A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - Chapter 2 - DOWNFALL
I spent a long time—my whole life, in fact—marking time endlessly, just to hold on until the dreamed-of epiphany, the one I had desperately sought by writing thousands and thousands of pages, alone in my crisis cell, a perpetual survivor, often desperate and tempted by suicide—a secret, painless one, the kind of erasure that would disturb no one’s peace and would cause no scandal. I counted the days, months, and years like a prisoner obsessed with a hopeless wait, forcing myself, just to endure, to mark time with fixed memories, always the same, constantly recalled, in order to persist until rehabilitation.
I gave myself the illusion of a life worth living, a life that had seen its share of luck. I hid from others—and from myself—what was, in truth, criminal and revealing, even though I always had this poorly controlled urge to confess everything, just as I had confessed, shaken to the core, my homosexuality when, at the very start of my career, a student had threatened to kill me by slipping a note under my office door, exposing me as the damned faggot that I was. The college where I taught had called the police to file a complaint and protect me. I reacted as if I were the accused, the one who had to account for his actions and submit to punishment. I laid bare my entire sexuality before my stunned colleagues, who were quick to assure me I was guilty of nothing. I even asked for a lawyer’s help! Already, at that moment, I was beginning to capsize.
So I only shared, from those memories that would later fill the pages of my personal chronicle, what seemed worthy of being told—what gave me the illusion of having value: the stories of countless one-night stands, always with the best, of course, among the men who paraded through the bars in the west end of the city every night—there were so many of them when I was in my twenties; the necessary reminders, for self-esteem’s sake, of my brilliant university studies; the completely fabricated tale of a happy childhood shaped by impeccable parents—a reliable father, a generous mother; the socially convenient but largely superficial fiction of political engagement, somewhat left-leaning, mostly anti-authoritarian. All of it, of course, was to keep up appearances and conceal the truth—one that was far more ordinary, often teetering on failure, especially when it came to love and sex. I moved through my life the way a historian navigates his favorite era, taking the time to gather only comforting images, images meant to last forever—yet they crumble when the sources, more abundant than expected and sometimes too talkative, speak in real-time of those who were starved, broken, raped, or killed by grand hopes and terrible illusions. The ultimate horror would be to plunge into this dangerous archive and confront the exact reality of those facts, which had become exotic only because they were buried so deeply in the past. That is what I ultimately decided to do, on a polar Sunday night in February—without knowing, without ever imagining that the search for that hidden, unreachable time would last my entire life. I was thirty.
I was alone the night I began writing my story to free myself from it. My partner at the time, who lived with me in a small house I had just bought on Gilford Street in Montreal, was working at the bar of a local theatre. I thought it would take a few weeks, maybe a few months, to trace the essentials, identify what was wrong, and give this account a meaning clear enough to rid me forever of the memory of a few incidents that still brought me shame and had stained my childhood. Perhaps that explains why life had now become so complicated, so painful, despite appearances. That first night, I began to dig through my memories. One, it seems, was quite exceptional: I had retained a perfectly clear image of an apartment at the top of Cartier Street in Quebec City, near Crémazie Street—a place we had left as a family when I was barely nine months old. "It’s impossible for you to remember that," my mother had often told me, long after the fact. But when I described the place to her in detail, including the color of the kitchen walls, she admitted—still surprised—that my description was accurate. I remembered vividly the incomprehensible embarrassment I felt when, for my second birthday photo, my mother dressed me in a pair of white wool shorts that hugged my genitals and made them visible. That lonely February night, I wrote only about my early childhood, in a blue hardcover notebook—the first of what would become a long series of notebooks, an enormous pile, thousands of handwritten pages, preferably written at night—and I became aware that, in this initial account of my early years, there was clearly something essential that I could not put into words, a memory gap, a dark space, a missing trace. Several times in the same text, as the story unfolded and I recounted only troubling episodes—the life of a little boy who had seemingly known nothing but problems—I noted, again and again: “What happened before? Before I became so tormented? What happened to me? I remember so little!”—even though I was writing down so many memories, even though I had always retained several, including that place where I had lived before I was even a year old.
