Episode 01-II | La vie en rose

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Second Transmission | The Body

| PART ONE |

Sweden, 2010

Laurent & Armand

That I was heading to yet another island was not by chance, not in my life.

'No man is an island', goes John Donne's line.

But I might be -- to some extent. I was conceived on the tiny Île du Blanchomme in the Indian Ocean, and born on the fanciful resort island of Punaouilo in the Pacific Ocean, where I spent the only happy years of my childhood.

I was finally on my way. To visit he who had brought his best friend and the man he had loved -- to become my father -- and the half-sister he had despised -- who would be my mother -- together on that first of all islands in my life. My lost uncle, Armand, who now lived on an island himself, off the Swedish coast.

 The ferry would take me only to a nearby dock in Smögen. From there I would have to take a smaller boat to reach the tiny, more secluded island where he had his house. That journey reminded  me of my father's, thirty six years ago, headed to the Indian Ocean.

Standing on the deck with my eyes closed tight, I saluted the rising sun. I watched my inner darkness become increasingly pink, as the golden light broke across the horizon and through my eyelids.

It was a game I had been playing since I was a teenager, that of seeing colors inside myself. It helped me think that my personal darkness wasn't so impenetrable.

But that was as close as I ever got to seeing la vie en rose. At thirty five years old, I  thought I still hadn't found the man who would take me in his arms and make my life pink. Though, at that stage, I already fantasized that Fabrizio Caprice could be the one. Even after our first disastrous date at his apartment in Vice City. With the condition that he would leave his fiancé, of course. And those e-mails he had recently sent about his "crossing" gave me some hope.

If a family is like a building -- and sometimes, it's the only place where you can or might want to live, even if it is in ruins --, I had just started digging for the foundations of mine.

There had always been something missing in my life, from as far as I remember. 

As a child, it was just a feeling that I couldn't quite express. Until Catherine returned to France, leaving me behind in Punaouilo. Then, I could name it: I missed my mother. Later, when my father and I joined her, I started missing Punaouilo, the tropical island of my birthplace -- and the sea! And when Carlo left home, for years I missed him. Next, when together with Angelo I moved abroad, I should have missed France -- but I didn't. And when Angelo left me -- I almost died.

On that boat that took me along the picturesque coast of Sweden, I got a bit closer to understanding what I had missed longest wasn't any of the things I had lost along my life -- but the things that I had never had. 

I felt nostalgia for people I had never met, for the places I had never been -- but that, unconsciously, I knew should have belonged in my life. Like my grandfather Gaston and my uncle Armand -- the De Montbelle family branch that had been hidden from me.

Two years had gone by since that conversation with Carlo at the Nirvana Lounge. I had been trying to contact Armand, through his professional e-mail, on the phone in his office, by letter, but he always dismissed me. Until, all of a sudden, I got my appointment to meet him. Not at one of his offices around the world, not at the Chatêau de Montbelle that had been l'objet du désir of my grandmother Celeste, and that I wanted so much to visit -- but at my uncle's personal retreat on the idyllic Swedish coast.

That morning, at sunrise, quiet and relaxed on the deck, embraced by the salty breeze, I recalled the one thing I missed from France. I smiled an welcomed the memory that was sweet, colorful, perfumed and painful at once.

******

Behind our rural house in the French countryside, there had been a secluded lake. It was small enough that a blood-red bug flying among the reeds on the other margin could be spotted -- if I had my glasses on.

It was not until my father left home that I started exploring the neighborhood. It had looked dull and deserted to me. Woods and fields and hills and mountains stretching in monotonous beauty, as far as the eye could reach. But without Carlo, our empty house seemed even more boring and desolate than the landscape around, and at thirteen years old I became an explorer of the countryside.

My mother was often absent, teaching in Belgium at the time. Or locked into the painting studio that she had converted into her own writing corner. And once in there, she had nothing to remind herself of her son's existence, so that I had long hours to wander around the fields in solitude, without being missed. 

Once I found the lake behind the hills, it became my hideaway. I would go there everyday -- and sometimes, even in the evenings too. I'd bring food and drinks and books and the notebooks where I wrote down stories and illustrated them. I lived the happiest hours of a couple of my teenage years there, reading, writing and drawing in seclusion.

I had been a loner since I arrived in France, but after the bullying at school, and my personal tragedy I became a boy full of fears, and never swam in that lake. Until one day I took Angelo with me, and before I could catch my breath, he had already undressed and jumped into the waters that, dark and deep, never revealed the bottom of the lake.

