images

By Louise Bouchard and Christine Tipper

In a letter that she writes to a certain Théodore, the narrator in Images evokes a tumultuous period in her life: her adolescence. During this period, filled with anxiety and panic, she found help and comfort from Dorothée, a young woman barely older than her, who helped her escape her nightmare existence. What was the young Isaac so afraid of at the time? And why is she now remembering the terrifying events of her youth? Images is about the fear of dying, the pull death has on us, and how we seek the help and comfort of others in an effort to escape this nightmare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781550719345

Book preview

translator

part one

chapter 1

The fear is overpowering. So overpowering. Sometimes I can no longer move. I remain lying down in fear. I can hardly breathe. If Someone came now, if he saw me in this state, he’d be moved, he’d feel pity. He’d take me on his lap and we’d form a pietà. I’d play dead. I’d be the body. But he doesn’t come. He doesn’t catch me in the clutches of terror during his absence. He doesn’t put a stop to it. Abandonment. He doesn’t stop it. Not the fear. Not the agony. He doesn’t show himself. So I remain prostrate, almost dead, as if I already could hear his footsteps in the corridor.

You were right, Theodore, I can’t live here. But in my mind it’s more simple than that: I can’t live. I’m sending you a few pages written while in the depths of despair. Don’t think for a minute that they are meant for you. Don’t get angry. I’m always speaking to Someone behind you. Don’t forget that.

Yesterday, I had the idea to write to him. That’s a bad sign. No doubt I’m about to commit an act of folly. When I write a letter, it’s because I’m at my lowest point. Yes, when I give in to the desire to write, I’m close to insanity, at its door. I enter. Familiar places, nothing but familiar places. It happened to me before; very early on, it happened to me … The adolescent in me was still continuing her oeuvre, and Someone, God, hadn’t even reached 30! That particular time the letter was written in green ink, because green had suddenly become very important. If Someone remembers it, if he’s kept it as a memory, he has never said anything to me. Perhaps he mistakes it for a dream. It had been written in the book of dreams that I kept then. I needed to try and capture something when everything was escaping me, first of all my sanity and my life, and also the dreams that surged forth in such numbers and spread out around me, even remained during the day. I was delirious. Very quietly. I said nothing. I’ve never mentioned it. Amongst my friends, they no doubt noticed something, those who were accustomed to it, used to it, but they kept quiet. I was a novice and they handled me carefully. Around me, eyes were closed. It was the first time, yet nothing surprised me. I seemed to recognize it. It was a benediction. It was like a nice dream.

At the time of the worst fears, during the unbearable times, I was suddenly reassured, consoled. It was like a nice dream. Why am I so afraid today when I sense its imminent return?

At that time, Someone had taken the name Dorothée, but I called her, my God, Rose; sometimes, for no reason, I called her Rose. She was a small redhead who took my hand to cross Avenue du Parc, although it wasn’t at all necessary to do so. She didn’t ask the impossible of me; it didn’t occur to her to test me. And I walked calmly around town. Next to her, I took a break from the fear. It was allowed. It was understood. My life was holding on by a thread; she could quite easily have snapped it, even by accident; but that didn’t happen. She didn’t want to. She found all sorts of ways to keep me alive. Once, I arrived at her place as night fell. It was the beginning of winter and dusk had caught me out. I rang, then knocked and knocked. She had to walk down a long corridor and then unlock the door. She ran, she hurried. But it took too long. She arrived almost too late. The attack had started. She managed to pull me out like you pull a struggling drowning person out of the water. Then she went outside with me and made me go round the building to find a door that opened down the east side of the house. This one is never locked, she’d said, now you know, you don’t need to be afraid.

Sometimes, she leaned over me, even though she wasn’t very tall. She leaned all the same. She took my hands in hers to talk to me. I don’t know what she said to me. I found it difficult to listen when spoken to. I was too far away, separated by the images that besieged me. I was elsewhere, but still I understood, because she was so young, so solid, that it meant: Calm down, calm down, you’ll come back. And I thought: If Dorothée had given me life, it would be more firmly attached to me. It could not so easily be taken away. I wouldn’t risk losing it at any moment. The life I had already was very fragile, brittle. And as Dorothée couldn’t give me another one, she seemed to be happy with it and she tried to save it. I didn’t think that she had anything else to do. She seemed to be completely occupied by it and, despite my distance, my faraway distractions, I was moved.

Once, she lent me a book for a week, one that she liked, one she rarely separated from. She must have known that I was then incapable of reading because of the images that formed like a barrier between me and the words. The few passages that passed through the delusions arrived deformed like an alarm clock in the middle of a dream and they troubled me inordinately. I no longer turned the pages. For hours, I continued to cry over blurred lines. The words that reached me seemed to be the last smothered calls, tired of a world I was moving away from and that would soon give up trying to hold on to me. That day, I left Dorothée, peaceful and reassured. I took the book that I would not read; I held it tenderly as if life had slipped inside its covers. Surely, I was going to live another week. Death would not strike me, was pushed aside for a few days. I would never leave. I couldn’t disappear with a book that didn’t belong to me. It was impossible. I would never have done such a thing.

Another time, Dorothée invited herself to my place and found me wrapped in woollens like a mummy in its bandages. She brought a small blackboard on which horizontal and vertical chalk lines were intersected with words. She wanted to explain to me what was happening. She started to talk. But her efforts seemed pointless. It was obvious she was wasting her time. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, especially not on abstract ideas. And my memory was not so much malfunctioning as overflowing, full. It was too full. It was spewing out my memories all over the place; even my treasured ones were being rejected. It couldn’t hold anything more. So what was the point of trying to teach me something? Dorothée’s blackboard disappointed me. I needed to be saved from dying; why did she want to teach me about this madness as a subject that should be learnt? Anyway, nothing bad happened; nothing happened to me. I was not suffering. I wasn’t ill except from fear. Fear was inside me; fear is inside me and I allowed it to grow too much. I left it to its own devices, and now it overpowers me. It pushes into my bones, my flesh. It drags me to bridges, rail tracks, inside tunnels dark with desire. It’s a desire inside me that I’d forgotten and that forced itself upon me in the past, and it has returned again violently.

The blackboard didn’t help me. Dorothée had definitely got it wrong. Yet the voice was that of someone who knows; I clung to it like a life raft. Within it there was an understanding of the future, the assurance of a fortune teller. An understanding of the ending travelled through her voice. She gave my life the appearance of a story, a tale that she had read and knew the ending, an ending towards which she could lead me calmly, with her gentle and assured voice that did not shake. It was no doubt for that reason that she’d gone to the trouble of drawing, of preparing the blackboard. So she could speak with that kind of voice, using the sort of tone that one uses to tell a child a story, a story that is known by heart. Through her voice, Dorothée gave me the impression that she was ahead of me in my life, as if she had already followed that particular path. She guided me; she was in front of me. I was not lost. So I wasn’t completely lost. And what was waiting for me was neither