At the time of the unraveling, I was a young professor, still in the early stages of my career, and we were about to plunge into a major social crisis—one that would prove deeply unsettling, a brutal confrontation with the government of Quebec, and with René Lévesque himself. He had turned against his own supporters, accusing them of being outrageously privileged and, in the end, of refusing to settle for crumbs. It was as if they were guilty of dissent and insubordination, seeking an emancipation that he himself was no longer able to claim—if he had ever even believed in it. I remember those union meetings where the president, determined to make sure we got the message and memorized it by heart, without room for dispute, would scream his rage into the microphone, hoping to spread it like wildfire among the teachers gathered in mass during that tragic crisis. It felt a lot like a rebellion against the father—except this one was conscious and carefully orchestrated. Some teachers cried; I, on the other hand, felt dizzy, often on the verge of fainting, wondering why we couldn’t express a perfectly justified indignation calmly, backed by reasonable arguments, rather than screaming like lunatics against the butcher of New Carlisle.
It was in 1983—the very year when one had to hate René Lévesque and wish for his death—that madness quietly took hold in my mind. That bitch had been waiting for the perfect moment, the opportunity to finally awaken and revel in its existence. A repressed, unsettling past took advantage of the overwhelming stress of that year, of a vigilance that had faltered, to rise up with force, to crack the identity I believed I had solidified—stable, even brilliant—and to hurl me into terror, dislocation, and utter chaos. I had managed, in my early twenties, to conceal my childhood fears and the deep depression that had marked my adolescence, but that deception could only ever be temporary. From now on, I would never again be able to escape as I had as a child, when I had learned secret paths to flee unnoticed. I used to hide in the vast, empty attics of the Petit Séminaire de Québec, where no one would be surprised to find me, no eyes there to judge my fear of others and my self-imposed confinement. But at 32, one no longer hides in attics. I had been working at a college for two or three years; I was forced to appear, to testify to myself every day in what felt like an endless trial of intent. I had little choice when a colleague, in a position of authority, aggressively sought to expose those who did not quite conform, who withdrew, who spoke too little when speaking was mandatory—mandatory, even if it meant saying anything, as long as one was heard, as long as one was noticed, so that others, in their unreachable, overwhelming heights, would take note and remember the name of whoever had dared to shine—and yet remained utterly transparent. The more I was yelled at to speak, the more, little by little, insidiously, I developed the anxiety of having to say everything, even what I did not yet know about myself, even what I had repressed but that now stirred with growing insistence. The more I was told to speak—everywhere, all the time, to anyone who mattered in the system—the more I ended up feeling like a criminal without understanding why, yet one who had to confess nonetheless. And I became singularly terrified of betraying myself. Speak! They wanted to evaluate who I was, so speak! And since guilt has an urge to be spoken, to be denounced, to rid itself of its own weight, I eventually thought, during those terrible years, that prison—at peace with myself after having confessed—was preferable to the freedom of a scoundrel tormented by remorse.
Had I been the only one guilty of what I felt was an unspeakable crime—worse than incompetence, worse than homosexuality—I might have turned myself in to the police, without even knowing why exactly. Simply to cry it out, to finally unburden myself. I might have even found love in prison, as my fantasies suggested—locked away, yet protected. But the truth was, I had always suspected that I was not the only one involved in a threatening affair. At times, with perfect clarity, I had felt this—even as a child, even as a very young child. I had no choice but to keep silent, to avoid arrest at all costs, to betray neither myself nor anyone else. Hence the sheer panic at the thought of something being revealed—a terror even greater than the glimpses of punishment I sometimes dreamed of: disembowelment, gouged-out eyes, a severed hand, a live burial, my body wrapped, immobilized, mummified.
