Against the Wind (4 page)

When I was fourteen, Papa died. Of a heart attack. He was forty. It was in October. In 1952. A sudden coronary, which he had “caught” at the time of the catastrophe, as Grandmama Jeanne never tired of repeating.

I was at boarding school. The principal summoned me to his office during class and gave me the news.

I was shaken, stunned, terrified, and I had no words, no tears to express my pain. I didn't even feel pain. I felt as cold as marble. I stared at Father Gagnon and kept repeating, “Papa is dead, Papa is dead” but I didn't believe it.

He spoke softly and said very little. I've forgotten his exact words. And besides, I couldn't hear any more than I could speak. He took me by the shoulders, gave me a hug and then led me to the priests' refectory, where we never went. He sat me down and asked the cook's helper to make me a “good hot grog, something good and strong” … altar wine with a shot of whisky and lots of sugar, served very warm in a bowl of café au lait. It calmed me down and made me a bit dizzy.

It was the cook's helper who brought me back to reality. Paunchy, red cheeked and good-humoured, with an impish look he couldn't suppress, even in the most tragic situation, he took a good slug of my grog behind the principal's back and said, “Poor kid, it's very sad. It's way too young to lose your dad. Take this, kid. You have to be in shape for tomorrow and the days after that. It's not over yet! It's just beginning! You need to get a good night's sleep. Take this. Swallow it as fast as you can. It'll do you good!”

Although I was feeling a bit drunk for the first time in my life, I came out of my cold torpor and knew that a flood of tears would pour out as soon as I was alone in my little white bed in the dormitory.

I fell asleep steeped in my pain, and in the morning when the bell woke me, I was surprised to find myself still alive and realized you don't inevitably die of grief.

Before noon, I took the train to my village. So I could avoid the ferry and all the complications of transferring, a priest drove me to Lévis. I don't remember what he said to me on the train platform – as kindly as it was, it went right past me. I was somewhere else, thinking of the earthquake my life had suddenly become.

During the endless train ride, hunkered down in a seat by myself with my forehead pressed against the window, I let myself be absorbed in the scene going by backwards against the background of the river and the sky melting into each other, perfectly alike, anthracite blue, infinite, their boundaries – like mine – blurred.

I talked to Papa. I started calling him Léopold, as if death had made me his equal. I told him about all kinds of things I had until then reserved for Mama – his death had suddenly opened the way for my confidences.

One scene kept coming back to me. It was a Sunday afternoon when I was six.We were in the living room, and there was a “raging storm” outside, as Grandmama had said. It was impossible to go out with all the highways and roads closed. The snowbanks reached up to the tops of the windows. The wind was howling like a writhing white beast, and all the lights were on as if it was night in the middle of the day.

I was sitting on the arm of Papa's chair with my arm around his neck. He said to me, “You will soon reach the age of reason. We'll do a little catechism to replace the mass. You'll have to prepare yourself well.” Preparing myself meant understanding what I was getting ready to experience, which would give me de facto “the age of reason” and was called “first confession” and “first communion.”

The big
Illustrated Catechism
was open on my knees. Papa was holding the pages.We were looking at the terrible page on hell, and he was talking to me with a seriousness I'd never seen in him before and I was staring at that horrible, complicated image with terror and anxiety.

How unbearable it was, that implacable thought of eternity inscribed over a strange clock above the gates of hell: “Always, forever!” I could understand the words, but their mystery was beyond me. Papa said, “Because of mortal sins that have not been forgiven by confession. It means: Always suffer, it will never end.”

And all those torments, all those tortures described in so much detail –
how could anyone draw such terrible things so well?
I wondered – the wheel with naked bodies chained to it being torn limb from limb; Lucifer, with his big pitchfork, impaling the worst sinners and throwing them into the horrible cauldron of fire; and all the little demons armed with their instruments of torture (whips, stilettos, knives and studded straps) relentlessly pursuing the millions of sinners condemned to eternal Gehenna.

Oh, how I swore I would be good and reasonable that Sunday afternoon, and how I wished for saintliness so that I could skip purgatory with its intermittent fire and go straight to heaven with its endless happiness, through the big gate where “St. Peter will be waiting for you with his clinking keys and his happy smile, his smile promising a thousand joys,” Papa had concluded.

