A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - CHAPTER 6 - THE CRIME

There is no one, no one whom I have loved as much as my brother. He was the first love of my life, and certainly the most significant, although I did not try to replace him later, when I began, in my early twenties, to have, laboriously, with difficulty, a love and sexual life. There was no substitute for this brother in my life, quite the contrary, my one-night stands were nothing like him, neither in manner nor taste. He got married and became more distant from me than ever; he had his normal life, which he enjoyed; our parents were proud of him; I saw him at Christmas, but otherwise he didn't care about me for years, without any brotherly bond. I got used to a clandestine life that slowly, very slowly, took up space and importance and which gave me, for several years, the happy impression that I no longer had a past, no longer had a family, that I was starting a new life that promised to be successful - brilliant university studies, a fantastic career ahead of me. Sometimes I no longer had any doubts. It was an illusion; it lasted for a while, long enough for me to flee to Montreal to complete my studies, long enough for my first significant romantic relationship. Beau Garçon came into my life. It was to last seven years.

I still remember when I became aware of the passionate love I had for my brother. I was 13 years old. We shared the same room, without collusion, let alone compromise. I only saw him naked once, at night, next to my bed. He was looking out of the window overlooking the courtyard. I had been overwhelmed by the beauty of his body, but I had hurried back to sleep, telling myself that I mustn't let him think or know that I had been able to see him. I was physically awful at that age, I had all the characteristics of a mutant, a very ugly teenager, often ill, crushed at around 15 by mononucleosis accompanied by very high fevers that had laid me low for more than two months. I never imagined I could seduce my brother, let alone make him fall in love. He went from one girlfriend to another, one after the other, before getting married. As for the rest, he had difficulty finding his place in the world, neither at school nor as a young worker, but he was not afraid of anything, and that amazed me.

One day, when I was 13, my brother suggested that we go to the Gaspé Peninsula together, on the road. It promised to be an absolute joy. We never went, and I perceived this aborted project as a betrayal. I hoped that my body would come back to life by being loved and desired. Instead, a sterile loneliness remained, especially since a priest at the Petit Séminaire had explained to me the bare essentials to know when you are 13: I would soon have erections and wet dreams; my mother would notice and change the sheets, no questions asked. (That's mostly what I heard. I immediately assumed that she would in fact ask a lot of questions, and that she would tell my father everything, who in turn might take a close interest in it.) He had told me that I should not take advantage of it, but take advantage of what exactly, Father? I had no idea what sexual pleasure was, no solitary activity, I didn't even know what it could be. I looked without understanding at the open book he had placed before my eyes “so that I could recognize myself. ”I could see nothing but a drawing, showing the body of the man in cross-section, in which I recognized nothing at all.

My brother was the eldest in the family, and in a way he took on that role very early on; my mother saw him as the extension of my maternal grandfather, for whom she had a real devotion. So she relied heavily on my brother, and my brother always lived up to her expectations. He certainly took legitimate pride in this. I imagine he saw it as a kind of mandate. He was the head of the family, appointed by my mother herself. Everyone knew it, my father as much as the others. Only he could say to my father, “That's enough!” and be heard. But despite all his qualities, I knew little about this brother. He despised me. I imagine it's a fairly common feeling, that of a big brother towards his little brother, except that my brother's contempt was essentially sexual, based on my orientation and gender, and he tried several times to corner me on this, to humiliate me. I was petrified in front of him, submissive, ashamed, lonely, unstable, willing to compromise on everything. My brother had found the exact phrase to describe me: “he's just a wimp who doesn't like to fight”, a failure, a weakling. I believe that everyone, grandfather, father, mother, the whole family had reached the same verdict: the little boy is a delicate one, very nervous too, but we pretend not to see anything, just to limit the damage. And I, and I, adored my brother. I loved him with all my might. And I was cruelly ashamed of my desire for him - at least for his affection, and for the concern he could have had in teaching me.

