***
Gazing out the window of the train, Nurse Vautour muses as she allows herself to be rocked to the rhythm of the rails. She has just finished reading the article on the researcher Kinsey in the magazine she picked up from the bench in the station. Dr. Kinsey’s conclusions on the sexuality of American women somewhat disappointed her. As far as she can tell, any reasonable person could have arrived at the same conclusions, minus the statistics. What she does find interesting is Alfred Kinsey’s career. A tireless worker, his social life was limited to Sunday evening musical get-togethers in his home. Dr. Kinsey, a dedicated musicologist, presented a program of classical music, commenting on each piece as it was played. Ladies were permitted to knit with muted needles at these recitals. During the intermission (cake and sherbet), the guests would converse about the pieces they had heard. Several people in the small university town of Bloomington who had initially felt honoured to be invited, eventually stopped attending these evenings, as they became annoyed at their host’s intensity.
Alfred Charles Kinsey, born in New Jersey before the turn of the century, was a typical example of the American self-made man. Beginning as a workshop assistant in the Stevens Institute of Technology, he eventually became its director of mechanical sciences, and this even though he had spent almost all of the first ten years of his life in bed, suffering from rickets, heart trouble, and a case of typhoid fever that almost killed him. In the end, their son’s numerous illnesses convinced the Kinseys to flee the polluted air of Hoboken and settle in the country, which greatly benefitted little Alfred’s health. In the country, of course, the boy discovered a multitude of flowers and birds. But his curiosity for nature was only truly sparked when one day he discovered a flower which did not appear in the botany book his father had given him. Alfred’s study on the behaviour of birds in the rain was published while he was still in grammar school. The young man completed his high school with excellent results, and without having neglected his piano. While at Harvard, Alfred Kinsey studied comestible wild plants of North America. He was subsequently fascinated by cynips, whose curious biological characteristics constituted proof in his eyes that evolution was not completed. Accompanied by his wife and children, he travelled over eighty thousand miles to gather three-and-a-half million specimens (the cynips is a parasitic insect living exclusively on oak trees), and compiled a mountain of statistics. He was forty-four years old when some students questioned him on the sexual behaviour of married couples. That was all it took. Ten years later, he published the results of his research on the sexual behaviour of the American male. A similar study on female sexuality was about to be released and Catholic authorities had already placed it on the black list.
***
In 1789, the German scientist Martin Heinrich Klaproth coined the name uranium (after the planet Uranus, sighted for the first time eight years earlier) for this “unknown substance which behaves like a metal.” Some forty years later, the Frenchman Eugene Melchior provided some additional facts about uranium without, however, awakening any great interest in the element. Approximately fifty years would pass before Henri Becquerel discovered the radioactive properties of uranium. Then, in 1898, the work of Pierre and Marie Curie (née Sklodowska) led to the discovery of two new elements in the same family as uranium: polonium (from Poland, Madame Curie’s homeland) and radium (thus named for its radioactive properties). At the time, Madame Curie was the only woman to have received the Nobel Prize, winning it in physics in 1903 jointly with her husband Pierre and M. Becquerel. Marie Curie was also the first person to be Nobelized twice, winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry on her own in 1911, for her discovery of Po and Ra, and for her additional work in radioactivity.
Until the Second World War, the element U would be employed mainly as a source for radium, used in the treatment of cancer. Uranium salts, which are phosphorescent, were also added to glass, to facilitate the observation of ultraviolet rays. But uranium, the sole element in nature whose nucleus is fissionable by slow neutrons, only truly came into its own in 1938, with the discovery of nuclear fission, the energy chain reaction which is the basis of the atomic bomb. The discovery of nuclear fission was the result of Einstein’s work and his intuition of the mass defect, that incredible force which binds neutrons in the atom’s nucleus. According to Grolier’s Livre des connaissances, a mass defect of one gram corresponds approximately to the amount of heat required to transform 220,000 tons of ice into vapour. Many scientists were responsible for concretizing the nuclear potential based on Einstein’s theories and the work of Hahn and Strassman in Germany, Frisch and Meit-ner in Denmark, the Joliot-Curies in France, and the Italian Fermi in the United States.