Catherine had bought the property where the lake was from its previous owner. Not because she loved the land, but because she thought it was good business. It was so cheap then, and its value had increased vertiginously with the years. She made good profit when she finally sold it.

But still, it was not my hideaway at the lake that I missed most. Though the house in ruins on its shores was so poetical and matched perfectly my mood, back then.  Ruins seemed very appropriate to depict that stage of my own life. Being as psychological as I may, I was probably trying to compensate my father's absence when I had fallen in love with my coach, who was twenty years older than me. He had simply ignored my ludicrous passes, and after him, there had come yet another older guy from the country club -- an affair that had led me into disaster. 

Neither was it the hidden lake itself that I missed. Everything that I had shared with Angelo, after he dumped me, became doomed, and so had the lake. Or perhaps it had been doomed even before that, for it was said that the reason why the land was sold so cheap, and the house left to crumble, was that the owner's wife had drowned in those waters. 

I wasn't so sure about that local legend of a foreign ghost, but I tended to believe that at least the part of the story that said the woman was Japanese must have been consistent. It was said that when her family fell in disgrace in Japan, and her brother committed harakiri, she had killed herself, too.

And the reason why I knew she was Japanese was the tree that would turn my life pink and peaceful every Spring from 1989 until 1994, when Angelo and I moved abroad.

One afternoon, I was at the lake when, my eyes wandering up a hill as I was looking for inspiration to finish a sentence, I saw a riveting blotch of pink in a scenery that was plainly green and gray from the trees and rocks. Being bored and yet full of energy, I closed my notebook, hid it in a trunk in the ruined house and decided to run uphill towards the intriguing pink. And that's the day when I met the sakura cherry tree.

I know, I should have written 'the day I found the tree', instead of 'met' -- but that cherry tree was a being with a soul. 

Not just an ordinary tree like all the others around her.

Obedient and respectful, I had dutifully submitted to my parents and teachers -- but before that cherry tree I felt something new, that I was not quite able to name at the time -- and that I wouldn't feel again until one decade later, when I met my first Buddhist master. 

Reverence.

I was breathless, and not because I had ran up the hill, as I stood still in front of the cherry tree. I had never seen anything more vivacious or beautiful. As I stood there, recomposing my breath, I realized the profusion of flowers gradually blossoming at once. It was like a prolonged explosion in slow motion, that I couldn't so much distinguish with my eyes -- but with my awareness. 

A shiver went up my spine, and I felt tears welling up as I slowly approached the tree, entering its soft cloud of heavenly perfume and delicate colors.

How could there be such a tranquil display of beauty, when my own life was a baffling torture, where I had lost track of myself? My father had left, and without his surveillance I felt defenseless. I suffered bullying and I fought it in silence. I hid it simply because revealing my struggles would only lead into further damnation. I fancied boys, and that what condemned me and legitimated the hate and despise falling upon me, I knew was actually my deepest, unchangeable truth. I managed fighting the boys that bullied me better than I did battling my own desire for those same boys. I judged myself sincerely guilty. My shame was complete and genuine. It took deep roots in my despair. 

"Is everything alright with you, Laurent?" Catherine had inquired, shortly after I quit the swim team. I was trying my best to hide the physical marks and the emotional scar that the encounter at the showers had left, and I was terrified when she had asked. I had not thought of an excuse to quit, and revealing the truth was opening up my shame and guilt. I decided to lie because I did not want to die at my mother's eyes. Having just turned fourteen, and living in a small rural community, coming out was not an option for me.

"A bien sur, maman." I avoided her stare. "Sometimes school is too hard for me. Too much homework, you know?" Trying daily to hide my sexuality had given me a scary ease to lie. "I need more time to study, instead of swimming." That's how I had justified my abrupt decision.

"You're old enough to know for yourself what's best for you, Laurent. If school is hard means you are being challenged, and then your education should be appropriate, I guess!" Nodding approvingly, she had ended our conversation and returned to her novel, the one she was either writing or reading.

I  had been carrying a question in my heart, when I first arrived at the top of the hill. 

WHY? I had silently yelled at the sakura tree. 

WHY do I have to be like this? My sexuality that painstakingly placed me off the curve was an ever present affliction.

WHY can't I change, for Heaven's sake? 

WHY does life has to feel like being my opponent, my enemy?

