dotted characters. Josette never knew why she was getting so fat or why she woke from a deep sleep to discover that she was thin. She only knew that Aunt Four’s adopted son ran away, like her, as soon as he could. He criss-crossed the same alleys at the speed of light, holding his sandals so that his feet would feel the heat of the pavement, the texture of excrement, the sharpness of a piece of broken bottle. He ran all through his childhood. And all through his childhood we other children, young and old, ten, fifteen, even twenty of us, patrolled the neighbourhood every month. One day we all came home empty-handed, as did the servants and the neighbours. He left our lives along the same trail he’d arrived on, leaving as his only souvenir a scar above his mother’s pubic area.
M y son Henri runs away too. He runs to the St. Lawrence River on the other side of a highway, of a boulevard, a street, a park, another street. He runs to the water where the smooth rhythm and the constant movement of the waves hypnotize him, offer him calm and protection. I’ve learned to be a shadow in his shadow so I can follow him without upsetting him, without harassing him. Once, though, it took just one second of distraction and I saw him dash in front of the cars, excited and full of life as never before. I was staggered by the juxtaposition of his happiness, so rare, so unexpected, and my own anguish at the thought of his body thrown up in the air above a fender. Should I close my eyes and slow down to avoid witnessing the impact, to survive? Motherhood, my own, afflicted me with a love that vandalized my heart, puffed it up, deflated it and expelled it from my rib cage when I saw my older son, Pascal, show up out of the blue, and fling his brother onto the freshly cut grass of the boulevard median. Pascal landed on his brother like an angel, with chubby little thighs, candy-pink cheeks and a tiny thumb sticking up in the air.
I cried with joy as I took my two sons by the hand, but I cried as well because of the pain of that other Vietnamese mother who witnessed her son’s execution. An hour before his death, that boy was running across the rice paddy with the wind in his hair, to deliver messages from one man to another, from one hand to another, from one hiding place to another, to prepare for the revolution, to do his part for the resistance, but also, sometimes, to help send a simple love note on its way.
That son was running with his childhood in his legs. He couldn’t see the very real risk of being picked up by soldiers of the enemy camp. He was six years old, maybe seven. He couldn’t read yet. All he knew was how to hold tightly in his hands the scrap of paper he’d been given. Once he was captured, though, standing in the midst of rifles pointed at him, he no longer remembered where he was running to, or the name of the person the note was addressed to, or his precise starting point. Panic muted him. Soldiers silenced him. His frail body collapsed on the ground and the soldiers left, chewing their gum. His mother ran across the rice paddy where traces of her son’s footprints were still fresh. In spite of the sound of the bullet that had torn space open, the landscape stayed the same. The young rice shoots continued to be cradled by the wind, imperturbable in the face of the brutalityof those oversized loves, of the pains too muted for tears to flow, for cries to escape from that mother who gathered up in her old mat the body of her son, half buried in the mud.
I held back my cries so as not to distort the hypnotic sound of the sewing machines standing one behind the other in my parents’ garage. Like my brothers and me, my cousins sewed after school for pocket money. With eyes focused on the regular, rapid movement of the needles, we didn’t see one another, so that very often our conversations were actually confessions. My cousins were only ten years old, but they already had a past to recount because they’d been
M y son Henri runs away too. He runs to the St. Lawrence River on the other side of a highway, of a boulevard, a street, a park, another street. He runs to the water where the smooth rhythm and the constant movement of the waves hypnotize him, offer him calm and protection. I’ve learned to be a shadow in his shadow so I can follow him without upsetting him, without harassing him. Once, though, it took just one second of distraction and I saw him dash in front of the cars, excited and full of life as never before. I was staggered by the juxtaposition of his happiness, so rare, so unexpected, and my own anguish at the thought of his body thrown up in the air above a fender. Should I close my eyes and slow down to avoid witnessing the impact, to survive? Motherhood, my own, afflicted me with a love that vandalized my heart, puffed it up, deflated it and expelled it from my rib cage when I saw my older son, Pascal, show up out of the blue, and fling his brother onto the freshly cut grass of the boulevard median. Pascal landed on his brother like an angel, with chubby little thighs, candy-pink cheeks and a tiny thumb sticking up in the air.
I cried with joy as I took my two sons by the hand, but I cried as well because of the pain of that other Vietnamese mother who witnessed her son’s execution. An hour before his death, that boy was running across the rice paddy with the wind in his hair, to deliver messages from one man to another, from one hand to another, from one hiding place to another, to prepare for the revolution, to do his part for the resistance, but also, sometimes, to help send a simple love note on its way.
That son was running with his childhood in his legs. He couldn’t see the very real risk of being picked up by soldiers of the enemy camp. He was six years old, maybe seven. He couldn’t read yet. All he knew was how to hold tightly in his hands the scrap of paper he’d been given. Once he was captured, though, standing in the midst of rifles pointed at him, he no longer remembered where he was running to, or the name of the person the note was addressed to, or his precise starting point. Panic muted him. Soldiers silenced him. His frail body collapsed on the ground and the soldiers left, chewing their gum. His mother ran across the rice paddy where traces of her son’s footprints were still fresh. In spite of the sound of the bullet that had torn space open, the landscape stayed the same. The young rice shoots continued to be cradled by the wind, imperturbable in the face of the brutalityof those oversized loves, of the pains too muted for tears to flow, for cries to escape from that mother who gathered up in her old mat the body of her son, half buried in the mud.
I held back my cries so as not to distort the hypnotic sound of the sewing machines standing one behind the other in my parents’ garage. Like my brothers and me, my cousins sewed after school for pocket money. With eyes focused on the regular, rapid movement of the needles, we didn’t see one another, so that very often our conversations were actually confessions. My cousins were only ten years old, but they already had a past to recount because they’d been
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