Jean!
Again she said my name as she had said it forty years before and again it separated me, marked me out from all other men. In the mountains the past is never behind, it’s always to the side. You come down from the forest at dusk and a dog is barking in a hamlet. A century ago in the same spot at the same time of day a dog, when it heard a man coming down through the forest, was barking, and the interval between the two occasions is no more than a pause in the barking.
In the pause between her twice saying my name in the same way, I saw myself as the young boy I had once been, encouraged by Masson to believe that I was more than usually intelligent, I saw myself as a young man without prospects, because I was the youngest, but with great ambitions, my first departure for Paris which so impressed me as the centre, the capital of the globe, that I was determined to take one of the roads from l’Etoile across the world, the last good-byes to my family, my mother imploring me not to go all the time that I harnessed the horse and my father put my bag in the cart. It is the Land of the Dead, she said. The voyage by the boat on which each day I dreamt of how I would return to the village, honoured and rich with presents for my mother, I saw myself on the quayside where I did not understand a single word of what was being said, and the great boulevards and the obelisk, the grandeur of the packing plants which I tried to describe in a letter to my father, for whom the selling of one cow for meat was the subject of a month’s discussion, the news of my father’s death, the noise of the trains through the window of the room where I lodged for five years, Carmen’s tantrums and her plans to open a bar of her own, her black hair the color of the coal I shoveled, the epidemic in the shanty town, the land of straight railways so flat and going on forever; I saw myself in the train going south to Río Gallegos in Patagonia, sheep-shearing and a wind that, like my home-sickness, never stopped, I saw my wedding in Mar del Plata with all seventy-three members of Ursula’s family, the birth of Gabriel six months later, the birth of Basil eighteen months afterwards and my fight with her family to christen him Basil, Ursula’s dressmaking, her mother’s debts, my friendship with Gilles and the pleasure of speaking my own language again, I saw Gilles’ death, Ursula refusing to go to his funeral or to let the boys go, the flight to Montreal, the boys learning English which I could never speak, the news of my mother’s death, the news of Ursula’s death, the fire in the bar, the police investigations, I saw myself working as a night-watchman, my Sundays in the forest, they buying of my ticket home, I saw forty whole years compressed with the pause.
What separated me this time from all other men called Jean or Théophile or Francois was not desire, which is stronger than words, it was a sense of loss, an anguish deeper than any understanding. When she said my name the first time in the chalet in the alpage, she offered another life to the one I was about to live. Looking back I saw, now, the hope in the other life she offered and the hopelessness of the one I chose. Saying my name the second time, it was as if she had only paused a moment and then repeated the offer; yet the hope had gone. Our lives had dissolved it. I hated her. I would gladly have killed her. She made me see my life as wasted. She stood there and everything I saw—her wrinkled cider-apple of a face, her stiff swollen hands which grabbed and rooted the region like a boar’s tusks, placed now with their palms to her breast as if in supplication, the frail veil, the morsel of cigarette-paper stuck to her lip were all proof of the dissolution of the offer. Yet I was forced—for the first and last time in this life—to speak to her tenderly.
Give me time to think, Lucie!