 WHY am I being punished? 

And WHY do I have to endure it all on my own? WHY?

I was not Saint Francis of Assissi and there was no almond tree to perform a miracle for me -- my Japanese cherry tree was the miracle itself.

Because there must have been a bird quietly sitting on the tree, that first day. I didn't notice it, but I'm convinced it must have been there. Having found refuge like myself, it probably was nested among the flowers. And it must have gotten scared when I did not scream, instead burying my cry for help deeper inside my soul. Could a bird have listened to my aggrieved heart? And it must have flown away, agitating the branches of the tree -- otherwise, how to explain that a rain of pink, perfumed petals, like a rain of blessings and balm, fell on me that memorable afternoon?

And the miracle, bear with me, was not that I was covered in perfumed pink. But that I was suddenly so happy! So joyful, exultant in the grimmest times of my adolescence. That first healing rain of smooth petals signaled towards the happiest days of my teenage years in France, that would soon start with Angelo.

And that's how a private ritual I would repeat every year began. 

By the end of winter I would already run up the hill to check whether the blossoms were coming, in anticipation, until it became fully alive again and the pink miracle would once more be staged. I would then daily visit the tree in adoration, seeking constant consolation, until the petals were all gone, and the cherries started growing. I preferred strawberries to cherries, and I knew I did not need to return to the tree until next Spring -- with another question in my heart.

I kept the cherry tree my secret. I tried to share it once with Angelo. I told him about the secret lake, and he had loved it. For all the years we spent together in France, we had never seen another person there. But the tree didn't move him.

"Why would I want to see a bloody tree? Don't we see many already? What is it so special about it?"

"I don't know..." I immediately retreated. "Nothing, actually."

"You're funny sometimes, Laurent. Or not the least funny, actually! Come on!" Angelo had jumped again into the cold waters of the lake we both loved.

Did I lend that tree a soul? 

I had no friends at the time. My heart was broken and still cracking open after Carlo had left. The affairs with older men I had tried to have at the country club had only opened more and deeper wounds. 

Or did the tree have the soul of the suicidal Japanese woman? In a period when I was myself daily contemplating suicide, had I somehow connected to her ghost?

Because I was sure she had planted the sakura tree. Or maybe, her husband had planted it in tribute to his deceased wife. Anyways, it must have been the sole Japanese cherry tree in that part of France at the time. Maybe it still is -- that is, if it still exists.

How did I know that the cherry tree had a soul?

Because from that first encounter, it answered my questions. Though sometimes it did not really answer them -- it just talked to me, in that delicate and subtle language of the cherry trees in blossom, of branches swaying and waving at me. I aspired the delicious perfume and I felt I was in the known.

And even when it wouldn't answer my questions, nor talk to me, it helped me to stay silent and concentrated, expectantly waiting for an answer. It was, perhaps, my first experience of meditation.

And it listened to me, too -- patiently listened to my pained heart. I used to cry in the bedroom, or even in my bathroom if Catherine was in the house and I was afraid that she'd listen to me -- but while alone my crying had easily turned into sobbing, under the protection of the cherry tree my tears had an unexpected cleansing quality, and I'd feel comforted.

It sheltered me, and saved me from my own will to end my life, as the blossoms murmured of promises and new hopes. It was the sakura cherry tree to carry me through another year, since I wanted to meet her yet another Spring -- just enough time for Angelo to enter my life and give it a new meaning and direction.

*****

My reverie ended with a click and slam of the door behind me, and I was back on the deck of the ferry boat. No longer a lonely teen cultivating suicidal thoughts in rural France, this was Sweden, and it was 2010. I had endured, and I had survived. I was on my way to meet my uncle Armand.

Inspired by my father, just that year I had been on two meditation retreats already. Yet, I still realized how easily abducted from the present I could be. My memories would drag me into the swamp of my past, where I'd drown in old sorrows and wounds -- but it was already a victory that the noise of a door could awaken me and bring me back to the present moment! 

Just in time to watch the tip of the sun break over the horizon.

With the corner of my eyes, I checked who had arrived on the deck.

And when I realized he was a tall, red-haired and good looking guy, I immediately became self-conscious. I turned and stared at him openly, just like he was staring in my direction.

