Relieved
by Katia Grubisic, Translated from Marie-Claire Blais
On the shore, the guru was shouting through his beard at the paramedics unloading the dead and complaining they didn’t know where to put them anymore, the light, he shouted, there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, you shall see, and I asked him, Augustino thought, I asked, after the light what else do you see, the light dazzles but does not soothe, nothing, the guru said, you don’t see anything, you don’t feel anything, that’s nirvana, an ocean of stillness, peace at last, and then comes the cycle of rebirth, but not for everyone, the rich shall be dressed in rags and the poor will live like princes, but all men long to sleep, to rest, oh, soon you shall see the light at the end of the tunnel, you will see it, more convoys will arrive from New Delhi carrying piles of bodies, the preacher shouted, children are trying to perform last rites with their parents but will they have time, the cloying smell of death wafted through the hot air, Augustino thought, alone in the kitchen of their house, the astronauts were letting themselves dream wild dreams, how could they be back on Earth when they had shed their physical selves, their bodies were still in space without them, they asked themselves pointless questions, pointless and, for them, unusual, when a virtuoso pianist or clarinetist dies in a car accident or in a plane crash, does their music go up to heaven with them, was that what they called the song of the angels, what they thought they heard as they sailed around the stars, was that what it was, they were sure they’d heard it, even for a second, divine music, it was unnameable, they thought, undefinable for anyone with such scant knowledge of the musical arts, they knew nothing about art, it was that music, it tormented them in their dreams, was that God speaking though God didn’t speak, God had no words, only a voice, God changes his face every day, the guru said, one day he is a lion, the next day an eagle, and he is a scorpion or a snake gliding over the desert sand, Augustino thought as he watched the massive cremation, the bodies on the beach, the arms and feet of the dead dancing in the fire, free at last from all evil, singing the glories of freedom, the end of captivity, some of them had been deemed subhuman, outcasts kicked aside, and now at last they were dignified and untouchable in their pride, they had been relieved of their birth, being born was perhaps the most fraudulent injustice, Augustino thought. Augustino was the same age as Jesus when he preached to the elders in the temple when he realized he was mortal, mortal like everything is mortal, mortal like the flower they call the Lady of the Night that his grandmother had shown him in the garden, the flower lives only one night, mortal as his grandmother would be even though he’d thought he would have her forever, Augustino understood that even the longest life is too short, it is nothing, the mark of mortality undoes the very meaning of life. And he thought of the loneliness of the astronauts keeping watch for nightfall at the window of the house where they had sequestered themselves, where did the fetuses of unfinished babies go, they wondered, did they turn into plants and animals, just like the astronauts themselves, fish or birds, their vegetative bodies growing like orchids in a dark, wing-battered cave, yes, they had wings, they had fins, they had panther fangs to sink into meals trying to escape, as fickle as feathers. Gusting winds or maybe whirling cyclones had struck cities, whole villages on Earth, hammering the suddenly unsteady air into space, the hands on a dial spinning to explain that suddenly the engines were out of control, and then everything seemed to settle, faraway waves blur and merge, Augustino thought, a Mendelssohn concerto for violin and orchestra abruptly interrupted, that boy listens to music even at night, a rescuer complained in the tent, Augustino figured that there were lots of people who probably complained about him too, he didn’t talk much with the others, he mostly listened, he heard their fuss and complaints, he saw them leaving the tent to pray, one hand over their hearts, more than the concerto fading into the echo of the fog, it was their cries he heard, there were too many people here, he thought, too many medics, too many rescue workers, when the guru wailed outside on the beach was it a lament or a promise, yes, one day, my friends, believe me, you will see it, you shall see the light. My grandfather Joseph played bits of that concerto on his knees before his executioners, who had such an ear for music, he always said that was how he was spared, how he escaped the final solution, though he was a mediocre violinist, he said, his knees were red, bloodied from playing in that position, but after they imagined they could hear the angels sing suddenly the astronauts heard nothing, just a banging against the steel hull as if they were suddenly being pelted with stones or pebbles, the noise was shrill and the silence held them still like they were lying in their own graves. Perhaps they thought that Earth and its inhabitants hadn’t survived a nuclear blast, maybe that was why it was so quiet, the whole world laid waste, were we condemned to emptiness, to a slow end, high on our swing between the ocean and the sky. There would be no memory of us, and we would remember no one.
Translated from Marie-Claire Blais’s Augustino ou l’illumination, published by Les Éditions du Boréal in 2022.
ABOUT THE CREATORs
Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator. Her work has won the Gerald Lampert award and been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Governor General’s Award for translation.
Photo © P. Seib
Marie-Claire Blais (1939-2021) was an important Québec writer, whose body of often experimental work includes more than thirty novels, as well as plays, poetry, essays, and film scripts. Augustino ou l'illumination, an unfinished fragment published posthumously by Boréal, is her final work.
Photo © Jill Glessing