GRACE AND GRAVITY

by Anne Colligan

After the horse’s death, our world changed. My mother stopped tending her rose beds and developed allergies whenever she saw anything reminding her of the horse. At first, my father was sure he could cure her. He always had: through her drinking habit, my sister’s abortion, my brother’s failed exams, the moves to Rome, to Cannes.

This time, he seemed defeated. The year 1973 drowned in sorrow and grief. Nothing could distract her. The mother with whom I’d shared fits of laughter now wanted me to cry with her every day. She came into my room when I was trying to write. She would stand before the picture I’d hung above my bed four years before. Staring at Timshel’s freckled head, she stroked the air and sent kisses up the wall. At first, I took part in the ritual. Then, as the days passed, it became unbearable. I was unable to work, to think. So I escaped my parents’ house and found a student’s room in Geneva close to the university. My desertion was both welcome and resented. My father took my mother up to the mountains to a charming hotel, to change the scenery, to fix her. 

“I had the best horse!” she told the pianist on their first evening in the carnotzet, the room in the cellar where guests gathered before dinner. Her elbows were on the piano, her whisky before her, and she lowered her voice. “He would have done anything. He knew. That horse understood. I took him inside one day through the terrace into our bedroom,” she mimicked herself holding the reins. “And I recited Dante to him. He would have followed me through hell.” Her eyes strayed, her voice trembled, and her shoulders shook. 

Madame M., the hotel manager, heard about her guest’s distressing performance and came to the rustic carnotzet the night after. She went to the bar where my father stood and greeted him. She knew his brother, my uncle Jean-Paul. Yes, my father nodded, he had been the one who’d recommended her peaceful hotel as a retreat for his grieving wife. Grief is part of life, isn’t it? He looked helpless. 

A few feet away at the piano, my mother, Helen, was reliving her journey with the horse, following the poet’s words through hell. My sister told me in detail the scene she had heard from our father years later, in one of those unexpected intervals when we were kind to one another.

“A horse in your bedroom?” Madame M. asked our father. “Is she making this up?” She touched his arm. “She’s got everything mixed up.”

Our father stirred and mumbled incomprehensibly. Finished with her story, my mother was crying again. Madame M. put her arm around my father’s shoulder. 

“I know a psychiatrist from the Jung Institute in Zurich. He’ll help her. She’s in need. She has to put this horse back where it belongs.”

He sighed, making a fist with his hands. “Hmmm, I’ll speak to her.” He wouldn’t admit it, but he was relieved. To his surprise, Helen was eager to meet the doctor. 

Meanwhile, I met Bruno. I was just as extravagant as my mother and as unconscious. My relationship with him was like being on a roller coaster or in a cartoon. On a high, I imagined we were still in the thralls of May of ‘68, or at Woodstock. We would change the world, abolish capitalism, and live d’amour et d’eau fraîche. From Rabelais I had read, “Fais ce que voudra.” This seemed clear and easily achievable. But I didn’t know what I wanted. Because I enjoyed the English taught in the English department by professors from England and America who didn’t overwhelm us with literary theories, I passed my BA exams in English and did well. Then I decided history and French could wait and I would spend time dancing again. I returned to the ballet studio I knew from childhood, an antidote to too many joints, too much wine, and sleepless nights. Undoing the evils of the night before, I searched for old sensations, my younger, wiser self. Me at thirteen.

The ballet teacher, the formidable Monsieur Tcheremissinov, encouraged me. ‘‘Keep it up, you’re getting stronger. Your body will remember and find its way back. Keep it up. Hold straight.’’ 

My arms remembered the roundness of a port de bras, the balance and coordination. But my legs were slow. I had lost the rhythm and could not do any enchaînement when I had the whole floor to myself. 

Bruno didn’t come to the dance studio and never saw me take ballet. At music festivals, I cavorted around, seeking trance.

Relearning classical steps, the pointé, développé, rond de jambe, and frappé clashed with my need for daily hash. The charm of smoking joints and taking occasional acid trips lost its innocence and spontaneity. LSD didn’t work anymore. It muted me, and my body went cold as stone. In the mid-’70s, I saw no love spinning over from the four corners of the universe and no perfect designs in roses. And now Bruno’s ex wanted us to try hard drugs. I felt withered. And I knew without thinking that if I took cocaine or heroin, I’d be dead in no time. 

Bruno tried to distract me. We’d go to the cinema. We saw Equus, with its blinded horses, the mad boy, and the troubled analyst. Everything rushed back before my eyes; images from the film and real life mingled inside my brain and swirled into a black hole. Timshell’s snapped tendon, the operation at the Tierspital, the animal hospital in Bern, an incurable Timshell put down, my mother weeping. I sobbed for hours. Bruno tried to comfort me, but he didn’t understand. 