Since the night I left Fabrizio's apartment in Vice City, when I had picked that Jason or Justin boy who had cried as I dumped him after we had fucked -- since then, I hadn't been with another guy. I hadn't paid attention to his name, like I had  instead delighted in his pretty bubble butt. He had been as young as myself when Angelo had dumped me, and his heartfelt tears had mirrored mine back then. I hadn't been heartbroken when I turned my back on him and walked out of the motel room, but later I did regret how I had treated Jason, or Justin -- and now, despite not knowing his name, I could not forget him.

So much time without sex was a world record to me! Since Angelo had broken up with me, and my recovery period having involved as many torrid encounters as I could have as a means to leave him behind and put some distance between us -- measured in beds, it seemed -- I had never sexually fastened for so many months. In fact, I had never fastened before.

I knew I wasn't going to do anything with that red-haired guy, but I still wanted something from him, as much as he seemed to be seeking something, too. A demonstration of our mutual attraction? The confirmation that I was attractive, and so was he? A recognition of the fact that we could make it, even if we wouldn't make it? The identification of ourselves as brothers in arms, who would love and not beat the other? 

In other times, I would have needed to take those forms of approval to a physical level to placate my own insecurity, and we should have sought the closest restroom, for I needed to profit from every chance to feel accepted when so often I had been rejected.

I no longer had the excuse that I was going to paint him afterwards, and turn him into memories and money. I knew I wasn't going to do anything with the guy, but I still wanted him to try -- just to reject him?

But what he did next was not some cheesy move like grabbing his crotch to indicate his intentions towards me. From guys who lifted their shirts to show off their chiseled abs, to others who would start opening their flies to indicate the urgent nature of their lust and the need to satisfy it, I had seen almost it all before. But not that one -- he just did this subtle movement with his chin, not indicating where the toilets we should be heading to were, but pointing towards the spectacle that hadn't stopped behind me.

And when I turned towards the horizon, I saw I had lost it.

The sun hadn't waited while I checked the hot guy and played with my expectations of what should and could happen between us.

The sun was already above the horizon, and though technically it could still be considered the sunrise, I knew I had lost its most magical moment -- and this realization delivered a powerful blow on me.

I wouldn't often think of myself as 'The Sunrise Son', but since Carlo had again shared the anecdote of my announced birth inspiring the famous song, it had become increasingly important as a symbol of renewal in my own life. 

But now, I had lost it. And like all the other times before that, I had lost it to another man. 

And I had lost that man, too -- when I turned to glance at the guy on the deck, he was nowhere to be seen anymore. He might have gone back inside without any noise this time... or he might have been a dream. An apparition, maybe -- as 'The Sunrise Son', I should have been an expert in ghostly manifestations at the sun up, shouldn't I?

And I was left alone on the deck, having missed the sunrise, having lost the guy.

But hadn't that been the tragedy of my whole life since I had met Angelo? I had given him the right and power to seduce and convince and talk me into satisfying his needs -- that's how we had both gone abroad, leaving France to study Journalism at Vice City. I had never dreamed about America, I had never cared about Journalism -- those were Angelo's dreams, but his life circumstances would never have allowed him to achieve any of that, not without me.

Once he hadn't needed me any longer, he had dumped me. And I found myself in a foreign country with no good friends -- and yet, I did not consider going back to France, where nothing awaited me but boredom and again submitting to my mother.

Why I had gone to Vice City in the first place? Because I had nothing better to do, nothing else to try. Having no dream or goal of my own, I had willingly embraced Angelo's. But at the end of our relationship I was left with nothing, back to the hollowness that had always been the core of my existence.

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Episode 89 | Listening to your silence

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Listening to my father, I concluded my mother had achieved what she had intended from the beginning. At the Île du Blanchomme still, she had started turning him into her servant, in all aspects. Even sexually -- and the correct word in this case is 'slave'.

 After all I had heard about her that evening, I wondered whether she would have been capable of denouncing Carlo. Hadn't she envisioned that possibility with her 'friend' from the Tax Administration, and set an strategy under course? But why get rid of my father like that, risking sending him to jail?

I did not have a watch, nor did Carlo -- in that matter it was indeed like father, like son. No matter the hour, I was feeling the urge to call Catherine in Russia and confront her about what I had learned. But I let my mobile rest dead in my pocket -- under those circumstances, it might have been the only appropriate way to torture her. How many times she must have tried to call me during that long evening?

"Honey, I don't know if this was such a good idea after all. You might get hurt again..." She had said over the telephone. It wasn't "such a good idea" just because it hadn't been hers, I thought. But I had nevertheless appreciated her concern -- to find out she was worried only about herself, and how Carlo's sincerity might destroy her carefully constructed story line, all based on lies. I was about to find more, and worse.

