Jean-François Beauchemin
from Assembling the Dawn
[La fabrication de l’aube]
Translated from French by Jessica Moore
One day, I died. It was towards the middle of summer and the sky was perfectly blue—this is one of the clearest memories I have of that day. I’ve always asked myself, “Why did this happen at a moment when the whole expanse of sky seemed to turn away from misfortune?” I remember, too (although much less clearly), arriving at the first hospital, how slow the nurses were at relieving my pain, and the insults I hurled at them. And also, eventually, I remember my ambulance ride to a second more specialized hospital, because at that point I had taken a turn for the worse. It was there in that ambulance that I was filled—for the first time in my life—with the absolute certainty of my imminent death. It’s a strange experience that has very little to do with what we usually imagine. You’re going to die, that’s all. There’s no time to be sad, nor even really to be afraid. In the urgency of the moment you have the curious impulse to gather up images, perhaps to pack—in the midst of catastrophe—a kind of suitcase, as though you were going away and suddenly realized that, at the end of the path, the plane was waiting only for you to take off. So to the kind ambulance attendant who held my hand and tried to comfort me with his words, I said, “I have four brothers and a sister, their names are Jacques, Pierre, Jean-Luc, Benoît, and Christiane. Three of them are older than me, two younger. Jean-Luc, Christiane and Benoît have children. Jacques just bought a new car. Pierre is a photographer. All of them wear glasses.” Why these obsessive details? Maybe because I felt the need to embody, through my words, these people whom I loved so dearly, to give them flesh and life, there, in that wailing ambulance, calling them to a certain existence at the very moment when I felt my own life escaping me at lightning speed. I also said, “I must tell you about Manon,” and in a clipped voice, segmented by blades of pain, I spoke of my wife. I don’t remember much about the description I gave, but I can still hear the words of the attendant when I finally stopped talking: “You’re a lucky man,” he said. And in a way, it was true. Despite the hundred knives tearing at my belly, I was lucky: I had lived on earth for forty-four years, sixteen of them with a woman who always put others before herself. I wanted to linger on this for a moment, to see again in my thoughts a little of the time I was convinced was coming to an end. But I also felt I had to prepare myself, now—I didn’t want to enter into death so hastily, without at least having taken a few minutes to bid goodbye to this world I would never see again. I had called up and then imprinted in myself the faces of those I loved. Now, at long last, in this vehicle that might well become my tomb, I needed to come face to face with myself. I had been alone my whole life, and had desired this solitude. Very early on I understood that there was something in the company of my fellows that didn’t suit me: despite all my efforts, that garment did not sit right on my shoulders. Still, I hoped to find some purpose, some raison d’être in work, studies, and the accumulation of money—this frenetic race that life in society demands of us. Childhood and adolescence had passed, and then the time of adulthood had come—and still I didn’t see why such agitation was necessary. For a long time I believed that the real meaning of solitude was found not in isolation—the distance of one body in relation to others—but rather in this profound contrast between self and everyone else. But at the moment when I felt that my end had come, death gave a whole new weight to the solitude I thought I knew so well. The nearness of my own end showed me the desert that is created within, surely within all of us, by our fate as perishable beings. Today I know that this desert is made of neither sand nor stones, that the wind does not blow, that no plant sends down its roots, that no animal finds refuge there and that there is no sky to shine above it. In that land, a strange silence reigns, worlds away from the talkative solitude that had been mine up until then. I went forward into that landscape that foretold of another one, darker yet, and perhaps even more impatient to receive me. How does one slip into the beyond? This inner absorption into which I plunged allowed me, oddly, to escape myself: suddenly I wanted to see the sky, the sky whose contours I had studied so many times, its corridors and cascades, its planes and suspended worlds. So when the ambulance finally stopped—I’m not sure if I dreamed this—and just before entering the hospital, I asked if they would let me look at the sky for a moment. It was evening and the air rang with the insistent song of insects. Children were playing on the sidewalk a little ways away. The first stars appeared. Life went on, without me, it already seemed. Then they pushed the stretcher into Emergency, and I realized that not once had I ever imagined a continuation beyond the end of my days, a life after life, as they say. Comparing death to a journey is strange. You’d have to believe very strongly in something far greater than yourself in order to see death as a passage into another place, or at least another reality. I have little to say about this. At a certain point on the way to the hospital I thought of my mother, who had died three years earlier, and then of my father, who had also passed on, just last autumn. Was I on my way to meet them? In order to believe this, I would have needed a particular predisposition