A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - Chapter 3 - ECHOES THROUGH TIME
For years, I had face-to-face meetings with the psychiatrist, who treated me (as I said, this was the usual arrangement) once a week, fifty minutes per session, paid for by the Quebec health insurance system. In hindsight, Freud's critics would find reason to rejoice, even though the Doctor believed in the unconscious. But in reality, the years went by and there had been no progress for a long time. He had asked me to write down my dreams, but he was incapable of feeling and explaining them, with the exception of the most blatant obviousness. He used the same recipe, systematically, linked to a bookish knowledge of Freudian theory, but without intuition, and when I asked specific questions, he invariably replied, “But I don't know, you're the one who knows!” And in fact, he didn't know much - sometimes specifying that he didn't do psychoanalysis. There was no close follow-up, ideally almost daily, but I urgently needed it, and he couldn't satisfy me in that respect. I needed help to break the deadlock, to decode the dark enigma, it had become essential, it had become inevitable.
That's when I met Julien Bigras for an initial interview. I had heard Bigras, in a TV interview, talk about the new psychoanalysis, the transgenerational unconscious, and the reality of “sexual crimes” that challenged the classical schema of the desiring child. Since then, I had been dreaming of undertaking psychoanalysis with him, but I couldn't make up my mind, especially since a very close friend was already his analysand. I phoned him one snowy November evening. I was in acute distress that evening. I picked up the phone book and looked for his number. I was sure I would get his voicemail. To my surprise, he answered.
“Tell me about yourself!”
The voice was hoarse, with a working-class accent. I quickly told him everything that I urgently needed to tell him. I spoke enthusiastically about a book he had just published, La folie en face (Madness in the Face).
“Which character did you identify with?”
I told him.
“It's with that kind of suffering that I like to work.”
He set up a face-to-face meeting with me for an evaluation. He listened to me at length, to the point that this first meeting seemed to last two hours.
- It is possible, yes, that there was a sexual crime.
And then:
- I have a serious health problem. I have worked so hard in my life, too hard. My cardiologist advises me to slow down a little. I don't have time to analyze you now, not for another six months. So, here's what we're going to do.
He suggested I consult another analyst, François Peraldi, assured me that he was excellent, and that he wasn't just saying that about anyone.
“I'll talk to him about you. And you and I will meet again in a while, when I have fully recovered.”
I never saw Dr. Bigras again. He died suddenly shortly after that interview.
I knew nothing about Peraldi. However, I called him as soon as I got home. He also arranged an appointment for me, on a Saturday at midday, at his house, upstairs, for an assessment - but I learned later that it was more to evaluate his desire to work with me as with any other patient he accepted, or not. I found myself sitting in front of him in a relatively narrow room with a tiny window overlooking the street. To my left, I could see the couch where everything was to take place. I told him about my symptoms, the suffering, the irrational fears, my certainty that psychoanalysis, the real, tough, expensive kind, could help me. He listened to me with a smile. I again expressed my surprise at being really ill, really mad, and he replied that to say that, just like that, was “a call that came from the depths of time. ” After about thirty minutes, he took out his diary and gave me the schedule of sessions to come, three times a week, but very quickly, at my request, we went to four, then five sessions a week, one a day. I had the immediate, liberating feeling of safely sharing my distress, of breaking with a loneliness that had become unbearable, and of being rescued, literally saved. During the first six months of psychoanalysis, the first spectacular effect of the treatment, I recovered from excessive thinness, I gained fifteen kilos. It was incredible, at the age of 38, I became muscular, almost attractive.
And I started to tell myself stories. They often came with dreams, almost every day, almost at every session. Most of the time, Peraldi said nothing. And sometimes, on the contrary, he wouldn't let me get away with it. He grasped the importance of what I was saying, insisted, asked me to elaborate, and little by little, it radically transformed the perception I had of my own life, particularly of my early childhood. One day, I told him that I felt like I was speaking a strange, different language with him, but that I was getting better and better at it. “That's exactly it.” He had a freedom of language that took me a long time to imitate. I understood that he was very left-wing, indifferent to some of my ideals - the Quebec national question left him completely indifferent - and very capable of naming and assuming any sexual fantasy. Psychoanalysis, with him, was the opposite, radically the opposite of any moral constraint. He hated all forms of authority and repeatedly told me that I did not belong to him and that he would not have power over me. One day, when I pointed out (to criticize him) that he was not a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, I heard him respond with scathing remarks about the repressive and absurd controls carried out by this type of association. He was a free spirit. From the very first months, I suspected he was homosexual, I don't really know why, the dialogue of the unconscious, perhaps. I told him so.
