Free Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker Page B

face is in shadow. He is huge, monstrous. I am watching Ariadne and the Minotaur.
    She began to suffer from tiredness, a lassitude that sapped her energy in the mornings. I saw the rings beneath her eyes darkening and deepening. She no longer went out to Gaillac on the weekends. Anne-Marie came to help her get me off to school and to give her a hand with the housework. Jean-Baptiste Michel refused to hear anyone suggest that she was ill.
    “She’s lazy, that’s all,” he snapped. “She thinks that she’s too fine to work.”
    But even I noticed the whispering and silences surrounding her exhaustion, the terrible yellowing crackleof her shriveling skin. She aged and shrank before my frightened glance. Her full breasts ebbed and her buttocks sagged. It was a spell working from within.
    I came home from school. The bedroom door was shut fast. My father was slumped weeping across the table. Anne-Marie, her face set and ruthless, her hands clasped, stood before me.
    “Your mother has left us at last, mon petit. She is rejoicing in heaven with Our Lady and the angels.” She spoke every word with measured and devastating certainty.
    I won a scholarship to the Benedictine school attached to the monastery and my father sent me away to board during the terms. In the holidays I was handed over to my grandparents in Gaillac. I never went home again. And I took my grandfather’s name.
    Bien à vous,
    Paul Michel

    Paris, 1 June 1984
    Cher Maître,
    No, I very seldom draw upon my own memories directly. But it is my past which provides the fixed limits of my imagination. Our childhoods, our several histories, lived in the bone, are not the straitjackets we think they are. I rework the intensity of that capacity to perceive, the shifts in scale, color; the silences around the table as a family lays down their forks, the howl of a dog chained to the woodpile as the sleet forms in a winter sky, the years when the autumn never comes, but the winter grey, the mass of wet leaves, coats the gravel long before Toussaint.
    I still see the chrysanthemums, huge white blooms, gleaming on my mother’s grave in the pathetic cemetery above our village among the vineyard slopes. I used to carry my own pot of barely opening lilac buds to lay on the green gravel of her grave. “Buy the pot which has the flowers still in bud,” ordered my grandfather. He grudged her even the colors achieved. But up there in the empty, walled graveyard, the flowers will open, in a gesture of consent, when there is no one to see.
    You asked about the men in my family, my father, my grandfather, my cousins. I must be cynical—and honest. They were what I have become—moody, taciturn, violent. Mealtimes were mostly a silent affair, interrupted only by demands for more bread. My grandfather was brutally good-looking, a huge barrel-chested man with his mind adjusted firmly in the direction of profit. He knew how to delegate responsibility, but he trusted no one. He had his fingers on every root in the vineyard. He understood his accounts. He bargained with the wholesalers. He bullied the inspectors. He quarreled with the neighbors. He sent away to another region for his barrels, where he got a better deal. He made the tonneliers pay the transportation costs. He was one of the first in Gaillac to invest in the modern mechanical systems. He spent two years in Algeria and came back convinced that France should abandon the territory, despite its wealth and beauty, simply on the grounds that we had no business to occupy another man’s land.
    I see him walking the length of his vines, his old blue jacket stretched across his huge back, bending over the twisted stakes, the clippers in his reddened hands, touchingthe mute, rough bark, his boots heavy with earth. Everyone in the house was afraid of him.
    One of his dogs bit a child in the face. I was ten years old. I see the child, white, weeping, two deep purple marks on the side of her nose, her upper hp, pierced, with the