I had a partner six years younger than me. I was twenty-six when we met; he was twenty. He was a self-assured young man, driven by an urgent desire to live and to accomplish things. He stated exactly what he wanted and had no shame in taking the necessary steps to get it. I adored him. He always had, everywhere, that astonishing gaze of a child discovering the world, with a delight he never concealed. He marveled at everything. He was constantly creating, to the point that, in our home, it felt more like his space than mine. He was a handsome young man, too—he had no trouble charming people, including priests. I adored him, but I did not love him. I forced him, I don’t know how many times, to leave me for a while—weeks, months at a time. And he agreed easily, so adaptable, so free of resentment. I always wanted sex with him, to possess him (he resisted, of course), to make him climax, and it was precisely this erotic charge in our relationship that kept it alive. I called him—absurdly, when I think back on it now—the child, never meaning anything bad by it. It was a teasing term, full of affection. The child—a meaningless signifier, really? Yet, in those years of my early thirties, I felt myself unraveling, and I wrote endlessly about this self-inquiry I was conducting, which was becoming increasingly tangled in dangerous, sometimes sordid details. I was living in constant terror, disembodied, quite literally compelled to throw myself into the void.
The psychiatrist I had been seeing once a week for several months had smugly told me that one doesn’t kill themselves by jumping from a balcony. And I had written, "He doesn’t understand a thing I’m saying. I’m telling him it’s stronger than me, that when I enter my home, I feel pulled toward the void." That this madness had a will of its own, that it dictated what it wanted, and that it was absolutely terrifying. But he spoke to me about some picturesque little balcony, while I lived on the fourteenth floor of a downtown high-rise—and he knew it. From that height, there was no question: a fall was fatal. And I didn’t want to climb over the railing, didn’t want to jump into the abyss—but it called to me, it pulled me in. And when that pull overwhelmed me, I clung to my bed, resisting as best I could, until I was completely exhausted. I had told him all this, eyes closed, pleading for him to show some concern, to offer me some kind of help—some miracle pill, anything to get me through to the next day. He had nothing to say in response.
I was desperately trying to understand what was happening to me, to save myself. And in the midst of it all, I wrote about my companion—the child—so intimately close, even in my bed, that it was he, without meaning to, who was making me sick. So when he asked if he could move back in with me, I flatly refused. A week later, he had met someone else—a psychoanalyst, he told me, a miracle worker, the complete opposite of what I was—and he announced that he was leaving me.
The last thing I ever said about him, the very night before he ultimately decided to end our relationship, was that I had never stopped being aroused just by looking at him, and that all it took was for him to undress for me to crave the kiss.
For months, even years after that, I struggled to detach myself from my now-absent partner. I was trapped in my own problems—an amusing understatement!—unable to adapt, incapable of facing what I had long wished for: to go out more, to change my soul and my body, to finally succeed at something, to finally succeed at anything. I must have annoyed him. He took pleasure in telling me that he would never come back. One day, he asked me when I was going to clear out, word for word, when—when on earth—was I going to rid him of my love?
What could I have said to him before the catastrophic breakup, to make the relationship last and help us survive the trial? How could I have explained to him that intimacy with him had literally broken me down, that I harbored an irrational hatred toward any intrusive presence—when I was even driving my closest friends out of my home? I didn’t even understand myself. I was speechless, constantly in survival mode, and of course, my psychiatrist left me to deal with it on my own. I asked him for medication, but he refused every time, telling me that it would only be one more obstacle preventing you from understanding yourself.