And how I wanted that same heaven for Papa, that afternoon on the train that was taking me toward his death, which I would see when I touched the cold body that would contain him until his burial and the last blessing, to wait for his “particular judgment,” as he had explained to me on the stormy Sunday of my “age of reason.”

Take me away, roads! …
But no, it is no longer the time,
We would have to come running
back where we are crying.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,
“Un ruisseau de la scarpe”

I see again the boy I was (and that I still am in the fluidity of the layers that make up the Joseph of today). I see again the boy I was, and the exact moment when I set foot on the train platform is as present to me as anything I experienced today.

I immediately saw Mama coming toward me, running with little steps, holding on to her hat with one hand because it was windy. The distance she crossed, as short as it was, seemed infinite to me, standing rooted to the platform, because I was thinking,
I'm afraid
, and in my head I was saying these words I don't know how many times,
Joseph is afraid.
And I said to myself,
I'm not afraid of death. Or even of eternity. Or even of hell. And I'm not afraid of anyone. I'm afraid of me. I'm not afraid of others. I'm afraid of myself.

I didn't know what was in that fear. Neither within nor around that fear. It was there, like a big lake that I imagined emptied of life, dried up. A void. I was afraid of that void, which felt like a huge indefinable mass. Untouchable.

And then Mama hugged me. It was cold outside, but her body was warm against mine. And her tears, through little choked-back words I've forgotten, brought me back to life. I emerged from my fear and found Mama again.

In the house, Papa's body was already on view in the living room among the wreaths and cards and smoking candles, with a crucifix in his hands, which looked like wax to me. On his face was a slight smile that already made him look “blessed.” The parish priest was the first one to use the term, and Grandmama told us in secret, “It's an honour that reflects on our whole family,” and then she too put on a mysterious smile tinged with sadness, like those on the holy martyrs when they offered their final sufferings to heaven.

There was a huge crowd in the house, from the “dignitaries” in the living room or Papa's office and waiting room to the friends and family all over the house, even in the kitchen, where aunts and neighbours busied themselves, and even in the bedrooms, including mine, where two cousins had gone to sleep. This state of affairs made me heartbreakingly sad. I wanted to be alone, or alone with Mama, in front of Papa's coffin, to look and try to understand where death goes.

Around midnight, the house emptied out. The only people left with us were three aunts and three cousins. Since we had to stay awake all night and “watch over the body” in the living room, two of the cousins, who had slept all evening for that very purpose, had the first shift. So I finally got my bedroom back. After kissing Mama, I stretched out on my bed and slept straight through till morning in my student's suit with a black necktie added for the circumstances.

The second night, it was my turn to sit vigil with Mama. We talked and we cried.We talked to Papa and mourned him.

The whole day of the funeral was a nightmare for me. So many rituals, so much agitation and running around in all directions so that “Léopold's last day on Earth would be good and honourable, as his life was.” In all the excitement, much of what was said struck me as pointless, and many outbursts of weeping rang false. All these people to whom “Léopold was so dear,” who made spectacles of themselves in the poses they struck, their sobbing and, above all, the place they claimed in the procession or at the grave, right at the edge where everyone would see them throwing the first handfuls of earth, wiping away tears and flinging themselves in despair into the arms of their closest neighbours, seemed silly and empty to me.

Mama, typically of her and so much like me – and Léopold and Grandmama – had her front-row seat in the church pews and the cortège snatched by two hysterical aunts, Papa's older sisters, who appeared to be writhing in pain and said, “Léopold was our dear, dear little brother,” adding nastily to us, “We knew him long before you two did.”

And so Mama's tears, and mine, were no longer for Papa alone, but for all the desolation of the world, for its meanness, its coldness, its pain.

The funeral meal was served at the house. Again there was a crowd, a teeming throng, but they were so tired and hungry that they gave up all the dramatic posturing and instead ate and drank in a buzz of little private conversations.We were brave and absorbed in our duties as hosts, and when the house was again ours, silence finally opened up its arms to us, the great silence in which death starts talking to itself.

In the evening after supper, I wanted to go out alone. I took my first walk as a man through the streets of my village. I took roads where I was sure I would meet no one and, indeed, there were no passers-by where I went, which was everywhere and nowhere, lost in reverie, my hands in my pockets, scrunching my head down into my turned-up collar as men do when they walk alone.

