Against the Wind (2 page)

So I dreamed last night that our
little family was back together.

Mario Luzi,
Trames

A long time after the
catastrophe
, I had my first waking dream. It happened after a forgotten dream one night, and it held me for days, with my mind cultivating offshoots like a garden growing over weeks. Even months. Years.

In my waking dream, I was patiently rewriting the story of my still-young life, embellishing it with my imagination, which seemed to me a wonder of invention and discovery.

By the time I was sixteen, the waking dreams had become infinitely rich, and there were two boys within me, with whom I lived quite happily. There was the boy who did well in school, who played with his friends, who with his burgeoning desire pursued the local girls, who was happy in his complex family, with parents and grandparents who cherished and pampered him. And there was the other boy, totally alone and content to be so, who was rewriting his story in his head as if it was the greatest, most fabulous book ever imagined.

It was my strength and my support, and it was my treasure, my secret treasure. I shared this secret with no one until much later, when I relived it with Mute, who was my love and who is still my love beyond my loss of her…

In the fable that had become my second life, I would recreate everything as I wished it, down to the tiniest detail, and every night before going to sleep, I would polish the day's chapter. In this way I was able to simply erase the catastrophe. None of it had happened. The hairy animal had not entered the house, Mama had not been raped, and therefore I had not killed. No more Mama's terrified face, no more the hoarse breathing or the sharp knife or the body to be stabbed, for the simple reason that Mama and I had gone with Papa to his conference in Fribourg.

I had done some research in my geography books and I imagined Fribourg. I saw the hotel where we had stayed, and walked along the streets with Mama, and in the evening when Papa came back from his work, the three of us would go to a restaurant recommended by one of Papa's colleagues. I discovered menus unknown in my little region.We savoured the food and I was allowed to drink wine for the first time.We talked, and we were happy.

During one of those conversations over a good meal – it was in my favourite restaurant – Papa introduced me to the Latin declensions and translation exercises I would encounter the next year when they sent me to a Jesuit boarding school in Quebec City. Mama laughed, remembering the young man just finished his classical studies, the young man she'd gone out with and loved so much.

On the way back, we spent a few days in Paris.We went to the museum and I discovered “real live paintings,” as Mama called them, and the reproductions I had seen in my books became real, as big as life. My visual pleasure was insatiable, I went to the museum again and again. Painting called to me as the God of other books calls to mystics. In that chapter, I became a painter for life.

My stories varied according to events.

When I was fourteen, in spite of my grief, Papa in my big dreamed book did not die of a sudden coronary, a death that isn't preceded by illness but that comes like a lightning bolt to the heart and that “poor Léopold caught” the day of the catastrophe, as Grandmama always said. Papa did not die, and in my free time during the day or at night in the white solitude of my little iron bed at boarding school, the conversation between the two of us continued. Conversation and journeys. Even when I was fifty and had a family of my own, Papa would sometimes come and spend a week at our house, and we celebrated his eightieth birthday with a drink together surrounded by my paintings. And we talked.

When I was seventeen, Great-grandmama died during Easter week, but I kept her alive. I even saw her open her eyes with their little laugh lines and smile at me from her coffin.

But I was never able to bring my mother back to life. With her, it was different; she had died before the catastrophe, and the story of my second life never went back that far.

Sometimes everything would get messed up, and I wouldn't be able to tell things the way I wanted to. Sometimes I would see that night that had ravaged my soul, I would see it over and over again in minute detail. I would hear every sound, every cry. I would see myself, Joseph Sully, with the knife in my hand. I would plunge it in again, I would kill again. This would be repeated over and over until I had the strength to make up my mind to dive back, swimming breathlessly, into my first life, where I would once again, with no apparent effort, become the happy, studious boy full of energy and plans.

When I was twelve, I had my first
vision
. That's how everyone around me referred to what I called my hallucinations. It was in August, at twilight, when the light is growing dim and the shadows are taking over, the time “between dog and wolf,” as people said, but I didn't understand why.

