A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - CHAPTER 11 - LOVES

 

One day in September 1992, I was so anxious that I called Peraldi even though I didn't have a session scheduled for that day. I told him I wanted to go to the emergency. “No, don't do that. You never know what kind of weirdo you'll run into in a place like that.” He tried to reassure me. “Take a little anti-anxiety pill, you'll be fine.” We hung up. He called me back immediately: “Come see me, I'll make an exception and see you today.” I found myself sitting across from him, him looking at me with obvious tenderness, a little amusement too, because I had asked him, searching for the right word, if I looked like an idiot! "I know you're suffering, that you feel like this suffering is immense. But still, do you know why you didn't kill yourself? It's because you know, more or less consciously, that things aren't really that bad, that you still have good moments, that you still have hope.“ ” As always, I paid for the session by placing the money on the small table that was there for that purpose, I imagine, and I went home.

Good times? There were some with him, of course, that I've never forgotten. In the days that followed, good times, anecdotes in fact, brief moments, came back to me, enough to resist, hold on and escape the dark periods during which I had to survive each day, each hour, the desperate length of each minute, and overcome the intense pain of distress, resisting the specter that attracts, seduces, and kills. This miserable ordeal was sometimes so unbearable, so organic, that death lost all tragic reality; it was already in the body, active, devastating, doing a lot of harm. I will never know if Peraldi spoke to me about death because his own was imminent, which I did not know at the beginning of that fall, and that he was holding on because he too had good moments. Yet he did not like Montreal and its climate. He no longer taught. He missed New York and the sun of the Bahamas. In 1992, he dreamed of returning to France and was happily preparing for his move. He wrote privately that psychoanalysis disgusted him, and even more so his patients, mired in their tearful narcissism from which they did not want to escape... I knew nothing of this, of course. I always had happy moments with him. Until the end, he never stopped listening, although I noticed that he no longer took notes. I never felt his anger or bitterness. So I imagine that he had good moments and that it was very deliberate on his part to suggest that I remember mine.

When I started writing my story, I made a list of memories from my early childhood that might explain who I had become, with all my fears and limitations. Ten years later, for a few days, I tried painstakingly to recall some good memories. They seemed terribly rare, terribly difficult to trace. For example, I noted that I hadn't had a love life in a long time, that I couldn't bear to have one, that I even hated the prospect of having one because it made me so sick, and that the only good moments I enjoyed were when I was alone, late at night, at home, reading or writing. And yet, all I dreamed of was being madly in love and having sex all the time, that it was the only thing that mattered, and that I loved taking the time to dream about it, to write my love stories, to imagine them, night after night, in bed, deliberately delaying sleep because it was so important that I experience something more successful than what I was living day after day in the harsh reality of the facts. The scenario was only plausible if I created a new body for myself, or more precisely, a repaired, virilized, seductive body, and if I spoke another language, “not so much English as the English speak it,” another reality, that of the powerful, of those who had never been humiliated. I imagined myself living elsewhere, far from my parents, whom I would never see again, mostly in San Francisco, a brilliant student at Berkeley, very committed to my day job, but frequenting bars in the evening and falling deeply in love at night. I imagined myself generous, attentive, eager to help, and loved precisely for that reason, above all for that reason. In these fantasies, which I had been developing for years, I repaired myself and made myself whole. “If I were regenerated, remade, healed, I could love and give to others, and get involved in causes that were important to me.” There had been the Rodney King affair in Los Angeles, and I saw myself becoming an activist in the American anti-racist cause. These fantasies were completely disconnected from my real life, a happy parallel life that gave me confidence and allowed me, at last, to sleep in peace.