That evening, at the age of fourteen, I knew I had become a man. I knew it for two reasons. First, I had been filled with fear. Real fear. Fear of myself. And I wanted to walk alone, along little roads with no passersby, lost in the thoughts and daydreams that gave rise to the visceral, primal joy of finally finding myself.

Along with this savage joy, I discovered the nostalgia that surrounded it as the atmosphere surrounds the Earth. I knew that the Earth could not breathe without the atmosphere. I would now have to live on nostalgia. As if, along with the joy of finding myself, so many old sorrows were coming to the surface, immemorial areas over which I could have no control, really. I had to accept this vague feeling that seemed to come as well. It was the price of becoming a man.

The rain always comes
like a crowd     it always
comes from the past

So pale the blood of heaven

Jacques Brault &
Robert Melançon,
Au petit matin

The summer I turned seventeen (I was born in July) was filled with important events, whose significance and impact I still often ponder.

It all began with my first exhibition of drawings, organized by my teacher, Tougas, and Father Gagnon, who had been “won over” by my “talent,” as he put it. My teacher, who I always called “Mr. Tougas,” had not thought it a good idea to include my paintings, which we called my “automatic abstractions.” He felt it was too soon, that they were “immature,” that the textures and the shapes of colour were not quite right yet. I agreed with him, especially because there were a lot of drawings (in pencil and charcoal), and in any case, I could have done without the exhibition. It made me nervous. I was scared. And fear comes from doubt, insecurity about one's talent.

The exhibition was part of the activities around graduation. I had completed my Versification course and I was graduating with my classmates. That meant a lot of solemn formal events: a public reading of results and awarding of prizes; recitals by the best musicians, mostly pianists, and the choir; a play by the college theatre troupe; a high mass concelebrated in front of many guests, including our parents; a graduation dance with the girls graduating from the Ursuline school and Collège Jésus-Marie as our guests. That meant a lot of excitement, running around, getting clothes and going to various rehearsals.

In the midst of all this hustle and bustle, my exhibition seemed superfluous. But it took place, and it was such a success that I came to terms with what until then had seemed an unnecessary demand. I learned that what people said about artwork could be as fascinating as the artwork itself. I also discovered the joy of making others proud when I saw Mama's pride in me and her happiness at being “proud of my son,” as she said, and also Mr. Tougas's pride and happiness. Mr. Tougas took the compliments on my drawings as compliments to him.

Despite the sadness that was constantly with her since Papa's death (although she hid it with a captivating smile and impeccable beauty in her appearance and dress), Mama seemed so happy that I experienced the two days of celebrations and the return home as pure beauty. Our trip along the river and through the valley, with a stop at an inn for one night and a picnic the next day – we went by car with Aunt Isabelle – will always be part of the great fresco of images of happiness within me.

The ordeal that awaited us on arrival was equally great. Grandmama was dying. She had “begun her mortal agony,” Dr. Dionne, our family doctor, said.

With Mama, Aunt Isabelle, Dr. Dionne and the midwife, Mrs. Lévesque, I stayed with Grandmama until the end came. It took ten days. At first, she was in so much pain that we were desperately unhappy. Then, with morphine, she went into a state of calm rest between waking and sleep, and in that in-between state, she was not fully alive but not yet departed, and she barely recognized us. At the end, she no longer recognized us at all, so much of her was already gone, but we still spoke to her and held her hand – you never know – and death came so softly that it took the doctor to make us understand that she had really died.

For the funeral, we were treated to the usual procession and outpouring of emotions. Now I experienced it like a play I was only half watching. I was somewhere else. Except for Mama and a few others, I felt very distant from most of the people, who were caught up in their unresolved dramas, their problems camouflaged under hoards of petty annoyances, meanness and spite.

I have to admit that it was those days that brought me together with the first love of my life. Carmen! Her name was Carmen and I was in love.We were in love, and we stayed passionately in love all summer long.With a sense of eternity that led us to make so many promises and vows to each other. We loved each other as no one had ever loved before, and we were going to love each other always. We would never love anyone but each other, ever. And for all time, we would love only one another.

I learned all the pleasures of the body and discovered all its joys. So did Carmen, and we were ardently attached to each other. Smitten. Besotted. And that first relationship, with all its power and its enchantment, foreshadowed all the later loves in my life.

We parted in September, stricken and adrift, to return to school and studies. We wrote to each other for a long time after and saw each other again at Christmas and Easter, and then life distanced us from each other, although we never actually broke up. A love that doesn't end with a definitive break never really ends.

