A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - Chapter 5 - Big Illusison

There was a moment, in analysis, when I became aware of the reality of the unconscious. Not through a theoretical explanation, of course; moreover, I followed Peraldi's advice relatively well, “not to read books on psychoanalysis” to avoid constructing a ready-made explanation that would not be my story, the only one capable of a liberating function, and “it must be said here, in this room”, in his home, where his armchair and the sofa were almost the only furniture. I was first of all fascinated to discover this reality, and to grasp the extent to which what was hidden, ignored, repressed until total amnesia was nevertheless what made me move, react, ask, fear; that deep down there was an essential effervescence that was revealed without my knowing it in what attracted or frightened me, in what had constrained my body and formulated my sexuality, in what had pushed me since childhood towards an infinite variety of morbid or downright deadly behaviors.

I discovered the unconscious as I discovered reading at the age of 5: the teacher, Miss D, had explained to us in class that sound came from the junction of two letters, vowel and consonant, which she wrote on the board, pronouncing the new phoneme while moving her lips exaggeratedly: that was it, reading, hearing sounds produced by combinations of letters. I started to turn quickly the pages of the little book that all the pupils had to learn to read, and I discovered that the same principle of joining applied to all the letters: I could read! It was extraordinary, and reading, for me, had first been a fabulous pleasure.

I felt the same pleasure, amused, fascinated, in finding the words to express the unconscious. I realized, and it was a very powerful feeling, that I could now decode what made me want and live. But at the same time the unconscious taught me the constant fever, and the increasing pain of a child with multiple sexual sensitivities, , whereas since my earliest childhood, certainly as soon as I became aware of my body and my genitals, this multiplicity of sexual expressions had determined all my relationships with others and rooted in my brain all the possible symptoms of hatred and guilt. “You became aware of sexuality very early in your life, which you repressed,” Peraldi repeated to me several times. I naturally began to resist and panic, returning a thousand times to the same symptoms, and refusing to play the game of free association when it came to imagining the sexual arousal of a very young boy, or even a baby. And yet it came, most often in dreams; the pleasure of discovery became the agonizing memory of desolation, the desolation that had unconsciously set in around the age of five. I was a little boy who was already strict, already sad. I suffered from this childish sexuality, from the shame of being a prisoner of it without knowing it, from the hatred of having been inflicted upon me. This led me to scream at my parents “I will never get married, because I don't want to make someone disabled”, I meant, a child who would inevitably be despicable and crazy because he would come from me, as I was despicable and crazy because I came from them, from this man and this woman who were my father and my mother. I was 13 or 14 years old when I screamed this hateful enormity at my parents, who certainly heard it without admitting either the distress or the anger, but who chose to ignore the insult, perhaps because we were visiting an aunt, all sitting in a large circle, facing the river, and that this extended family couldn't care less about me anyway. I had no friends there. The cousin avoided me like the plague. I was certainly a bit of a embarrassment: the unconscious is contagious, what is signified is always heard by all. The unconscious does indeed exist as a ghostly double that has its own existence. No wonder children are so easily frightened of ghosts: they really do exist.

My mother died in October 1999, shortly after a devastating bout of cancer required emergency surgery, quite aggressive surgery, according to the specialist who had operated on her, to remove the metastases that were spreading rapidly from her breast to her shoulder blade. She had apparently recovered surprisingly well. There had been a day after the operation when she had been a little delirious: she saw big pipes hanging from the ceiling of her room, and she kept insisting that they be removed! Her roommate laughed heartily. But two days later, she was doing very well, sitting cross-legged in her hospital bed, listening to the chatter of her family gathered around her, smiling slightly, filled with the reassuring presence of her loved ones. She was still alive and, as a sign of health, was devouring the cheesecake that I had picked up for myself in the cafeteria. I ended up going to get a second one, along with other sweets that my mother asked for. It was the last gift I gave her, it was the last day I saw her alive, happy, believing she had at least another 10 years, the expected lifespan of her investments. She left the hospital shortly afterwards, for home follow-up care. She saw her doctors regularly, including a cardiologist exactly two days before the heart attack that was to strike her one Sunday morning, just after breakfast. “I didn't see it coming,” he assured us all, himself surprised by this unexpected death, and it was certainly true. In any case, what could be done once the Grim Reaper had passed through? On the evening of her death, my young sister had washed the breakfast dishes of my mother, left on the kitchen counter, and nothing struck me more than this detail vividly illustrating what final disappearance is.