Bruno left every night. At first, he told me where and who he saw, but then I didn’t know where he was and who he “experimented” with. I fretted alone in our dark apartment, dressed in black, and wrote in my diary: 

Time, separations. Constant. Reversals.

I’m wasting my life, destroying myself.

At twenty-two, I longed for a romantic wedding, my white frilly gown sweeping the floor as I danced a waltz with my father across the ballroom of a restaurant by the lake. I wanted to live in an apartment on a square filled with trees or a converted barn in the country where Bruno and I would garden. The ground floor we had moved into was scarcely a dream place. There was no central heating and no direct sun or moonlight. And our kitchen looked onto a courtyard where people discarded their trash. One day, we heard mews from the courtyard. In the waste, Bruno found a weak and starving kitten. We fed her and loved her. She was pink and gray, and she slept on our wool sweaters in the bedroom cupboard.

Some days, I wanted to quit university altogether. I imagined I would never get through L’École de Genève and its elitist French department where I sensed bilinguals were not welcome. I wanted to become a nurse. I wanted to be a mother, pregnant like my sister who was expecting her third. I told Bruno we should have a child. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. He was scraping by with odd jobs here and there. Some nights, he dealt hash, and, before he left, his mouth turned down into a rictus that destroyed all the beauty in his angel face. I was frightened. He took risks. We took turns being hysterical. We reproached each other for our weaknesses. Me, his absence; he, my insecurities. 

Then I got a call from my mother one morning in the winter of 1975. It was cold and I stood shivering in the hall on the phone. My father was in intensive care. He’d had open-heart surgery, a double coronary bypass, and he was slow to recover. She sounded calm. I heard myself saying bland words. I didn’t want to talk to her. My feet were numb and I didn’t know what I felt about my father. Did I care? I was empty.

I didn’t see my father for days, though we were nearby. Our cheap place on Rue des Pitons was one block away from the hospital complex. I felt derelict, nauseous, confused, and wrote in my journal:

What and where is reality?

Who is real?

I hate myself. Half-brain, I hate the selfish beast I am. 

I roamed the streets of my neighborhood. I picked up things people had accidentally dropped: a hairpin, a shopping list, a glove, a scarf. I was fascinated by what had fallen and been abandoned. I also couldn’t take my eyes off the broken bodies I saw. The addicts with their fixed inner gaze, the drunkards trying to make contact in slurs and songs, and the grime homeless leaning against a wall. I felt I had a black hole inside that I had to fill.

A week passed, and I got another phone call. Vicky, my sister, was enraged and rightfully so. ‘‘You haven’t gone to the hospital. Dr. Durchwald says Daddy wants to see you. What the hell are you doing?” I said nothing. A crab ate at my stomach. 

“Go! Now, this minute!” she screeched. “You’re such a spoiled ass. And by the way, what did you do with my husband’s cowboy boots?” 

Despite the frustration in her tone, I heard that he wanted to see me. I had to show up. Show my messed-up self. Show up whoever I was. “Stop screaming. 

I’ll go.” 

I told Bruno I was going. 

‘‘You’re going because your mother’s shrink told your mother to tell your sister to tell you to go? What does this Dr. Durchwald have to do with you in the first place? This is horripilating’’—one of Bruno’s favorite words. ‘‘And your sister is a fascist,’’ he said, patting the embroidered leather of the Western boots I’d given him.

I walked down the busy boulevard to the hospital anyway. Why hadn’t I reached out to my father? Why was I so cold?

“Ah!” he said as I opened the door to his room. “You’re here!” His voice was weak, his smile pale. “You’ve come.” 

“I… sorry, I lost the sense of time… I don’t know what happened. I’m… sorry, Daddy!” I stood, my arms dangling at my side, feeling foolish and small. “I’m so sorry.”

‘‘Hush, shh, Cornichon, don’t say anything or apologize.’’ He waved me closer. 

I was baffled. We were both desolate. I don’t know which of us was weaker or more remorseful. Strangely, his words soothed me. He hadn’t called me Cornichon since I was ten. I remembered him ensconced in his burgundy armchair, beaming as he called, “Cornichon, viens me raconter ta journée!” I was struck by how pale and thin his face was but in his eyes was a playful flame and I felt hope. 

He pressed his hand into mine and pulled me forward.

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Anne Colligan is a memoir-obsessed writer who now calls Lewes, Delaware, home. Originally from the beautiful city of Geneva, Switzerland, she began her writing journey ten years ago after retiring from a fulfilling career teaching languages in Swiss public schools and relocating to the United States. In Washington, DC, she completed the New Directions Program, a unique writing program that explores memoirs through the intriguing lens of psychoanalysis. When she’s not busy writing, singing, or tending to her garden, Anne enjoys leading lively discussion groups about French films.