It was around this time that VCRs appeared, and with them, pornography, abundant, vulgarized, available for just a few dollars. These fantasies of a clandestine, romantic, committed existence were also, for many, fueled by pornographic images. When I wrote this short text in which I listed the few good moments that kept me alive, I had to note, embarrassed that I might have to say it in therapy, that I had imaginary loves but very real orgasms, which reassured me for short moments and meant a lot in my life at the time. I didn't see porn actors as objects, bodies to be fucked, a labor force exploited at will like any other worker, by an industry that squeezed them for as long as they could generate huge profits, earning their living by building lucrative careers in luxury prostitution. They stood in for a dream life, beautifully fantasized. I was trapped in a loneliness that was sometimes unbearable. So I envied their luck in being so easily desired and loved, without any taboos destroying them. They made me feel alive. “I would so love to love and be loved” like they were, without admitting that my personal scenario was pure fiction. When I mentioned this to Peraldi, told me, “Pornographic films reproduce the distance, the divide between you and the other, the other who no longer touches you, who no longer disgusts you, who no longer brings back the distressing memory of white stains, saliva, and everything else you imagined that polluted your child's body.” I could allow myself to love without danger, at least in fantasy. “At least there are others; it's a middle ground towards others.”

This fantasy life, systematically constructed during the years of psychoanalysis, radically counterbalanced and, in its own way, healed a dream of extreme loneliness that I had repeatedly had when I was 6, 7, or 8 years old, the very years when my brother was violently abusing me. I was at the bottom of the back stairs of the family home with my sisters or cousins, and we were talking about marriage, and there was always one who would say to me, “No one would want to marry you, but if you really wanted to, you'd have to marry yourself.” It was an extraordinarily painful dream. How could a child of that age understand, even if it had been explained to him, that they were divided, split, that there was someone else inside them and that they had to marry that other person to reconcile with themselves, without fear of abandonment?

Even now, loneliness still makes me anxious, as I still don't know how to love and make friends easily. I never learned how to socialize. But I don't blame myself anymore. I know it was difficult to discover the world and find my place in it, as mental illness had taken over and paralyzed every aspect of my life. In this regard, social media, with its new language that leaves the body in the background, has been a great help to me. After I turned 50, I started meeting a lot of people, especially at night, all over the city. I enjoyed it very much. I always met nice guys, very nice men. It was about time. These adventures often brought me a lot of happiness.

And then, I loved my people, the people of Quebec who needed to be liberated. It was an unconditional, daily commitment that came from the heart. I had been an activist for a long time. I talked about it all the time. In 1992, we all believed that national liberation was within reach, that it had become irreversible. At college, a student I liked very much organized seminars on current political issues, and he invited me to lead the discussion on the future of Quebec. I spoke of the intense dream of a country freed from its unscrupulous exploiters, a country that would avenge my father, who had suffered discrimination and saw his low-paying job as an expression of class oppression, as the only job available to him in a dominated society. Of course, he didn't use those words, but he felt it nonetheless. And yet, as I said, he had always refused to take the plunge, to make that authentic personal revolution of becoming an independence activist, overturning the infinite variety of psycho-social conditioning imposed in a dominated and exploited society. It was while talking about my personal experience in front of a group of students that I realized how true what I was saying about my origins was, how much it had marked me, and how it was driving me towards political activism. Love for my country and my people meant regaining national dignity and a job as a boss for my father, of course, but it also meant, more immediately, revenge for the French-Canadian proletariat.

The intense dream of a free Quebec was also a huge opportunity for me to start over, to erase and rebuild, and to finally allow myself a destiny other than shame and fear. It was the perfect way to give myself a name, to escape sexual humiliation, to belong to a society where I would be free, loved for who I was by an overwhelming majority of my compatriots transformed by their audacity, capable of liberating everything by liberating Quebec, finally freed from the atavistic fascism that had made my childhood an experience of systemic oppression. It was, in fact, a blue-sky illusion. Back when René Lévesque had created the Parti Québécois, Father N had suggested that perhaps “your political convictions serve to make you accepted by others,” in other words that my beliefs were not as authentic as I thought and that I would not find the love and self-esteem I so desired in a transformed Quebec. This was certainly true, just as it was true that Lévesque, always ending up backing down, retreating, falling into line, regretting his boldness after the fact, incapable of taking radical measures to achieve his ends, humiliated me deeply and reminded me how much my father had disappointed me—and how much I was disappointing myself.