On the Sunday of her death, I arrived in Quebec too late to hope to see her still alive, and in any case, my mother died alone, without her family, in the hands of doctors who were attempting the ultimate resuscitation maneuvers. I remained by her body, already inert, cold, even rigid, for at least an hour, perhaps more. My mother, dead there on the bed, her little white stockings still on her feet, her nightclothes still on her, everything testified to a sudden death. I touched her hand, her cheek, her hair; I spoke to her, I prayed to her, I prayed; I hoped to feel her presence and perceive a “sign”, in vain, of course; I said my goodbyes, still too young, it seemed to me, to lose my mother. For several years, for twelve years exactly, we had gotten into the habit of talking freely, she and I, for real, and with a lot of affection. At the end of her life, my mother gave a lot. She who had been so thrifty with everything, including her reputation and the image of the family to be presented to rue Cartier, Quebec City and the rest of the world; she for whom, for so long, the truth had been of little importance compared to what others, all others, should think of the forms and facts concerning her; she, my mother, in the decline of her life, was finally opening up. She knew what therapy I was following and how unwell I felt. She listened to me, she supported me, she didn't blame me for anything, she didn't ask me to keep quiet or compromise. To the violence that I told her about, she responded by telling me about the abuse she suffered in a second marriage that was ill-considered, to say the least. She never betrayed me, she believed me and didn't question anything. She herself had opened the door to the authentic story of my life and hers on the night of my birthday, March 11, 1987, a red-letter day in the history of our relationship. The mother I love and miss is that one, as opposed to the proud, cold and narcissistic woman of my childhood. “We didn't kiss each other much,“ she used to tell me, ”but that's how it was, we thought we were doing the right thing.” I had in mind, to contradict her, several of my uncles and aunts who kissed their children a lot. But at the end of her life, my mother kissed a lot.

I owe a lot to my mother, starting with my life, barely, but still, and certainly also my tenacity to stay in school, when everything was falling apart in my head as a teenager. My mother studied in my place, for her and for me, giving a lot of time to the lost and suicidal young man that I was. “Your father criticized me for it, because I left him alone in the evening when I was studying with you.” She certainly wanted me to succeed, and yet she didn't hesitate to cruelly tear me down along the way, repeating to me, publicly and sometimes in front of my few friends, the harsh and contemptuous words that this or that person with whom my mother wanted to maintain rewarding relationships had said about me, despite the humiliating embarrassment that my father and I caused her, for different reasons. She never took any real interest in the misfortunes of the child that I was, never attached any real importance to the warnings that a few people, such as Father Caron, a fantastic teacher in secondary 3, had been able to give her, because what mattered above all else was silence, oblivion, ignorance, the terrible facade. Later, when I would say to her: “But couldn't you see your little boy was suffering?”, she would reply: “But no, you were doing so well at school, nobody ever complained about you, you never caused any problems.” Of her four children, I was surely the one whose very existence, particularly as a teenager, disappointed and humiliated her the most. She resented me for that, for that, for the scandal contained in this overly thin, overly sad, so unmanly teenager, and certainly also for what she sensed behind the pitiful reality of her young son, and which she experienced as an affront to her own femininity. She did not think she was beautiful, at least not as much as her sister was, and not as much as she would have liked to be in order to live an opulent and successful life. She blamed this supposed ugliness for the mediocre lifestyle choices she had had to make. Crucially, she sometimes deliberately tried to turn a blind eye to this; she confided this to me, quite astoundingly, at the end of her life. I was stunned to hear her tell me that there were indeed things that she didn't want anyone to know. So I didn't look at those things. ”

Yet one night she overheard a disturbing incident, which she pretended to laugh about for several days, claiming that my father slept so deeply that he didn't know what he was doing in the kitchen with one of his children that he had to take for a pee...

- Marcel slept so soundly that he put Richard, for his night-time pee, on the sewing machine in the kitchen! He thought he was in the toilet!

The people around him laughed. I remember that I, frozen, uncomfortable, did not laugh at all at this supposedly absent-minded father, absorbed in his dreams. Standing there with my pants down, I knew exactly what had really happened. I was probably three years old, maybe a little younger.

