Against the Wind (3 page)

When I arrived at school at the beginning of September, I adapted very quickly to the new pace of life, the style and the rituals that were unlike anything I had ever known. In my first report card, I was first or second in almost every subject. I was very proud, and Mama and Papa were too. I read it on their faces on visiting day.

In all my free time, or “wasted time” according to our math teacher, I continued to cultivate my two secret gardens, my second – invented – history and my visions. I would add whole parts of chapters to my history in my head. As a beginner in Latin, I took pride in titling my chapters in that language.

As for the visions, they became more and more frequent and varied. It was no longer just completely unknown foreign cities that appeared to me in every detail. The long hours in the chapel for the many religious services, masses, vespers, stations of the cross and confessions had given rise to mystical characters, with whom I would have conversations.

Sometimes I would sit at the right hand of Christ, as for example at the Last Supper, and listen with delight to his confidences and secrets about his miraculous powers. Christ was my favourite magician, surpassing even Houdini, who was to me the greatest of all magicians. I saw myself with him, turning water into wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead – I didn't hesitate to bring back a few of them to chat with.

These parallel activities became so important to me over the weeks that I began pursuing them in class and study time. It was only during physical education that they left me. My marks plummeted. By December, I had fallen to the bottom of my class.

Just before the Christmas holidays, the principal summoned me to his office. The prospect of that meeting terrified me. Father Gagnon seemed so scholarly and so stern, even rigid. He had a terrible reputation among the students. They called him “General Hannibal.”

I went there with a heavy heart during study period, as arranged with the monitor of the division. I knew the way to his office. It was on the other side of the chapel, in the wing where the priests lived. You had to go down long dark corridors with creaky old wooden floors, climb long staircases with groaning steps, and, once past the refectory, take smaller corridors and a tiny spiral staircase.

Before reaching the chapel, which at that hour was also dark and only had some ancient little priests praying in it, leaning on the armrests with their heads in their hands as if they were crying, you had to go through the shrine of “our holy Canadian martyrs,” Brébeuf, Lalemant and Jogues. I genuflected and crossed myself as we had been taught, with great fervour and conviction. And I asked the three of them, who had been so brave under torture by the Iroquois, to take me under their protective wing and support me in this ordeal that I feared would involve prying questions.

It was nothing like that. I found a calm and affable principal who wanted “to help you remedy this academic downturn.” He didn't understand how the same student could be “excellent in September and a dullard in December.” He called me “my lad” and tried to understand the reasons for my academic decline. I told him I didn't know why things had changed. I had no idea that my imaginary inventions and my visions could have any connection to my sudden lack of interest in my school subjects.

He talked to me about the ability to concentrate on studies and about many other things that I later forgot but that impressed me at the time. At the end of our “chat,” he said he was going to “inform your parents of this state of affairs” when they came to pick me up for the Christmas holiday.

My parents were dismayed by the news and my Christmas holidays were sad. Mama and Papa didn't scold me or deny me gifts or treats. The whole situation was “beyond us,” they said one evening at the table with Grandmama and me. Grandmama declared that I had been through too much recently, with the catastrophe – which she couldn't mention without crying – and “that episode in the cemetery” with my father, which “was too much for a sensitive little boy, I always said I was against the idea.” Her solution was to keep me at home for the rest of the year. “He'll rest and regain his strength with us,” she said. In any case, she had been “so lonesome” for me that she couldn't imagine a better solution.

Papa let her speak. He said finally that he and Mama had thought of something that would “cure” me. I should mention that the day before, I had confided inMama about my “hallucinations.” Papa said he was not a psychiatrist, but as a doctor, he knew enough about this kind of visions to be concerned about my “psychological state.” He said that schizophrenia could be cured. That I would go back to school after the holidays. That he would get me an appointment with one of his colleagues, a child psychiatrist for young people in Quebec City. And that Mama would go with me for the first visit.

Grandmama was crying harder and harder and kept repeating “my God, my God,” with her lace handkerchief in her hand and her face wet with tears.

Mama was cold and had wrapped herself in a shawl. She was drinking her tea in little sips, her eyes moving questioningly back and forth between Papa and me. Each time her eyes met mine, I felt I could hear her begging my forgiveness for betraying my confidences. Or perhaps she was reliving the catastrophe.