This brother, six years older than me, was in fact much more than just older, especially since he had meaningful relationships—I mean, relationships of similarity—with my father, my grandfather and an uncle, all close neighbors, drawing their common identity from the pleasure of washing their precious cars in the backyard of the huge family block. It was there, much more than anywhere else, that their solidarity as real men was established. Very early on, the uncle taught my brother to drive, and he enjoyed car rides for years, necessarily limited to the length of the alleyway running alongside the house and the courtyard. At 12 or 13, my brother already looked like a man, bearing little resemblance to my father but a lot to my grandfather, with a strong build, a stubble beard and a growing hairline, and he was proud of it. When he got out of the bath, he enjoyed strutting around the house in his underwear, and a very clear image of that has remained with me: my brother, aged 19 or 20, in his underwear, showing his manly torso to my father and uncle through the kitchen window while they were working outside repairing a roof. The men laughed at the joke; my brother was one of them, there was no doubt about that.

Seeing my brother like that, I was deeply attracted, to the point of being dizzy, struck by a violent desire to touch, but also to resemble him, humiliated to be so far from the model, me, the runt of 13 or 14 years old, as thin as a rail, who thought that simply pretending to be inspired by him and to copy him would provoke a mad rage, or even worse, general hilarity, by simply pretending to be inspired by him and to copy him. I realized that day, I remember it very well, how much I wanted him. He could have been, should have been my father, or at least his replacement. I could have bonded with him, enjoyed his company, learned to imitate him. But my brother had long since lost all interest in me. I had to admit that I made myself absent, invisible, a “moody wanderer” as they said of me everywhere, at school, at cub scouts, at home - which meant, I understand now, elusive, both literally and figuratively. At the time, I would have sworn that I was hiding only from my father. And on the contrary, I would have wanted my brother to seize me, a wish all the more peaceful since I feared nothing from my brother, so absolutely and totally normal. Never, never would I have thought that it was from my brother that the real violence came. I never, ever thought that I was enslaved, dominated, muzzled by this brother, my elder, whom I knew so little, who was my mother's ally and who, in any case, despised me all the time.

Yet it was to this brother that I confided first, in my early thirties, when nothing was going right for me. He had just separated from his wife. It was a Sunday afternoon, he had come to visit me in Montreal for the weekend. I was already very ill at that point, but my brother didn't know anything about it. Maybe he thought I looked a little pale, a little anxious, but he didn't say anything. It hadn't even been a year since Beau Garçon had decided to break up with me, so the two single brothers were spending some time together, it was an unexpected solidarity, after all this time, and very new. I was disconnected, disoriented, lost in the symptoms of a major depression, even though I didn't even know the medical term for it. I was having violent dreams more and more often, often incestuous, sometimes very brief, my hands held firmly against the bed, a very white penis massaging my face, my pajamas lowered and sometimes the very clear sensation of a mouth sucking on my penis. I told the doctor all this, and there had been talk of possible incestuous sexual relations, which now seemed possible to me - unbelievable, scandalous, but possible. That Sunday afternoon, I had told my brother about the likelihood of a “sex crime”. He listened to me very carefully, and I could see his gaze fixed on me, his eyes wide open, alert. I didn't suspect anything. I thought he was afraid for me. And I spoke. For a long time.

I told my brother without censoring myself, in the urgency of telling everything, about the suicidal distress that had led me to therapy, and which had subsequently worsened to the point where my whole life had collapsed, that there was nothing but the delusional unreality of active things, that I was nothing but the living dead, a “sick butterfly” - I remember those words very well. My brother listened to me, his eyes wide, sometimes saying, “How is that possible...” I have absolutely no idea why, in the flood of words, I told him a specific memory, isolated in my memory, without any sense, to the point where I had never even thought of talking about it in therapy.

- Do you remember when I used to get into your bed, when I was about 6 or 7 years old? I would sit on you, you would make me jump up very high, I would land on your hips, laughing out loud, and once there was something very hard that hurt between my buttocks, and I asked you what it was. I really thought it was some kind of object, a piece of wood, maybe a bottle, hidden under your sheets. I reached for it with my hand. “Don't touch that!” you said. We tried again, but it hurt more and more. I tried to remove the very hard object. “Don't touch that, I told you!” You were holding my hand firmly. I stopped finding it funny. I went back to bed and fell asleep.