I was often afraid of my mother, and not without reason. If someone hurt her, there was always the fear of her defensive reactions. She didn't hesitate to crush me in front of my friends, if she thought it was a way to unburden herself of what had humiliated her. “Out of band,” Mr. G, a neighbor of the cottage, had once said to her. I have no idea what he was accusing her of. But in the car that was taking us back from Île d'Orléans to Quebec City that day, it had become, according to my mother, who recounted everything she had been told, “Out of band, Richard,” with the shower of insults that I had apparently received from those people - particularly from a Mr. V, a vulgar asshole. What I had to understand from what my mother said, choking back her pain, was that it wasn't her that was rejected, it couldn't be her; it was me, the ugly big pole (and here I censor an even more humiliating, horribly homophobic insult), the skinny one so unmanly, so submissive that you could hit him without any danger of him resisting. I was sitting in the back seat of the car, with my great friend by my side, JM, who was going to come back a little later, at the restaurant, to talk about the incident, to make fun of me, even though I loved him so much. Who would want to associate with a scumbag, considered as such by his own mother? Of course, at 17, I hadn't realized that my mother's anger had roots that went back much, much further than the delusional words of an abject man. That same evening, I went to the Petit Séminaire to meet Father N, the institution's priest-psychologist, and I begged him to get me out of there, to find a solution so that I would never have to go back home, to her house, or to my father's for that matter.

- Impossible, you know, you're still a minor. If I got you out of there, I would expose myself to problems with the police...

In short, there was nothing he could do, except tell me to keep my dignity. I cried a lot that evening in the office-bedroom of Father N, who, by teaching me about dignity, had nevertheless saved me. I have never forgotten.

The essential plot of my mother's life, as long as she was my father's wife, was the patient and methodical accumulation of well-hidden money, stolen from view, a small nest egg whose existence she constantly denied and which was to remain unknown to the rest of the world. It was in the figures that only she controlled that the treasure was hidden and slowly grew, figures that she lined up in large account books, as if she had to manage a vast enterprise; not a single dime went astray without her knowing and noting exactly why, without her having measured the inevitability of the expense. She made convenient “forgetfulnesses”, of course, when it suited her. But any problem lost the very right to exist when it was necessary, in order to solve it, to scrimp a little: “it'll work out,” she would say, which meant that it would work out for free. She thought that commerce was essentially thieving, that everything cost too much, and that everything therefore impoverished her. For my mother, even children were expensive, and later, they had to earn their keep. I never earned anything.

My aging mother, now at peace, told me a lot about herself and my father, from the day she first noticed him, in the winter of 1940. “It was strange,” she once told me, he was skating with a friend, arm in arm, with an obvious, inexplicable tenderness between them; I was disturbed; I thought, yes, I clearly thought he might be homosexual. But in 1940, we knew nothing about any of that, it was never discussed. » She chased the little annoyance out of her head. She flirted anyway, despite the stubborn indifference of the man who was to become my father, because she found him handsome. This was one of the most meaningful admissions she ever made to me, as when she revealed to me how afraid my father was of his latent homosexuality. “He often spoke to me at night, when he was discouraged with himself, about this fear he had, which he associated with impotence. He had had some homosexual sexual contact when he was a young boy, but it didn't really matter. He would have loved to have had men to command...” I had jumped at these words, and I was shaken by them for a long time, so unlike the real father I had known. Peraldi had said to me about this in session: “She found someone who didn't care about desire, he found someone who didn't ask him for desire.” The remark was striking, and certainly very true. I have often thought that she felt she had to respond to my father's desire in a way other than with her body as a wife and mother, and that she had to send me to him, without seeing or knowing what would happen. “There is the sexual subconscious of your mother” at play here, Peraldi, to whom I was telling these bits of family history, had also told me. My mother remembered: ”He loved to take you for walks when you were a baby. He would sing to you in his arms, “little boy, little boy… She never wanted to hide anything from me. She assured me that she had never seen anything that could have aroused her suspicions. But this was coming from the same woman who had already told me that she refused to see what she didn't want us to know, from this mother who had nevertheless noticed my father's supposedly disturbing sleepwalking. In my dreams, I had often seen her eye peering at me through the crack of the door to my bedroom, closely watching what was happening between my father, who was there, and me, in bed, half-naked, my mother fearful and aware of the desire I inspired in my father. For a long time, I thought that she wanted to expose a sexual rivalry that she feared: Peraldi had already suggested on this point that she herself could have pushed me towards my father, whose desire she sensed, while nevertheless fearing that he would act on it: “perhaps your mother pushed you towards your father, but she blinded herself to this, to avoid a radical, potentially fatal devaluation. ” But I also think that she was on the lookout, and was keeping a close eye on what I might say to my father about his attempted theft at Simard & Voyer, about his kleptomania, which she had admitted to me. In any case, I feared terrible reprisals if, out of excessive love for my father, I offered him many things that he should neither take nor know about.

