Télécharger le PDF - Formules

do as a first step toward his estranged father, or for sharing his joy of
going out with a pretty teenager, or because John and Sylvie would be
present, smart and looking happy, a good hard lesson for Jacques, but on
the contrary because there would be several unattached women and girls
there. Jacques was aging, but still attractive. Maybe he would find his
mate at the party, if this is what he’s looking for. And Joël would feel less
unfairly blessed with his own conquest of Muriel Robinson. “Conquest”
was not the word, he had learnt to repudiate it, even though such words
kept creeping up, associating with his father’s image.
“L’Amant et le frère, deux doubles du moi perdu, chez Marguerite
Duras”, “La Voix de l’autre et l’image de soi chez Louis-René
des Forêts”, “Mental Landscapes in Wallace Stevens and René Char”:
“One may well wonder what two poets, so different in their formal approach
to the practice and concept of poetry, have in common to justify
a comparative study.” Boring humanities jargon. How obsessed he is
with the self, the subject and all these abstractions... Or is it a façade?
Mere academic exercise?
Then, as Joël was putting the research papers back where he
had found them, piling up on Jacques’desk in the glazed veranda, the
perfect spot for sunset watchers, under the large potted poinsettia that
would hopefully grow as big as the one which filled most of the room
in the seventies, half a dozen hand-written yellowed letters fell from an
ordinary cream colored file marked: “Personal mail : Matilda 1973-75”.
He was sure he could not refrain from reading them, with a bizarre intuition
that he was not doing disservice to his father or infringing on their
mutual trust. He picked the letters from the floor and sat close to the
window in a light comfortable folding armchair that was miraculously
free of reading material.
More than written, the words were drawn in a myriad different
styles, sometimes flowing from a corner of the sheet, or clustering in
oddly shaped constellations, sometimes filling all the available space, or,
on the contrary, leaving huge deserted blanks between them. It was like a
picture or rather a mask of the person. What could she look like? There
was no photograph. Jacques took pride in not keeping any “idols”.
81