“You are wondering about your analyst's sexual practices?”
And then:
“Everyone has their own sexuality, and deals with it throughout their life.”
As soon as I heard this type of comment, I would start to withdraw. And then I would find my voice again, legitimized by dreams that allowed themselves, more and more, all the excesses.
“Psychoanalysis is like peeling an onion. To reach the unconscious, there are several layers to be removed, it's a job of endurance. Sometimes it goes very quickly, you will make associations easily, and hidden or forgotten memories will come back to you in abundance. Sometimes you will have to be patient. You will put up a lot of resistance to the work you will be doing here. You still have to make an effort. This whole process takes time and costs a lot of money, which you will have to pay me in cash at the end of each session. Try to use free language, to call things by their name. Piss, shit, cunt, cock, ass, spit, snot, you see, there's no point in hiding behind a refined vocabulary. I won't hold back myself.”
I only missed one analysis session. He canceled several. I sometimes slept through the entire session, always on Fridays at noon, the only one that never changed its schedule, and which invariably followed a class I had taught that same morning. I would arrive exhausted. The sofa and the colorful velvet cushion then took on a completely different function from that of storytelling and transference. All I heard those days was, “It's over now.” I hadn't said a word.
I was born in Quebec City on March 11, 1951. I arrived a little too soon, a month too early, and not really wanted. My mother often told me that she didn't have the money to pay for hospitalization, and that this embarrassment had been the cause of her constant anxiety throughout her pregnancy. “And then everything worked out,” she said when she came back to this episode in her life, and particularly in mine. Someone had paid to ensure that I had a decent place of birth and the good care of Doctor L, a mysterious donor who had too much, why not steal a little from him, she must have thought. I never found out who it was; there was a condition, it seems, to the long-awaited payment, a promise never to reveal who, through miraculous generosity, had paid for my free birth, but that settled the matter. My mother has always appreciated the value of what costs nothing. She kept her mouth shut. I know that they - my parents - never repaid the benefactor, and so I have a debt that has been running for a long time, impossible to pay off.
I aged very quickly. The free child became the old child, very thin, lifeless, a good child out of obligation, marked by the terror of being in the world. I already knew I would survive, and later, looking at photos from that time, I would tell myself that I looked surprisingly like a child held prisoner behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp. I became aware that my destiny was sealed, that my whole life would be abnormal and difficult, an endless shame. At around 5 or 6 years old, I was already implacably lucid, I knew I was going to have a hard time. I would formulate this terrible fate for myself at night, using words like these.
I developed a restorative fantasy at a very early age, which assured me that I could start all over again without going back into my mother's womb. My mother would say, when I asked the inevitable question about where children came from, that they came from “their mother's womb”, which, for a long time, led to some anatomical confusion in my mental representation of the exact location of the exit route. I clearly expressed the reparative fantasy in the summer of my third birthday, when my father, my mother and I were on the balcony of the house. A very old lady, wrinkled, shriveled, all folded in on herself, her small hands closed, brought up against her mouth, was slowly going up rue Cartier. I believed (I was certain) that she was peacefully, irreversibly becoming a developing fetus again, curled up on herself, waiting to unfold again. Life was therefore an endless cycle, without birth or death, just a recurrence that allowed one to dream of something better in a new life. This illusion was absolutely essential to me. I said out loud what I was thinking, about this return to the embryo, which I could picture very clearly; I said that next time I would try to choose correctly who I would be, without making silly mistakes, that I wanted to be different, remade, someone other than what I was. I imagine that my parents were charmed by this reflection of a child who understood nothing about anything. They laughed heartily, explained to me that, no, alas no, we all ended up dying, and that there was no life after death (except in heaven, as one would expect, although my father, despite Duplessis, and despite the intimidating outbursts of his prince-cardinals, was more than skeptical about it and remained so.) I was holding on tightly to the banister of the balcony; I remained silent, painfully dismayed, humiliated at having been so trusting, and at having provoked a frank, somewhat cruel laugh at my beliefs. We die! We are finished! Why live, then, especially if the only life available to us is a bad life? When an old man takes on the appearance of a fetus, it is not that he is gestating himself again and capable of regaining a whole life, as he might want to: it is that he is dying! I experienced this discovery as a real betrayal. What is the point, from now on, of having ideals, morals, and even joie de vivre, if we were to end up dying without being able to start over, better informed, able to freely reorient our destiny? From that day on, I have forever remembered inevitable death and nothingness, life being perfectly useless, except for enjoying or suffering, simply trying to avoid the low blows and delay the fatal outcome.