I knew my mother's crime; by repressing it, I allowed my father's desire to take root in me, obscuring it too, a desire that may never have materialized other than in an overexcited symbiosis – but there is reason to doubt it, reminding me of the particular use made of a sewing machine, and even of his bed. The mourning of a grotesque illusion, that of a perfect family, is terribly difficult to do, especially when the love one has for one's mother is immense, immense as was her generosity during the last years of her life.

I often spoke to Peraldi about my notebooks, where I recorded the content of the sessions, everything I had said, everything he had replied to, interpreted from my dreams and my words, but where I also tried, relentlessly, a hundred times over, to pierce the smooth metal plate that split my brain and blocked the emergence of any significant memory ” deeply encysted” - the expression is Peraldi's own. He had told me that writing so much, alone, was not without risk, that it had to come up in session, and had asked me to bring him my notebooks, which he would read.

“You'll never get through it all, there are thousands of pages. And much of it is illegible.”

I took them to him anyway, a huge pile, and he read some of it, because at the next session he said to me: “There are some heart-rending pages about your father in your notebooks. Don't you remember that? ” I replied that I didn't, but I imagined that it must have been some desperate appeal to my father, lines like: where were you, dad, when I needed you? In reality, he was there, in my life, day after day. I was his son. But I didn't want to learn anything from him; I certainly wasn't going to ask him for help when he was still alive and in the flesh, when I was certain that all my problems came from him, and that he himself was in terrible need of help, which he never sought and which no one ever offered him. My father, so dependent on my mother, was nevertheless, and unfortunately, a deeply lonely man.

My father died in February 1985. He was 68 years old. For several years already, he had been suffering from profound, irreversible dementia, which was constantly getting worse. That was what my mother had told me on the phone when she received the diagnosis that would lead to my father being hospitalized during the last year of his life. Profound dementia. It terrified me because I was already very ill at the time and I was sure I would end up identifying with my father again, even in the terrible illness that would truly kill him. I had enormous difficulty detaching myself from him, relieving myself of the guilt I felt for hating him. I pitied him, and I write this without any contempt; my father was truly a poor man dissatisfied with his whole life. In analysis, I often dreamed that I was resurrecting him, that I was bringing him back to life, at his home on rue Cartier, in Quebec City, that my whole family took this reincarnation very badly and deserted the place as quickly as possible, including my mother; I remained alone with my father, unable to bring myself to leave the place too, going up and down the stairs, while I heard my father walking in the house, I even heard him breathing. “He's my father, I have to save him. ” This meant sacrificing my life and my freedom, and imposing on myself a level of intimacy that I radically no longer wanted.

I know almost nothing about my father, about his personal history. And he never spoke about his life before his marriage, except to my mother, in the privacy of their bedroom. Depression, which shattered an intelligence that could have been honest, and which totally crushed him, eventually killing him, sometimes caused him too much pain: then he broke the silence he imposed on himself; he would tell my mother, at night, alone with her, that he would cry about his mediocre life on a small salary, when he would have liked to be a boss and lead masses of men, give orders, magnify his paternal and social power. His two brothers-in-law were a terrible example to him in this respect, one a doctor, the other the director of an important financial department. My father was undoubtedly a victim of capitalism, but except once, during the October Crisis of 1970 when I heard him say “they were right, the FLQ guys”, he never criticized the system. On the contrary, he would have liked to have been at the top of it, and to have enjoyed it indefinitely. From dominated, he wanted to become dominant, ceasing to produce on command in order to enrich himself simply by directing. Through this in fact very limited class consciousness, he showed that he had nevertheless understood the logic of the system, and how, in truth, the happy opulence is manufactured. How many times did I hear my mother say that she, of the three sisters, was “the one who had ended up with the most miserable of husbands”? My mother would protest for the sake of form, but never contradict the implacable verdict. One day when I was still living at home, I was 18 or 19, my mother, exasperated, said to me: “The doctor tells me to encourage him, to praise him; I can't tell him he speaks English well! ” She made us call him “the boss”. He never pretended to believe it. And I never, ever used that atrocious word to refer to him.