Still, November 15, 1976, had been an extraordinary event, liberating from the outset, a very happy occasion to celebrate. It had no lasting impact.

I really liked the students I taught, and even now, more than ten years after leaving the profession, I still feel nostalgic about being in the classroom and sometimes managing to captivate the attention of the whole group, creating a moment when the students became aware of a historical marker with which they could all immediately identify. At that moment, there was a kind of synthesis between the students and me. This happened especially when I talked about the Canayen collective unconscious, which is deeply imbued with Indigenous culture, and our desire for a rebellious freedom that was difficult to harness to a project of independence requiring constraints and discipline. When Gilles Vigneault “heard us talking about freedom tomorrow,” we applauded him wildly, but when Lévesque and Parizeau spoke of the “calculated risk” of “building a country,” we didn't hear very well, as this country was still “that bohemian country” evoked by Madame de Vaudreuil in 1724, where the inhabitants resisted “troubling themselves to form solid settlements” “with surprising insolence.” The fact is that Canadians “loved freedom and hated domination.” They were, wrote Hocquart in 1736, “naturally unruly.” On the eve of the Conquest, the intelligent Bougainville noted that “the air that nourishes the [natives], their example, these immense deserts, everything inspires and offers independence [to the national character of the Canayens].” When I explained these things about the archaeology of Quebec culture, the audience always listened intently. I was speaking to the group's unconscious. The pleasure was immense. The new Quebecers were fascinated, wanted to be part of it, and many joined.

There was also love, often, when I helped students get out of trouble and ultimately complete their studies. Because it took time, I would take some of them to the cafeteria; we would sit in a relatively quiet corner and ask the essential questions:

- I want to succeed.

- You will succeed.

- But I don't even understand what you're saying in class.

- What don't you understand?

Sometimes it was concepts; sometimes it was the language itself that was the problem, when it wasn't the language of the working class, or when French wasn't the first language of students who were struggling. I spent a lot of time with girls and guys who were looking for help, and I felt it was my duty to provide it, even when they confided in me—especially when they confided in me—about the dramatic aspects of their lives. I have always been certain, ever since my first year of teaching, that the help I could provide was my own very modest way of fighting against the fact that I was born into a disadvantaged background. I listened, and it made me happy to do so. It was when I was helping that I was truly in love, even if sometimes the slope to climb was particularly steep. I remember a student, enrolled in psychology, who told me that she “wanted to sit on her donut and collect the big bucks.” I was stunned. There was work to be done. When I told Peraldi about the joke, he replied that what the girl thought “wasn't always so wrong.”

One day, I simply gave a warm pat on the shoulder to a student in his thirties who had just been released from prison, whom I liked, and who hadn't seen me when he passed me in the hallway. A beaming smile, a handshake, a few kind words—it was a warm encounter. He came back to see me a few days later to tell me that when I had greeted him, he was in the process of giving up everything, leaving the college never to return, but that I had stopped him with a simple gesture of affection. I have never forgotten that. I had received enough to be able to give back. It was a real, genuine moment of joy.

I am sure that you have to learn to love, just as you learn to read, to grapple with difficult books, to develop a passion for science or music. I tried to love, several times, tolerating the intimacy that comes with living together, and I failed several times. I felt that my romantic failures were absolute disasters, which was obviously paradoxical, and I understood that perfectly well, since I should have been happy to end any relationship that was suffocating me, even if the other person was not to blame. I suffered many heartbreaks, but I tried to learn from these experiences, constantly, which was not easy when you hate yourself, hate your body, and meticulously hide your mental illness.

I began to reconcile with myself and my mediocrity when Thomas Lebeau, from our very first interview, explained to me, with evidence drawn from the experience of American soldiers who had returned broken from the Vietnam War, that I was a victim, the powerless victim of sexual abuse for which I was in no way responsible, and that acknowledging this was not self-pity or petty misery, but rather a first gesture of tenderness that one could have for oneself.

