Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

dark blood bubbling into her mouth. My grandfather did not shoot the animal as he could easily have done. His loaded gun stood against the door of the lavoir. He beat the dog to death with a cudgel in the chicken yard. We heard a terrible sequence of howls and thuds. My grandmother closed the window. When he came in, his hands covered in blood, the child’s blood, the dog’s matted fur, I said that the child, a neighbor’s child, had been responsible. She had teased the dog. With one stride he was beside me and had seized my hair. Before my grandmother could intervene he had broken my nose.
    “That’s right. Go and whimper in your grandmother’s skirts,” he shouted, flinging me out of the kitchen.
    The doctor, setting my nose in a plaster cast and covering me with bandages, so that I looked like Phantomas, or the invisible man, said, “Why did you provoke him, petit? No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Learn that lesson now.”
    When he was older, slower, he bought a television and would sit frozen, hypnotized by the moving screen. When he was dying he lay staring into space, with unsteady, flickering eyes, as if he was still following the shifting black and white images.
    But I remember my grandfather outside, always outside, his great arms browned with heat and dust, his eyessteady on the wine vats, attaching the cylinders filled with the poison he used to treat the vines onto his tractor, testing the sprays. He employed two men, both of whom loved him unconditionally. He ignored my whispering grandmother. She spoke to him continually in a low, persuasive hum. He neither listened nor replied. I hear him leaving the house in the murky dawn, his feet heavy on the tiles in the corridor, the rustle of the dog’s chains in the dust as he passed through the gate. Then, and only then, would I settle into my bed, secure, relieved, reassured that the house was empty of his presence.
    I only saw him strike a woman once. I cannot know whether this is something I have imagined because it is a scene I needed to remember, or whether I really witnessed the event.
    It is late autumn and the lights are on in the house. My grandmother is in the church hearing the catechism class. I have helped her today by cleaning the family graves. There is moss under my fingernails and my hands are chapped and red. I am outside the house, coming home. I hear raised voices in the spare bedroom which I share with my mother. The front door is ajar. There is mud on the doorstep and across the flagstones. I hear my mother’s voice, deep in her throat, no, no, no, no, no. Our bedroom door is open and my grandfather, in his outdoor coat and boots, is standing over her. Her arms are rigid, her hands crisping the bedspread. She cries, again and again, no, no, no, no, no. With one muddy boot he slams the door shut behind him and I hear the flat smack of his hand against her unresisting cheek as he pushes her down. Then the pitch of her cry is horriblychanged. And I stumble backwards through the kitchen, down the path, leaving the forbidden gate open behind me, out into the darkening vineyards, high above the village, gasping for clean, unheated air.
    No one provokes Jean-Baptiste Michel and gets away with it. Why did I so easily comprehend that lesson of fear which my mother had never been able to learn?
    You ask me what I fear most. Not my own death, certainly not that. For me, my death will simply be the door closing softly on the sounds that trouble, obsess and persecute my sleep. I never court death, as you do. You see death as your dancing partner, the other with his arms around you. Your death is the other you wait for, seek out, whose violence is the resolution of your desire. But I will not learn my death from you. You revel in a facile dream of darkness and blood. It is a romantic flirtation with violence, the well-brought-up doctor’s son dabbling in the sewers, before going home to turn it all into a Baroque polemic