I received a letter from my brother the Friday after that long conversation, which often felt like a confession. A few lines that seemed absurd, implausible, coming from a sexually blameless brother, right in the middle of normality, a letter that claimed to clear everything up at once. First he told me that the criminal, if there had indeed been a “sexual crime”, was him. “I was haunted by our conversation... Last night, before falling asleep, memories came back to me that I absolutely must tell you... I was aware of the games I played with you. I used you to masturbate... I took advantage of you without your knowledge. When you slept, you must have been 6, 7 or 8 years old, I often went into your bed to masturbate and suck you... I have already imagined that through these gestures I could have had something to do with your sexual choice in your subconscious... After our conversation, I could no longer refuse to tell you this.”

I clearly protected my brother for a long time. In any case, I didn't remember anything he told me, and I had no idea whether this amnesia and the acts it covered should be considered significant. It was with time and increasingly precise dreams that the assault made sense. Two years later, I brought the letter to a psychoanalysis session, and I read it, holding it high with both hands, so that Peraldi, sitting behind me, came closer and read it at the same time as me.

My brother realized the importance of what he had confided to me in writing. He didn't want to talk to me about it again for a long time. He went back to living with his partner, and I only saw him rarely. I started to be afraid of him, I couldn't help it, so apart from family obligations, which gave me violent migraines and sometimes vomiting, I avoided him completely. The years went by. One autumn evening, he invited himself to my place to spend the night. And it was during that night that we went back over the details of these repeated attacks. And the fact is that he spoke, that he answered my questions in abundance, specifying for example the memory he had of that hand, my hand, which he had to relax so that it would masturbate him, of my small penis, “I can still see it”, erect, sometimes ejaculating, the rigidity of my body as he sat on top of me and pulled down my pyjamas, the spasms that forced him to immobilize me with both hands, and force, he said, my consent, my head moving and banging against the pillow, my whining cries which, if they became too bad, caused him to slow down, if not stop the aggression, of my naked body, my open mouth, the forced intrusions, the liquids spilled and swallowed. In all of this, this whole horror story, there was no loving complicity, of course, but there was the fear of getting caught, and “it was a close call, once I had to get back into bed very quickly. ” I said “we” when I questioned him insistently, talking about the very strange couple that we were, that we had already been, because I wanted him to talk. I wanted to coax him, I was really very afraid of him, for no reason other than that I was reliving with rare intensity the violent emotions of another age. I didn't ask any questions about the identity of the person who almost saw everything, about that terribly feared third-party gaze, and I regret remaining silent once again on that too, when it would have been so important to have that clarification.

The night of the big reveal was long. Around 4 in the morning, I gave him a hug before finally going to sleep. I was literally buying peace, buying time until he left early the next morning.

I received two letters from my brother afterwards, one in 1996 and the other in 2010. Essentially, he wanted to trivialize the “gestures he” had made on me, and make them into nothing more than the strict sexual curiosity of a child, stating now, in 1996, that he was only 9, 10 or 11 years old at the time of the “games”, which took me back to very early childhood, 3, 4 or 5 years old. “My touching you, the things I may have asked you to do to me, the participation I asked of you,” was just banal curiosity, and besides, ‘I have no memory of a refusal on your part,’ the considered and moral refusal of a 3, 4 or 5-year-old child, unconscious, who was supposedly asleep. In the 2010 letter, he further reduced the age of the “touching”, placing it at 7 or 8 years for him, and therefore “at 2 or 3 years perhaps” for me. If he had indeed been 7 years old, I would have been in my first year of life. And he added: “you were asleep most of the time.” Not always, but most of the time.

The fact is that I don't remember anything. At the time, I was certainly very scared, and it's still terrifying to try to imagine it now. Peraldi had told me that I had an undeniable perception of sexuality with my brother, but that this perception had been felt under self-hypnosis, that it was embedded deep inside my head. This self-hypnosis was intended to make me pretend to sleep, to see nothing, to feel nothing, and thus to cut myself off from the reality of the world. “Moreover,” Peraldi added, “the situation is complex because your brother is also pretending. He is pretending, but he suspects that you perceive something, since he thinks that he may be the cause of your sexual orientation.” During the analysis, I dreamt a lot about my brother, the only way to gain insight into these events. A few days after receiving his first letter, I had dreamt that I heard him moaning, that he wanted to come and join me in bed. And I was scared to death, I froze in terror: “he starts caressing me and goes crazy. He doesn't stop. I imagine him biting my penis and tearing it off if I resist.”