As astonishing as uranium and nuclear fission turned out to be, they were soon overshadowed by the discovery of nuclear fusion, which led to the hydrogen bomb. To understand the magnitude of the H-bomb, one need only recall that the Hiroshima atomic bomb — which killed 72,000 people and completely flattened an area of twelve square kilometres — contained a mere kilogram of uranium, which is the equivalent of about one thousand tons of T.N.T. And yet, this tremendous force would serve as a mere match to ignite the hydrogen bomb, also called the thermonuclear bomb, because a temperature of at least fifty million degrees Celsius is required to trigger nuclear fusion. To describe the phenomenon another way, suffice it to say that nuclear fusion is the source of the sun’s energy, no less. As for the incomparable power of the C-bomb, it results from the triplet fission-fusion-fission, all contained under the same roof, in a manner of speaking.
The first experimental explosion of a hydrogen bomb occurred on October 31, 1952, in the Marshall Islands, a territory of the United States in the Pacific Ocean. The bomb weighed 67 tons and was 125 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. The test raised the possibility of a more efficient mechanism of the same type completely wiping out all of humanity in a single stroke. In spite of this, Baby M., whose soul was already wandering the earth, decided to enter into gestation. All that remained was to select a family and a sex. As innocent as the choice of family might seem, it was not easy, given the important role family ties had played in the perfection of the nuclear bomb. Think of the couple Pierre and Marie Curie, of their daughter Irene, who, together with Frédéric Joliot, formed the team of Joliot-Curie; of the Austrian Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, and of the Rosenbergs, to name a few. As for choosing a sex, it was no easier than choosing a family, judging from the Jorgensen affair, which had plunged sexual identity, along with the rest of the globe, into the fiery cauldron of degeneration and reconstitution.
***
The train’s motion and the progress of Dr. Kinsey’s life have plunged Nurse Vautour into a kind of cinematic reverie. This woman in her fifties watched the scientist’s life take shape before her eyes as she read the article while the landscape filed past. Now she feels a certain lightness, as though she were detached from reality, as though she were at the movies. She feels good. Floating effortlessly above matter and reality, she does not feel the effort of the locomotive carrying her so easily through space. This lightness has a virtuous feel to it, like an emanation floating high above everything. To put it bluntly, she feels free and immortal. She needs nothing, desires nothing more.
It may have been theoretically possible, in 1953, to eliminate all feelings of immortality, but this had not yet been done. Cardinal Stepinac, Lavrenti Beria, and Baby M. are prime examples. Cardinal Stepinac, under arrest in the Krasic territory of Yugoslavia, continued to berate his country’s Communists, proclaiming that the Church would never give in to Tito’s decrees. Lavrenti Beria also must have had complete faith in his own immortality, judging from the crimes of which the ex-chief of the Russian secret police who aspired to succeed Stalin had been accused — including Trotsky’s murder — and worse still, “plotting with a foreign power” to overthrow the Soviet regime. His feeling of immortality, however, failed to save him from execution, onl
y nine months after having served as pallbearer to the man of steel. Finally, a third proof of the indestructibility of the feeling of immortality can be gleaned from the fact that Baby M. chose incarnation even after having passed through the nuclear cloud over the atoll of Eniwetok, as she circled the earth. To many, this may seem like sheer innocence; yet, they cannot deny that such innocence has, so far, succeeded in resisting the most powerful mass defect: evidence that the soul itself may be nothing more than a free-floating mass defect, capable of defying probability and putting on or shedding weight as required.
***
Claude takes out the box in which are stored the selection of audio tapes he had integrated into his treatments. This is the first time he has re-examined his collection since leaving Montréal. As he reads the list of titles of these more or less musical experiments, it occurs to him that they provide no new inspiration. He has difficulty even remembering that period of his life, although it was not so long ago. He retrieves the tape entitled Berlin Woman, turns the case in his hands, as though it were the fruit of some strange tree.