He held his own father responsible for his failed existence, my paternal grandfather, whom I never knew, having died before I was even born. As a young man, my father hated his father and avoided him like the plague: and while I have never seen my father read a book in his life (except for a novel by Hervé Bazin, which one of my cousins had given him with the deliberate intention of awakening me, I have always been convinced of this), he took refuge, it seems, as an adolescent, as a young adult, in reading, to avoid any intimate encounter, man to man, with his father. I was flabbergasted to hear my mother tell me about my father's phobia of his own father, because I developed exactly the same avoidance strategy towards him, the same one, without knowing that I was borrowing his method. When my father saw me reading for hours on end alone in my room, did he understand why I was isolating myself from him in this way? I have no idea. One thing's for sure, he knew I was escaping. As a teenager, I would leave wherever he was and join my mother, and he would shout after me loud enough for me to hear: “He's doing it again! He's running away from me! He's turning his back on me!” It was better, if by any chance there were some unfortunate remnants of another era to recall, that I remained silent. I remained silent. I read.

I have never, not once in my entire life, chatted with my father. Never. Neither talked, nor played, nor learned, not even a manual job, not even a sport: he never offered it to me. I don't know how to skate, nobody showed me, which is quite incredible when you consider that my mother noticed my father for the very first time in a crowd of skaters on the ice of a public arena. When it came to the essentials, he left it up to my mother. I guess he was afraid of me, just as I was afraid of him. In front of my father, I built white, smooth, clean and neutral walls, but they were never high enough, never thick enough to protect me from contamination by saliva, urine, a hair, nail clippings or dead skin, by tiny insects lurking in his clothes that he could have placed on my bed where, horror, he sometimes came to bed without me understanding why he did so; I may have made myself inaccessible to all eyes, and rejected in advance any claim on his part to give me lessons; I may have tried to make myself untouchable, to lock myself in my blockhouse, but nothing ever protected me sufficiently from him. He remained my haunting obsession, my phobia and my thinness, my wound and my distress, my name and my destiny.

My father was my progenitor: I always recognized him only with resistance, happy that I did not resemble him, to the point that my brother had already suggested that I might not be his son. He was my father with difficulty, during the last 30 years of his life (I was 33 when he died), the years when I often crossed paths with him, although less and less, frightened by his presence, disgusted that he could ask me for something close and intimate, and demand it, because he would have had the absolute right of the father over his son. This alone could explain why I knew nothing about him, without my mother's late confidences, nothing to the point of not being able to write anything of a full, and above all meaningful, story about who he was, what he had experienced, long before I met him - I didn't know him, I found him, already there, in my life, like a stranger, troubled and dangerous.

My father, the only wage earner in the family, took my mother's constant reminders of our relative poverty badly. He already thought his job was mediocre, having initially been the manager of an electronics store and wanted to become the owner. My maternal grandfather had refused to finance the purchase. Out of spite, he had accepted a job with the Canadian army, poorly paid, it seemed, but stable and reassuring for my mother, who was always afraid of being short and who could never have managed to save enough to stay alive. He ended up hating his job, due to the distressing low salary, which ruined his already low self-esteem. One day when I had asked him to play with his tools, he had lent them to me very reluctantly, almost angrily; when I had told him that I wanted to “do the same job as him” later on, he had curtly told me to do whatever I wanted, except the job of electronics technician, had turned his back on me and left the house, disgusted with him and with life, as if I had said something vile about him. It was an absolutely dramatic moment for a little boy of barely 5 years old, who simply wanted to play with his father's tools. I was ashamed, I got up, and I left those degrading adult toys there. My mother pretended not to see any of it. The most important thing was the money that came in every two weeks, and the savings that could be made. She never had any ambition for my father, not even that he have a frank conversation with his son.

