The Torrent

A young boy survives his tormenting mother and their isolation in the deep woods of Quebec. She has a troubled and mysterious past, but that is not the subject of the tale. Rather, it is the unrelenting severity of his upbringing, and the sadness that permeates all of the darkness around their poor farmland. He is physically and psychologically abused; in one violent incident, she strikes him so hard that he loses his hearing, forever. The silence of the world. They survive in a closed space; she demands that he be obedient to her and to God; he obediently attends the seminary, but remains aloof from all the other boys; when the mother dies, he follows the rushing silent river in his heart. The torrent, drawing him ever closer to the falls; he imagines a lover, Amica, who glides in and out of his presence, ghostlike. He succumbs to the melancholy that engulfs the universe. In the final scene, he hangs above the cascade, staring down into the abyss below.

Anne Hébert, in 1945, an author now famous for her portrayals of how the old certainties of religion were being pushed aside at the end of the war; how a tortured man continued the same difficult life as that of his mother. An interesting play on words in the original French; he can no longer hear (entendre), and he spends all of his life without understanding (entendement); condemned to repeat the bleak cycle of the seasons, in the remote and barren land that is the only real home that he has ever known. No light, no horizon, only the turbulent waters of the river; we are far from the sun-dappled brooks where reflections dance. A story of a soul suffering — in the stifling atmosphere of 1945.

Obviously not a happy story, and most certainly not an uplifting conclusion. A Canadian story; as Margaret Atwood would say (I am drawing here from her well-known critical work on the essence of our national writing): foremost a narrative about survival — in wild and uncaring nature. In the torrent, you come up gasping for air, lost in the chaotic waves around you.

I have never been a big fan of Hébert (too much sadness and folly in her writings), but the short story is something that she masters well.

And that was story number one.