It’s that time of year when I chatted with the writer Marie-Claire Blais, who left us almost two years ago. November is the month of the dead and my birthday month, which makes me want to celebrate my dead.
Updated at 7:15am yesterday.
She was one of the rare people who gave me hope for the future, convinced that humanity was still moving towards a collective consciousness that nothing could stop. She had lived through Duplessis’s Quebec, then transplanted to the United States, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the AIDS massacre in her community, the hurricanes that hit Key West, where she lived, without wanting to leave their cats behind. Shortly before her disappearance, she had sent me a photo of her late Frida, who was “in an animal paradise,” she wrote, still sad.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Frida, Marie-Claire Blais’s cat
To keep it relevant, I often reread its final pages, the posthumously published Augustino ou l’illumination, which ends abruptly with this sentence: “…because we now know, wars always beget other wars, other beginnings and Restarts of hostilities, that is unfortunately the case. » She, vibrating in unison with humanity, may have sensed something coming, but reminded us that we now know that there is no good in any war.
Réjean Ducharme admired her greatly and dedicated his first novel L’Océantume to her “as respectfully as a princess”. It’s been six years since we lost him and we can still see him with his dog in one of his rare photos. The horrors in the Middle East reminded me of Bérénice from L’avalée des avalés, who will land in Israel with a gun in her hand. She said: “Everything consumes me. If I close my eyes, I will be swallowed by my stomach, I will suffocate in my stomach. When my eyes are open I am swallowed by what I see, in the belly of what I see I suffocate. I am swallowed by the river that is too big, the sky that is too high, the flowers that are too fragile, the butterflies that are too shy, my mother’s face that is too beautiful. My mother’s face is beautiful for nothing. If he were ugly, he would be ugly for nothing. Faces, whether beautiful or ugly, are useless. »
What do we see of the faces of Gazans covered in dust and blood, of those of Hamas hostages in photos that angry people are tearing from the walls where they are being held in major cities?
I would have liked to be a tragic and deadly beauty, but I never managed to take my face seriously when I looked in the mirror. Comedy was my destiny. Humor, my courage. Laughter, my only medicine, my only relief. Because laughter is characteristic of humans, said Rabelais – and of Madame Itou. Laughter in the worst moments of my life was the only true philosophical education that I respected, and it certainly did not derive from the dark thinkers I tried in vain to read in my youth without ever losing that cheerful side of mine character. But these days, with the violence and suffering in the world, I struggle. To paraphrase Bérénice: Everything makes me worse. I cannot understand the extreme cruelty of people.
And I remember that in the work of Marie-Claire Blais, her great cycle Soifs, there was always a fear behind every celebration, no calm spirit among the characters whose thoughts were whirring – except perhaps the animals.
The more peace on this planet declines, the less peace of mind is possible. This is the price we have to pay for keeping everyone informed of what is happening in real time – if only it made us realize that we are connected…
Looking for something sweet, I delved into the book The Smell of Rain by Cédric Sapin-Defour, a story about love and grief between a man and his dog, but the title alone brought tears to my eyes. And from the first pages, when he talks about his last deceased dog and his desire to once again submit to that love for an animal that will always live shorter lives than us, I broke down despite (or perhaps because of) the little one of my animals always stuck to my legs.
“Since then, his absence has accompanied my every day and I don’t find it entirely normal that life goes on. So I know it. What an emotional undertaking this is. I’ve already cried, with a medal in my hand. Taking a dog means adopting an unshakable love, we never part, life takes care of it, the declines are illusory and the end unbearable. Taking a dog means clinging to a passing living being, committing to a full life, certainly happy, irretrievably sad, thrifty in nothing. »
Marie-Claire Blais and Réjean Ducharme would certainly have loved this book.