I might as well have robbed or killed, I wouldn't remember any more. Brutalized, terrorized, I took action. What remained was the awareness of having done something horrible and very guilt-inducing. As for my brother, I began to love him, not without a powerful sense of prohibition, forever locking away any return of the memory.

Peraldi tried, at least once, to bring the unconscious memory of this sexual violence to the surface. “There is a threat to your sex. You have to find out what it is and where it comes from. ” And during the same session: ”It is impossible that you were not aware of what was happening with your brother. You defended yourself as best you could at the age you were.” He invited me to imagine and describe a sexual relationship between my brother and Beau Garçon, something I had been unable to do, not even stammering a few meaningless words. And yet, I had suspected something once, and in a session I had recounted the anecdote that had given rise to this doubt.

Perhaps there was some truth in the following story. Perhaps Beau Garçon had allowed himself to be tempted by a powerful sexual fantasy, which came true in the middle of summer 1985, with my brother, in a chalet built by the river, very close to Quebec, and next door to my mother's. Beau Garçon and I had already been together for seven years. My family accepted it without any problem, and even my mother, shortly before, on a premiere night at the theater, had spoken of him “like one of her sons”, a way, if possible, of denying that I could really sleep with this adopted brother. One day at the end of July, he had gone to help my brother build a terrace around his country house. My brother had what it took to turn Beau Garçon on, I knew that full well, even though at the time I was a skeleton barely covered by a very thin layer of skin. I had just arrived from Montreal. I was supposed to join the two brothers-in-law that afternoon, and in fact, I arrived on the scene around 1 p.m. There were tools left on the terrace, which was at a very advanced stage of construction, so the two men must have been nearby. I called and shouted, but they were invisible, mute as fish, non-existent. And I suspected, right then and there, an absolutely dramatic betrayal, if it turned out to be true, that would blow my brains out. I went into the chalet, went upstairs, went around the bedrooms, deliberately avoided the bathroom. No sign of anyone. I went back down, left the chalet and walked around the building. No one. I pulled up a chair on what was already a terrace and waited, facing the front door of the chalet. I was sure they were there, both of them, hiding, and that they were having sex when I arrived too early, so sure of this fact that I finally left the place to avoid the worst and allow them to maintain a semblance of morality, and I went next door to my mother's chalet. She was there, and we settled on her balcony, very flowery as usual. And all of a sudden, there was my brother and his apprentice (Beau Garçon!) coming up the little path through the countryside, walking side by side towards us.

“Where have you been? I've been looking for you everywhere!”

My brother replied:

“We've been here.”

“Where here?”

And he, very aggressively, repeated:

- We were there.

I evaded the question, even though it was perfectly obvious that they could not know, without at least having silently observed me, that I had already arrived at the scene, first at my brother's house and then at my mother's, waiting for them. My partner said nothing, not a word, and we never discussed the incident again. Shortly afterwards, on Monday, August 12, he announced his decision to break up with me for good.

Two years later, I asked my brother if he had slept with the “child”:

- No, but I wanted to. He was the one who made the approach, don't you remember? We were eating at your house on Gilford Street. He had told P that he wasn't interested in her, but by pointing at me, he was, in fact, interested in me, yes.

I didn't look any further. That was the end of the anecdote. Except that it opened the door wide to the telling of a completely different truth, a major one, and it was this story that Peraldi had tried to unlock.

