by your death.

I hear David scratching at the door and calling me.

He's now in my lap and petting his cat, Lamby, which he carries everywhere with him. He's watching me write – I told him I was writing to you – following my hand as if you were going to appear in the words. He says I'm drawing you. Oh, how you would love him, Véronique! And how unfair life is to have taken away his Mama! Does he miss you? Does he long for you? Sometimes he starts crying for no apparent reason, he's inconsolable and his sobs seem to come from so deep, from a place that eludes us, where he already feels a loneliness that's beyond him.

We comfort him, Véronique. We all love and treasure him: Mama, Rebecca, Dena, Louis, Denis and Michèle. And other friends who sometimes join us. And even your parents, who've grown closer to us since your death, especially your mother. Your father, on the other hand, is withdrawing more and more, sinking into a silence where nothing and no one seems able to reach him. Your mother has taken the reins in the house, so to speak, and this new power has given her a gentleness and a calm we hadn't seen in her before. You wouldn't recognize her. She and Mama even get along very well – who would have thought it?

Thanks to your mother, their notary has transferred “part of Véronique's inheritance” to the foundation and to your school.

David will go to your school in September. He's overjoyed and he talks about the school as if you were there. To him, music and Véronique go together. He makes up little songs about you and does not seem to need to see you to know you're alive. Childhood is the heaven of belief, that's what David shows me every day.

On March 20, we went to the cemetery together. To your grave. I held David in my arms, and that responsibility kept me from collapsing (I hadn't gone back there since the burial). We placed flowers there. White lilies. The whole group was there. We felt as if we were in another world. We read aloud this verse by Aragon that I had inscribed on the stone: “Already the stone thinks where your name is inscribed.” Do you remember? Do you know? What is death?

Disappointed in not seeing you appear out of those lines or out of a drawing I was doing of you, and tired of being quiet for so long, David said, “Lamby and I are going. We're going to
see
Mama Véronique.” And he walked away, his face aglow, elated with his plan.

That child always brings me back to what's really important. Recently, I was reading Saint-Denys Garneau's journal. He says the poet – but it's true of all artists, I think – is like a child, he has “intense curiosity about the
why
and the
what
behind the appearances of things, wherein he so often surpasses the adult, in whom such a spirit of inquiry has been put to sleep.”

Like David, who “plays” and makes whoever he wants “appear” in his toy box, perhaps I've been sheltered from disaster by this play with my paint boxes, this play in which I move objects and make them be reborn differently, this childhood I keep inside me like a treasure. Because since you've been gone, my Véronique, disaster seemed to be my only path, a path travelled trembling over the dark abyss on slender wires stretched from one murky horizon to the other.

Perhaps, Véronique. Perhaps …

So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.

Elias Canetti,
“Hermann Broch”

February 2, 1975

You wouldn't recognize your music room, Véronique. Your piano is still there, and your table, where I come to write to you, your photograph and your furniture – and the maple tree still grows outside your window. But since his third birthday, which he wanted to celebrate here, opening his gifts and playing games with “my own friends” for the first time, David has in a sense taken over your room.

At first, he would quite naturally come with a toy and Lamby, telling him for everyone to hear that they were going to play in “our
other
playroom.” Without saying anything, he would always leave the toy there, so that by the end of two weeks, practically his whole world had been moved, and organized in his own order, which we don't disturb except when his things start to overflow anarchically all over the furniture and the floor, literally preventing us from walking across it. So we (Mama or I) tidy up, we set aside well-defined areas: the doggies on the chairs, nicely arranged, the other animals in their farm or forest (usually under the table), the little cars in their garage, the games, drawings and books in a bookcase we've turned over to him. When order has been restored, David, delighted, exclaims, “Now we can play again!” Which he does the next day, with new scenarios and a thousand other inventions and strategies, until everything overflows again a few days later.

Slowly, David has transformed what had been a kind of mausoleum into a play area. A lot of your books and sheet music are now at the school. I've also given each of our friends something of yours. I took your collection of stones to my studio. Under the big windows, they seem to come to life and conjure up your presence. I keep your journal and all your correspondence in a big drawer in our bedroom. I haven't read any of it, I just couldn't. I would feel nosy, and besides, it would break my heart to read your words.

When I finish this journal to you, I'll go and burn all of it on your grave, both your writings and mine. I thought of it the other day just like that, during a long walk in the streets. I won't hesitate an instant. I knew right away that I had to do it, and I knew you wouldn't resent me for it if you were aware of it, wherever you are – if you are somewhere – that you wouldn't resent me if you were alive, and that if I were dead and you were alive, you'd do the same thing.

I walk every day – for a long time – in the streets of the city. I vary my walks and change neighbourhoods often. I love Montreal and its many centres, like a conglomeration of villages each congregating around a church. My favourite ones are Côte-des-Neiges, Outremont, Plateau-Mont-Royal and Saint-Louis. I also love the downtowns, the one where I work and the one to the west, the downtown of business and the English, but also of tourists, hotels, restaurants and bars. When I don't have time to leave the city and go somewhere else, that's where I go away to. I feel a little like a stranger in my own city, and this internal exile is conducive to daydreaming.

Last month, I ran into Ben near the Van Horne Shopping Centre. He came toward me with a big smile on his face, and he didn't seem to be walking October. But I was mistaken, because after shaking my hand, Ben told me he had found a way to avoid being hassled about the dog. He explained that things had been peaceful since he had decided not to use the leash anymore. “After all,” he added, “October is pretty old, and he walks beside me on his own, completely free.”

Since nobody notices anything now, the two of them can go out without being harassed. “Anyway,” Ben said, “I don't even talk to him out loud anymore, which also created a lot of problems for me. October does likewise. We've become very discreet.”

That's how Ben solved the biggest problem in his life. No one suspects that October still exists. Ben is no longer dragged off to the hospital for minds. Things are fine at work and his family is happy.

“What else could you ask of life?” Ben said happily. “What else and what more? I'm telling you, Joe, life is much simpler than it seems. I'm telling you, you can find the philosopher's stone!”

So Ben and October continue to discuss, debate and exchange their knowledge. Both are still avid readers (Ben listed some recent titles). But they keep this activity concealed. Ben no longer needs to reveal his secrets.

We went for a coffee. October slept at our feet, and we talked for a long time. About you, mostly. I felt in Ben such a capacity for empathy, such compassion, that I saw myself living
between
us. How can I put it? No longer in me, nor in you, but
between the two of us
, Véronique, through this amazing capacity he has to create a presence
between
himself and the person he's talking to.

Ben has the “gift of metamorphosis,” as Elias Canetti calls it. It is a gift of poets, according to Canetti. By poets he means all true artists, whatever their mode of expression. In “The Writer's Profession” (and it was Ben who suggested I read it), Canetti writes:

It was with the insignificant October – insignificant because he was invisible and because he was a dog – that Ben found a way to be
between
people and to give you access to that state. I understood the leash he used in the beginning. That state first requires a bond, a fixed connection – otherwise, the risk of dissolution of either party is too great.

And it's thanks to Ben that I'm patiently learning to live
between
you and me. That I'm no longer that body of atoms and dust floating in the abyss dug by your death. That my body no longer clings to your death down to the most minute fibre, until the end of time.

Véronique, your death dogs me with the faithfulness of October. And like Ben, I've destroyed the cord that linked us, that attached us to one another in its miserable invisibility.

I don't know if the luck of our walks will lead me to Ben again. Basically, it doesn't matter. It's one of those friendships in which the intelligence of a single encounter makes other encounters unnecessary.

If only that could be true of our love!