Against the Wind (15 page)

Man is the one who hears, in the complaint of the wind, the complaint of time.

Octavio Paz,
The Monkey Grammarian

March 20, 1983

The die is cast, Véronique. Today I'll visit your grave to burn all these words written over the last ten years.

I'm not sure why, but I know these pages will be the last ones I write to you. One knows when things begin and when they end, but one never quite knows why. From the beginning of time to its end, the most important things have come to us under the seal of secrecy.

You died exactly ten years ago. It's two o'clock in the afternoon. I'm in my studio bathed in sunshine, flooded with light from my recent paintings, filled with the white silence of winter that stretches and melts, permeated with your silent presence that only your photographic gaze cries out.

We become attached to certain anniversaries as if they meant more than others – why the tenth, why not the ninth or eleventh? We hold on to certain dates, marking them with signs and rituals, and the ceremonies we invent celebrate good fortune or ward off ill. Our wedding anniversary, this year, Véronique, will be that of burned letters turned into ashes on the earth that receives ashes and turns bodies to dust.

I'll go this evening, alone. This last ceremony requires a private meeting.

But what meeting, Véronique, if not that of a last look toward death, toward that sphinx you became so long ago, forever?

As if at the ends of the Earth, I'll bend over, dizzy, staring one last time into the abyss, and then I'll stand up, cross the cemetery and walk here without looking back. My last grieving for your death will be for that black bed where you do not rest, that dismal layer where you are no more, where only your name is written because you have been. And the precise dates when you were here: 1940–1973. That's all!

I'll weep no more for your death, nor cry out for it. Life has taken me wholly in its arms again. Life and its joys. Life and its discoveries. All outrage in me has been silenced. I have gone beyond the unnameable despair that comes to us from nothingness. I've shouted all my sorrows and I've thrown them everywhere in the universe. My sorrows have punctuated my days and my dreams, and now they orbit like nebulous satellites scattered among the galaxies, their cords cut.

As in childbirth, I have brought forth all my sorrows with complaints and cries and delivered myself of them, each time feeling myself becoming all women in the world while knowing I was a man – ultimate grief is androgynous, that's what I've felt all these years.

You see, Véronique, I'm speaking these words knowing they're imprecise. No word in any language will ever convey the full measure of death and loss. No combination of words either. No image or music ever created. Words, images and music are only rituals to ward off the ill fortune of death.

Even good fortune in life calls ultimately for silence. Silences between words, between images, between sounds.

The ritual I will invent this evening at your grave will take place in the absolute in-between of everything, where silence speaks all alone – that's why I'll feel dizzy.

That silence and that dizziness fed by your absence, I'll leave them for good, consuming them with the rest, burning with them that part of me that is still attached to your immortal absence.

I've come from the window that looks out on your maple tree, which is now as tall as the house. The wind has risen barely perceptibly. A fine snow is blowing over the first rivulets of spring and they will soon be covered with a light layer of ice. The sun has disappeared behind the veils of clouds forming into lines. I hear the faint moaning of the wind. It conveys the complaint of time and takes me back to you.

Even though I know you are no more, even though I'm writing my last mourning to you, its last skin, I won't lose the very keen need to talk to you once in a while, as one sometime talks just for oneself, just to oneself, when the world inhabits us entirely and there's no one around.

On my last trip to Spain, one day when we were walking on the beach in Sitges, Giovanna said, “I know when you're talking to Véronique.”

“How do you know? Often, I only realize it afterwards.”

“I know. That's all. It's as if I knew Véronique as well as you, Joseph.”

“Yes! If you'd known her when she was alive, I know you would have become the best of friends.”

Giovanna knows I'm going to go and burn all this on your grave. She knows of my love. She knows of my mourning. With no apparent effort, she was able to take the full measure of their lack of measure. In that, she's like you.

Giovanna and I have seen each other often, for short and long visits. She came once for a month with her daughters. Everything went well with Mama and David. I had been worrying for nothing. About David, especially. The three children were like brother and sisters. They weren't born with the idea of a single-parent family. David is of his generation.