That same year, I went to Beau Garçon's house, for the last time, to talk to him alone. I wanted to make sense of the aberrant behavior I had exhibited toward him during the final years of our relationship, and even more so after we broke up, a time when I had been harassing and even vile toward him at times. I started by telling him, I remember very well, that the mentally ill were the real damned of the earth. That already exasperated him. And I added, revealing something that I was telling him for the very first time, and where I was taking a big risk, that in therapy, we were increasingly convinced that there had been incest (in any case, I dreamt about it a lot, it was food for thought) and that this crime was possibly at the heart of my madness. He told me to stop talking to him about it, “it made me feel sick.”

In his two letters of 1996 and 2010, my brother criticized me for having broken the confidentiality of what he had confessed to me. I never sought to discredit him. I wanted people to understand, at least in my immediate family, that I had no choice but to move away. I never, ever asked anyone to cut off any relationship with him. Besides, no one did, even knowing bits and pieces of my story, and it was rather I who found myself alone, with little, very little support from my loved ones, with the exception of my younger sister. In the meantime, I never stopped fighting, going from one therapy to the next until the day before my sixtieth birthday. I spoke about my brother's sexual assaults, mainly to my mother, because I had to get through them to reach my father and revive what might have happened between us early, very early in my life. First of all, it was sexual activities with my father that I had dreamed of, and the memory of which perhaps resurfaced, prompted by the therapeutic work itself. It was certainly with him that, very early in my life, I identified myself. In these stories of desire, sex and repression, and in the consequences they had on my whole life, it was my father's sexuality that mattered most, buried deep within me. Peraldi had said to me during one of the very first psychoanalysis sessions: “It is the unconscious fear of an attack that paralyzes you, that makes you hide ” in a toilet, in a house entrance, in a completely absorbing fantasy. “You believed that your father wanted to sexually assault you” and “you thought that your mother encouraged him to do so. You protect your sex. It does not exist. You have hidden it from the gaze of others, and especially from the sight of your father. "Because what he did not understand is that it is normal to be attracted to the spontaneity of a child. ” If the father is “sexually interested in his child”, if there is an actual act, “the confusion that sets in is extreme”.

During the first weeks of psychoanalysis, with three, then four, then five sessions a week, he repeatedly told me that I had had too much knowledge of sexuality too young and too soon. I had pointed out that this presumed knowledge was surprising, contradicted by the little boy that I was, between the ages of six and twelve, who was totally unaware of what masturbation could be - not the slightest idea, nothing, of this jerky movement, of the pleasure that followed. But I had vomited, however, in front of captive monkeys who had ejaculated in front of me in the large windows of their cage. “They're rubbing each other!” shouted a kid next to me, laughing heartily and enjoying himself. It happened at the Quebec City Zoo. I was 8 or 9 years old. My mother held my hand, angry with me, and my stupid nausea ruined everything. The monkeys were not to blame for anything, they had done nothing wrong. I had spoiled the Sunday outing. My father had said nothing, he had kept out of the way. We had left the place, having paid for the zoo entrance ticket for nothing, it was heartbreaking.

But what did I know so well? As I entered adolescence, I was afraid that my homosexual desires, if my father were to find out about them, would reveal something about him and me and provoke him, which was strictly forbidden, and terribly frightening. So, as a defense, I imagine, an absolute hatred for my father developed. While I despaired of my brother, a loving, protective and non-violent brother, I hated my father. I was afraid, all the time, that he would observe me, approach me, caress me, ask me for something, expect my consent, enter my room, a place that I forbade him to enter, in my thoughts at least, yet powerless to do anything effective. He would come in whenever he wanted, lie on my bed whenever he felt like it. I was afraid, all the time, of having to love him, to touch him and of being contaminated, even by a single-celled organism that had detached itself from his body and entered mine. It was the most raw anguish of my childhood, and even more so of my adolescence. Fortunately, I told myself, my mother was there to sleep with him and do the necessary dirty things, which protected me from visits from my father and the expected, dreaded gestures. And when my father tried to pretend that he had been troubled by the desire of a woman, of MM for example - the housekeeper who lived with us, and whom we all adored - all of us — MM, who had allegedly shown him her breasts, as he claimed, I would fly into a rage and denounce the fraud, without mercy for my mother who heard me, even though I needed her so much to continue sleeping with my father and do what had to be done to put up a barrier and ensure my survival.