Should I have told the guy I lived with about my breakdown, which had arrived precisely the day we re-established our life together after months of what only seemed like a breakup? A separation I had imposed without any explanation—just to spare myself the risk of an irreversible descent into madness. How could I explain the disgust I felt for my own degraded image, the one I inevitably saw in the mirror when I stared at myself ten, twenty times a day, frozen by self-hatred, horrified to see myself losing my hair? How could I make him understand the overwhelming sexual guilt that followed each of our encounters—the way I kept thinking afterward that this would, at last, be the final time, that all of it was filthy and repulsive, that I had to wash before and after every sexual act, that I had to fear stains and impurities, that I had to hide my waste from others, as if it were shameful, as if it revealed my own depravity—until the only refuge left was to flee into another body, one that was perfect, disembodied, a place where I could disappear?
I was 33 when it happened—something that had been waiting for a long time, patient, inevitable. An experience so violent that I would carry its scars for ten, twenty years, even longer, and return to it a hundred times, a thousand times, because I was convinced that this incident was speaking, revealing something about my past—a past I had repressed until I had forgotten everything. That conviction, I am certain, is what saved me from total incoherence, from complete fragmentation.
I was on vacation in Mexico with my boyfriend. A day or two after our arrival—made with no reservations, our first nights spent in a grimy little room—we had to go to a bank to exchange travelers’ checks. The process required us to sign them in front of a teller, who was responsible for verifying that the second signature matched the first. We had to wait in line for a long time—an endless stretch. My boyfriend stood in front of me. And suddenly, my heart started pounding furiously in my chest, struggling like I was walking into mortal danger. I stared, stunned, at my blue t-shirt jerking with every beat—the panic attack was completely visible, humiliating, absolutely horrifying. I was accusing myself of something, something terrible, in public, in a bank, in a foreign country, with no words to explain my distress. I was literally walking toward my own execution. I felt utterly dissociated from my own self, stripped of my thousand memories, exposed in a strange world, defenseless.
I wanted to flee, to escape the impending catastrophe, but to where? And how? I was trapped in the queue. What was happening to me? Why this terror? I was shaking so badly that, when I finally reached the teller, I was completely frantic—simply at the thought of having to show her my signature. She sent me to her supervisor, who immediately noticed my struggle to write, the nearly illegible scrawl of my name that I managed to scratch onto the paper. He scrutinized me, obviously suspecting fraud. He demanded to authenticate my passport, comparing it to other identification documents. He pointed out that one piece of information was missing. And then, at last, he handed me the cash I had requested.
But my boyfriend was no longer there. He had already stepped outside, waiting for me on the sidewalk.
And that was the end of my confession.
But in the weeks that followed, that incident transformed into what I believed to be pure madness, a schizophrenic episode. It took me several therapy sessions before I could even recount it to the doctor—who, of course, denied any possibility of schizophrenia, instead pointing out my tendency to dramatically amplify everything that concerns me.
But I believed it. And derealization set in.
I was coming to terms with the fact that I was truly sick. That realization alone was a colossal shock, even worse than the raw terror I had felt in the Mexican bank.
And I had just discovered, with absolute stupefaction, that I was that person.
That I was mad.
Mad—just like that soldier who had made us laugh so much when I was a child. He would sometimes appear, fully uniformed, marching up Cartier Street in Quebec City. We would rush to see him, some Sunday mornings, keeping pace with his steps, shouting out his military commands—commands he had heard too many times, in circumstances far more tragic.
We had given him a name, my cousins, my little sister, and I—"Gauche/Droite"—"Left/Right."
That poor man, a shattered soul, traumatized by the Second World War—still so recent, in the 1950s.
My mother had explained to us that he was sick, that the war had broken him, and that it was wrong to laugh at him.
A few years later, I recounted the episode with the travelers' checks to a psychologist who practiced rebirthing therapy. I provided all the necessary details, and I watched him collapse—literally crash to the floor—right before my eyes! It was hardly the best technique to reassure me. I had barely made it home after the session when I found a message from him on my voicemail, canceling all future appointments, begging me not to call back, and very explicitly suggesting that I find help elsewhere.