Until his retirement, which he barely enjoyed, my father remained in the employ of the Canadian army, which he said discriminated even in the use of the toilets. Humiliated, stripped of any real dignity, without true autonomy, endowed with a completely artificial family authority, my father sank into an increasingly dark and sometimes delusional depression. The more the years passed, the more he was alone, isolated in his own family. He screamed his anger for a long time, gigantic, disproportionate to reality, to finally stop talking, sink into dementia, and die, still young, his family around him, from a morphine injection that resembled a collective assassination. My brother told him to “look towards the Light”. What was he going to see there? A big job? Lots of money? Slaves, en masse, to serve him endlessly? I doubt that my father felt he had made anyone happy during his long life. Obviously not my mother, in any case, who never stopped envying her two well-married sisters, with their impressive pay cheques. So she fulfilled herself by depriving herself relentlessly, and by depriving those around her. In such an environment, parental love was filtered, to say the least.

There's no doubt that this had a profound effect on me. I had a hard time learning to love without anger. “You can't give what you haven't received,” Péraldi once said to me. It was immediately obvious.

My brother once told me that my father had knelt down in front of him to literally beg his forgiveness. He was 4 or 5 years old, my father more than 30. My brother was in bed crying because my father had drunk a little too much, was staggering and scared him. “I watched him humiliate himself in front of me, I felt ashamed for him, I never forgave him for degrading himself to that extent.” I wasn't even born when the incident happened. As far as I know, my father never drank again. But there were times when my brother would express aloud the fear that our father continued to inspire in him. On two occasions, he expressed his anxiety in a particularly dramatic way.

I must have been 7 or 8 years old when one night, on Île d'Orléans, my brother started screaming that he had seen a man in the house, a stranger, who was moving silently, with a hat pulled down over his head. “I saw him, he's here, he's hiding here! ” he cried, crying at the same time. He was 13 or 14 years old. We didn't share the same room, but the four children slept upstairs, my parents on the ground floor. They had hurried upstairs, of course, lighting up the whole house, searching every nook and cranny, the backs of cupboards, the undersides of beds, probing the windows, and then my father came back down alone, inspecting the kitchen, the living room, even scanning the rear balcony, the black of the night, the edge of the forest... My brother was still begging us to search again, he wasn't making it up, he was insisting with good reason, he was telling the truth: “No, I wasn't dreaming, yes, there's someone here, in the house, he went upstairs, he's got a coat, a hat, he's hiding somewhere! ” I had stayed in bed, as had my sisters, we were waiting for the result of the search, but I had said to myself, without a shadow of a doubt, I, a boy of 7 or 8 years old, in the terror of the night: it was our father he saw, this ghost is our father, he is afraid of our father. It took a long time to calm my brother down. He was crying profusely, deeply shaken, and closed to any words of reassurance. My parents assured him that they had searched everywhere, checked everything, that there was no intruder in the house, and that he could sleep again. The lights went out and we all went back to sleep. I imagine that my brother kept his eyes open for a long time, despite everything.

We talked about the incident for a few days. My brother insisted on repeating what he had seen, sometimes complaining that people doubted his word. My mother ended up laughing about it. My brother went back to the neighbor's farm, where he spent his days, and we ended up forgetting about the nocturnal intrusion, apparently at least, because I always remembered it.

A year or two later, my brother had another episode, shouting at the top of his voice for my mother to come to the front door of the house on Cartier Street in Quebec: he had feared to the point of tears that a man with a hat wedged deeply on his head, sinister, laughing like a madman, was trying to break down the front door of the house. It was evening, and already dark. My mother ran to the front door, and both she and my brother began to push against the door that the terrifying, threatening man was trying to force open. The man had stopped laughing, however, and was shouting: “It's me, it's your father, it's Marcel! Open the door, let me in! ” Of course the door opened, and I can still see my brother bawling his eyes out, completely distraught, his voice quavering as he said to our father: “I didn't recognize you! ” Shaken and embarrassed too, my mother had gone to lock herself in the bathroom for a few minutes. My father wandered around the house, humiliated, angry, guilty too, as always when you are accused, as always when you have caused fear, and you think to yourself: what if I had something to do with it? I don't know what my brother went through to have given substance to such anxieties, both anonymous, both at night. However, I know what I thought at the time: “He scares us all, we're all scared of him.” My father didn't want to scare anyone, nor disgust them for that matter. He had a bad luck spell. That evening, he felt as if we no longer wanted him in our home. That was certainly what I wished for without saying so. I sat down at the table, my mother served, nobody spoke anymore; a kind of crime had just been committed against my father, but a barely formulated violent reproach also hung over him.

