Winter Child
Page 1
l’enfant
hiver
Virginia
Pésémapéo
Bordeleau
Winter
Child
TRANSLATED BY
Susan Ouriou AND
Christelle Morelli
English translation copyright © Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli, 2017.
Original text copyright © Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, 2014.
First English edition. Originally published in French in 2014 as L’enfant hiver by Mémoire d’encrier.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems — without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Translated with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts’ translation program. Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Pésémapéo Bordeleau, Virginia, 1951–
[Enfant hiver. English]
Winter child / Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau ;
translated by Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli.
Translation of: L’enfant hiver.
Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-988298-06-1 (softcover).
ISBN 978-1-988298-07-8 (EPUB). ISBN 978-1-988298-08-5 (PDF)
I. Ouriou, Susan, translator II. Morelli, Christelle, translator III. Title. IV. Title: Enfant hiver. English
PS8631.E797E5313 2017 C843’.6 C2017-900965-6 C2017-900966-4
Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Author photo by Ariane Ouellet
For my son Simon
so that he may live
always
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Cry
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Life
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
His Voice
Chapter 46
About the Author
Is there life before death?
| UNKNOWN |
Women never stop stitching men up
and men keep pouring themselves drinks.
| MARIE UGUAY |
the cry
Her water broke in one swoosh, like a spring encased for too long in ice. The child would arrive soon, perhaps by day’s end, her contractions coming faster by the hour. The pain hadn’t yet begun. But intuition led her to phone the child’s father and urge him to come home early from work and drive her to the village clinic. Her nerves thrummed with a tender feverishness; the birth would be uncomplicated, just as with her daughter, Amélie, whose arrival had been a moment of unspeakable joy, in keeping with her tiny being, her beauty so singular even then that the doctor and his assistant exclaimed together, “What a beautiful little girl!”
This time, they wheeled her into the delivery room as soon as she’d been examined. Her body was poised, she could feel the pressure of the baby’s head, she pushed instinctively, urged on by the same nurse who’d been there for her first delivery. Her husband smiled valiantly at her; she could tell that he would gladly have taken on some of the pain of the baby’s descent punctuated by her muffled moans. The doctor was close to retirement age and his face mask highlighted the wrinkles along his temples and under his eyes, accentuating the kindness of his gaze so like a grandfather’s. Suddenly, he ordered, “Stop pushing!”
He shot a quick glance at the nurse, who handed him a pair of scissors. No words were exchanged, but the child’s mother could tell something was wrong, she could read concern in the woman’s eyes. The doctor remained expressionless, focused on the decision he had to make; she squeezed her husband’s hand, held her breath, strove to fight off the panic threatening to engulf that space reserved for joy, for giving life; she squeezed her eyes shut and breathed deeply from the baby upwards, willing the baby to continue his journey through her.
The practitioner’s fingers groped blindly inside her, then his words, “The cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck, I’ll have to cut now …”
She nodded.
His delicate gestures, the scissors disappearing inside, beads of perspiration pearling on his bald forehead, his intense focus on that opening, all shook her even further; she didn’t want to see the expression on her husband’s face, didn’t want to lose heart by acknowledging the fear she sensed in him as the older man told her to push one last time. In one heave, she felt the child slide from her, damp and viscous, wetting her thighs. The moist heat of his body bursting from her womb fanned the hope that he would live; she caught a glimpse of his black hair matted with mucus, the blue tinge of his skin. The doctor laid him on her belly. His tiny, limp arms dangled on either side of her waist; she mouthed repeatedly, “My baby, my baby …,” while, still without a word, the doctor turned him, folded him over and over, reached a finger into his tiny mouth; the nurse handed him an instrument to aspirate the mucus. The child’s mother stared at the gloved hands dancing across the tiny body, shaking him as though to waken him from sleep. The older man worked feverishly, bent on hearing the newborn’s breath, until at last the baby uttered a first tentative croak like a frog unsure of spring’s arrival. The child’s father’s tears. Her own silence in the icy grip of the interminable minutes of intimate terror, her womb still pulsating to the accelerated rhythm of her heart.
Snow fell and stayed. Winter made its entrance on that late September day. Come evening, a woman laid the child on her breast; clean and swaddled in a soft cotton blanket, he suckled hungrily. The woman smiled and said, “He’s okay!”
Alone again, she cried, prayed as she laughed and directed a chorus of “thank yous” at the crucifix hanging on the wall across from her bed. Snow continued to fall, covering the window ledge; with the baby clasped to her breast, she let her gaze follow the falling snowflakes until her anguish eased.