"I was aware that our fights were affecting you, son."

Catherine and Carlo had never, ever shouted at me, not even to reprimand me. But I recall my parent's screams and shouts at each other coming from their room next to mine, and then the sudden bang of a door, or more than one door -- if Catherine would retreat into the bathroom and Carlo should leave the room, and sometimes they did it concomitantly --, followed by a haunting silence.

And I remember that silence announced the tragedy that was to come, more than the screams. That heavy silence was the harbinger of my father's absence, and my own anxiety attacks.

"I tried to stay away from Catherine," Carlo continued with his recollections, "but she would come into my workshop to discuss the gipsy girl. I guess she had never expected I would cheat on her... and I want to stress I wasn't cheating on her! But she was obsessed with Jaella and her son. Finally, I contacted a lawyer to go through the process of asserting that the boy was not my son. No, Jair is not your brother, Laurent. And I didn't leave home to move in with another family."

"With my escape to England, this process of recognition, or actually the opposite, since that child was not mine, took even longer than expected. With the passing of years the stress between your mother and me eased into indiference, and we fell further apart. When at last the case was closed, she had already found another mate, as you well know..." Carlo stared at me, but I just nodded and made no comment, not even to encourage him to continue. Edoardo was an issue I was never willing to bring up. "And there was no going back to Catherine any more."

"But it is not true that I never called you, Laurent. I called home before crossing to England."

*****

"I want to talk to my son, Catherine! Now!" 

"I'm sorry, Carlo." They had fought so many times, but now that Carlo was away, Catherine felt very calm, and relieved. "But Laurent does not want to talk to you."

"I want to hear that from Laurent himself. Now let me talk to him, Catherine! You cannot do that to me..."

"What am I doing to you, Carlo?" 

"You cannot keep away me from my own son, Catherine... Please, let me talk to him!"

"Please do not call again today, Carlo! The police is still here. I am trying to convince them to leave before Laurent gets home. I have to go now. Bye!" And Catherine had not only hung up, but disconnected the telephone as well.

I called several times from Davez Drew's house in London, where I stayed for a few months before renting my own apartment and studio in the city. He and his girlfriend at the time, Layla, were very generous and patient with me. 

To Davez, it was particularly shocking that I had parted from my 'Sunrise Son'. 

"Man, there is a worldwide legion of fans of the Sunrise Son... Should we get them to fix this for you? I mean, they could do a manifestation in front of your house... They could actually bring your son here to you, any moment you say you want it done..." Unfortunately, Davez was doing drugs again, and he was often out of his mind. Kidnapping my own son was not an option.

"Laurent is not home, Carlo." Catherine actually felt sorry for Carlo, and sympathized with him when she thought he was going to start his own personal exile. 

"Of course he is! I know he is. He is doing his homework in his room. I know his schedule, Catherine. Better than you do! Please do not lie to--"

"You are offending me, Carlo! I'm not lying." Catherine did not even try to sound indignant, for she was so relieved with Carlo's absence. "Laurent is not home. You used to know his schedule, you're right. But things have changed." She actually tried to show some empathy towards Carlo's suffering. He wasn't a bad man and had been rather useful. She was still trying to figure out how she would manage the household chores without him. "He has asked me whether he could spend more time at the club, and I thought it was a good idea." Catherine was celebrating taking decisions about Laurent without listening to Carlo's opinion, even if in the past she had already often made up her mind before he spoke out. "This empty house seems to sadden him." While Catherine was quite content to have the whole house all to herself, without the two men in it. "So now he goes to the club for lunch even, right after school. Then he has his training, and after it's finished he stays there doing his homework and studying. I believe he is even making new friends."

"Can you ask him to phone me when he gets home, Catherine? I want to talk to him, please..." It was almost a supplication.

"I don't think Laurent wants to talk to you, Carlo. But I'll inform him that you have called. And if he wishes to call you, he will. Can we agree on that? I really don't want you to call us any longer, Carlo. Now that you've left us, will you please give us some time... and space? We deserve another chance, Laurent and I, we deserve another life! Please don't ever call again, Carlo. If Laurent wants to talk to you, he will call you, have you understood it?"