I started school at the age of five. My mother had her hands full, taking care of her sick mother, my grandmother whom I loved so much, and my young sister who was still very small, barely two years old. There was no daycare at the time, not even the concept of it, no babysitting possible without paying a high price. Mothers from modest backgrounds had to devote themselves to their family obligations, with their string of children, putting on a happy face about the fact that they had to meet all the needs of the household. My mother never thought about it so much. A child had to free up space - besides, Richard is so curious, he can't wait to learn, so I sent him to a small private school, which accepted children too young to be enrolled in public school. I went to this school alone. My mother, as always, had once shown me the way to take, from Rue Cartier to Rue Père-Marquette, a half-hour walk to be done four times a day. It was on the way to school that I first began to feel fear and shame, especially shame. I was ashamed of my body. I was afraid that my too skinny body would rub against that of the other boys, whom I saw playing in the playground of a school for older children, and that I would shame them by simply brushing against them, by simply wanting to have fun with them, like a child without a care in the world. What does he want, that one? What does he want? I was walking along the pavement, alone, along the street that led me to the little school, and I was hoping for eternity, the eternity we were taught about in catechism; I imagined that there was time there without space and without life, life without air and without light. I already had a very clear idea of what suicide was, although I have never attempted it. I had just turned 6.
It was when I was about 6 or 7 that my mother dangled the carrot of an easy and painless death in front of me. But to do that, we had to go back, all the way back to the very origins of my existence. What had possessed her, that day, to tell me the embryo of my life in minute detail, what urgency did she have to confide, alone with me, such intimate things, when neither she nor my father, for that matter, ever spoke of sexuality? I didn't understand at all why she needed to tell me that at that moment. But I could clearly hear the story of her heroism and her anger. I was alone with her in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes. I was standing, a little guy, at the back of a chair taller than me, and I was looking at her, listening to her, submissive, terrified by the right she gave herself to dispose of my body as if it belonged to her, and perhaps indeed the fetus had fully grasped the omnipotence of this surrogate mother and her intention. But at my age, when I heard her express the main reproach she made to me that day, I knew nothing about pregnancy or childbirth. And yet, when my mother set about giving me a frightening account of the first nine months of my life, I understood perfectly what was going on, standing there in the kitchen, and I heard her immense frustration at not having managed to rid herself of an embarrassment.
- I found myself pregnant, by accident. It wasn't supposed to happen, not so quickly. Some friends had visited us at the chalet in Val Saint-Michel (it was July 2, 1950), and we had told each other saucy stories all afternoon. In the evening, we did what we shouldn't have done. We didn't have the money for a third child. We didn't know how to pay for the hospital or the doctor. During my pregnancy, I fell down the stairs and had to stay in bed for several weeks, otherwise I risked losing the child - it was me she was talking about, it was me who could be discarded, and listening to her, I was as if I was back in her womb, immersed in a pool of inexpressible anguish. Finally, a month sooner than expected, the waters broke, and the head emerged - my head! - and I rushed to the hospital. But everything stopped. For three days, you had started to come out, and then nothing, no contractions, no baby. The doctor told your father that you would probably be a stillborn, but they didn't tell me anything, so as not to worry me. On the third day, the doctor decided to induce labor. And you arrived while I had gotten up to go to the bathroom...