I remember it because of the clarity and detail of the vision, but also because that week I was experiencing things I considered very important, packing my trunk and suitcases for my first year of boarding school. I was filled with excitement. Not fearful, but nervous about the change, a bit worried, but at the same time, thrilled to be embarking on a new adventure, wearing my school uniform, the first symbol of my future life as an adult.

I was no longer a child or even a little boy, I had grown that summer, “sprouted like an onion,” as my father Seamus said when I went to meet him at the train. Life seemed huge, infinite, before me, and I was going into it full steam ahead, filled with enthusiasm. My excitement worried Papa,Mama and even Grandmama Jeanne, who had moved in with us the year before, right after the catastrophe. Sometimes, Grandmama would say, “That child is too nervous. And he's grown too quickly. He has a young man's body with the heart of a child.” And she would recommend “a tonic” to restore my strength and calm me down. She would say, “It's calm and balance that give you strength.” I really loved Grandmama but I felt she was exaggerating, and I threw myself into many activities.

Another thing, one that was very important to me, was a visit by my father Seamus, the first one since he had gone to Abitibi. He had sent a letter saying he was coming, and his mistakes had made me feel ashamed, as if his lack of intellectual knowledge would reflect on me, his “natural son,” as they called me.

Also, I wasn't sure how I would find this man, I mean, how I would see him, whether I would be drawn to him or repelled by him. In other words, would I like him, would I find him “worthy of his son,” as I put it to myself?

Not to mention that his visit seemed morbid to me. He was “coming down to go see my wif in the semitary,” he had written, and at the same time “to see my son Joseph.” That meant I would have to go to my mother's grave with him, and that terrified me. I hated cemeteries, although I had never set foot in one.

I confided in Mama, who prepared things as best she could. One evening, she told me the best remedy for my fear was “meditation on life” and she read me Psalm 126, which she called the “Song of Return,” and which her father, Grandpapa Napoléon, whom I never knew, had always read to her in “tragic situations.” Beautiful Mama, my beautiful Mama, Françoise, I can still see her with her silky, almost black hair tied back simply at the nape of her neck with a little black velvet ribbon and her half-closed eyes focused on the Bible in her slender hands, which, it seemed to me, were trembling slightly, like her quavering voice that made her sound like a nervous young actress in her first leading role. The scene had a theatrical feeling, which, combined with the mystery of the text, only intensified my fear. She read the entire psalm, but I've always remembered only the last verse: “He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.”

So my father Seamus came on the train one August morning, and he wanted to go to the cemetery that night. It felt like a kick in the stomach. There was no way I could “run away from the ordeal,” Papa said, adding that “duty builds character.” My father did not use those words, which would have sounded phony to him. He put his tanned, muscular arm around my shoulders and, after remarking on what a “beanpole” I had become, said, “It's normal for a boy to go to his mother's grave with his father.” Those were the only words he spoke to me that whole day.

The two of us went to the cemetery after supper, at around seven thirty. Grandmama had made me dress in my “Sunday best,” which I always hated. I preferred my weekday clothes, which I found easier to move in and even to think in. My father read the words on the tombstone out loud:

For the first time, I saw the solemn names of my paternal grandparents in full. I saw my mother's name and imagined her skeleton touching those of her in-laws. I even saw my father's name, although he was very much alive beside me. But he wasn't saying a word. After reading the epitaph, he seemed to fall into deep thought. And how could I dare to disturb the contemplation, perhaps even the pain, of this man who was a stranger to me?

I held back my questions and tried to understand the history – my own history, after all – by rereading the names and comparing the dates, subtracting and adding as if that could exorcise my distress and the nameless terror that seemed to come from nowhere, out of nothing.

It was in that faltering of my whole being, standing beside a stranger who was my father, so close to me but so far away in his sombre thoughts – or prayers – that I had my vision.

On the western slope of the cemetery in the purplish light of the setting August sun, I saw an unknown city with streets, parks, cathedrals, imposing buildings and houses neatly lined up in front of gardens, a miniature city but one lacking no detail of everyday life. There were people in the streets, even a crowd in the market square, and birds, dogs and cats, as well as small boats on the horizon in the port, where the city gave way to the sea. I saw horses, carriages, coach drivers and passengers. It was a city from another century and most certainly, judging by the styles, from another continent.