What had taken hold in my mind was no longer just a set of survival strategies, those of a lesser man—a coward, a weakling—whom I had understood, as a child and as a teenager, that I would pay dearly for being, for the rest of my life. It had suddenly become a real problem, a working hypothesis when I pondered it alone, in silence, pen in hand. More than anything, it was a daily terror. And one sleepless night, just after returning from Mexico, I suddenly became aware of something: I would never again be able to speak during departmental meetings, I would never again be able to use my credit card, I would never again be able to read a list of names aloud, I would never again allow myself to be photographed—never again.
It came to me like that, all at once—a cascade of phobias—while I lay next to my partner, who had no idea of my distress. I imagined, with increasing certainty, that I might one day hit a child while driving—hit them so hard that I would kill them. A child appearing out of nowhere, unseen until it was too late. I stopped driving—for a long time.
I did not set foot in a bank for a year. When I finally forced myself to go back—because eventually, I had no choice—I would turn on my heels the moment I saw a queue forming at the tellers' counters.
To lose one’s mind in a matter of months—it is a brutal, violent experience, one from which one never fully recovers. Psychoanalyst François Peraldi would later tell me, when I finally shared all this with him, that one day it would be nothing more than a memory without emotion. He was right. But it took time—a long, long time—to get there.
At the moment when madness was emerging, I was a young history professor at a college in Montreal. I had already had my first teaching experiences as a teaching assistant or a lecturer in a university setting. But I had found little joy or freedom there—little space to passionately express what I sought in historical narrative: something deeply personal, an individual function of History rather than a social one.
That’s why I strongly preferred college-level teaching—far more permissive, more creative, allowing room for introspection. The fact was, I had always understood that the History I told was infused with my own anger, my own traumas and suffering, my calls for greater justice and freedom—all deeply intertwined with my personal trajectory.
- Students, I am speaking about myself! Hear me! Love me!
- I denounce the manipulators, the exploiters, the conquerors—and especially those who permitted themselves to own human beings, to force their bodies into labor, to violate them regularly.
- Students, listen, understand—I am fully part of the history of the humiliated, the racialized, the emasculated—love me!
That didn’t stop the class from occasionally slipping into mild disarray—nothing catastrophic, just a few students dozing off here and there, a few unjustified absences after the break, or even the occasional beauty queen meticulously doing her manicure at her desk, her essential products carefully arranged in front of her—sometimes even with a full meal spread out before me, making my stomach growl as I spoke. A double discourse particularly unsettling—especially when hunger was the one message heard loudest.
And then, there was the parallel life—the madness that was slowly taking shape in my mind, quietly gathering evidence, without me ever, ever—at least not until I was 34—considering that I might have been involved in any kind of family secret. There had been warnings, though. Moments that briefly, for a few hours maybe, pushed me into a state of unreality, almost dissociation. But things would always return to normal quickly, and I would forget.
One day, when I was 24, a friend told me about a man he had met—a father—who had shared something disturbing. "He sucks his son, can you believe it? He claims his 12-year-old son likes it." my friend asked. No, I couldn’t. But as I listened, I felt myself withdraw so sharply that I nearly vanished, as if I had become weightless, stripped from my body. Back then, I didn’t have words to describe that sensation—the way I became frozen and distant, unable to close my eyes, unable to block my ears.
Another man, whom I had just met, confided in me late one night—without the slightest trace of guilt—that he had engaged in a sexual relationship with his younger brother, two or three years his junior, when he was 17 or 18. I was so stunned that I made him repeat the story. I wanted details, something significant, something that might have escaped me. I didn’t really know why I needed to hear more, but I insisted, as if I were slowly realizing how much this story unsettled me, how it vaguely echoed something I couldn’t quite place. The man, growing wary, described things more specifically, recalling the moments, the words, the actions. I’d say to him: P, come here, and he'd come, and I'd suck him, and I'd fuck him, and he liked it. And that was it. I was 25 or 26.