Carmen, like all girls her age in her country, could not “go all the way,” as we said. A girl from a “good family” – or any girl – could not make love before marriage. She had to “keep her virginity” until then. Like all the boys, I resigned myself to this and used every trick in my book to do everything but what would make her “lose her virginity” and risk “getting in trouble.” And Carmen had as many tricks as I did. We invented a thousand games that led to pleasure and then ecstasy, and the desire between us unfailingly opened the door to the sheer exuberance of life.

In the evenings, we would go to dance halls with a gang of our friends, although in that time and place, dancing was also forbidden, decreed a “mortal sin” by the archbishop of our diocese and all the priests in our villages. We would “dance close,” so close and with such movements, that we were quite literally making love standing up, without seeing each other, since we had our eyes closed.

Sometimes Carmen would have doubts about “our purity” and, through her tears, which I drank tenderly, would convince me that we had to go to confession.We would each go on our own without telling the other the substance of our confession – that was also forbidden – each knowing what the other must have said to “cleanse” his or her conscience. And we would come together again afterwards completely purified, to begin anew that unbelievable celebration of bodies in the tumult of love.

It was also with Carmen that I returned to the cemetery one day to have a real look at Papa's family's monument. She examined that whole side of my genealogy with me. I hadn't seen the monument the first time; there were too many people around and I was too immersed in my pain. And the second time, when Grandmama died, I was between Mama and Carmen, totally with them, absorbed in them.

I was surprised to see a new cemetery for the rich people, and to discover that the monument of my second family – my only real family – was nothing like that of the Sully family, whose small rectangular gravestone of gray granite was one among many similar stones around the outer edge of the cemetery, past which you would end up in a field of oats for eternity.

The Jacques family monument, in contrast, was very visible, in the central section of the cemetery close to the big cross and the great monument to the founding priests. Made of pink granite, as shiny as marble and in the imposing form of an obelisk, it had four faces that told the story of four branches of the family. There were the paternal and maternal sides of Léopold's family (Grandmama was “resting” on the Héberts' side, and Papa on that of the Jacques, where Mama would also have her place. And the graves of all the children who had died before carrying on the lines, some with names unfamiliar to me, fathered by uncles or great-uncles with big families, lying there beside their wives. I found their names and ages fascinating.

With Carmen, I recited all the names and dates. The dates especially intrigued me. I added and subtracted, going back and forth in a time I could barely understand, with as many layers of mystery as there were stories to be imagined under the names and dates. I remember the inscription, “Napoléon Hébert: 1908–1912. R.I.P.” I wondered what that little boy's life had been like, how he had lived, if he was handsome or intelligent, what he wore, how he spoke, whether he had suffered in this village before the “FirstWar,” in my country, Quebec, which was then called French Canada.

And all the other names. All the little children of a family decimated before its time. A Jacques married to a Charest, ten of whose seventeen children had died before the age of eight, and of the seven surviving children, one, named Ozanam, had died accidentally at twenty-four. I wondered how those parents, Iréné Jacques and Adèle Charest, had managed, after so many trials, to live to eighty-four and eighty-eight.

Carmen brought me back from my musings. She took a little book that I didn't recognize out of the pocket of her blazer. She said, “Look at this, it's beautiful. I have something to read you. It's my first book on the Index.” It was Rimbaud's
Illuminations
. She said, “Out of all the forbidden books, I chose one last winter, and I read it all the time. I swiped it from the locked library of books on the Index.” She described how and we laughed till we cried, and then we kissed passionately at Papa's grave.

Carmen read a long passage. I'll never forget it:

Carmen read it as if she were singing. No one else could have given the words the music they usually kept secret, and with such intensity.

A fine rain began to fall. It looked like a tulle curtain against the slanting rays of the August sunset and the fleecy orange and mauve clouds. Carmen said, “Look, Joseph. It's as if the sky were raining blood.

The pink granite sparkled in the sun. The black letters of the names engraved on it were like mouths speaking silently to us. Carmen asked, “Could you do a painting of this?”

I thought,
Yes, one day, Joseph Sully-Jacques
– that was my artist's name, the new name I had given myself –
will be able to paint this
. “Not now,” I told Carmen. “Not right away.” Without having the words to express it, I felt I needed more experience to portray that Beauty that had slipped quietly from the realm of Death into the realm of Life.