Read Online Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon - Free Book Online Page A

Joseph was twenty-three years old at the time and Marie-Nicole was twenty-one.
    Together they had gone through all those years of study and the discovery of autonomy in a world that seemed to belong completely to them and offer them a thousand guarantees of hope and success. Marie-Nicole was as much a part of Joseph as life itself, and until his return from Ireland broken and devastated, he had believed that was what love was: that life, easy, loving but without passion, he had with Marie-Nicole, his faithful companion and confidant.
    After his return from Ireland, things had fallen apart between them. The last year in Paris and the return to Montreal by way of Italy and New York had been a nightmare, until Joseph’s breakdown in the winter of 1968. Marie-Nicole had at first decided to leave Joseph for an entire year, “to take a break,” she had announced, “and to find myself. To see who I am. To take stock of my life.” Joseph had had no choice but to accept this decision, which was expressed with irresistible force.
    With that “final” letter, which he knew by heart, Joseph was faced with a
fait accompli
. There could be no more discussion or delay. His faithful confidant did not even give the reasons behind her “irrevocable decision.” She had “suffered so much from the loss of your love.” She said he was “a dreamer caught between your allconsuming work and the painful memory of the impossible love of an Irish cousin.” Marie-Nicole “no longer loved” him. She was leaving him, walking out of his life. Joseph, who, without really thinking about it, had always seen himself as perfectly decent, was tormented by those words. Without Marie-Nicole, his life at first seemed to him like a huge chasm that he would have to cross on a tightrope suspended between two precipices. He felt a dizziness, a nausea in his body and his soul.
    Then Véronique had come into his life like a miracle – a strange, disturbing miracle. Love regained had a previously unsuspected power that gave him giant wings, but it did not take away that dizziness of his whole being. One night when Véronique was sleeping peacefully in his arms, Joseph said to himself – and this thought calmed him –
If dizziness is my lot, I will take hold of it and conquer it, building my life on its power.

IV
    She was lying in her bed in a
nightgown in the morning
when they found her dead, her
eyes closed, her head on her bare
arm in the pretty pose in which
she usually slept. Just that, and
nothing more.
    Georges Walter,
Les pleurs de Babel
    Joseph had told Dr. Laporte – and then Véronique – his story with his Irish cousin Irene.
    It had happened during the summer of 1966, when he had gone to Ireland by himself to meet the cousins on his father’s side who had remained there. He had decided to reconnect with the Gaelic part of his origins, as he told Marie-Nicole, to “meet the hidden side of my destiny.”
    At first, he had found the train trip across England fascinating, and southern Ireland, which was new to him, captivating. Then, after the initial images, he had discovered the extreme poverty, the misery of the villages in County Cork, where his cousins lived.
    However, he had been received with an exuberant hospitality that was completely unfamiliar to him. On the first evening, they had all gathered at the little house of his most well-off cousin – who owned two cows, a pig, some chickens and turkeys, and a field of potatoes – to welcome the cousin from America, their arms laden with food and their spirits overflowing with affection, laughter, stories and songs. They had celebrated finding Joseph again with glasses of whisky and beer until the wee hours of the morning, and he had gone to sleep at dawn, drunk and euphoric. He woke up the next day lying fully dressed on an old mattress on the ground beside his bags, between the kitchen and the adjoining