In the years following psychoanalysis, I began to read extensively about sexual assault and incest survivors, and I also read many gay novels to learn how others had experienced their marginality and to become aware of the difficult social integration that characterized all of these stories, without exception. I read about shame on every page, and the death drive was everywhere, devastating, particularly deadly when the AIDS virus appeared, as if the virus were its ultimate expression. Two of my cousins were struck down by the hate-spreading, serial-killing virus. There were a lot of TV shows on the subject. Young men cried out their despair in front of the camera, which sought to capture their faces in distress, forgetting all decency. Like many others, I learned the hard way the importance of social solidarity, which must be protected at all costs, when people demanded that AIDS patients be deported to remote locations, supplied by helicopter, isolated from everyone until they died. It was in this terrible context that I became more aware than ever of the death wish that also lived within me, and that I treated, more often than not, with great care. Sometimes I was clearly aware that I was wallowing in my misery. So I read. I wrote. I joined a gym. I quit smoking. I became more and more sociable, and I enjoyed it very much, even though I still tended to play dead at home and shut myself away in solitude, even though it hurt me so much and still does, and still scares me so much.

I fell in love for the first time in a long time, shortly after Peraldi's death. I developed a consuming, dangerous passion for a young man who told me his name was Yannick. I found him so incredibly handsome when I met him one night on Sainte-Catherine Street that I walked around the block several times to see him again, which amused him greatly. He was using hard drugs, intravenously. He would sometimes show up at my place with bloodstains on his clothes. He often asked me to take him to a detox center, which he always ended up running away from. “Yannick, come on, can't you see you're killing yourself?” He contracted AIDS, attempted suicide on the Jacques Cartier Bridge, and ended up in a psychiatric hospital where he should have been locked up, but even there, when the need became too urgent, he would walk out the front door, take Sherbrooke Street, and walk to downtown. I never knew if he was a prostitute. He was so afraid that people would find out he was gay that, over time, a silent ritual developed between us that we had to follow when he spent the night at my place and he felt like it: shower, bed, silent immobility, and then his arm around me, and what followed, always denied the next morning. I had to bring myself to break up with him, move out, and forbid him from calling me. I would sometimes run into him on the street; without treatment, he was getting sicker and sicker. He was terribly emaciated, losing his teeth, living as a recluse in a small apartment on Saint-Hubert Street. I didn't know if he had any help, but in any case, he never asked me for anything. The last time I saw him, he told me he wanted to leave me a cottage he owned in the Laurentians. “Come pick me up in your car. We could go there together. You'll know where to find it when I die.” There was never any trip up north. I never saw him again.

It took me two tries to adopt a dog. A small dog. A male. A tiny little dog. I first chose a Maltese, which didn't even weigh two pounds. This little animal became so attached to me that I said several times, jokingly of course, although it was the absolute truth, that no living creature had ever loved me as completely as this dog. But I never managed to love him without trembling, to tolerate his presence without feeling intense anxiety. As soon as this dog came into my life, I wanted to get rid of him. During the months I kept him, I experienced a feeling of rejection that was all the more violent because the little dog had adopted me without reservation. I was literally tearing myself apart by the simple fact that he was there, in my home, playful, loving, trusting, and proud of me—something like that, yes, proud of me. He slept with me in my bed. When I woke up in the morning, often quite late, I would find him waiting patiently, lying on his side with his head resting on a pillow. He would stare at me, jumping for joy as soon as I got up. This relationship between a master and his tiny little dog, this strange intimacy with him, was so meaningful that I still wonder why, at the time, I didn't understand what was going on between us. The fact is, I didn't understand, and yet I urgently wrote dozens of pages, searching my mind, my emotions, my history, looking for a clue that could explain why I so violently rejected a little animal that loved me so much and had no idea what he was triggering deep inside me. I ended up giving him up, making sure he was safe, of course. I saw him a few times after that and realized he had never forgotten me. It was incredible and deeply disturbing to hear this little animal howling with joy when he saw me, certain that I had come to take him back with me. Over the years, he had obviously given up, but he still stared at me for a long time when he saw me. It's absurd to write it like this, but I often saw incomprehension and, as far as a dog can conceive of such a thing, a silently expressed reproach.

