1953
Page 14
The meaning of all this? The Englishman George Lesley best summarized the situation as he lay in a Dartford hospital with a leg fracture and other injuries “after lying on the tracks, unable to move, while twelve trains ran over him.” Lesley, who had not lost consciousness during the entire ordeal, said he was grateful there had been no thirteenth train, because he was sure it would have been unlucky for him.
***
For Acadians, accustomed to Marian coincidences, 1953 could not have ended on a better note than with the proclamation, by the pope himself, of the Marian Year. Indeed, thanks to this announcement, it was as though the year were not ending at all. It would slide instead into a long slow crescendo, beginning on the night of December 7 to 8, and ending exactly one year later on December 8, 1954, the one hundredth anniversary of the declaration by Pope Pius IX of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God. In that memorable year, the infallible pontiff had declared that “the doctrine according to which the Blessed Virgin Mary had been, from the first moment of her conception, by the grace and singular privilege of all-powerful God, and in anticipation of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of humanity, preserved and exempted from all trace of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and which, therefore, must be firmly and inviolably believed by all the faithful.” To mark the inauguration of this “small Holy Year,” a mass would be celebrated at half-past midnight in a number of parishes, and the faithful who had not eaten since midnight could take communion, on the condition they pray for the intentions decreed by the Holy Father during at least two hours previous (a period which could include the duration of the mass). These intentions were addressed first to young people, “that they apply themselves in mortifying their passions, practising purity, and resisting corruption through worldliness,” then to the elderly, “that they distinguish themselves by their honesty, fidelity to the domestic hearth, and the care they give to raising their children properly.” They were also addressed to the Mother of God, asking her to intervene so that the hungry, the oppressed, and refugees be granted justice, peace, and a homeland. People prayed also for the freedom of the Church, “that God, by the intercession of Mary, break the bonds upon freedom of conscience,” and that He give imprisoned or exiled priests “the joy of returning to their flocks.” Finally, they prayed for the coming of peace, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin who gave the world the Prince of Peace. The inauguration of the Marian Year continued during the day of December 8, 1953, in Rome, where a half-million people lined up to see his Holiness Pius XII travel the four miles between the Roman basilicas of St. Peter and St. Mary Maggiore. As had been prearranged, when the pope’s car arrived at St. Mary Maggiore’s, women waved handkerchiefs to commemorate the snowfall by which the Virgin Mary had identified the spot upon which to build the basilica.
In the Acadian archdiocese, where the hundredth anniversary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the crowning of the national Madonna, the invitation to celebrate the Marian Year took on the force of a command. A pastoral letter, delivered to all leaders of the faith, listed various ways of celebrating Mary’s glory: by raising a Marian sanctuary in an easily accessible spot in every church; by establishing Marian sanctuaries in every family; by giving conferences, sermons, and instructions on Marian devotions; by the daily recitation of the rosary in every family; by making monthly preparatory novenas and reciting the Litanies of Loreto on the first Saturday of every month; by reciting the prayer of the Marian Year every Sunday and statutory holiday during the year; by renewing, in October, the oaths of the Crusade of the Rosary; and finally, by the participation of students in Marian competitions and meetings, in writing essays, making scrapbooks and albums. The pastoral letter also offered priests a selection of appropriate sermons, invited them to participate in Marian days and pilgrimages, and urged them to foster a Marian atmosphere in their parishes and dioceses. They were also asked to inform the faithful of the program of indulgences for the Marian Year, including the invocation “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who beseech you,” which alone was worth three hundred days of indulgence. The greater part of the letter was published in l’Évangéline on December 7, 1953. An advertisement for Moncton Plumbing took up the rest of the page. It suggested that readers electrify their lives with modern miracles by buying, for Christmas, a Westinghouse refrigerator or washing machine, or an iron, toaster, or double waffle-maker.
***
Back in her office after having walked Élizabeth to the elevator, Brigitte stands before the large window, watching the movement of passers-by on the street below. She is waiting for the appearance of Élizabeth, who, any moment now, will slip back into the turbulence of life. She thinks she knows what direction her friend will take. She can already imagine her stride and long coat. She also senses her characteristic pale melancholy, a mood Brigitte rarely experiences, being generally swept up in the play of discovery. Then she remembers that old scene from her childhood. Once again she is on the high seas, personifying love. She can see the astonished faces of the neighbourhood children, who seemed so perfectly to understand the drama of love and solitude. As though they could also understand the way something can be huge and yet escape us, or escape us for the moment but become one with eternity. And for an instant, Brigitte grasps once again the simultaneously dual nature of every experience. Permanence and impermanence. Something played out and something passed on. Something passed on and something which nevertheless continues on its way forever. Each person’s DNA and destiny, its appointed hour, its moment of truth.
