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.
She was one of the rare people who made me hope for the future, convinced that humanity was nevertheless moving towards a collective consciousness that nothing could prevent. She had experienced the Quebec of Duplessis, then, transplanted to the United States, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the AIDS massacre in her community, the hurricanes which struck Key West where she lived without wanting to leave her cats . Shortly before her disappearance, she had sent me a photo of her late Frida who was “in animal paradise”, she wrote, still saddened.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Frida, Marie-Claire Blais’s cat
To keep it present, I often reread its last pages, those by Augustino or enlightenment, published posthumously, which end abruptly with this sentence: “… because we now know, wars always give rise to other wars, other beginnings and recommencements of hostilities, that is unfortunately how it is. » She who vibrated in tune with humanity perhaps felt something coming, but reminded us that we knew NOW that there is nothing good in any war.
Réjean Ducharme admired him greatly and dedicated his first novel to him. Oceantume “respectfully as to 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 happening in the Middle East reminded me of Bérénice from The swallowing of swallows who will end up in Israel with a gun in his hand. She said: “Everything is swallowing me up. When my eyes are closed, it is through my stomach that I am swallowed, it is in my stomach that I suffocate. When my eyes are open, it is by what I see that I am swallowed, it is in the belly of what I see that I suffocate. I am swallowed by the river too big, by the sky too high, by the flowers too fragile, by the butterflies too timid, by the face too beautiful of my mother. My mother’s face is beautiful for nothing. If he were ugly, he would be ugly for nothing. Faces, 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 tear off the walls where they are pinned in big cities?
I would have liked to be a tragic and fatal beauty, but I have never been able to take my face seriously when looking in a mirror. Comedy was my destiny. Humor, my courage. Laughter, my only medicine, my only relief. Since laughter is characteristic of man, said Rabelais – and of Madame Itou. Laughing in the worst moments of my life has been the only true philosophical education that I have respected, and it certainly does not come to me from the sinister thinkers that I tried to read during my youth, in vain, never having succeeded. to lose this happy-go-lucky side of my character. But these days, faced with the violence and suffering in the world, I’m struggling. To paraphrase Bérénice, everything makes me worse. I cannot understand the extreme cruelty of human beings.
And I remember that in the work of Marie-Claire Blais, her great cycle Soifs, there was always an anxiety behind each celebration, no tranquil spirit among the characters whose thoughts swirl – except perhaps the animals.
The more peace recedes on this planet, the less peace of mind is possible, this is the price to pay for being all interconnected in real time about what is happening – if only that would make us understand that we are interconnected…
Looking for a little sweetness, I dove into the book Its smell after the rain, by Cédric Sapin-Defour, a story of love and loss between a man and his dog, but just the title brought tears to my eyes. And from the first pages, when he talks about his previous dog who died, and his desire to submit again to this love for an animal who will always live less long than us, I broke down, despite (or to because of) the little heat of my animals always stuck to my legs.
“Since then, his absence has accompanied each of my days and I don’t find it entirely normal for life to go on. So I know. What an emotional enterprise this is. I have already cried, with a medal in the palm of my hand. Taking a dog means welcoming an immarcescible love, we never separate, life takes care of it, the declines are illusory and the endings unbearable. To take a dog is to take hold of a passing creature, to commit to a full life, certainly happy, irremediably sad, economical in nothing. »
Marie-Claire Blais and Réjean Ducharme would have loved this book, I’m sure.