Free Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon

paragraph, which would forever remain etched in Joseph’s mind in letters of fire: “She was found in her bed that morning as if asleep, but she was dead, her eyes closed, her head on her beautiful bare arm, dressed in her white nightdress like a young virgin. Just that, and nothing more.”
    And cousin James had blessed Joseph and implored him to return to the bosom of “our Holy Mother Church,” because he knew that Joseph, like many of his compatriots, had strayed far from “the holy paths of our universal Church, the only one recognized by our Heavenly Father and Sovereign Lord.” At first, Joseph had felt nothing. He had read the letter from cousin James and felt as if he had been turned to marble. Icy marble encased his whole body, with the words about his dead lover etched in fire in the unreachable depths. Until the day in the hospital for minds when those words had come back up from their buried source and flowed out in a torrent of tears with Joseph’s story.

V
    It is through scars that stories arrive and depart.
    Alain Tanner,
La vallée fantôme
    â€œIt’s not fair,” said Véronique one afternoon during occupational therapy. Joseph continued working on his painting without missing a word of Véronique’s halting sentences, sometimes adding a few words of his own, looking her right in the eye.
    â€œIt’s not fair…you’re making progress…I’m just going around in circles, I’m not doing anything.”
    Joseph said that, from his point of view, progress was something “very relative, very uncertain.” And that perhaps Véronique had not yet “come to the end of her sorrow.” As he said these words, he was thinking that you shouldn’t try to avoid pain or sadness or even stupidity, and not even madness. You had to go into them, go all the way through them from beginning to end to have any hope of getting over them.
    Véronique understood what he was saying. She even agreed with it, only she hadn’t “had time to think about these questions” until now. She wanted to play music, to go back to her piano. Just to play music and, “in order to live,” to teach from time to time. “But you understand, Joseph, I feel totally incapable of it. I’m afraid … I’m afraid of my piano. I’ll have to tell you the story of the piano. Last night I dreamed of a wonderful black piano, like mine, lying in a ditch. Its keyboard suddenly turned into the jaws of a monster. The monster was a woman … that’s what the dream was saying without words. Like a raging wild animal making terrifying sounds…howling…hoarse, throaty cries. I was so afraid I thought I was going to faint…I was limp as a rag. In my dream, I said to myself,
I’m dreaming. If I manage to shout these words at the monster, I’ll wake up and I’ll be saved.
The words
I’m dreaming
wouldn’t come out…it was hurting the back of my throat…I was going to faint … I was dripping with sweat. And then a survival instinct resurfaced from very deep … as if from the centre of the Earth, which was also the centre of my belly. It reached the surface and my mouth opened very wide…I screamed…I screamed, ‘I’m dreaming!’ The piano monster vanished. I woke up and cried in your arms, you were sleeping so soundly, until I fell asleep exhausted.”
    That evening, Véronique told Joseph “the story of the piano.” The story was so incoherent, it seemed so illogical, that Joseph listened to it without asking any questions, telling himself that Véronique would one day be able to sort it all out. Or to let go of it, perhaps, and replace it with a different story of the piano that had enabled her to become a wonderful performer and to attain such beauty in her body and her playing.
    In Véronique’s story of the piano, there was a usurped legacy