Against the Wind Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Part One: Childhood

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Part Two: The Hospital for Minds

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Part Three: What is Death?

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Part Four: The Little Path

  To my sons,

  Charles-Patrick and

  Sean-Christophe Mahony

  … having found the key to myself

  … the center of myself, in which I

  dwell like a sacred spider, on the

  main threads that I’ve already spun

  from my mind and that will enable

  me to weave wonderful lace, which

  I envisage and which already exists

  within the heart of Beauty.

  Stéphane Mallarmé,

  letter to Théodore Aubanel,

  July 28, 1866

  Part One: Childhood

  I

  It is true one might write using the

  third person: he went, he said.

  Yes but how to take into account

  the inner movements of the soul?

  Stendhal,

  The Life of Henry Brulard

  I had probably just fallen asleep. I heard a commotion in the house. I was alone there with Mama. We were alone and peaceful, Mama and I.

  But then I heard loud noises and muffled shouts from downstairs, hoarse shouts in a man’s voice I didn’t recognize.

  Then Mama ran up the stairs and past my closed door on her way to her room. Someone was chasing her. I heard her door slam. Someone heavy came into the hallway, brushed past my door and ran to Mama’s door. He smashed the door open, saying words I couldn’t make out but I knew were swearing.

  Mama screamed like a cornered animal, then there were smothered sounds of struggling bodies and I thought I heard them fall onto the bed.

  All of a sudden, I didn’t hear anything. A deathly silence filled the house. I got out of bed.

  Without turning on the light, I opened my door very cautiously. I can still see myself tiptoeing down the hall to Mama’s closed door, holding my breath.

  And then it all happened so fast. I opened the door. I wasn’t afraid. The bedside lamp was on. A fat man naked as a beast, slobbering and sweating from every pore, was lying on top of Mama as if he was devouring her. He was raping her.

  Mama saw me. Her eyes were bulging and frantic. She was gagged. I recognized the dish towel – the animal must have brought it up from the kitchen.

  Mama lay there looking terrified. Her eyes were pleading with me. Her eyes that I will never forget.

  The animal puffed and panted. I stared at his fat, sweaty back and instantly knew what I had to do. As light and agile as if I were flying, I ran down to the kitchen. I saw the overturned table and chairs. I opened the drawer with the utensils and grabbed the biggest knife, with a blade as sharp as a guillotine.

  I raced back upstairs with the knife in my hand. Mama saw me come into the room and she closed her eyes. An instant later, the blade had pierced the animal’s back, and he collapsed onto Mama’s body with a gruesome moan.

  I remember trying not to plunge the blade in too deep for fear of hitting Mama, for fear of hurting her.

  I took off Mama’s gag. I pulled the knife out of the animal’s body and threw it on the floor, and rolled the huge, hairy body onto its side. Blood was spurting everywhere. I saw his eyes, already glassy. He was dead.

  He was dead and I’d killed him. I was eleven years old.

  Mama had fainted. Her clothes were all torn and stank of sweat, slobber and blood. There was blood everywhere, even in her hair, even in her mouth, which stayed open when I took off the gag.

  I laid her gently on the floor and went and got water, lots of water, and I undressed her and washed her from head to toe.

  Mama regained consciousness. She was trembling and she didn’t speak. Her face looked as if she was coming back from a long, painful journey. I went and got her bathrobe and covered her. I put cotton socks on her feet.

  Mama looked at me for a long time as if she was really seeing me for the first time. She took my head in her hands, choked back a sob and took my body in her arms. She hugged me to her as hard as she could without smothering me. I heard her breathing, her low murmuring. She kissed my forehead and my hands. We were completely silent, all the terror gone. It was good. I shivered.

  Both of us at the same time saw the bed of blood with the fat, inert animal’s body. For the first time, I was suddenly afraid, and Mama saw it. I remember her eyes. We ran out of the room, shutting the door behind us, and went downstairs hand in hand. We crossed the kitchen quickly, not wanting to see the disorder from the sounds that had awakened me, sounds that would pursue me my whole life.

  We ended up on the living room sofa beside the telephone table.

  Mama picked up the receiver and dialed. She was calling the police.

  II

  Mama was not my mother and Papa was not my father. I had been “given away” to them when I was eighteen months old. That’s the way our people did it back then.

  My real mother was Papa’s second cousin. She had married a very poor man – my father – who worked in a sawmill and could barely feed his thirteen children. I was the second-to-last child of that large family.

  Mama and Papa were well off and had no children. They’d always wanted kids, ever since they’d fallen in love “at first sight” and decided to stay together “till death do us part.” Papa was the village doctor andMama was a nurse and helped him sometimes. They were thirty-two and twenty-nine when I was “given away” to them.

  It happened at my father and mother’s house. They told me everyone was there – as well as the brothers and sisters, there were uncles and aunts and my paternal grandmother, who presided over the ceremony seated in the only comfortable chair in the house. I’ve been told that story so many times that I can see the scene in minute detail, as if I had heard and understood everything that was happening.

  It had been agreed a few weeks earlier that Papa and Mama could choose the child they liked best, boy or girl. In fact, the agreement had been concluded during the Christmas holidays and the exchange took place in April, “the month of promises,” as my grandmother had said.

  I say “exchange” because in those times and in those circumstances, nothing was given away for free. A sum of money had to be paid by those receiving the “gift,” a sum that varied according to their means. It was done without formalities and without a notary. Sometimes the village priest was present, and then they’d have an improvised second baptism, without water or salt but with a Latin blessing on the forehead of the “gift-child” in front of the family in a circle on their knees.

