Free The Last Bullet Is for You by Martine Delvaux

Caravaggio canvas, made of mysteries, a world where reason and law never have the last word. The leaden blanket of the Vatican does not ward off transgression, and if men marry, they do not limit themselves to the marriage bed.
    Even today I still wonder what in you echoed so strongly in me. What was the empty room, what was the need you gave the impression you could fulfill, what truth about me did your presence reveal? I wonder what battle you allowed me to fight, and what freedom I was meant to conquer.
    I don’t remember which of the fathers of psychoanalysis said that love is the experience that most closely approximates psychosis without actually crossing over into madness, I don’t remember if it was Jung who one day succumbed to his passion for Sabina Spielrein, a former patient. Later on, when she had become a psychoanalyst and opened a kindergarten in Moscow, she had a strangely violent young charge named Vassili, Stalin’s son, registered under a pseudonym. Spielrein had always supported the system, but as time went by and events developed around her, she realized that her country had fallen into the hands of an insane person. Threatened by the KGB, her school was shut down. Apparently she died in a hail of Nazi machine-gun fire in a synagogue in Rostov, the city of her birth.
    Once, when she was still very much in love with Jung, who had abandoned her to return to his wife, she wrote Freud a letter saying she wanted to separate from Dr. Jung for good, but couldn’t succeed until she was free enough to be able to love him, or until she had forgiven him for everything, or killed him.
    When you brandished your homesickness like an olive branch, I loaded my cannons with Dostoevsky’s words: “When you encounter the first small instance of suffering, you brood upon it like a hen with her egg.”
    It was hateful, you claimed, the way I mocked you when you defended the myth of the Slavic soul, the wound you said was impossible to cure, whereas I understood that you did not want to be cured, it was your way of establishing your identity. You loved the Czech Republic, that was the excuse you served up to anyone who would listen and accept to be contaminated in the process, for who could compete with such horrors?
    You screamed at me, I didn’t understand anything about your world, only what you taught me, and now I was stealing it from you, you accused me of pillaging you to fill the empty container with what didn’t belong to me, since emptiness is what defined people on this continent. For you, the people of Quebec had nothing to offer, and you separated me from the rest only because I had a vaguely European background. You forgot that my father had immigrated here too, and the way you rejected the place that had opened its arms to him was repulsive, he had no part of your admiration for the French who were the ones, according to you, we had to rely on to build our culture, and for that reason their arrival like a wave in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood was a blessing.
    You explained that Slavs knew how to live because they ate, fucked, and slept with death. You forgot that your origins were in part inventions and that your memory wrapped them in nostalgia that had nothing to do with reality, the sites of childhood always end up playing the role of paradise lost. You forgot that as the years passed and your travels added up, you had become a hodgepodge of identities, that was the destiny you were facing and the trouble with America, it mirrored the image of your identity, your body as a land of immigration.
    You dreamed of purity and sometimes, without the slightest hint of irony, you came up with statements that were racist, snobbish, reactionary, and misogynist, and no one could tell if you believed what you were saying or even understood what you meant, or whether you were just trying to provoke. At those times you embodied everything I can’t stand, but I went on loving you