In any case, I didn't resent her for it. Nor Grandmama for crying so much over something I found far from sad. Nor even Papa for making plans behind my back. I thought they were being dramatic over nothing, and told them that my invented history and my visions were as important to me as my studies, which made Papa angry, and that made me see their reasons.

I asked Papa what schizophrenia was and what psychiatrists did. He answered that schizophrenia was a “serious illness of the mind that begins with delirium and ends in madness.” And that psychiatrists were doctors for “sick minds.” His words worried me, and it must have been obvious, because he decreed that since things had been decided, we would change the subject, think about other things, eat our dessert, light a fire in the fireplace and put on some nice music. And why not play cards? Which we did.

The rest of the holiday continued on this festive note, lighthearted and even happy.

My mother would say:
Sometimes we talk to you and
we wonder if you're there.

Serge Doubrovsky,
Le livre brisé

As we had agreed, Mama came to Quebec City for two weeks in January to go with me to the “mind doctor.” She stayed with her sister, my Aunt Isabelle, whom I barely knew but I loved her right away because she looked so much like Mama that they could have been twins. Before the appointments – there were four of them – I would go to her house for lunch.We would talk about this and that, avoiding the main subject that had brought us together.

The psychiatrist had set up the schedule of appointments with Papa. He would see Mama and me for the first session. After that, he would see me alone, for as many sessions as necessary. Then he would see us together again.

Since Papa couldn't leave his practice, he had talked with him on the telephone for a long time. I found out later that he had spoken of schizophrenia. His colleague “had taken the matter very seriously,” Mama told me many years later.

We went to our first appointment. Mama was nervous. I was curious about this turn my life had suddenly taken and, all in all, happy for this time off from the boarding school routine.

The psychiatrist's name was Dr. Gilles Lévesque. He was courteous and direct when he received us in his luxurious office, with its windows overlooking the river and walls covered with magnificent paintings. I felt I was in familiar territory. Looking at this art that was completely new to me, I realized that my visions were a sorry sight in comparison. It was “abstract art,” he told me at our second session when he saw me speechless with wonder. He was a “lover of abstract art” and he “collected the Automatists.”

He very soon told me I could call him “Doctor Gilles,” which surprised and pleased me, because I was used to speaking to all adults formally, except for Grandmama, Papa and Mama. I even called my father “Sir.” As for the priests at school, if they had been aware of this “liberty,” they would certainly not have encouraged these “profane” meetings. At school, addressing any representative of authority by his first name lost you three conduct marks on your report card.Ten marks and you'd forfeit the right to leave the school grounds for the next month.

After the usual questions, Doctor Gilles asked Mama to explain what had led us to consult him. Mama talked about my “plummeting” academic performance, my visions or hallucinations, and the possibility of schizophrenia Papa had mentioned. She went back to the catastrophe, recounted it in tears, and said that the ordeal had been too much for such a young boy, that it was still a horror to her, day and night, “as if the sky had fallen, as if the ground had opened up beneath our feet and had plunged us into an unfathomable abyss.”

Doctor Gilles, Mama and I spent the rest of the hour talking about this and that. I was surprised he did not dwell on the catastrophe, and I dimly grasped, without yet being able to put it into words, that what Mama had gone through was probably a lot more painful, that being raped was perhaps more devastating than killing. But I didn't communicate these confused thoughts. I would have had a hard time expressing my complicated feelings in the words we had to use there if we wanted to “heal the sickness of the mind.”

Then there were the sessions where I was alone with Doctor Gilles. There were only two of them. “That was enough to make a diagnosis,” he told Mama at the fourth and last appointment. Our two sessions alone were spent talking about anything and everything – at least that's my memory of them, but no doubt there was a logic in the conversation that escaped me at the time – and playing games like Parcheesi and Chinese checkers, and best of all, with me drawing and painting whatever was in my head. I filled lots of large sheets of paper with my visions, using all kinds of different materials – pastels, gouache, charcoal, pencil – one after another, randomly, chaotically, in the exhilaration of spontaneous creation.