Only Mrs. Leblanc reacted a bit badly to all this. And yet she never knew you. Maybe precisely
because
she didn't know you. One rainy day when they were all there running around and making a racket in the house, I heard this scrap of conversation between Mrs. Leblanc and Mama:

“Isn't it awful, these poor children!”

“What's awful? What do you mean, poor children?”

“Oh, if only Madame Véronique were here! Poor David! Madame Vana (she can't pronounce Giovanna's name and persists in calling her Madame) isn't even his Mama! Poor children! Every­thing's all mixed up.”

“Come now, Mrs. Leblanc, these children are happy! I know Véronique. I can guarantee you she's very happy to see them like this.”

They continued the conversation. In a friendly way. About the generations. How things have changed since they were young. About families breaking up and reforming. About children, who “have so much to say these days!” All these changes that are a bit hard for them to take in but that generally please them.

And what Mama said about you was music to my ears. I smiled at you in my thoughts as if you were here. I know all the time that you're not here, but there are moments, often at the most ordinary times, through little chance events, when the most innocuous things create a kind of miracle, there are moments when everything starts to vibrate as if I were touching your presence.

One day, Giovanna and I will live together. When? We don't really know. In Quebec or in Spain? We're not sure about that either. Whatever our decision, which involves a lot of considerations for both of us, we'll be happy together. We'll grow old together. You see, I'm writing this note in spite of my fear of old age, which is the only fear I acknowledge. You and I didn't talk very much about it. We were too young. But I'm forty-three, with my first grey hairs and deteriorating vision, and it makes me rather anxious. I mean, decline, decay, all those little goodbyes I now have to say to various parts of my body. The big goodbye to my whole body seems less painful to me. Less petty. More noble, if you like. In the beginning, I tried to imagine how you had said your last goodbye to your body. I told myself that, even though it happened so fast, a person must find the time, precisely because it's all so fast. We'll never know.

I heard Mama playing her Chopin waltzes on your piano. She has her very own way, with a kind of twenties rhythm that's lively and languid at the same time. When she's feeling good, she gets out her music books. The other day, David asked her, “Grandmama, don't you get tired of always playing the same tunes?” I was about to say something, but I saw that Mama was dealing with it very well on her own. She looked at him with an enigmatic smile (like the
Mona Lisa
's) tinged with condescension and went back to her waltzes.

David is wonderful, full of energy. The world belongs to him. He has loads of friends and all kinds of projects and he does well in school, although studies are not his primary concern. He's very good-looking. With his curly jet-black hair and his soft, dark eyes, he has a Mediterranean look. Or Amerindian. I'm not worried about him. He exudes happiness. God, how you would love him, Véronique!

The sun is setting. I went and turned on the lights. I'm looking at my paintings. They take me back to that marvellous journey to the valley with Giovanna two summers ago, when we slowly made our way back and forth across the Lower St. Lawrence, stopping at inns and motels or camping when the weather was nice.

Well, believe it or not, Véronique, I did some pastoral painting, and I had a great time! Can you imagine it – me, a landscape painter and loving it? It all started in Rivière-Ouelle in the church square. I'd bought an easel and a wooden box for my materials. I had seen so much beauty since the beginning of the trip that I had to express it in movements of colours and shapes, and that's what I did for the rest of the trip.

During those hours, Giovanna would walk, visiting the churches and villages and exploring the area, or she would come and read beside me, sunbathing.

I painted the river at dozens of places. I painted the shores, the rocks and the stones, the houses, the churches and the cemeteries (those in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Rivière-Ouelle, Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer, Sayabec and Amqui are my favourites). I painted the mountains, the hills and the rivers, hundreds of fields, little roads and trails. And the great Lake Matapédia.