A woman clad in pink step
ped into the room. She carried clean towels, a washcloth, a small basin. When she untied the blue gown from behind your neck, your body was revealed. Your buttocks still youthful-looking, firm, still smooth, never exposed to the sun.
Could I have washed you? Ignored the taboo and touched my father’s body? I don’t think so. In any event, I didn’t. Even knowing it should have been me, I didn’t dare … Delicate throughout, the woman in pink caressed your face, dipped the washcloth into the basin of water, wrung it out and ran it gently over your skin. Respect brought moisture to your inert flesh, a hint of love’s breath surrounded you because this woman, without knowing you, loved you.
You lay there, serene, handsome. If I die at your age, I know what my death will look like, my features like yours, like my son’s, my daughter’s and my granddaughter Léa who you never knew. For me, your departure came neither too soon nor too late; I was at peace with your leave-taking, there was nowhere left for the two of us to go, and yet part of the landscape collapsed before my eyes that morning to be replaced by a precipice. I was never able to speak the words you could never have accepted, given your boundaries, your padlocked doors, or maybe those bounds, those walls are my own …? I inherited your position as the family’s and clan’s elder, no aunt or uncle lived longer than you; you left me at the crossroad between the road to maturity and that of childhood, a childhood that was mine as late as yesterday because you still lived. That morning I was no longer anyone’s daughter, and my orphanhood rattled me: secretly, I had thought of you as immutable, there forever ahead of me, but now there was no one left to call Papa or Dada the way I had as a child. The word itself, Papa, encompassed the full measure of a childhood granted, lived and accepted. Until the end, that was what I called you; I could never see myself using your given name or the familiar tu, like my brothers and sisters. What sacred bond was I determined to maintain? Or what frontier was I unwilling to cross? Could it have been the hope that my childhood would one day be returned to me? By that one word: Papa.
It was only much later in life that I understood why I could never see you as a friend: for want of a love that was suitable to a father and daughter. Not that you were threatening, protective in fact, especially in your sixties: a good grandfather loved by his grandchildren. You suffered through years of anger, in the grip of violence, trapped by your memories of the war of 1939, the war you and your brothers enlisted in; there was no escaping the Canadian government’s conscription for either you or my uncles. Despite your mixed blood, your name sounded French and your father was Québécois; in any event, you welcomed the chance to be a warrior defending your country, afterward, you carried the war inside you for the longest time, handing it down to us in the shape of constant worry, chronic insecurity: never turn your back, be wary of the ground you walk on … never breathe easy.
You, too, felt the distance separating us, a wound to your heart, though you never spoke of it; only occasionally would a sudden gesture or look glide over me, as soft as the down in our duvets. No one believes a baby being born understands what is underway, and yet it was at that precise moment that our love imploded, given no opportunity to know joy or the slightest growth; it shaped me, full of repressed tears and pain, yet gleeful and quite mad when I give myself over to the lifeforce bursting at my seams. You made me what I am, my mother too, of course, but this is about you, you and me. You would lean over my shoulder as I drew and exclaim in admiration. Did you understand that it was my only means of survival, my opening, however small, to the sun from which my eye never strayed night or day? Was that why you pushed me so hard to take up art, knowing that that break in the clouds heralded my hand’s transmutation into the light you extinguished the day I was born? No, you couldn’t have known.
So let me tell you. I was fifty already, in a relationship about to unravel like every relationship before it as soon as I’d seen what there was to see and boredom set in. Yet the man in question would help me make the connection between my life’s beginnings and its sadness by recommending I see his therapist; I was tired of the struggle life had turned out to be for no apparent reason. Using a deceptively simple technique, the psychologist took me back into my distant past. With eyes closed, I felt you reject my body even as my soul arrived with its wealth of joy. I wasn’t the right gender: I was a girl, a girl and a consciousness, pure incarnate consciousness, like all babies being born. No one truly realizes that, unless their spirit has been wakened. The bolt of lightning was so blinding that the child shut down; my stomach aches still, Papa, at the thought …
Some will say that moment was of little importance, including you, had I reproached you. My shield held high, armour encasing my entire being, I thought you would deny the truth after the words escaped my lips, “Was it a boy you wanted instead of me, Papa …? When I came into the world?”
You could never lie, your expression an uncompromising show of candour, at least with me. Taken aback, you said, “Who told you? How do you know?” I didn’t respond.