I was both fascinated and anxious. Fascinated by the beauty before my eyes. Anxious because of the strangeness that was suddenly revealed to me. I said nothing about this to my father, and the vision disappeared as soon as he started speaking. He told me the story of his family – and mine. He told me of his Irish parents' arrival in America – in the Gaspé, to be exact – and his “Gaelic roots.” Of the extreme hardship of those poor former peasants from County Cork after everyone had been “ruined by the potato famine and the English.”

He told me how Grandpa Joe O'Sullivan and Grandma Helen Brian had met on the boat from Ireland in 1878, how they had been planning to go to “the townships” but had stayed in the Gaspé – my father didn't really know why – and married in 1880. How Grandma Helen would recite Shakespeare's sonnets by heart (he pronounced Shakespeare as if it were French) when they were small, looking out at the sea, as she had done at fourteen in Ireland when she was watching the cows. How she had only gone to school for two years and “she knew those sonnets in Gaelic” and he had no idea where her brilliance came from. How she had gone from Nellie/Helen Brian to Hélène Briand because it was easier where they lived, in Paspébiac, in the Gaspé, with “the French.”

He told me of their life in Paspébiac, and how they had crossed the peninsula by land when he was eight, as far as Petite-Madeleine on the other side, to find work, in a wagon pulled by a team of horses, with all the children and their racket. Then their fruitless search for work, their brief stay inManche-d'Épée and the trip back toward the Baie des Chaleurs and finally to Matapédia, where they settled and worked hard the rest of their lives.

How he, Seamus, had met Marie Jacques, my mother, at a Mid-Lent celebration in Restigouche. How Jacques was one of many saints' names the missionaries gave to the Amerindians they baptized. “You see,” said my father, “they had to take away the Indians' pagan names so they could become real Catholics. When you meet a Jacques, Pierre, Matthieu or Jean, you'll know that he's basically an Indian dressed as a Catholic. But your mother was a good Catholic and a beautiful Indian woman. Here, look.” And he took a photo from his coat pocket and held it out to me. Yes, she was very beautiful, that Marie Jacques who was my mother. “She died of consumption,” my father said. “She was a good woman.”

He told me the names of all my brothers and sisters, whom I only knew from a few photos, and whom I called my cousins. He started with the ones who were dead, leading me to the small white markers at the edge of the cemetery, where all the children who had died in the village since the beginning in 1889 “were resting” on the side of the rising sun, “because that's what they were, suns just starting to rise, and there was no more room in the grown-ups' area.” I looked at the names as he read them: Seamus, known as Jimmy; Cathleen, known as Catherine; Oniel; Michael, known as Michel.

Then he named the ones they “had had to give away,” starting with me: Joseph, Marguerite, Gisèle, Gilbert, Patrick.

And the “older ones” he had taken with him to Abitibi: Jimmy, Michel, Paul, Hélène and Marie.

He said that one fine day he would reunite us all at his home in the village of Lebel-sur-Quévillon. “It's a beautiful place,” he said, “everything new, not a single old house.” Then he fell silent. He looked uncomfortable, perhaps embarrassed at having spoken so much. I saw his broad, work-bent back, his head bowed toward the small white slabs, his thinning, greying curly hair, and his hands, his large hands that spoke for him, telling of his poverty and courage. “Let's go,” he said, and I followed him to the road that went by the church and along the river to my house.

Just before we got there, he said simply: “I heard about last year, about that lunatic who did you-know-what to your stepmother, Françoise. You did the right thing, killing him. It had to be done.”

That night before I went to sleep, I made my vision come back and I walked through my family tree, stopping at the special branch that linked my two families, the branch with two Jacques, the father of my second cousins, Grandpapa Napoléon Jacques, Papa's father,
and the father of Marie Jacques, my mother. And between waking and dreaming, I said to myself that I was truly related to Papa, Léopold Jacques. This thought comforted me.

The next day, my father took the train back to Abitibi. When I said goodbye on the station platform, he was embarrassed to hug me. He shook my hand firmly and said, “Try and put a little meat on your ribs.”