It was after returning from a difficult trip to France—one I had taken alone—that I experienced the most violent shock, the one that shattered whatever illusions I still held about the perfection I had attributed to my family. The revelation left me momentarily unmoored, shaken to my core.
My younger sister lived just a few blocks from me. At the time, I was living on Mentana Street, facing Laurier Park. I was feeling wounded, sad, on that particular evening when Liliane came to visit. I was cooking. She stood beside me, watching. I no longer remember why I brought up the subject, but I think it was after a television program featuring a a pedophile writer who was shameless about his love of little boys, who were so readily available, and who wanted nothing more than to be grabbed by an older guy who knew how to give them the full service.
"Well, at least in our family, there was no such thing."
"What? What do you mean, no such thing?"
And then, suddenly, she told me that our older brother—six years my senior, nine years older than her—had once tried to initiate something with her. It had happened a few years earlier, one night when she had to stay over at his place on Île d'Orléans. He had come into her bed. Things had gone far. She had finally managed to push him away. But he had been insistent, pleading, trying again. They were alone. No one to intervene, no one to help.
I was stunned, shaken, so overwhelmed that I thought I might faint from the sheer force of the shock. That night, my younger sister fractured the world order I had held in my mind for so long. In revealing her story, she also revealed the liberating power of words when protected by the right to speak.
A few days later, I went to visit her. Sitting on the floor in her living room, I experienced my first-ever panic attack (there would be many more to come, each more spectacular than the last). A textbook example of a full-scale breakdown. I began shaking as if I were standing in subzero temperatures. My entire body seized up; my jaw locked so tightly that I could no longer speak. My younger sister, calm and composed, wrapped me in blankets, trying to warm me, to ground me, to bring me back to the reality of her beautifully decorated, warm living room in the fading days of August.
I had always found him handsome, my older brother—infinitely more attractive than me. I envied him, envied everything he was.
That night, I learned that my younger sister did not see him that way at all.
Because I suffered from severe migraines several times a week and likely had dysthymia, I had begun introspection with Dr. B, a psychiatrist who was deeply Freudian in his convictions, though not at all in his practice. He called it a treatment, rigorously following the ready-made model he likely applied to all his patients.
From the very beginning, since I was gay, he had labeled me once and for all: "You are a narcissist, sir, and do you know why? Because you were terribly afraid of sleeping with your mother, which, inevitably, greatly displeased your father. That is what made you impotent—metaphorically speaking, of course—and thus, gay."
Throughout the first year of therapy, he would repeatedly tell me that I had alienated myself from my mother and allowed myself to be dominated by her—an automaton manipulated by the wicked woman. And I, too, played along, agreeing with him, inventing childhood behaviors to fit the narrative—portraying myself as a boy desperate to please his mother, intuiting what she expected of her son to satisfy her own narcissism. I was saying anything, really, and if there was anyone I was actually trying to please, it was him, the psychiatrist—who didn’t even bother to hide his satisfaction with himself.
An hour after that very first session, I had written down: "There is nothing shameful in anything that belongs to my past." That alone shows how far I had to go. He, on the other hand, would take years before considering any other hypothesisbeyond an unresolved Oedipus complex.
But little by little, my dreams began to tell a story that did not align with the preformatted model the good doctor was using. And for a long time, the essential truth escaped me—just as it escaped him.
For the first two or three years of therapy, I was terrified of ever telling anyone that I was in treatment. I was convinced that the very particular story that was gradually unfolding alongside the therapy had to remain private, that there would be terrible punishment if I ever revealed (but to whom?) the secret of our sessions.
I belonged to the doctor.
And it was this very doctor whom I saw in a dream—white shirt, red tie—stepping into my bedroom, menacing, intimidating, watching over my sleep, forcing me into silence and forgetting.
In that dream, carefully recorded, my father stood motionless behind him.
Suite: https://histoiredelahonte.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-chronicle-of-shame-chapter-3-echoes.html
Commentaires
Publier un commentaire