of heart. And maybe my devotion to this magnificent, terrible world where I had lived for more than four decades was too great: it’s true, reality was never sufficient, but still I could not convince myself that it extended beyond its own borders. In a sort of movement tuned to the imperatives of existence, I had always believed in the authority of love. I had loved many people deeply. Among them, my mother, whom I loved as a well-digger loves the earth. In this was the fecund joy of the man who delves into things and thereby quenches his thirst—not for water, but rather for a kind of verticality; because my mother always, in all circumstances, rather than collapsing, drew support from foundations that the earth itself seemed to dedicate to her. I had drawn some of this quiet strength from her. On the very day of which I speak, this solidity served me still and kept me, at least briefly, from crumbling beneath the weight of my misfortune. Still, I was convinced that my mother was entirely at rest beneath the grass of the little cemetery. And so it seemed to me that even love did not authorize the belief in a spilling over of our days into the beyond, or in that journey of a soul towards a place from which none has ever returned to prepare the way. I once heard author Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt tell the story of a singular experience he had had, while traveling on foot through the desert with some friends. At a certain point, Schmitt went ahead, stopping here and there to contemplate the landscape, an escarpment, or an unusually shaped stone. He soon realized that he had lost trace of his companions. He retraced his steps, looked everywhere for their tracks, and called for help, all in vain. Night fell. Resigned, he sat down at the foot of a rock, buried himself in sand so he wouldn’t freeze, and then, preparing to live out the most terrifying hours of his life, fixed his troubled eyes on the countless stars that appeared, one by one. That night—which was surely one of the most exultant nights that have ever been—turned out to be the first in his life as a believer. Indeed, it was in this desert, alone at the heart of the glacial night, body joined with the earth, that a kind of proof of the existence of God came to him. I wish I could say the same. I would have liked, as did Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt and thousands of others, to experience a revelation. It seemed to me that those who had faith possessed a certain quietude that had nearly always been denied to me. My sense of peace, more earthly, more organic, sprang from a different fountain: that of the patient body, of the nonchalant nature, anticipating nothing more than the passage of days. I would have liked to have possessed the same faith as those who felt within them the bloom of a consciousness that was, if not higher, at least closer to the mysteries of the world. But I never accepted the enigma in the beauty of things: I searched, and hardly ever looked beyond the world for the explanation for its miracle. If God ever had a thought for me in this endless quest, he (or she?) never let me know it. Someone once said, “You’re looking too hard for God not to find him.” But where, then, would I find him? If he had still not shown himself, even in this wailing ambulance, where the hell was I supposed to look? In death? Who would want a god who only existed in death? Older people especially urged me to pray. Suddenly it occurred to me that all my life I had been praying without being aware of it: the hours that I spent measuring the sky and its stars, being moved by the melancholy gaze of animals, walking in the night, writing, nearly always putting the best of myself into love, feeling irked by the mess of people’s coexistence, all of this inclined me toward contemplation. The idea that God would only show himself to us via hidden, impenetrable channels made me angry. I didn’t want a god of guessing games. I wanted him sitting at my table, sharing my weariness and responding clearly to my questions: What is inside the heart? What is death? How should we live? In the countryside where our house stood, deer would sometimes venture right up to the windows. It seemed to me that I saw in their inquisitive eyes more religion than I had found in most churches. Perhaps it was that God dwelt within these shy and voiceless animals, for whom the company of humans was so rare. Perhaps the deer, in coming so close to the house, were trying to inoculate me with some germ of faith. The pact I had made one day with nature will not come as a surprise. Every fleeing animal, each branch that seemed to have climbed the sky, every fern chiseled by some unknown master’s hand, and every rain that came to cleanse the earth seemed to me to contain a promise. My whole life was the container for this promise. These things came back to me as I lay on the stretcher and in my agony heard faintly, as through a sort of fog, the worried voices of the doctors who examined me; and I knew that, my whole life, all I had done was lend my ear to the great orchestra of the world. Now, as I felt my body closing in, and imagined that the last of the cords holding me to this place were breaking, I thought again of my wife, my brothers, and my sister. Never again would I see the mountain behind our house, nor the deer, nor the trees so close to the sky. It seemed clear that I would never know the conclusion of the oath made by the deer, the trees, and the mountain. But as I went forward into death, I carried with me the image of those who brought me some consolation in spite of this.