My father died one morning in February 1985. He was in terrible pain that morning, struggling to breathe. A young doctor had suggested injecting him with morphine, which might relieve his pain but would inevitably kill him. My father passed away quickly, euthanized, it was the right thing to do, his last moments had become undignified, miserable. And it was this death that would very quickly release the incredible story that connected me so intimately to my father's, and allow me to remember it. The day before he died, alone with him in his hospital room, I had put his hand in mine, which the comatose man had immediately grasped and reflexively caressed with his thumb. Once again, I had the impression of being infected, of being sullied, and that vile matter was passing through my skin. I had to resist the repugnance, which I knew so well when it came to my father, in order to tolerate this unbearable gesture. Yet I had asked him, if he could hear me, if he had to die, to help me, if he could, from Heaven, which was a perfectly implausible entreaty coming from his youngest son who had for so long, wished for his death (and preached militant unbelief). Of course, you can't reconcile with a dying person, and he himself was not going to show kindness at the end of his life, when for so many years I had expressed to him a condescending and hateful contempt.

I imagine that my father could not die without talking to me afterwards, and revealing what he knew about our past, very old relationship, from the very beginning of my existence, and that this was the reason for the many dreams in which I brought him back to life. I needed to see, hear, feel something, and for that, I needed him, alive, talking to me, telling me stories. In one of the dreams that I had after his death, which took place in the family home in Quebec City, my father suddenly appeared, to everyone's surprise, kept alive by large amounts of oxygen. He ends up seeing me. He chases me, I run away from him, he wants to force me to make peace with him, he wants to prove to me that he has changed: he grabs me in the kitchen and says to me: “Wait, Richard, wait, who are you with?” He says it to me with a smile, he touches my arm, I don't want him to live, it's a nightmare, and I still think: “there's no reason to be afraid, there's no one there, you're dreaming, Richard. ” And yet I suddenly feel a very vivid sensation, it's my father holding my penis and pulling back the foreskin, taking my penis in his mouth, and I wake up with a start, disgusted, unable to bear such familiarity.

He and I won't leave it at that. There will be other dreams, many of them, always with the same genital preferences. It was as if my brain, little by little, taking years to do so, was reconstructing the facts as they had been at a very young age. “Your dreams remember,” Peraldi had told me on June 3, 1992. And so one night I dreamt that “I was in a small bed, which was no longer a child's bed. A door opens, then another. I wake up, terrified, my father is there, looking at me in the dark, he is motionless, the danger is great, imminent, and I am so scared that I scrape with my feet in the mattress, to dig a hole as fast as I can, to burrow, and disappear. I'm trapped, like an animal that knows it can no longer escape and that it's going to be caught.” Or this dream, again, which I wrote down exactly as it was: ”Very distressing dream. Mum tells me to go to bed. I lie down, I start to fall asleep, but I'm very scared, the danger is close. I become very stiff, very hard, I try to scream, but I am unable to. I want to be heard and I am afraid of being heard. I lament. I refuse to see the person who scares me so much. ” And briefly again: ”In the dream, I become hard, blind, my jaws are paralyzed. I see and I don't see. I want it and I don't want it. And I show my body, my sex. "This one, in delirious mode: ‘I am completely rigid with fear. At a certain point, I put my fingers in the shape of a cross to protect myself from the ’monster', and I press hard on my fingers in the shape of a cross. But nothing helps. The monster moves around. It starts from a room (actually, my parents' bedroom), it opens the door to my room. I can see it! It's my father. He asks me, smiling, if I want something, if I have a desire, if I have any desire. He goes elsewhere in the house. He moves around. I am a prisoner in my body, seized with extreme rigidity, I hear a vibration, a humming in my ears, which makes me believe in a “power”: I could rise up to the ceiling. ” The last example in a particularly significant series: “My mother keeps a close eye on me, sees what's going on in my room through the doorway and enters, angry and worried. My father stands close by, next to my bed. I know I'm going to let him do it, that he already did it several years ago and that I liked it. My father did indeed touch the tip of my penis. My sheets were pulled down to my waist. Mom and Dad laugh. They pretend that nothing is happening. ”

But these are two dreams that have become, over time, inescapable references, dreams that we talked about in analysis only by the titles we had given them, “the dream of the sewing machine” and the “dream of the two babies”, the latter being the major one, and basically containing the very foundations of my whole story.