I have no idea if my brother ever overcame the fear he felt towards our father. He did, however, confront him when necessary, and more than once served as a protective shield against him. I also don't know what my father wanted so exceptionally to be forgiven by my brother. I remember, however, that many years later, he had wanted to confess - he was a practising Catholic, although the churchy frogs had a knack of exasperating him - major faults that required going elsewhere than to our parish. I was about ten years old. I saw him pacing nervously, trying to justify his choice to my mother, who didn't understand anything about it.

- Why the Franciscans?

- Because they have a reputation for being more tolerant of the unspeakable, for being less strict, for forgiving more easily...

She didn't ask any more questions. I, watching the scene, had “understood”. I might have been completely wrong, but I had figured that it had everything to do with my intense unhappiness in life, with the unspeakable anomaly that isolated me so much from others and that made me so ashamed, without me being able to confess anything. The Franciscans could do nothing for either my brother or me.

My father was handsome. “It was the only thing he was proud of,” my mother told me, when we started to open up to each other. In the winter of 1940, my father had finally noticed the young woman who never took her eyes off him. What had he thought of her? A priest once said that my mother had the btain of a man on a woman's body. My mother was very proud of the compliment, which she repeated a thousand times: she liked the idea of a man's brain. But what about my father? They were together for more than four years. “It was the war,” my father explained. I didn't want to marry Lucette too quickly, in case there was conscription. ” And yet he had been declared unfit for military service because of flat feet! I never believed this absurd story, but my father did what many men in Quebec did between 1940 and 1942: avoid being forcibly conscripted, certain that conscription would be imposed sooner or later. A large number of doctors played along, granting exemptions for any far-fetched reason. The fact is that in my family, one uncle, just one, one of my mother's many brothers, enlisted and made it to England: my maternal grandfather never forgot this exceptional son. As for my father, I have always thought, without proof, of course, that the war allowed him to delay a marriage that he only desired half-heartedly, somewhat forced by social constraints and by his father who expected it of him. And yet, shortly after the wedding, my mother became pregnant, indisputable proof that my father “could”, after all. My mother (she told me so, as it happens) “ would activate him, make him hard..” My brother was born in 1945.

The older my father got, the more he shouted, and perhaps these were the first signs of the Alzheimer's that would destroy him. It was upsetting to hear him rant and sometimes even rave, but at least he acted like a man who was not lacking in aggressiveness (loud, apparent aggressiveness) or fighting spirit. In extreme situations, when what he cared about most, what he saw as a substitute for an intact body, his car, his precious car, was being touched, my brother had to be called in, as only he could bring him back to reality. He would scream at homosexuals, those unnatural abominations, all of them good for prison or the lash. But at night, he confided in my mother about his fear of being one, which could explain everything about his miserable life. He told her that he had had some experiences when he was a teenager. The matter was quickly dismissed as a simple curiosity. His father, he often told my mother, “considered me from the day I married you. ” What did my grandfather know about my father's sexuality? What was the sexuality of this paternal grandfather in particular? From what little I knew for sure, it was these sexual experiences of my teenage father that astonished me the most: how, on that too, could I have been so much like him, and have stumbled like him, once, once too often, without knowing what had become of him? I was terrified that he would find out and take revenge on me. Until, thirty years later, I learned that my father, who claimed to have strict sexual morals and to take a whip to offenders, had, in his younger days, followed the same sexual path as me.

One day, during analysis, I had told of a dream in which three men, sitting side by side in a truck, were subjected to a violent and deliberate attack on the road: someone rammed the truck repeatedly, pushing the vehicle towards the void. The three men were in great danger. “It's your grandfather, your father and you,” Peraldi had immediately interpreted. “What similar thing happened to all three of you? "I had a grandfather who died with his secrets. I had a father who died with his secrets. The mystery completely crushed me, like a worthless car made of sheet metal, pushed in, broken, twisted, under the effect of a depersonalized shock.