I was already very troubled at that age, unhappy to be so fearful, so alone, so abnormal, I insist on this word, abnormal, terribly meaningful in Quebec in the 1950s; listening to my mother tell this story that avenged her, I screamed: “I should have died there! ” And I truly regretted having missed this chance to avoid a life that was too long and too difficult, to remain only the despicable runt that I was. “I should have died there” was obviously a violent reproach that I addressed to my mother, whom I held responsible, as well as others (but who exactly?) for my singularity and who left me to stagnate, without help, without support, without explanation as to what had happened to me. So, yes, I should have died there, in her womb, and at that stage of my mother's pregnancy, unconscious, without pain, neither seen nor known. My mother said nothing, heard nothing of my distress. And I ran away.
One night, more than a year after I started psychoanalysis, I dreamt that I was walking to Peraldi's house along the usual route, Boulevard de Maisonneuve to Rue Jeanne-Mance, where he had his beautiful house. It was summer and the weather was very clear and bright. I felt, strangely, the cool wind caressing the back of my head, and I put my hand there. My head was shaved and as I felt, I discovered not only the oval of the shave, but a deep slit, covered with skin, which went into my skull. I didn't know I had this old head injury, and that it was so obvious. I was horrified. Of course, I told about this dream at the following session.
- And what does the “slit” that goes into the skull make you think of?
I was terrible at the association game. But this time, the answer came immediately.
- To the axe blow to Zeus' head, which allowed the birth of Athena.
- Exactly. As is often the case, your dream expresses something in the manner of a negative of a photo. You have to invert the representation of the dream. What you see is in fact your head, trapped in your mother's birth canal. You dreamt of your own birth. You remember it.
- It's surprising, because when I was a child I knew so little about how children are born. For a long time I thought that the opening was between the breasts.
- But deep down inside you knew the reality of the situation and the fear that went with it. Why do you think you didn't want to come out?
- In the dream, it is on my way here that I discover my head cut and shaved. I imagine that I come here to be reborn, in a way, and to repair myself, as I had clearly fantasized when I was three years old.
- Possibly. But you mainly wanted to tell me about your birth, in a different way to how you were told about it. And you said it yourself, it horrified you. That's why you didn't want to come out. But I also think that what you're telling me, at the same time, and bearing in mind that you come here to be reborn, is that in fact you don't want to heal.
I used a doll that belonged to my younger sister to dramatize what we do to an unwanted baby. I was 8 or 9 years old, and of course I knew nothing about the use of dolls in clinics to help children talk about what had traumatized them. The truth is that I hated that doll. It ended its days in a dissection ceremony, in which, of course, I had involved my sister. I thought it would offend her, shock her; but no, she had simply said to me, satisfied: “It's good for her, she annoyed me so much!” Liliane and I sometimes had a tender heart in unison. The doll, of astonishing insignificance with her laugh on command, at navel height - a prerecorded thing - excited my rage. Her stupid happiness shocked me. So she had tasted it. It was the end, she was going to perish, fortunately for her, moreover, because there had been, beforehand, another cathartic session that had left me with a memory of intense, imperishable joy.
One day, it was a Sunday, I hanged the doll. I was alone again with my younger sister. The weather was fine, what better than to execute her in broad daylight, and let everyone in the neighborhood know about it? Liliane was protesting against this torture scheme, barely showing her usual indifference when it came to her doll. So I took the object, put the rope around her neck, opened the second-floor window and threw her out, just to make her feel ashamed and despised, for whoever wanted to enjoy the show, an unrepeatable opportunity. A neighbor across the street couldn't have asked for a better way to spend her Sunday afternoon. She settled down at her window, elbows on a pillow placed there on purpose in case the spectacle lasted a while, hoping that the little Sunday circus would be worth it. I started to swing the rope from left to right in a steady movement; the hanging doll swung dangerously, very rapidly describing a 180-degree arc on the wall of the house. The audience remained silent, but attentive. It's hard to say exactly what the lady was thinking. The fact remains that we were laughing like crazy, lying on the ground, taking turns from time to time to observe the neighbor opposite, whose head was swinging from left to right following the movement of the doll, which was laughing stupidly when we hit it too hard against the wall. It was hilarious! But the children's laughter soon ran out and their happiness faded. The doll went home. Barely de-curled, no marks on the neck. It was surviving. I was a bit dizzy, the session had been tough; I gave it a punch in the face as a final reckoning. I felt a bit nauseous, though. I put her down on the ground and left her there. She wasn't crying, she only ever expressed herself through her clear childish laughter that made me grit my teeth. She was desperately trying to please. It was hard to bear. Liliane didn't want to waste her time coaxing her. And I only knew about the hole she had between her buttocks; I already knew how to use it to abuse my little sister's naivety. Once incontinent, once hung, what to do with a perpetually naked doll, especially when you're a little boy who doesn't want to play at being his father? So she ended up dying a dissected corpse. That was her fate, inevitable. After all, the doll had been a gift from my mother.
