Augustino and the Choir of Destruction by Marie-Claire Blais Page A

architect when I collected and consolidated them with my camera eye, put them into a structure and aesthetic ordering, that was before Charly, when I was with Jean-Mathieu and dignified, I used to say, welcome to my house and my table everybody, it wasn’t Charly adding something to my drink back then, it was the euphoria from an intoxication I really benefited from, drops of a deadlier poison; ah yes, a feeling of guilt I had never had before, what wasn’t yet in my nature became so, actions, even those I hadn’t performed, were prejudicial, the boat Henrietta Marie with all those drowned aboard began appearing in my dreams, why had the worthy, light-hearted, complacent woman in me never before had this impression of letting others down, this poison was the shadow of all my thoughts, I could have told Charly, enough, I won’t hear any more, but I didn’t, perhaps my whole started to go tip with the Henrietta Marie as it went down amid the waves, the memory of the falconer’s return and of the child, the little girl that we dropped from the boat at sea, my first husband and I, there you go, we don’t want you, you have to be gone from your mother’s womb before you are viable, this was neither the time nor the epoch to be born, quick, let’s throw her overboard, for many women abortion was butchery in those days, I was hatefully indifferent, I felt mutilated but indifferent, true or false, we went out so much it was dizzying, shallow, cruel amusements, hunting gazelle from an open convertible, deer captured dying on the railway tracks, either this is how we thought of it or this is what he said, this is not the time nor the epoch, dark days, a fascist era in Europe, darkness over the earth, the disillusioned unemployed, the hungry everywhere waiting for bread, lines of men and women in the streets hopeful for what never comes, desperate farmers, women sitting on barrels in front of tents, young immigrants already so tired in their cotton dresses, worn down by poverty, cold and hungry November days, the brutal forces advancing everywhere on women and children, we had no choice, that’s just the way it was, everything went too fast, perhaps we simply had no time, and in the darkness there was nothing else to be done, the child was not to be born, come to grips with it, yes, those drops Charly put in my glass every evening weren’t good for me, the child, one of the wrecks, the Henrietta Marie in the sea, said to me at night, Mummy, I can’t get back up to the surface, help me, and I answered, it isn’t me, it’s this darkness all around, there’s nothing I can do, I never wanted a child to hear the explosions in Pearl Harbor while eating his pancakes in the morning, nor to run in fear through the rice paddies, no, no, I did not want that, the Pacific waters may be far away, but we cannot cut ourselves off from others in a few instants of fear, the sand of the bay, the banks, the keys extending all the way to the ocean, and the entire town of Aiea were covered with corpses, was this a time to be born, when life itself was scarcely viable, I could not think about it nor about all those other embryos that mothers were getting rid of, so many wrecks to surround the Henrietta Marie , small hands and feet malformed, not yet perfected, undulating on the waves, true or false, I could not think about them but saw them in my dreams, when a voice fraught with indecision said, regretfulness is not for you, you may have given up on architecture, but you can still defend your country, where now women can learn jobs usually meant only for men, airplane pilot, marine lieutenant, and who knows what else, but I was forgetting the little one, her life hardly viable, I didn’t have the nobility of Justin, whose book I’d later discuss with him, a book that came out amid controversy and which I judged harshly, I envied these scientists with the secrets that went into building their