*****

That was true enough, I thought. It had actually happened. Catherine had indeed 'informed' me about one of my father's telephone calls -- but in a moment when my anger was so great that I had simply sent Carlo to hell.

After he left, I had been saddened for days. I cried and cried, and I had questioned Catherine on his reasons. So insistently that I had infuriated her. WHY? WHY? We finally had a serious quarrel. And since I had never had a fight with Catherine before, it was a horrible, terrifying experience. When she had walked out of my room, pissed off and slamming the door behind her, I drew my breath as I felt the floor failing to sustain me. My father had left, and now... my mother was abandoning me, too?

In my teenage years, or maybe since I had arrived in France, my mother had grown closer to me. And with Carlo's absence, we would become even closer.

"You are close to being a real person now, Laurent. I mean, your opinions are increasingly interesting, in comparison to those childish jokes of yours." At thirteen years old, that had seemed like a big compliment coming from my ever demanding mother. By then, I had mastered my writing, and though she thought my compositions had no style nor interest, they used to be grammatically flawless. She was then investing in my conversational skills, for I knew I often embarrassed her before her illustrious intellectual guests. I stressed to learn, until my mother and I were able to engage in proper conversations. And though Catherine was still condescending, I gradually felt much closer to her, as I grew older. 

Yet, I feared losing her, much more now that I had already lost my father.

Or actually, I feared never conquering her.

Then, only a week or maybe many weeks later, after Carlo had left, I stopped crying.

That's when my sadness turned into anger. And the longer I suppressed and repressed my sadness, the stronger and wilder my anger grew -- and somehow, the stronger and wilder I felt to be, too. Sadness was my natural state, making me soft, vulnerable, fragile. But anger strengthened me. And thus fortified, I felt I could handle the bullies at school much better. Not one of the major and usual bullies, I had slapped this one guy in the ear so hard, to keep him from pinching me, that he had fallen disorientated to the floor. Since then, he was keeping distance from me. That's the point in my life when I started repressing my sadness, identifying it as a weakness. And instead cultivating anger, that I reputed as a good ground to grow my self-confidence. 

I recall having tried to destroy the very few paintings from Carlo that existed in our house -- one portrait of Catherine, and two depicting me. 

I still remember when Carlo painted Catherine's portrait -- she had been teaching a seminar in Belgium, and Carlo and I had had the best of times together, just the two of us for a month or more. And Carlo had taken to painting naked, since he had read somewhere the anecdote that Renoir told a journalist about sometimes painting with his penis. Don't we say "In Rome, do like the Romans"? Carlo had joked. "I guess when in France, do like the French, haha!" I always wondered if Catherine had ever learned that little detail about her portrait -- though I don't think Carlo had ever actually painted it with his penis. 

"Stop it now, Laurent!" My mother walked in on me just as I had started scratching one of the paintings in my bedroom. "That's so childish of you!" Catherine had understood well that I was in an age when being called 'child' was what I dreaded most, being the best way to reprimand me. "Carlo has painted very few portraits in his entire career. Actually, there are only these three, as far as I know! They must have some value. So don't be foolish! Keep them and sell them someday, but do not waste them! Later, you'll probably make good money and still get rid of them. Do you understand me? Don't ever touch those paintings again!"

Another incident stands out from that period. One Sunday, when I had stayed home, since we would not train at the club, I had dragged Carlo's easel and thrown it into the pool. It made a bigger splash than I had expected.

"Laurent, what do you think you're doing?" My mother had heard the noise and come to check from the veranda on the first floor. "That thing does not belong to you... to us." I must have looked at her puzzled, because I wasn't sure she was addressing the easel or the swimming pool. My father had built it, for me. Maybe Catherine had plans of emptying it, and burying it again? Or was she going to forbid me to use it? "Put it back in that stupid atelier. Now!" And after having clarified her marching orders to me, my mother had gone back to her reading and writing.

For days, I let the easel sit at the bottom the pool. My newly discovered rage lend me a strength where I could disobey Catherine, even. When I swam, I tried once to kick it. The easel was standing on the swimming pool's floor, and in that position, it still looked menacingly defiant to me. It was as if I hadn't defeated it. With my kick, I tried to finally knock it down -- but instead, I only hurt my toes.

My mother never said another word about it -- until, one day, I came back from my long days at the school and the club, to find the easel was gone from the pool -- and from the house.

