Against the Wind Read Online Free Page B

about this and that, avoiding the main subject that had brought us together.
    The psychiatrist had set up the schedule of appointments with Papa. He would see Mama and me for the first session. After that, he would see me alone, for as many sessions as necessary. Then he would see us together again.
    Since Papa couldn’t leave his practice, he had talked with him on the telephone for a long time. I found out later that he had spoken of schizophrenia. His colleague “had taken the matter very seriously,” Mama told me many years later.
    We went to our first appointment. Mama was nervous. I was curious about this turn my life had suddenly taken and, all in all, happy for this time off from the boarding school routine.
    The psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Gilles Lévesque. He was courteous and direct when he received us in his luxurious office, with its windows overlooking the river and walls covered with magnificent paintings. I felt I was in familiar territory. Looking at this art that was completely new to me, I realized that my visions were a sorry sight in comparison. It was “abstract art,” he told me at our second session when he saw me speechless with wonder. He was a “lover of abstract art” and he “collected the Automatists.”
    He very soon told me I could call him “Doctor Gilles,” which surprised and pleased me, because I was used to speaking to all adults formally, except for Grandmama, Papa and Mama. I even called my father “Sir.” As for the priests at school, if they had been aware of this “liberty,” they would certainly not have encouraged these “profane” meetings. At school, addressing any representative of authority by his first name lost you three conduct marks on your report card.Ten marks and you’d forfeit the right to leave the school grounds for the next month.
    After the usual questions, Doctor Gilles asked Mama to explain what had led us to consult him. Mama talked about my “plummeting” academic performance, my visions or hallucinations, and the possibility of schizophrenia Papa had mentioned. She went back to the catastrophe, recounted it in tears, and said that the ordeal had been too much for such a young boy, that it was still a horror to her, day and night, “as if the sky had fallen, as if the ground had opened up beneath our feet and had plunged us into an unfathomable abyss.”
    Doctor Gilles, Mama and I spent the rest of the hour talking about this and that. I was surprised he did not dwell on the catastrophe, and I dimly grasped, without yet being able to put it into words, that what Mama had gone through was probably a lot more painful, that being raped was perhaps more devastating than killing. But I didn’t communicate these confused thoughts. I would have had a hard time expressing my complicated feelings in the words we had to use there if we wanted to “heal the sickness of the mind.”
    Then there were the sessions where I was alone with Doctor Gilles. There were only two of them. “That was enough to make a diagnosis,” he told Mama at the fourth and last appointment. Our two sessions alone were spent talking about anything and everything – at least that’s my memory of them, but no doubt there was a logic in the conversation that escaped me at the time – and playing games like Parcheesi and Chinese checkers, and best of all, with me drawing and painting whatever was in my head. I filled lots of large sheets of paper with my visions, using all kinds of different materials – pastels, gouache, charcoal, pencil – one after another, randomly, chaotically, in the exhilaration of spontaneous creation.
    I didn’t know that these pictures were “beautiful,” as Mama said ecstatically when Doctor Gilles showed them to her. To me, those snatches of my visions did not nearly do justice to what I had really seen and what remained with me like