It took a bit of prodding from François Peraldi for me to realize that I was fantasizing about killing a baby. That at the age of 8 or 9, I had unconsciously acted out, in a spectacular way, what I had understood about my own birth, and the rage I still felt about it. “Your jaws, which you often complain about being always clenched, are the expression of a very, very archaic anger. There was a threat. And you wanted revenge. " This brought to mind another memory, a heavier, more embarrassing one, older too, which resurfaced slowly and with difficulty. In the session, it finally came back to me in sharp, three-dimensional colors, a first experience of child murder, which could have succeeded, it was so close.
The very summer when I had been seduced, then overwhelmed by the sight of my father appearing almost naked in front of me, I tried, because the opportunity presented itself, without my having planned it, to let my younger sister drown. She and I were bathing in the river, in fact, we were going into the very cold water, we were taking small steps. I was 5 years old, she was 2 and a half. The water was surprisingly clear, I remember that detail very well, because when Liliane slipped on a rock covered in silt and began to float motionless in mid-stream, I was first surprised by the precision of the image. I quickly realized that this was an opportunity not to be missed, that I could let this young sister, who was too happy, too trusting and frankly too much, die there. So I silently got out of the water and went back to my beach towel. I sat there, pretending not to have seen anything, waiting for the fatal outcome. By the water's edge, my mother and her two sisters were chatting in their deckchairs under the sun of a perfect summer's day, laughing carefree, not worrying about us. And then, all of a sudden, I heard my mother's voice, high-pitched, shouting her daughter's name to the sky and the world, pulling her out of the water, screaming, crying unrestrainedly. Was she dead? My mother was holding the small bundle of a two-year-old, my young sister, dazed, who seemed not to understand anything, speechless, unable to denounce the murderous older brother. My Aunt H. was terrified. She was crying too. She took it upon herself to tell me what my mother could not express so clearly. She came up to me and blurted out: “And you, of course, you didn't see anything!” It was more than a reproach, it was an accusation. No matter how old I was, she was accusing me of trying to kill my sister. And I couldn't explain that Liliane had simply slipped on a rock that was too slippery without also admitting that I had seen everything and planned the murder. The three women, my mother and her sisters, walked past me, completely ignoring me, still crying their eyes out. I followed at a distance, livid. My mother never blamed me for it afterwards. But I knew what I had just done: I had tried to let this young sister die, a sister who received all the love of my mother and a lot of tenderness from my father, my father who was not excited by the touch of her little body, who never humiliated or rejected her. She had peace, and I resented her terribly for that. I was very angry, even hateful, against the serenity and happiness that made her love me without problem, me, Richard, 5 years old, even though I already clearly felt all forms of desire, even from her, as being unbearable.
When I told Peraldi this story (after several attempts), the story of the crime of a tormented 5-year-old, forever expelled from the quiet pleasure of simply existing, he said to me: “You know, if all the little sisters in the world really had to disappear under the blows of their big brothers, there wouldn't be many little sisters left on earth! ” I laughed heartily. Nevertheless, Peraldi could see the factual correlation between the extreme guilt I felt at imagining a euphoric sexuality with my father, and this attempt to get rid of a younger sister who was obviously too happy and could have witnessed a great embarrassment—a great danger. “You know, even at the age of five, children have trouble distinguishing what they thought from what they actually said or did.” I remember imagining that perhaps my younger sister had really read my thoughts, that she knew something, that she knew I was perverse. I often dreamed afterwards of my mother's anger, and in these dreams, my mother always blamed me for both my father's desire and mine, and always held me responsible for sex and infanticide. I saw my mother coming towards me holding a severed hand in a box, with a picture of my sister stuck on the box, a drawing that I had actually made, and I cried and screamed. I dreamt of my aunts, who reminded me of the very serious mistake I had made in the summer of 1956: “The murder,” Fleur-Ange said to me in a dream, “we know it was you who did it.”