A year later, I adopted another little dog, a Yorkshire terrier, whom I kept for fifteen years, his whole life. He was a little dog with a very different character from the previous one: independent, curious, strong-willed, very controlling—the vet told me he had the typical profile of a dominant dog. I was in a relationship with AS at the time, and we lived together in the same house. AS, who didn't want the dog, had been perfect with him from day one, making sure he had everything he needed. He pushed me a little to take the dog out on the street. We had to buy everything he needed: a brush, shampoo, a basket, bowls, food. AS clearly felt no embarrassment about walking the dog, being seen with him, socializing him, letting the dog get attached to him and me. He was so completely in the moment that he cut off the parental bond that I was quickly establishing, unconsciously of course, with a little dog. Without knowing it, he blocked what I was projecting onto the dog. He prevented the dog from becoming aware, even instinctively, of a crime that was not his, with the inevitable consequences of shame, terror, and withdrawal. I was then able to become passionately attached to Victor: he often imitated my postures, which was adorable and made me happy; I never thought I had damaged him. I let him love me. I often took him in my arms and placed us in front of a mirror, contemplating us both, without feeling any anxiety about doing so, without freezing in hatred of him and myself—the dog, in any case, did not appreciate the spectacle very much and struggled to avoid it. One night, shortly before he died, I got up to treat a particularly bad migraine. I was sitting in the living room, in the dark. The dog had followed me. I started crying because I was in so much pain, and I saw this little dog, suddenly very worried, go to his basket, take some of his toys and bring them to me, pushing my leg so that I would take them and play with him. I played, of course; with Victor, it was always a bit rough. He wasn't afraid of me, I didn't disgust him, I hadn't passed on any of the family's masculine, transgenerational dishonor to this little dog who didn't deserve such a fate. I wanted him to be proud of himself, confident. He was. He was loved by everyone, a fate contrary to mine as a child. He died in February 2011, just as I was retiring. I had successfully adopted him and allowed him to be identified without being crushed by guilt.

Whatever I say, my relationship with children has not been easy, but I loved, at least as best I could, a little nephew to whom I told crazy stories at bedtime. He wanted me to imagine, very seriously, a day in the life of Tarzan. So I would imagine Tarzan and his mother, a gorilla mother wearing a completely oversized pink ribbon bow, who invariably received slaps on the back of the head, slaps that sent flying, always very far, a set of dentures painstakingly held in place by enormous rubber bands, so that the dentures would quickly return to their starting point... When Tarzan reached the jungle, he invariably found the Canadian arm on his way, fallen from the sky right next to the family hut! It could also be, when we changed the hero of these bedtime stories, Superman landing by mistake on hot asphalt, where he remained firmly stuck, while a steamroller advanced inexorably in his direction...

My nephew and I laughed heartily at these moments of madness, but I didn't really like being the one assigned to play with the children at family gatherings, as the memory of my own childhood always made me angry, and I didn't want to go back to that age or those memories. I often fantasized that my younger sister, the mother of the nephew I loved so much, was watching me closely when I was alone with her son, which she most likely wasn't doing, just as I dreamed at the same time that my mother was watching closely what was happening in my room when my father entered with specific intentions. Sometimes my sister would leave her son in my care, which terrified me if I had to pick him up by car, as I was so afraid of killing him in a road accident for which I would have been held responsible. At the time, I didn't yet understand how much I had feared my father's suicidal impulses, which were undoubtedly unconscious, when we were alone in the car. I always remembered, however, how much I didn't want children as a teenager so that I wouldn't make them disabled. This explained, to a large extent, the relative coldness I felt towards my nephews and niece when it came to acknowledging our family ties and the risk that one or other of them might take after me.