 Nowhere to be seen. Without the easel, and his sports car parked in front of our house, it seemed like Carlo had barely existed in our lives. He had always been discreet, shy and economic, owning few possessions -- even in the atelier, his sacred space in the house, to where he would often retreat to let Catherine enjoy her guests. A few Art books, that like his remaining clothes, Catherine gave or threw away -- a sure indication, to me, that my father would not return. She trashed his oil paints and brushes along with the pasta left in the kitchen, and let his Mediterranean herbs dry in the vases, until she got rid of them, too. I just observed and never commented her demeanor, guessing she was finding her own ways of revolting against his abandonment. And I never tried to rescue anything, because in my own rage I had wished to erase all of Carlo's traces from our lives, too. Catherine was fast, and before the first hints of melancholic hope and longing for my father sprung in my heart, he had been expunged from our rural home.

Midst those measures, rather precise and coldly executed, within a couple of weeks, Catherine had refurbished the atelier and turned it into her home office, vacating the room right behind the fireplace which had constituted her writing bunker all along. 

And in time, just like all Carlo's traces disappeared from our home and lives, my rage subsided and vanished. Resentment replaced it. 

And that's what I had cultivated for the last twenty years, along with the firm determination to forget my father, and to live a life where he wouldn't be missed, nor make any difference. 

But my present need for atonement told me I hadn't succeeded in leaving Carlo behind, nor out of my heart. WHY, I would every now and then ask, when some events were too heavy to bear alone, and I had wished my father was by my side. WHY?

What Carlo was now telling me is that he would have tried to come back, had I called him. 

But I had not known about that condition imposed by Catherine. The harder life seemed, and the more problems I had, the lonelier I felt, since Carlo was no longer there to advise and guide me. Therefore, the more I resented him.  Until he had become an annoying memory that I forcefully pushed away whenever it sprang in my mind. 

Two years later after Carlo's departure -- and it's funny that what I called 'departure', Carlo had called 'escape' --, Angelo had entered my life. To rule it, and to become l'homme de ma vie, the man of my life, taking the chore that my father had left vacant. 

Surprisingly at ease with both his masculinity and femininity for a teenager, with his determination and assertiveness, Angelo had grabbed and dragged me at his own will and convenience. And I didn't feel I was being manipulated. I had so happily, eagerly obliged to let him take care of me -- clinging to him even when he had dumped me already, addicted to his body as much as to his fierceness, that I had always lacked, in taking decisions.

Suddenly, I woke up from my recollections at Carlo's voice echoing in The Dark Room. He had himself just emerged from one of his long silences. We had taken one of the black benches at the far end of the room, opposite to the entrance towards where my father had just twisted his body. Giving his back to me, what was he trying to hide?

"It was not just that you would not speak to me on the phone, Laurent..." He chocked, his voice caught, and though I could only see his back, I realized his whole body had started to shake. "You never, ever called me back. And I understood it as a sign that you felt the same as your mother... that I was making your life small and miserable, and that like her you wanted to forget me..." I tried to face my father, as rare were the occasions in my life I had watched him surrendering to his own emotions. He was a bit embarrassed, and so was I -- with my voyeuristic curiosity. Carlo simply went on. "You were willing to have 'time and space' to grow into a new life, like Catherine had said. You know," Tears had welled in his eyes, "sometimes I think I could never have been a good father... because I never had one myself. And... I have survived the loss of my father... and mother... since I had no other chance but to survive it." It was disconcerting to see an old man holding back his tears, ashamed to cry. "And I thought you'd survive my loss too, Laurent." It was perceptible the effort Carlo was making not to collapse, physical and emotionally. He sat rigidly, attempting to keep his posture straight, and his emotions under control. His meditative practice was in use at that very moment, I guessed. "In fact, your silence made me think you actually wanted to survive my loss... to live without me," He gulped, "as if I were actually dead. Just like my father had been for me..."

I gasped. I might have wished my father was dead, in my teenager anger, but I had never meant it. All I ever wished was that he had never left.

"I've been listening to your silence, Laurent. Since the day I left home. For twenty years now." The way he said it, sounded like he had been counting each day. "And I left it not because I wanted, I hope you now understand it... And if I never returned, it was because you didn't seem to want it. I was so sure you wanted nothing more from me... until a few months ago, when you called inviting me for your vernissage. I was so happy, my son!"

next episode

Author's note: having been imported from a former version of the story, some of the comments below are dated previous to this post. Once the plot has not been altered, just the pagination, I am keeping them since they are very dear and precious to me.