Subsequently, it seemed simpler to me to attach my younger sister to my everyday life, to the point of regressing for a time and imitating her childish babbling. She never rejected this bizarre brother, without precise sexual boundaries, and yet still very violent towards her. Obviously, she had no idea what it was that made me so afraid. I knew I was safe as long as I copied her and stuck close to her. I invaded her games, which she willingly shared, even though I was a little ashamed of the reassuring pleasure I took in these amusements obviously designed for girls: my little sister was my shield, a formidable refuge against my father's desire, against the very awareness of that desire, and she was, without her knowing it, a very effective instrument of denial, if not amnesia. And even if playing with girls was despicable, it was still less dishonorable than what I knew about my father's desire and desire for my father, and the danger that any overly risky or compromising rapprochement represented for both of us. Moreover, any form of father/son closeness, even banal and normally desirable, had quickly become irreversibly disgusting and radically impossible.
All this was an extreme expression, externalizing a very acute anxiety, animating a mise-en-scène in which I literally wanted to be the role I was playing; all this shamelessly symbolized the immense distress and confusion that I already knew so well at the age of games that said it all without the need for words. But what was obvious to those who knew how to look and listen was not at all obvious to my mother, who let it happen, much to my relief. With my younger sister and LdeB, I survived, playing on the back balcony of the house, which had become my improvised (illusory) shelter from misfortune and perversion. And nobody said a word, not even my grandfather, who pretended, when he passed by me, to completely ignore me, and whom I was not stupid enough not to guess, even at the age of 6 or 7, was expressing his contempt for me.
“Sex and death were very present during your early childhood, can you see that?”
If my mother said nothing, complete silence on the aberrant behavior of her little boy, it was perhaps because we were accomplices, she and I, and she must have feared that I would cause a scandal that would have seriously damaged her; she must have thought that she would have been disgraced for life. For a woman who considered herself to be very superior, it was certainly an inconceivable prospect if only the affair were known. And since children have the unfortunate habit of saying everything, without a filter, and without even meaning to, it's best to show little Richard that silence can be learned and exchanged, service for service, deal done. However, I had completely forgotten a (distressing) incident that occurred the year I turned three, in which my mother unfortunately put herself in the spotlight, so to speak. This event was absolutely crucial in my life. When the memory came back to me during the session, it had delighted Peraldi, who exclaimed: “The thief!” He always attached great importance to this incident, which I witnessed without really understanding it, far from it. I was just three years old. Thief became a keyword among a few others throughout the four years of the analysis.
My mother was beautiful that day in the spring of 1954, resplendent even. I can still see her blond hair, her bright red lips, her white dress with floral prints and a neckline that revealed the cleft between her breasts (“What are you looking at there, Richard?”), the (fake!) pearl necklace around her neck, which only served to emphasize the air of triumph and domination that she had that day. Her gaze was whimsical, excited, lit up, as if there were only light to illuminate her. She was aggressive, decisive, young, fast. It was sunny and warm, my five-month-old little sister was sleeping in her stroller, and my mother had told me to “climb onto the back of the carriage and hold on behind the sides” of the little car. It all looked like a majestic walk that took my mother and me to that square that the people of Quebec City called Carré d'Youville. There was a shoe shop there, Simard & Voyer, I think, and my mother had told me on the way that she only wanted to look but not buy anything, that she didn't need anything. The shop was almost on the corner of Rue Saint-Jean and Rue des Glacis. It was not easy to get the carriage in; it was big, and the steps were high. “Richard, go and sit over there and wait for me,” and of course I went there, in silence, it was so beautiful in that luxurious place, where only the varnished wooden bench where I sat seemed old and repulsive. My mother had only gone in to look, she said; she didn't have the money to buy anything, and it was too expensive anyway. I would really like her to get something, I told her, believing I was increasing a rather exciting desire, when everything is so shiny, so dazzling. She replied rather curtly that no, she wasn't buying anything. I'm not sure why, perhaps an urgent need that left little choice, but she went to a small room at the back of the shop, behind a curtain. She came back, and I can still hear her, even now, saying to a gentleman who was