Read Online Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon - Free Book Online

so gratifying that he had refused to take money. He had given paintings as gifts to Rebecca and Dena, but also to Véronique.
    â€œIt’s strange,” Joseph said to himself, “that by rewriting the story of my life, I’ve regained my first real visions from adolescence.” He didn’t really understand why, but that did not alarm him. He was so happy with the results, seeing the precise old forms emerge under his hand on the canvas to join the abstract ones in which he had long excelled. Joseph considered this recent marriage as successful – and as full of promise – as the couple formed by Véronique and him.
    â€œA whole lifetime won’t be too long for me to understand what is happening now,” Joseph said to himself. It was agreed that Joseph would continue seeing Dr. Laporte, but privately, after leaving the hospital. “I want to continue this journey,” Joseph had announced. “And I want to organize my first solo exhibition since coming back from France. I’ll call it
Return of Visions
. And I want to get back to work.” As if that brief sojourn among the mad had given him access to a whole universe of inventions and unfathomable truths he had never dreamed of. “I’ll go back to work as soon as I leave here.” Joseph was a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts, which would soon become part of the new Université du Québec network. He was part of the core group of teachers chosen for UQAM, in Montreal.
    But all this, all this energy, all these beauties, did not keep him from suffering – and sometimes horribly – when certain feelings, certain images, certain phrases came to the surface. He had always seen the story of the catastrophe as finished, over and done with. But it had come back to haunt him, to gnaw at him as if it had just happened. He circled around it, came close to it, brushed up against it, fearing that it contained a dangerous burning centre like a volcano. He wondered,
How many times, how many more times will I have to plunge my knife in and kill the monster to free Mama and me of him forever? How many times?
    There was no answer. Joseph resigned himself to letting the ghosts come, letting them move about and speak in their vague, enigmatic ghosts’ words.
    The only peaceful times occurred between him and his canvases, when he was working, completely enchanted by that subterranean world that sprang from his body, eye and hand in the silence filled with movement, as if his hand were thinking, but without words. And those times of peace and happiness when he met Véronique in the occupational therapy sessions, when she spoke very little and always in halting sentences, or when they ate a meal together – and especially, during those evenings and those nights when never again, oh never again, would they be apart!
    But at the same time, there was that letter he had received from Marie-Nicole, passed on to him by his best friend, Denis, to whom Joseph had finally decided to reveal the secret of his hospital stay. Joseph had read and reread that letter – he kept it in the inner pocket of his jacket, carefully folded in four – and it broke his heart. His thoughts (and his feelings) wavered between the pain of losing the woman he had long felt was the love of his life and a sense of deliverance at breaking with her, a great sense of freedom with regard to Véronique, whom he wanted more and more to be his. Because it was indeed a break-up letter, signed by Marie-Nicole, who had been his close companion for such a long time. Since that day in September 1961 when they had met while crossing the Atlantic on the
Homeric
and had fallen in love. They had become attached to one another and had taken the train together from Le Havre to Paris and had gone together to the Canadian students’ residence in the Cité universitaire, where, the following year, they had married so as never to be parted again.