There was always this problem of identifying with my father, this radical refusal to resemble him in any way, this refusal to accept the family and social role I could have taken on from him. I was 10 years old when my mother told me one day that I was going to “have a beautiful nose like Dad's.” I immediately protested with all my might against such a disgusting possibility, this thing that would stare me in the face, one of my father's features right there, and not just any feature, a runny nose with a moustache underneath! I would be forced to bear such an obvious, shocking resemblance to my father, it was something to be ashamed of and want to destroy myself. I mentioned this memory to Thomas Lebeau one evening in the mid-2000s. I was now in my fifties, and I was once again realizing the enormous sacrifice my father's refusal had represented, the loss of apprenticeship that had followed, the fear that a relationship of some kind would subsequently develop that would reproduce a filiation I didn't want, but which cost me a lot. "The problem with that is that I am nothing; it's one thing to free yourself from what you are not, from what you don't want to be; it's another to know who you are when you reject any model whatsoever. I can't let anyone get close to me. I'm afraid, and I immediately tense up, and it would be the same, Thomas, even if you suggested something we could do together. “ The session, consisting of these few words, came to an end. It was autumn and already very chilly. Thomas said to me, ”Wait, Richard, I'll get dressed and go out with you." We walked side by side through the countryside towards the farm buildings. Thomas raised horses. That evening, he showed me how to approach them without scaring them, always from the same side, how to stroke them, how to establish contact with them without fearing their strength and their fear, how to brush them, feed them, and care for them. It was an extraordinary moment of intimacy, overwhelming, stressful, a total surprise for me. My muscles were tense, my teeth clenched, and yet I watched and listened, torn between the urge to leave, to run away, and the desire to finally enjoy a lesson, a skill, the reassuring presence of a man. On the drive back from Rawdon, I started crying like I don't think I've ever cried in my life. I had to pull over, park the car on the side of the road, and I cried so hard that I threw up in the ditch.

The brand-new Quebec left is proposing a radically changed society where hierarchical relationships would be profoundly transformed, where wealth would be shared much more equitably, and where the multiple oppressions against the incredible diversity of people would disappear. Many of the exploited wonder what value they have left when the wealth of the few is flaunted so shamelessly; many rage against what they rightly feel is an injustice that weighs on them and too often forces them to suffer rather than love themselves; many are like my father. It seems obvious to me that in different class relations, in a fundamentally reconstructed society, my father would have lived his life differently, that he would have been a man essentially different from the man I knew, unrecognizable in fact, and yet the same person, with the same genetic makeup, a man who would have suffered neither humiliation nor broken dreams. I don't know if, like me during my adolescence, my father was personally targeted and destroyed by insults, and branded for life by relentless belittlement. But I do know that there were also social insults that hurt him deeply and certainly contributed to his decline. These insults are never forgotten. In an ideal society, free from all forms of hierarchical violence, my father would have found his way without being so heavily traumatized by the expectations of his father, my grandfather, who forced him to value a model of masculinity that made him believe in gender inequality and the importance of power over others. He desperately sought to prove to himself that he ultimately mattered, but by submitting to traditional values, he condemned himself to never being able to change his life. My great-grandfather's machismo instilled in him an overwhelming superego that imprisoned him for his entire life. By assimilating sexual values that he believed to be eternal, which they obviously are not, he oppressed himself and participated in the oppression of others, including, no doubt, the sexual oppression of his own son. I imagine that my life too would have been much happier and freer in a society where violence was no longer an everyday occurrence and where all traces of oppression, including against children, had disappeared. I am convinced that sexual oppression perpetuates society as it is and its violence. That is why I wanted to change countries, to change the country; that is why I have always hated ambition, power structures, and economic and social processes that humiliate human beings en masse, and why I have always found it difficult to understand why so many people dream of opulence and oppression.

I am 70 years old. I am still fortunate to be in perfect health. But at my age, I (probably) have relatively little time left. Peraldi worked until the very end. I imagine he asked himself: what can I still do, in the little time I have left, to be useful to others? Similarly, while this story is first and foremost an act of justice for me, it is also an answer to that question. In writing it, I will have done what I could to do good, right up to the end.

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