Torn between a general feeling of magnitude and the sense that every human life hangs by a single thread, Brigitte finally spots Élizabeth emerging from the shadow of the buildings. It is as though she were emerging from the entrails of the earth. She follows her, watches her back as she moves up that most romantic of avenues. She knows the autumn light on her face. She hears music, envisions a film, senses a story, maybe even History, in this projection on the border between reality and the imaginary. Then Élizabeth disappears onto a side street. Brigitte is left with a feeling both peaceful and disquieting. Unsure of what to return to, she looks down to the other end of the court. Something hesitates. And yet, she can see the ball. It is bouncing around, but not in her direction. As though the ball had begun to play its own game. Brigitte watches. Waits. Will continue to wait. For the ball to decide. For the ball to return.
Because each ball is a challenge.
***
Recalling the relentless labour required to publish the daily Évangéline during the fifties, Baby M.’s father would later admit that nothing seemed less certain than the paper’s survival. Because any one of several factors could cripple the enterprise, Baby M.’s father knew that disaster was only as far away as a bit of “bad luck, a slip, or merely the combination, according to the law of possibilities, of any two of those factors.” The dedicated scriptor and his colleagues toiled mainly just to put off that fateful day. And though the composition of the team changed over time, the publication of l’Évangéline was always an adventure, an adventure that lasted from September 1949 to September 1982.
Naturally, the working conditions of these “pioneer labourers” were modest: antiquated typewriters and salaries, and virtually endless days. The hindsight provided by Saturdays off only made Sundays all the more unbearable. On that day, the enterprise was like a monster they would never slay. Baby M.’s father remembers once “crossing his arms on a pile of papers on his desk, dropping his head, and crying like a baby.” Seeing this, a fellow worker had been moved, but refrained from intervening. Two hours later, the energy had returned to the editorial offices, where all incoming stories were in English. No one here was above translation, or working the humble parish life, sports, or legal beats. And everyone learned to talk to the rotary press as though it were an old nag you had to urge on to the finish line. It goes without saying that, with
such limited human capital, “no absence could be taken lightly.” So it was that the dedicated scriptor worked through the day and night of Baby M.’s birth, signing both of the next day’s editorials.
Just as we can understand the Englishman George Lesley’s reticence regarding the thirteenth train without making judgements about human projections, beliefs, and superstitions, so can we also appreciate the parallel between the length of l’Évangéline’s life and that of Jesus Christ’s stay on this earth: thirty-three years. An Acadian numerologist would have a heyday. Further interpretative adventures might be undertaken on the parallel roles of l’Évangéline and of DNA in preserving heredity, or on the consistency of double numbers reflected in the number thirty-three, the double nature of Jesus Christ (both God and man), and the double helix of the DNA molecule. Of course, this list of potential comparisons is by no means exhaustive. Once you get started, parallels, like railroad tracks, are almost without end. Furthermore, in addition to being the basis of the rail industry, the parallel is also the basis of cinematographic film, whose repercussions on humanity have equalled those of the railway. As for parallelism in writing, it goes back further than one or two centuries. We need only look to the Holy Scriptures, and more specifically to the parables of Jesus Christ, which are essentially comparisons, that is, operations drawing parallels between one thing and another. Of course, in the case of the parables, it must be said that long deep thought is often required to understand Christ’s intended meaning. Some would require a lifetime of reflection. Unless one is a novelist, it’s best not to worry too much about these. Excessive guilt hampers the work of repair, even when we don’t know what exactly is broken.
***
Élizabeth is seated at a small table on a sun-drenched terrace on the isle of Corfu. She has finally seen the famed serpent-haired Medusa, which in this place has been transformed into a mythological monster symbolizing “the perversion of spiritual and progressive impulses into vain stagnation.” Élizabeth wanted to see with her own eyes this figure that also embodies the caduceus, the universal symbol of medical science. She decided to take this voyage on her last trip to Montréal, after her meeting with Brigitte, and before starting back to Moncton. As she turned off the sunny avenue onto a side street, her gaze had fallen on the large posters of Greece in the window of a travel agency. She had only briefly hesitated before stepping through the doorway. In the end, she had completely forgotten her appointment at the hairdressers.
The caduceus, “most ancient of symbols,” portraying “a staff around which two serpents are coiled in opposite directions,” illustrates the equilibrium achieved by the integration of opposing forces. In the chronicled history of civilizations, the staff represents “the axis around which the world turns,” referred to sometimes as the cosmic pillar, the tree of life, the erect phallus, or the spinal column; the column of a temple or a column of light, or then again the sceptre, symbol of “the spirit’s dominion over the body.” The serpent alone, symbol of “the primordial undifferentiated, reservoir of all latency . . . playing on the sexes as it plays on all opposites,” represents all complementary principles: the soul and the libido, the womb and the phallus, movement and water, the diurnal and the nocturnal, good and evil, sulphur and mercury, fixedness and volatility, the damp and the dry, hot and cold, left and right. The legend of the caduceus therefore comes from the “primordial chaos (two serpents fighting) and its polarization (separation of the serpents by Hermes), with their eventual entwinement around the staff, thus achieving the equilibrium of opposite tendencies around the axis of the world.” A variation on this interpretation emphasizes the snake’s vain nature, so that the coiling around the cosmic pillar represents “vanity tamed and submissive,” transforming the serpent’s venom into medicine, hence the art of Asclepius, father and future god of medicine, who “employed poisons to cure the sick and revive the dead.” As the emblem of Hermes, messenger of the gods and guide to the living in their transformations, the caduceus became the ideal symbol for psychosomatic equilibrium because it represents “the even hand, the harmonization of desires . . . the ordering of affectivity, the need for spiritual-sublimation, [which] not only rules over the health of the soul [but] codetermines the health of the body.” From a yogic point of view, the caduceus around the waist of the ugly and apparently insane Medusa (mouth wide open, eyes bulging, and the less-than-reassuring serpents in her hair) illustrates the disorder which threatens those who are unawakened to the cosmic consciousness and who, consequently, seek nourishment in distorted images of themselves.
