Against the Wind (16 page)

It wasn't a nightmare, in fact, it was a beautiful dream, but I woke up bathed in sweat, crying. Those beloved faces, both as familiar as myself and as enigmatic as total strangers, left me in a haze all that day, as if I had profaned my own image, staring too long into reflections of reflections.

You and Giovanna have returned me to my primal truth, which is to grasp oneself in the very act of flight, to dissolve at the slightest touch.

Love is the simplest and most mysterious thing. There are those who find their complementary opposite and recreate themselves in the soil of difference. And those who, like me, seek likeness to find in the depths of themselves their elusive strangeness.

Today I could write to you well into the night, but life awaits me ever more urgently. I hear the noises of the house calling to me. It's my turn to cook tonight. I promised them spaghetti Bolognese. David will help me. He sometimes really enjoys cooking. Louis, Dena and Rebecca are coming for supper and bringing wine. They insisted on this commemoration. It's been ten years, Véronique, and the event won't be tragic – it's as if your death has dissolved over time.

Dena and Rebecca are wonderful, they bring light and warmth to our lives. They're still working at the hospital for minds and taking care of your foundation.

Under the influence of Louis, who's still my best friend, the school has changed its mission somewhat. It's become a centre to introduce contemporary music to young people of all ages. It's the only one of its kind in Quebec – and perhaps the world – and students come from all over to take courses.

Sometimes, we all go to concerts or recitals together. David, who's more interested in blues and rock, says “it makes the scales fall” from his ears. He much prefers to express himself through drawing, but says he won't make a career of it. He doesn't know what he wants to be. The other day, he said, “I'd like to be a diplomat in embassies. To travel all over and make money.” He said he would have a villa on the Côte d'Azur where Mama and I could “end your days.” Great!

Véronique, they're calling me, with specific demands this time. I'll come back later tonight to pick up all our papers. I'll walk to the cemetery. All the conversations in the world, even the most marvellous, must one day come to an end. Even though, deep in our souls, they're endless.

When his evening was over, when the house was calm and tidied up and he could hear Françoise's and David's deep, regular breathing, Joseph climbed the stairs to the studio and, without reading them, gathered all the papers destined for the fire: Véronique's journal and letters and his autobiographical account of his childhood, as well as his letters to Véronique over the last decade.

He got matches and a flashlight and packed everything in his bag, which he slung over his shoulder and across his chest to keep his arms and hands free during the long walk. He had put on an anorak, tied a scarf around his neck and pulled on high felt-lined rubber boots, with knee-high woollen socks. This was his early-spring outfit, which he wore on long walks on paths less travelled.

Softly closing the door of the studio, he went noiselessly down the stairs, turning off the last lights on the way. He went out the door, slowly turned the key and set off into the night. Everything was quiet in the streets and alleys of Outremont. He knew the way to the mountain by heart, the shortcuts, the places he could cut across, the stairways of the regular walkers and even the gardens asleep under the last wet snow. Only a few dogs acknowledged his presence, and they immediately went back to sleep. Joseph was not a stranger to them.

At the top of the mountain, he turned west onto a little path down a gentle slope and into the cemetery. The path was narrow because not many people took it, but it was well established: those who had taken it had done so with respect and knowledge of the place. Bordered by straight rows of young poplars, it was like the nave of a cathedral that inspires contemplative silence or prayer.

Tonight Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery looked like a city to Joseph, with boulevards and avenues, streets and alleys, courtyards and gardens. But a dead city, whose houses of marble or granite were stripped of their doors and windows and the porches and balconies where children play and grandmothers sing as they knit.

Joseph knew the path that led to Véronique's lifeless house in the street of maple trees, where tonight the black branches, like waltzing ghosts, cast shadows on the fine film of ice over the snow.

When he was in front of Véronique's little dead house, Joseph opened his bag and built the commemorative fire. In the flickering light of the fire dampened by the wet snow, he contemplated what remained of the writings, and he knew that it was good. He knew that their destiny was to be burned and that it would have been harmful to refuse this consummation.

And suddenly, parts of his life began streaming by like so many witnesses, expressing their approval of what he had undertaken. A scene from the film
Every Man for Himself
, by Godard, came back to him, where the character (whose name he had forgotten), after being run down by a truck on the road, says, as he picks up his glasses, that he can't be dead because he hasn't seen his life flash before his eyes.

Joseph said to himself, “I'm alive, because I'm seeing my life flash before my eyes.” He didn't realize that he was saying exactly the opposite of what he meant.

Then, without saying anything more, he found himself completely absorbed in memory, seeing only the events that were coming back willy-nilly, not in chronological order.

The almost silent flickering of the fire brought back the sizzling of trout frying in a pan the summer he was ten and he and his friends would go fishing up the river, and when they got back to the shore at the “little point,” they would cook themselves supper like grownups … when the sunset was like a crimson ball rolling behind the hills, leaving its last blazing threads like lace around the topmost branches of the trees … and when he tasted the trout, and when his arm brushed against the arm of his first girlfriend, Nicole, with her blond hair and fiery cheeks. What bliss that was!

He saw his first walk as a young man in the autumn of Léopold's death, when he had set out alone in the night on those empty paths and he had turned up the collar of his jacket because he knew, now that he had no father, that he was becoming a man, because the grief of his loss had made him turn his back on childhood. Alone for the first time, really alone, he had seen life open up before him like a huge map unfolding, full of promise.