These days, Claude can’t quite make out what is happening to him. He has difficulty following a single train of thought, which actually reflects his errant movements in the physical space of the city. Since arriving in Toronto, Claude has done little else but wander here and there. He has no idea what he is looking for; he’s not even sure he is looking for anything. He is simply waiting and watching. Perhaps, one day, something will capture his attention. Nor is he trying to meet someone. He is content to engage in random conversations with people he has no intention of seeing again. His recent encounter with the stranger in the bar marks a break with the anonymity of these last few months. In fact, he wonders what possessed him to give the man his business card. But, as strange as the gesture seems, the realization of this strangeness is fleeting, because already his mind has changed direction, taken another angle, a new tangent. Nothing lasts very long. Each street corner brings a new transformation. But silently. Or almost. As though these were rough sketches, compositions. Attempts, feebly, to lift up his voice. Because finding love does not always depend on the person seeking it. As a matter of fact, Claude does not realize he is thinking of love. He does not realize that love can be a kind of drifting. A vagueness of the soul. A desire seeking itself. Seeking us.
***
The movies were doing their part, in 1953, to prevent the destruction of the sense of immortality. Their characters swelled the general ranks of humanity and, in populating the earth with more souls than bodies, increased its capacity to counter the mass defect. When you consider that, in 1953, some seven hundred movies shown in theatres in Moncton, Shediac, Bouctouche, and Richibouctou had implanted thousands of characters in the minds of the people of just this small corner of New Brunswick, there is no doubt that, on a global scale, the cinema represented a tremendous force. Nurse Vautour, herself a strong and righteous woman, did not deny herself the pleasure of believing in these characters, in their joys and hardships, and in adopting their attitudes. And, though she sometimes found the Church’s reservations exaggerated, she understood that the Church had much to lose in this new game of being. Competition was intense and Jesus Christ, the Church’s own main character, was in danger of being upstaged.
Nurse Vautour nevertheless took note that the Church knew a good film when it saw one. For example, The Catholic Cinema Centre found that The Sound Barrier (David Lean, 1952) offered “a lesson in courage and professional conscience,” though it called on educators to explain the young woman’s pregnancy to children. The Centre noted also that “the law of confidentiality to which priests are bound was well portrayed” in I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953), a psycho-religious drama filmed in Québec, starring Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter. On the other hand, Nurse Vautour did not know what to think of the fact that the Church endorsed Hitchcock’s unique talent to “hold an audience in doubt and uncertainty.” She was, however, happy to see that, aside from its usual reservations regarding the sexual scenes, the Church generally approved of Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952), a family drama starring Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth, who won the prize for best actress both at the Oscars and at Cannes. Nurse Vautour felt the Church’s attitude towards the “spinster” played by Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen (John Huston, 1951) was rather mean. The Centre did not approve of this prim and proper lady falling suddenly in love with her companion, played by Humphrey Bogart. Nurse Vautour also felt the Centre was being overly cautious in not recommending this film for children, when it offered “fine moral lessons in duty, courage, endurance, and the influence of education on character.” Nurse Vautour had not seen High Noon (Fred Zimmermann, 1952), but her brother had, and enjoyed it very much. The Church found some merit in this film, particularly the presentation of “a main character who overcomes his fear to do his duty,” but as might have been expected, the religious authorities were not happy about “the discreet allusion to the sheriff’s past relationship with a woman in the town.” Both the Church and Nurse Vautour enjoyed Detective Story (William Wyler, 1951), which painted a picture of a typical afternoon in a New York police station. But the Catholic Centre nevertheless concluded that this “great work containing absolutely moral images” was not appropriate for children. Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952), starring José Ferrer as the painter Toulouse-Lautrec (he played the entire movie on his knees, with his legs tied behind his back), was roundly condemned: “Toulouse-Lautrec’s numerous affairs, the degeneration of this genius into alcohol and lowly passions,” required “serious reservations, in spite of the incontestable artistic merit of the film.” Probably because of its French title, the film was shown in almost every theatre in French-speaking New Brunswick.