But none of that matters in the least, however contradictory that may sound; what I think doesn’t matter since life is fate’s true decider of destinies. Nothing to be said, nothing to be done, other than face squarely into the shower of stones chosen to lapidate me. And so it is for us all, every single one of us. Some have an easier time of it though, why is that?
This need to talk to you, no matter where you are or whether you still exist. To share the unbearable with you, Papa, because on this day of total annihilation, I have no one else to turn to.
A rattle accompanied his breath in and out, a harsh wheezing in his chest, his burning skin reaching frightening temperatures. The child’s mother gathered together fleece-lined clothing from the baby’s tiny room and called to her husband out tinkering in the garage: “Quick, start the car!”
The neighbour would come for the baby’s big sister, well-behaved enough to stay home alone a few minutes while, panic-stricken, the child’s parents barely took time to shrug on warm clothes. The child’s mother almost slipped on the steps down from the verandah with him wedged against her.
The on-call physician at the clinic was not the doctor who had saved her child at birth two months earlier. That didn’t bode well for what was to follow; the man had a reputation for carrying out only cursory exams and minimizing his patients’ symptoms — in short, he was not well-liked by the locals. The nurse at the reception desk helped the child’s mother undress the baby then placed a thermometer under his arm; she grimaced at the number shown. The doctor palpated the inert child, lifted his eyelids, opened his mouth and, shining a small pen light, took a quick look. His diagnosis struck, its force as brutal as a fist to the solar plexus, cutting off all breath, “There’s nothing for it but to hope the fever breaks on its own, if it isn’t already too late.”
Winter invaded the child’s mother’s heart. Her hands shook as she dressed the baby. The nurse helped, muttering through clenched teeth as though in a fury, “Hurry home and bathe him in ice water …”
With a shattered glance, the child’s mother nodded, gathered him up and ran to catch up with her husband by the exit. She resisted her sudden impulse to lay the baby naked in the snow outside the hospital. The child’s father ignored every stop sign on the drive home; in this northern village, few cars were out at night. He left his wife to her task, already resigned to the fact that death would take the child it had stalked since birth, leaving nothing but a fleeting burst of light, joy amputated at its source and fear like a ball and chain around the father’s ankle. In despair, he returned to his workshop, laid his head on folded arms and unleashed his anger, his grief. The child’s mother filled the sink to the rim with cold water, threw in a bag of ice from the freezer, then lifted him from the counter where he lay motionless, touched her lips to his forehead and submerged him in its icy coldness. Still no response: she pushed back the terror exploding inside her, refused to give up, reined in her panic and the howl that had been galloping through her chest ever since
the doctor’s insane pronouncement. She spoke to her child, “You can do it, I’m here for you, my baby … come on now … come back to me.”
Her fingers could barely tolerate the freezing cold, she had to keep switching hands to hold the baby’s head out of the water. With eyes closed, he looked to be asleep. Again she touched her lips beneath the line of damp, dark hair, wedged the baby against her hip, water spraying the floor, pawed through the freezer, grabbed another bag of ice that she threw into the sink, then immersed his inanimate body once again.
The clock struck one. Was the dark of night about to steal away her angel’s life, along with the little time granted for their love? She placed her mouth on his temple, inhaled deeply without thinking, perhaps inhaling his fever. His skin no longer consumed by fire, she enveloped him in a towel. The soft spot on his crown pulsated gently, rising at increasingly regular intervals; her child sighed softly. She picked up the rectal thermometer, inserted and removed it: 37.5 degrees … She clutched her son to her and, her blouse soaked from her leaking breasts, threw on a wool blanket and walked to the rocking chair, humming a tune. Scarcely burgeoning as he was, he cloaked her heart in hoarfrost. She uncovered him, wrapped her fingers around his feet, kissed the tiny seashells on his toes, basked in her child as in the setting sun. She wept quiet tears and watched over him till dawn; cutting through the wonder, an intuition was born during that long night’s watch that he would be her wound, she would have to battle to keep him with her, to defend him against the worst of all enemies.
I went to see my doctor, told him about my headaches, my insomnia; he seemed upset to hear what had happened because his friend, my brother, hadn’t mentioned a word. Mon père, death is such a hard subject to broach that sometimes people say nothing because if they opened the hatch to that raging sea of tears, how would they ever stop the deluge? He listened, told me that in my place he would have had just as many health issues, counselled me not to be alone or at least to surround myself with caring people.