I came back to Montreal with an incredible number of small paintings (which I had shipped by train, since there wasn't room in the car). Mama was delighted and so were my friends. But others – connoisseurs, collectors, critics and gallery owners – received them very badly. They were outraged. How could I, Joseph Sully-Jacques, with a well-established reputation as a “postmodern” painter (that's what they say now), let myself be sucked in to taking the easy way of the “Sunday painter”? And so on.

But I had a lot of fun. I even learned from it. Going back to the drawing of my early days, I almost unconsciously applied the technical skill of the blended sequences of what I call my “abstract concreteness.” I went back to impressionism, at least for the time of that magnificent journey. I'll never again see the landscapes of the Lower St. Lawrence and the Matapédia Valley in the same way. It's probably not coincidental that this way of seeing came to me in the country of my childhood. I believe part of my vision had remained there, intact.

The small paintings from the summer of 1981 are now all over the studio. For friends and family, people I'm close with. I may perhaps go back and exhibit them there one day.

And I have another studio. It's huge! In proportion with my other paintings. I've rented a loft in a former factory in the south­west, near Wellington Street. My space is as high as the three floors of the house and it's covered with glass, supported by an industrial architecture of iron and concrete. You'd love it. It's another world.

I usually go there in the morning. After unlocking the huge iron door and closing it again, I open a few panes and breathe in the mingled smells of the lower city, the port and my oils and I feel as if I'm embarking on a long trip on a freighter, exhilarated by the silence that finally has room to breathe.

I walk around the place, pacing up and down to get accustomed to it. I touch the canvases, which have become gigantic, looking at the colours and dreaming of the subjects, waiting for the click that will begin the shaping process.

I'm happy there, Véronique, I breathe, I feel I've been given a new freedom. I look at the river, which may be less beautiful here than elsewhere, but it has the capacity to take me farther than any road of asphalt or dirt, to where all the elsewheres of the world, including those within me, are beckoning, calling me to the unexplored spaces of the paintings at once far and near.

It reminds me of an evening when I was walking along the Seine with Giovanna. We were coming from a concert of the Alban Berg Quartet playing Beethoven's Late String Quartets. We were walking in silence, still feeling the emotional impact, when Giovanna said something I found incomprehensible: “Violin, viola, violoncello, cello! With the cello, I couldn't for such a long time.”

With her hushed voice and hesitant movements, she seemed as if she was coming back from another world. In response to my quizzical look, she told me the following story.

When she was quite little, in the Naples suburb where she lived with her family, an uncle on her mother's side came from the United States to spend the summer with them. One day – and again, other days, other nights – he raped her. At first quietly, and then more and more brutally. And always under the seal of secrecy, because otherwise, the rich, powerful uncle would disinherit and dishonour her family. The classic scenario. I'll spare you the details.

In any case, to come back to the violin, violoncello, viola and cello, Giovanna, who had always been afraid of those instruments, especially when she was little, had just made the connection. The name of the uncle who violated her was Marcello.

That night, I in turn told her about the catastrophe when I was eleven. “You did the right thing,” Giovanna said. “If I could have killed, I would have. There are murders that are inescapable. Murders that are
intrinsically
necessary.” She emphasized
intrinsically
.

We were in agreement on that catastrophic necessity. That was another pact between us. With people who really love each other, things that go without saying between them can become pacts.

It's funny, Véronique, how love cries out for likeness, for sharing. Shortly after that evening of walking and exchanging confidences on the banks of the Seine, I had a dream in which you appeared to me from a completely new perspective. I was in a café by the Seine and saw two women sitting at different tables. I saw them from behind. Suddenly, the first one turned around, and she was my double – exactly like me, but a female version. The second one did likewise, and it was the same, the woman was a carbon copy of me. The three of us looked at each other and knew immediately, without words, that we loved each other. I saw myself as a woman in them, they saw themselves as men in me, and we loved each other. Then the first one started to look like you, and she smiled at me just as you did, she cried and she vanished. She disappeared, leaving a shadow on her chair. The second one went and sat down on the bluish shadow, which dissipated like a cloud. She looked at me and smiled, and it was Giovanna.