waiting, who was probably hoping for a lot from my mother: “it's too expensive”. We were about to leave and go back home, but time suddenly stopped and we found ourselves trapped in the shop. There were shouts from a man and a woman at the till; my mother was crying and sobbing and moaning: “No, please don't call anyone, not the police or my husband”; I lowered my head, looked at the ground, embarrassed, I deliberately tried not to understand what was happening, just a few steps away from me. She begged to be released. And then we left, this time for good. My mother had no one to help her get the carriage out of the shoe shop, she could hardly hold the door open, everything was bumping into everything else, but my little sister was still sleeping, her innocence unspoiled. We went home. It was on the way back that my mother, still shaken, called on my collaboration, and on the silence of a three-year-and-two-month-old child, who was going to pay dearly for having been there, witnessing her mother's criminal desire. She talked to me all the way, while talking to herself and justifying herself. She pontificated, as I saw her do so often afterwards, delivering a plea learned by heart from books on popular psychology that she loved to read (in particular by Father Desmarais, of whom she was very fond) : sometimes we do things without understanding, we all make mistakes, we have to forgive and forget, we lack money, it explains a lot, we have to know how to keep a secret, we mustn't tell dad when we get home... Not to tell dad. She was sad, humiliated, but bloated with self-importance. I was especially stunned by the exceptional gravity of the tone of the confidence. I felt ashamed. I didn't cry. It had to be buried, and therefore never relived. I was marked for life by my mother's fear, and by the formal order never to say anything. When I had terrible dreams about her, I would always say to Peraldi: “She is capable of anything; she has no restraint; she could be totally immoral if she saw an advantage in it; she is terrifying because of that.”
A few years later, I was coming home from school through the kitchen, as my mother asked us all to do. I was alone with her. She told me that that morning she had heard a psychiatrist on the radio talking about a “mental illness”, kleptomania. She repeated the word several times. “It's involuntary,” my mother told me, “it's beyond one's control, it's an illness, it's not the thief's fault, they don't really want to steal”. I could see my mother congratulating herself on this amazing discovery and on this blessed word, kleptomania, which rehabilitated her in her own eyes. That's what I understood. That's what she wanted me to understand. So she hadn't forgotten. She assumed that I might still remember, and that it was finally time to explain myself. I never forgot the urgency of what she was telling me, even if I couldn't remember anything about the failed robbery attempt in a shoe shop on Place d'Youville. So I didn't make the connection that she wanted me to make, at least not explicitly. But this story of the theft, and the illness that explained it, was to have considerable, even decisive importance for my future life.
(In 2009, I went back with my boyfriend at the time to see the inside of the shop where I had sat at the far end a long time ago and which had become a dairy. The varnished wooden bench was still there. I was overwhelmed, but very, very happy. So it was all true.)
What my mother did on that spring day in 1954, by imposing silence on me, was to teach me to keep quiet by any means possible, and what lies behind such silence becomes deeply internalized. On top of the facts, an incredible opacity settled in for good: lurking in the shadows, a shame, a stain, linked to an intense family misfortune, camouflaged, transposed, for the benefit of a perfect mother saving appearances at all costs. I lost myself in this story. The unspeakable about my father became all the more unutterable because my mother had shown me the very simple method of repression and lying. She had taken me hostage to her weakened respectability. She had wrapped me in cheap morality, which I was expected to swallow whole. Amazing that she so easily presumed my silence and my forgetfulness. Amazing, above all, that I said nothing. My mother, my own mother, showed me how to keep quiet. She showed me how to shut down my brain. She felt it was her duty to blind herself, at the same time, and in all fairness, to the desires of my father, even my brother, and to the silence that I too had to keep completely. From then on, I was going to distrust my father, for a long time. In fact, the mistrust never ceased until it turned into deadly hatred and disgust.
I know now that my mother only intended to commit petty theft, which, as she said, brought her nothing but shame. I know that it is more than likely that, so soon after the birth of my sister, she suffered from postpartum depression. I never spoke to my mother about it before she died. I imagine she thought I had forgotten everything, and maybe she managed to do it herself - to repress once and for all this desire to steal, this kleptomania that revealed her all too brutally.
Commentaires
Publier un commentaire