Her head resting against the back of her chair, Élizabeth offers her face up to the sun, shutting her eyes for a moment on human myths and beliefs. The Dictionnaire des symboles, written by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, lies on the table beside the plate in which a few olive pits swim in a pool of oil and basil. Funny to find herself in Greece with this book under her arm, she who has always shunned mythology, with its countless figures butting into life whenever they please, without regard for whether they are real people or imaginary creatures. She smiles too because of the heat on her face and the light which illuminates everything. In this light that fosters exquisite daydreams, Élizabeth imagines Claude magically appearing, he stunned to find her here, while she accepts it as a natural unfolding. They would gaze at each other a long time in the abundant light, occasionally speaking but barely, because once again there is the unfathomable and the unspeakable.
But Élizabeth is suddenly jolted from her half-sleep by a passer-by bumping her table on his way to another. Not Claude. This is another man, who excuses himself, but not too much. Just enough to ask if he can join her. Élizabeth points to a chair. The man spots the Dictionnaire des symboles on the table and risks commenting, in an accent Élizabeth does not recognize, that she “is taking it seriously.” He says he has never been fascinated by symbols but, if necessary, he can manage to find anything interesting. Then, in a confidential tone and at the risk, he admits, of appearing slightly odd, he confides that “doing whatever is necessary” is what he enjoys most. Élizabeth wonders if she is really hearing what she thinks she is hearing. She suspects that a slap is in order, but she finds herself unable to disregard the man’s soft eyes and innocent smile. She thinks of the caduceus’s equilibrium of opposites, wonders if she has fallen into some sort of tourist trap or into a true moment of cosmic magic; into a good book ( . . . and they loved each other forever and ever and ever) or into a bad movie ( . . . and they loved each other forever and ever and ever). She decides not to think about it too much and opts for the good book; if need be, she will write it.
Acknowledgements
Background information for this book has come from numerous sources. I have attempted to identify the principal ones in the course of the story itself, namely Roland Barthes, author of Writing Degree Zero (Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1967); Françoise Dolto, author of Solitude (Gallimard, 1994); Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, authors of the Dictionnaire des symboles (Robert Laffont/Jupiter, 1982); Jean Chastenet, author of Winston Churchill et l’Angleterre du XXe siècle (Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1956); and Kjell Espmark, author of Le Prix Nobel (Éditions Balland, 1986). However, in wanting to avoid weighing down the story with many footnotes and other customary references, I have not yet acknowledged other works which were also of great help. First and foremost, I am particularly indebted to all who contributed to the Acadian daily newspaper l’Évangéline from 1949 onward, and particularly in 1953. I am also indebted to the following: S.V. Haas and M.P. Haas, authors of Management of Celiac Disease (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1951); Michael Bloch, author of The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor/ The Private Papers 1937-1972 (Harper & Row, 1988); Bernard S. Schlessinger and June H. Schlessinger, authors of The Who’s Who of Nobel Prize Winners, Second Edition (The Oryx Press, 1990); Roger Boussinot, author of L’Encyclopédie du cinéma (Bordas, 1980); R.A.E. Pickard, author of the Dictionary of 1,000 Best Films (Associated Press, 197
1); Nicholas Thomas, author of the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Directors, Actors and Actresses (St. James Press, 1991); the Centrale catholique du cinéma, de la radio et de la télévision for its annual Répertoire général des films, and the Fédération des centres diocésains de cinéma for its Index de 6,000 titres de films avec leur cote morale (1948-1955); Time magazine, August 24, 1953, edition, for its feature article on Alfred C. Kinsey, and for articles on George Jorgensen’s sex transformation (December 15, 1952; April 20, 1953); and Paul Hofmann, author of Cento Città/A Guide to the “Hundred Cities & Towns” of Italy (Henry Holt and Company, 1988). Other works have also been very helpful, notably Grolier’s Le livre des connaissances, Le Grand Larousse, and le petit Robert 2. I am also grateful to the Université de Moncton’s Bibliothèque Champlain, for accessibility of information, and to the archives services of its Centre d’études acadiennes, where l’Évangéline’s “remains” are now kept. L’Hôpital Georges-L. Dumont’s archives services also provided key information for this book.
Quotations on pp. 13, 14, 15, 17, 38, 39-40: from Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture, © Éditions du Seuil, Paris: 1953; Writing Degree Zero, translation by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Jonathan Cape Ltd.: 1967.