I didn't know that these pictures were “beautiful,” as Mama said ecstatically when Doctor Gilles showed them to her. To me, those snatches of my visions did not nearly do justice to what I had really seen and what remained with me like the blood in my veins, the images in my head or the words in my mouth.

I clearly remember the last session, when Doctor Gilles told Mama all those things that would forever mark the course of my life. I was not schizophrenic, he said. To be schizophrenic, I “would have had to have auditory hallucinations,” which was definitely not the case. I had no hallucinations, and not even visions in the “clinical sense of the term.” I was simply a “young boy gifted with an amazing imagination,” which recent events, with their great emotional impact, had intensified, as if the shock had “opened up the floodgates of a huge dam onto virgin territory.” He felt it was essential that I be given the means to “channel this overflowing imagination.” I've never forgotten those words. I could see my visions flowing away one after another in a big canal across cities and countryside, and washing into a faraway sea from which they would never return.

Doctor Gilles must have sensed my anxiety, and he got me to talk a little. He said to me, “You see, Joseph, you will not lose your images. On the contrary, you will bring them to life in your own style that you will learn to discover and develop.” Turning to Mama, he added, “Joseph has a lot of talent. It would be good if he took serious art lessons. I don't think it would detract from his studies, quite the contrary. Joseph is an artist. He could become a painter.”

“Joseph is an artist. He could become a painter.” These words filled me with unutterable joy. I looked at the river through the big windows and I saw the paintings of the Automatists, and I said to myself,
I am an artist! I will be a painter!
That day, I knew that my real life was beginning. The chapter of childhood was over. I had a goal, an ideal. I was an artist. I would be a painter.

My parents came to meet my principal, Father Gagnon. Arrangements were made for me to take private painting lessons and to go to the studio every day under the kindly supervision of a little old priest saying his rosary, while my classmates were in choir practice or learning to serve mass. As predicted, my grades did not suffer. During all those years of classical college, I was an above-average student.

I learned drawing, form, colour, perspective, light and shadow. I was happy. The only little problem, so small compared to the wonders of the painting studio, was that I was regularly made to feel my inferiority as an artist. In the many sermons the priests gave us on our future as “children of the elite” and on our “vocations,” the “occupation of artist” was on the bottom rung of the ladder.

We were all “called” to great things, we the “privileged of society,” in the following order of priority: at the very top of the ladder, those who were “destined for religious orders,” starting with the Jesuits, of course; next, those who would become secular priests; then, quite a bit lower down, those who would take up the liberal professions as doctors, lawyers and notaries and become good husbands and fathers, the “temporal leaders of a complex, hardworking society, side by side with the former, the ultimate spiritual leaders”; after them, but only after, the engineers, architects, contractors, industrialists, merchants and farmers, who, after all, were needed for society to run smoothly; still lower, the lay teachers who were too far from the true doctrines that formed souls and minds.

And at the very bottom, artists, which included me. It didn't help that painters were the very lowest, after musicians and writers, by a logic that was so complicated that I couldn't make head nor tail of it and would return happily to what I was already calling “my work.” I must say that this presumption was instilled in me by my private teacher, Tougas – that was his only name, he had no first name. He was a real eccentric, and very funny. He “believed in” my talent and was not shy about saying so over and over again to whoever was willing to listen to his flights of eloquence.

It was the unenthusiastic view of the artist I had become in everyone's eyes that one day gave rise to this remark by the principal, Father Gagnon: “My son, you will be able to leave us after rhetoric. When you go to art school” – as it was becoming clear I would do – “you don't need two years of philosophy!” The sentence was delivered with a certain disdain.

I was neither hurt nor outraged by this. On the contrary, I accepted it with satisfaction and relief. Two years less of boarding school, which I was finding more and more restrictive and tedious, felt to me like deliverance and the promise of a life that would finally be adult, finally free.

What I was discovering in the art of painting was such a source of wonderment and pleasure that the atmosphere of contempt and condescension could not really touch me.

I was a painter and I loved it. Some day I would even make my living from it. I would often thank Doctor Gilles in my heart for having revealed me to myself. And as for my second life, written in my head – like Lot, I never looked back. Reaching toward the future, my life was borne forward by so many dreams destined for fulfilment, so many promises of delight.