  In my case, there was no priest. I’m not sure why. It was my grandmother who blessed me. And I never knew the amount of money Papa and Mama paid. It was “substantial,” Papa always said.

  It took place one evening in April, right after supper. All the children of the house were washed and dressed up and had been instructed to be polite and on their best behaviour.

  During the proceedings, I played with grandmother’s rosary, which she kept in
the pocket of her white apron and let me play with on “special occasions.” I loved the feel of the smooth wooden beads in my hands and I especially liked to suck on the medals and the cross, which tasted like slightly salty honey.

  My mother was cradling the youngest child, who was still breastfeeding.

  My father served the men a glass of “cordial.” It was a good Napoleon brandy that Papa had brought. The women –Mama, my aunts and my big sisters – drank coffee with little cookies from my Mama.

  At around nine o’clock, everything was decided. Papa and Mama had first withdrawn to the parents’ bedroom for a few minutes and come back smiling but solemn. Everyone was silent. As was customary, it was Mama who spoke. Singling me out with her eyes and pointing her finger, she said, “That’s the one we want.” Papa added, “Yes, it’s little Joseph-Édouard-Marc. We’ll call him Joseph.”

  My mother beckoned to Mama to come over to her. And my mother whispered a secret in Mama’s ear, a secret I was only told much later, on the day of my confirmation. My mother had said, “You can take him, I give him to you, but you’ve chosen my favourite.”

  Mama took me in her arms and hugged me very tight but oh so gently, and she and Papa spent the rest of that memorable evening fussing over me and saying sweet things to me and gathering up my “things,” of which there were few.

  As she was leaving, Mama told my mother, who had a heavy heart and tears welling up in her eyes, “You can come have a rest at our house when you want to see Joseph. Bring the little one to play with him. And if you want, during the holidays, I could let you have him from time to time.”

  Mama was not to “let her have me” often. The next year, my mother died following a miscarriage. She was thirty-nine years old.

  During the first months of his widowhood, my father distributed the younger children among the family and went away to Abitibi with the older ones. I hardly saw my father again. Just two or three times, at big family gatherings or funerals. He was no longer my father. I saw him as an uncle. And my brothers and sisters had become my cousins.

  III

  Niemand

  zeugt für den

  Zeugen

  No one

  bears witness for the

  witness.

  Paul Celan,

  “Aschenglorie”

  The months following the rape and the murder were an indescribable nightmare, because I did not yet have the words to express all the complexities of the situation.

  There were days I experienced as eternities and others that piled up willy-nilly so that they formed a sort of magma within me that was impervious to memory, a mass without fault lines or fissures between my awareness and the shifting pool of memories.

  We were caught in the labyrinth of the justice system, moving day by day through reasonings and rationalizations that confused and terrified us. At night, I had trouble sleeping, and in the morning, just seeing her swollen eyelids and the circles under her eyes, I knew the same was true for Mama.

  How could we live peacefully and sleep the sleep of the just when, through all kinds of convoluted, deceptive hair-splitting, the guilty party became the victim, and the victims, the culprits?

  During those months, we had to parade past an army of policemen, lawyers, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, ending with the judge at a complicated trial, which finally found us innocent. But along the way, we were assumed to be guilty of so many misdeeds that the presumption of our innocence would never completely wash away the stains of the investigation.

  I think Mama suffered more than I did. Because of my age and my status as an “abandoned child” and then an orphan, I had the benefit of a certain “paternal clemency,” as the judge put it. And of course, our lawyer had pleaded self-defence. I could go back to the notes from the case and reread his subtle arguments, but I don’t have the heart for it, and that isn’t my purpose.

  But how Mama must have suffered with all the questions and suppositions! Why hadn’t she locked the front door? Why had she sat sewing at the kitchen table without drawing the curtains? Why was the window open, letting the music of Madame Butterfly be heard outside? How was she dressed?Why that flimsy negligee and her long hair falling over her shoulders like an invitation?

  And why hadn’t she screamed louder to alert the next-door neighbours?

  And besides, where was her husband? What was he doing and why had he left her alone for entire evenings?

  And was it possible that the man, the “alleged rapist,” was someone she knew and had even “kept company with”? Hadn’t they been drinking together, and drinking a lot, before that episode with the table and chairs being overturned was “provoked” by Mama?

  They had investigated, had sifted through our minds, through our past, until the present became strange to us, until we were strange to ourselves, and the future rose up menacingly and closed in on us like a thick fog with no horizon visible.

  And what about Papa?

  With “our” lawyer, we went to pick him up at the airport, two days after the events. He had left his medical conference in Fribourg as soon as Mama had called. I remember his drawn face, his tired body, as if he’d aged ten years since leaving.

  I remember his first words as he hugged us, “It’s impossible, it can’t be true,” words he repeated like an incantation through stifled sobs as cold as stone. I felt his icy body and the sweat from his beard, which he hadn’t shaven since he’d received the news. The sweat from

  his beard on my forehead.

  “That was when Léopold caught his coronary,” Grandmama always said after that.

  Grandmama was Papa’s mother. I never knew Mama’s parents, who died long before I was born. As for my mother’s and my father’s parents, I called them “Grandma” and “Grandpa” followed by their family names.

  I have two family trees and two destinies. But my original name was never changed. It was the name of the paternal branch of the first tree, according to the custom of my country. My name is Joseph-Édouard-Marc Sully. Originally, my family name was O’Sullivan. It had been changed over time according to the custom of the adopted country of the paternal branch of the family.

  IV

  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.