The so-called sewing machine dream I had exactly one month after my father's death, well before I started psychoanalysis as such. I had dreamt that my father had lowered the trousers of my pyjamas and was giving me oral sex. In the dream, I was a little boy of two or three years old. The scandalous affair took place in the family kitchen, in the darkness of the night. My father had strangely placed me on a piece of kitchen furniture, possibly the unit containing my mother's sewing machine. I was stunned, shocked by this dream. At the time, it made no sense to me, to the point that I didn't write it down in the big notebook where I was trying, at the same time as therapy, to write a definitive version of my story, “to free myself from it”, even though I was in my early thirties. I didn't write it down, but I didn't forget it. I told it several weeks after the fact to the psychiatrist I had been seeing for some time, originally for migraines: I stammered, I hesitated, I was trying to figure out how to share a story that couldn't find the words to tell itself. It was the doctor who blurted it out, rather curtly: “blowjob, it's called a blowjob; in your dream, your father gives you a blowjob.” Silence. Shame. Crime, major crime, mortal, to simply imagine such a thing, to accuse my father of it. I was killing him again by talking about this dream, even in the private, padded space of a shrink who can hear everything. “Wait, you never told me that your father had made sexual advances towards you?” And I, quickly, absolutely sincerely, sure that I was telling the truth, replied: “No, no, never in my life, it's impossible, but still, how could I have had such a dream, my father disgusted me so much!” There was another silence, time to take in the extravagant twist, and the unforeseen, radically unforeseen turn that my account of the early years of my life was taking for this very calm gentleman, who was not embarrassed by anything he heard. That was the end of it at the time, but this dream was to become a major reference point for what Peraldi, a few years later, was to call, in order to make it a key, something terrible, something terrible that had certainly happened to me during my early childhood. The bomb had been dropped, and it would take a long, long time, years in fact, to explode.

The other essential dream that both Peraldi and I called “the dream of the two babies” came long after the sewing machine dream, in the midst of a jumble of dreams that often expressed sexual violence that was not unique to my father. One of my very close friends, GG, was at my house the morning after the night of this dream, and at breakfast, I had told him “that I had had an important dream, perhaps the most important of all, and that it explained everything.” I was certain of it, by intuition: I knew. When I told Peraldi, he quickly gave me some essential clues to understanding the historical and symbolic significance of this dream. I had dreamed that a man, whom I was watching, and who could be anyone from my father or me, as a little guy in a big bed, a double bed, a parental bed, had two naked babies in front of him, two little boys, one maybe six months old, the other rounder, more exciting, a year and a half old. The man, feverish, exalted, overwhelmed by a fantasy of which he says nothing and which is his most absolute secret, undresses the babies, takes off their diapers, and hides the clothes in a closet - and then, in a variation in the same dream, he does not undress them, he found them naked, just like that, in the bed, but he still hides the clothes from view in case he has to hide them from an intruder - a third party, someone else - which he is doing, so as to make it look like he wasn't the one who undressed the two children. Another variant, as if I were thinking in my dream and writing a script that is as accurate as possible: the man hides the clothes to conceal the fact that he is the one who undressed the babies. He knows these little children. He can do what he wants with them and fulfill a sexual fantasy to his heart's content. These little boys can't talk, and he knows it. The man moves the babies' little penises with his tongue. The children laugh and fidget. They watch carefully, seeing everything of the man who is undressing in front of them. And they will remember, contrary to what the man could have imagined, this man and his particular pleasures, in the secrecy of his intimacy.