He saw himself again take the long train trip from college home to Léopold, whom he would never again be able to talk with. He again heard Léopold read to him from the Bible, the Psalms, the Book of Job and Genesis, his favourite book. He saw himself again on Léopold's knee on stormy Sundays with the big
Illustrated Catechism
on his lap, with the page on hell and its pictures of horror arousing unspeakable fears.

He relived in minute detail his memory of the catastrophe, a memory as cold as ice. He knew that the murder of the monster raping Françoise had been necessary, but he was so little then, and he knew that at whatever age it happens, a murder shatters the heart and hunts down the child curled up in the depths of innocence. Once again, Joseph felt a pang in his heart from an old scar reawakened by the little fire on the grave.

Léopold's smile came back to him, the smile of his “final rest” that made him look “blessed,” when the house was teeming with paunchy luminaries with their sham sorrow, and he had seen, beyond the smile, a little wrinkle under one eye, so clearly delineated that it could have been the bed of a single dried tear.

And he saw again the first scene, the images of which had been created through so many retellings by Mama and Papa, when he had been given by his first family to his only real parents. He heard the words of that ritual of origin as if it were yesterday and he were there again, warm and cosy in the arms of his grandmother Nellie, sucking on the beads of her wooden rosary, breathing in the smell of her big starched apron.

Then he saw again another apron, that of his Grandmama Jeanne when he would visit her in her garden and she would take the fruits she had gathered out of the big pockets around her belly and show them to him, beaming as he tasted them. He tasted the fruits from Jeanne's garden, strawberries on bread fresh from the oven, with maple sugar and fresh cream. He tasted the meals at the family table when he would come home from school, as tall as a man and ravenous. He tasted the lips of his first love, Carmen, the summer he turned sixteen, when his whole body was exploding with the hunger of desire.

Marie-Nicole crossed his mind like a fleeting shadow that he let pass – that break-up had left him with such a taste of bile in his soul. He had only wanted to make things right, but Marie-Nicole would have none of it. And Denis, with whom he had never reconciled. Joseph had to admit to some failures in his life, which he would have wished to be dominated by loving relationships. In the case of the failure with Denis, the words of the two of them had became murmurs, and then had finally faded into the night.

Irene, his great Irish love, came briefly to tell him that that ultimate desire to connect could be the one utopian dream forever lost and only that.

Joseph was cold. When a group of his brothers and sisters appeared, those strangers, the “given-away” and the “kept” sons and daughters of Seamus and Marie, when he saw again his last trip to Abitibi to bury Seamus and heard the songs and laughter drowned in whisky and beer, when he saw himself writing his childhood, a prisoner in a little motel with a storm raging outside, when the cold of solitude came and covered him like an icy cloak, and when, at the same time, he saw another group arrive, made up of the people from the hospital for minds, Joseph knew that the end of the recollections had come.

He crouched near the dying fire, blew on the last sparks and warmed his hands, and then scattered the ashes on the grave. The ashes formed a grey flannelette blanket from the grey headstone to the maple tree black with winter and with night.

Joseph knew that it was good.

For the first time that night, he looked up at the sky and saw the quarter of the new moon that formed a closing parenthesis on the wispy clouds drifting toward the east and shrouding the stars.

He remembered his first visions, the drawings that had followed them, and the thousands of paintings that over the years reflected an infinitesimal part of life. He knew that others would soon spring forth from his hands, more paintings still, and for a long time to come.

Getting up from the blanket of ashes, he heard, as if from the far reaches of ages past, some words from a poem by Mallarmé that he had learned in school and since forgotten – he didn't remember the title either, or the beginning or the end:

Reciting that luminous poem, Joseph gave a little wave of farewell toward Véronique's name engraved on the stone. He slung his bag over his shoulder again, turned up the collar of his anorak, lit a cigarette and left without turning around.

He walked. Without thinking about it, he took the little path again.

Rimouski, September 1993–May 1994

Madeleine Gagnon
has made a mark on Quebec literature as a poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. She decided at the age of twelve to be a writer, and after her early education with the Ursuline nuns, went on to study literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis at the Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and the Université d'Aix-en-Provence, where she received her doctorate. Since 1969, she has published over thirty books while at the same time teaching literature in several Quebec universities. Her work in all genres combines passion, lucidity, erudition, poetic vision, and political commitment.

Also by Madeleine Gagnon

My Name Is Bosnia*
Lair
Song for a Far Québec
Stone Dream
Women in a World at War*

*Available from Talonbooks

Copyright © 2008 Éditions TYPO and Madeleine Gagnon

Translation copyright © 2012 Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott

Talonbooks
P.O. Box 2076
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6B 3S3
www.talonbooks.com

First printing: 2012

Cover design by Overleaf.
This ebook was produced in part with 
PressBooks
.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit for our publishing activities.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Le vent majeur by Madeleine Gagnon was first published in French in 1995 by VLB éditeur and subsequently in 2008 by Éditions TYPO.We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gagnon, Madeleine, 1938–
[Vent majeur. English]
          Against the wind [electronic resource] / Madeleine 
Gagnon ; translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.

Translation of: Le vent majeur.
Electronic monograph issued in EPUB format.
Also issued in print format.
ISBN 978-0-88922-721-7

          I. Aronoff, Phyllis, 1945–  II. Scott, Howard, 1952– 

III. Title.  IV. Title: Vent majeur.  English.

PS8576.A46V4613 2012           C843'.54        C2012-904179-3