***
And the ball returns.
No matter how hard she tries, how many loose ends she gathers up, Brigitte can’t get past this point. Something sticks to her, something like that ball she keeps sending over, and which keeps returning. Or something like this present that keeps repeating itself, and on which she must nevertheless rely. Brigitte can’t quite grasp how it is that she finds herself ensnared in this game. In fact, she does not even know what the game is. She has no clear idea what is going on. Like those neighbourhood kids she once mesmerized, she does not know whether she is on the verge of a higher state of consciousness or simply of losing consciousness. The explosion that has paralyzed her has also revealed a dimension within time, something like an implosion which freezes her to the spot even as it propels her into a great leap forward. Nothing remains as it was. Not even the words. Which she would like to say. To Élizabeth. But which don’t seem to come. Won’t come.
And yet, there is nothing in what Élizabeth has just told her that surprises or shocks Brigitte. Her silence is neither a reaction nor a response to the postmodern delinquencies evoked by her friend. If we can speak of delinquencies. Words are treacherous. Pregnancies too. One becomes pregnant or contracts AIDS. Life or death. Or both. Or, worst luck: neither. No, having broken with pathologies of all kinds, none of this upsets Brigitte. Yet, clearly, something has caught up with her, something that was seeking her specifically, something like desire, which no one could have suspected, was behind this incredible fragmentation. So that, electrified by destiny which is fulfilled even as it is revealed, Brigitte can do nothing but let this moment be. The nuclear instant exists, of that she is now absolutely certain. And after it comes something which is not quite life and not quite death. Neither is it some kind of sacrifice. Jesus Christ is certainly dead. And has been replaced.
But the ball wants to return. And each ball is a challenge.
8
The Long Road Back
An easy birth — Doses of vitamins and minerals — Waiting for the revelation of the minutely indivisible and the elusively omnipresent — Structure of idleness and verticality of anonymity — Hat sale at Creaghan’s — Boredom as a sign which does
not lie — Entanglement of freedom and the mystery of origins — Time as a virtue — Surrender and the point of no return — A moment of human warmth — Multiple layers of solidarity — The Flemming’s salad — Internal arrangement and the play of mirrors — Instant of desire and the ball which keeps coming back
IN THE END, Baby M. met her deadline of November 1953 and slipped into life with all her parts and a few tears, for which she earned a paragraph in l’Évangéline. She was, however, hiding a congenital metabolic anomaly, which took the form of slight digestive problems during the first days of her extra-uterine existence. But the digestive problems soon disappeared and the disease remained in a latent state for several months. It then resurfaced as a case of bronchitis, but this rather common condition passed without raising any celiac suspicions. A precise diagnosis was only made in July 1954, when the disease finally exhausted its disguises and drastic measures were required to check the profuse and nauseating diarrhea with which Baby M.’s mother, helpless at the sight of her child wasting away, could no longer cope.
The sight of the child’s body, which had begun to wither and showed the early signs of malnutrition, sent a kind of shock wave through Moncton’s Hôtel-Dieu l’Assomption. No matter whether the source of the illness was attributed to an infection of the respiratory canal or to some sort of emotional or psychological problem, the case was rare. Baby M., for her part, did not realize that her little game would shake the very raison d’être of the hospital, whose mission was also the survival of the Acadian people. Already entirely preoccupied by the effect of “Nature” on her “style,” Baby M. had no idea how big a fuss she was causing, just as she had no way of appreciating her pediatrician’s acumen, the warmth of Nurse Vautour’s embrace, or the discipline of the kitchen staff, which were absolutely forbidden to serve her anything but banana, liver, or chicken purée. At one point, the kitchen was authorized to deviate slightly from this routine and to prepare an egg puree but, following Baby M.’s highly unfavourable reaction to the new dish, this happy occasion was never repeated. As for the other nutrients essential to the child’s growth, they would be provided by proteined milk and doses of vitamins and minerals.
1953 Page 11