Peraldi told me right away that it was a story of archaic events that took place at an age when the child cannot speak and does not yet know how to count. Two babies on a bed, side by side, one bigger than the other, having their genitals touched with the mouth, tongue and saliva. In the very limited symbolic representation of a small child, this means having oral sex several times over a long period of time at a very young age. These are sudden sexual acts experienced by a child who had no words to describe them, no distance, no linguistic ability, no way of counting. This child totally identifies with the adult who takes advantage of him, and in fact, merges with him. The child can therefore only tell this story by imitating the man and his desire, which was the exact function of this dream. “The adult was your father. The child was you. You see babies as if you were seeing them in a mirror, this baby changing between six and eighteen months. The mirror effect is reassuring: it's you, but it's also someone else, who doesn't really exist, and it's at the basis of this process that we call splitting.

I wrote everything down, but I didn't understand everything immediately and irreversibly. It took me other words to understand, finally, and to calm down, a long, long time after Peraldi's death. But these words were his again, transcribed, published; as I read them, I could still clearly hear his voice.

One day, Peraldi told me that it was just as damaging for a young child to guess that one of the parents had incestuous intentions as it was to see them realized. I thought, and still think, that he was right. At the time, this remark had stunned me, because I had heard, of course, that he no longer believed in the reality of my father's sexual crime in my history, and therefore in the genesis of what troubled me so terribly. The following night I had a long dream, a nightmare, explicitly sexual, which told of a child abduction, by a man, nervous, distressed, laughing like crazy, who arrived in a black car, a child subsequently sucked and sodomized, without pleasure or fear; the stranger had come to get the child and was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs of the house of my childhood, on rue Cartier, Quebec. I told Peraldi about the dream in the following session. “You don't remember yesterday's session?” No, I didn't remember, I had already forgotten. “Your dream is a succinct response to what I told you in yesterday's session.” I made him repeat it: “an answer heard”. I searched, I remembered; and never, ever again was there any question of us disputing the reality of past events, as they had been related in the dream of the two babies.

Just as with what happened with my brother, I don't remember anything I'm saying here about my father - except for the fact that I had to pee standing up on the kitchen cabinet with a sewing machine in it, one night when my father was apparently completely lost and disconnected. I remember the rage I felt (and how I screamed!) when my mother told me, while giving me a bath, that I had to clean my penis by pulling back the foreskin, that that was what dad said to do. I haven't forgotten that, and I hated him for it. I have also never forgotten - I have already spoken about it here - the embarrassment of people being able to see my genitals through the white woolen underpants that my mother made me wear on my second birthday. And I have never forgotten the disgust, the complete aversion that I have always felt for my parents' bed, which I have never touched in my life, not even returning to it in my twenties, leaving Beau Garçon to sleep there alone, one summer weekend we had spent in Quebec City, and me taking cushions and settling down on the living room floor to sleep there, still avoiding the worst, that proximity, my parents' bed, my father's bed.

The enigma was and remains the remark that Peraldi made to me one day: “The real question is what punishment, what violent rejection you suffered, about what and who, not your brother, but your father. It is the sexual prohibition that is important. Who imposes it, viciously, to the point where there is no more body, no more sexuality?” And yet, ”there is still something concrete. There is, for example, your father's desire. And there are considerable defenses against your desires as a child who identified with his father, who loved his father. That's what needs to be clarified.” In April 1992, I had a dream that my father was coming into my room, and I was terrified: what are you doing here? what do you want? My mother had said something to him that had made him furious. He wanted to kill me. Now, I had spoken to my mother before and during the psychoanalysis; and I had told my mother, several times, that I suspected my father of a sexual crime. That's what I imagined she told him and that made him mad with rage against me, and that should have silenced me forever.

There was, at least, a dream of remission during the psychoanalysis. A dream that seemed endless to me, which I also recounted in session. I am at a family party at my brother's house, at Lac Beauport, near Quebec City. He makes fun of me, takes a photo of me as a child, and with a pencil, while looking at me, pierces the photo, which amuses everyone, including one of my aunts, my mother's sister, whom I hear laughing out loud. One of my nephews, a tiny baby, was sleeping in a secluded room, and I realized that he was in great danger. I woke him up, asked him to be quiet, took him in my arms and ran with him to the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, where I saw a doctor who agreed to protect us and promised to help. After hearing the story of this dream, Peraldi concluded: “You would make a good father,” in other words, something radically different from what I was, a long-time prisoner of a fusional, immensely punishable relationship with my real father.