I therefore find it very difficult to talk about my father's life. I have often only retained what dramatically documented my own trajectory, as well as that of my father. For a long time, I listened to my mother as one listens to a perverse story. He blamed my mother for managing everything, and the blame often came on nights of deep discouragement. “I said to him: do you want to take care of everything? I'll give you the books, the personal finance papers, the checkbooks, everything. "My father had backed out, ‘like when we were in Europe and he passed out in a bank in Monaco. He didn't want to make any more withdrawals. He said to me, ’You take care of it from now on.'” My mother told me that day that my father had serious problems saying his name, my grandfather's name and mine, revealing his needs, confronting his anxiety. I heard the anecdote until I was completely imbued with it.

I have kept a very small, very unhappy childhood memory, which I am telling because it says it all. I was 6 or 7 years old, it was summer, the children were playing in a group on rue Cartier. There was excitement, shouting, fun, happiness. And then I saw my father coming home from work, walking down the street, wearing a white shirt and gray coat; he smiled at me very tenderly, a little shy, silent, as always when it came to him and me. I felt compelled to follow him, to go home with him. This encounter, in broad daylight, on the street, in full view of the other children, destroyed all the pleasure of living in the moment. I didn't know what was so painful, so embarrassing, so shameful, about the simple fact of walking, a little boy, with my father, on the street, before going to dinner. But I knew that I would have preferred not to have met him, and not to have experienced that ordinary moment of intimacy. This fear of intimacy with my father has never left me. Never. I turned 20, 25, and any prospect of attachment to him was radically impossible. I was ashamed of him, of course. I felt guilty for hurting him so much. And I had to suffer a lot, for years when my survival was threatened on a daily basis, between the ages of 30 and 40, before I admitted - half-heartedly, and without ever relenting on the suicidal urge as soon as the unspoken thing about my father was merely suggested - that there had been an intimacy between my father and me, a tragedy, for which I was not responsible.

Until I was about three years old, I wanted to sleep in my parents' bed at night with my parents, with them sleeping in the middle. One day, when I got up to join them, my mother put a stop to it, once and for all. I always remembered my father's gaze that night, imploring, begging me to give up, above all to say nothing and forget everything. I subsequently developed, without wanting to and without understanding it, a real aversion to my parents' bed, to the point where I wasn't even able to touch it with my fingertips. There were many, many traces of my father there... Surprisingly, it was precisely in this bed that he had found a part of the value he accorded himself: “there at least, in bed, I am worth something.” When I spoke to my mother about him, she sometimes used an astonishingly precise vocabulary, describing my father as “a morbid pleasure-seeker who gets angry if you tell him it's pleasurable”. But that didn't stop him from “becoming a different man in bed, a real man, a good lover, and the resulting sense of well-being for me was a major factor in the longevity of our relationship. ” But “he was jealous of a neighbor who flirted with me in Val-Saint-Michel, he was even jealous of Jean [my older brother], whom he potentially considered a better sexual partner than himself.” Mom would sometimes add, in the confidences she shared with me: “if I had to get on my knees,” I would do it; “I've already said this to other women: sometimes you have to get on your knees,” an extraordinary confidence coming from a woman so proud, so sure of her superiority, so viscerally upright.

My mother told me, it was March 31, 1989, that my father didn't want to take care of us when we were children. Yet it was he who had decided not to have me circumcised. He only wanted dilatation, he said. I had no idea what that meant. But it concerned my penis, that much I knew. I rebelled openly and angrily against the right my father gave himself to intervene in my body. And I was just a child, to whom his father never gave his bath, apparently, but I have my doubts.

One day, during a session, I remembered the first standing up I managed, the balance I kept, my first steps, looking at the ground, then walking forwards, a success. I was what, 12 months old? “Who were you going to?” Peraldi asked me immediately. I was unable to answer. I didn't know. And it was very, very unsettling, this feeling that at the end of the desire to stand up and walk, there was no one I could recognize or name.

Suite: https://histoiredelahonte.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-chronicle-of-shame-chapter-6-crime.html