The Last Bullet Is for You

by Martine Delvaux

I store your words in a plastic bag, the kind detectives use to preserve evidence of a crime. One day I will reread your letters, and draw the chalk outline of a beautiful love affair murdered by hatred.

  St. Augustine said that we mourn the dead for seven days, but we mourn a madman every day of our lives.

  Life will continue without you. I have broken off, cut the ties, and if I felt as though I were the one who’s been left, it’s only because the one I fell in love with never showed up at the altar; someone else signed the papers. He slipped the ring on my finger and kissed me tenderly in front of the justice of the peace. He quickly stopped wearing his and surrounded our marriage with silence. As time passed, he showed himself as he truly was, and for months I excused his conduct with stories about culture, childhood, and temperament, until I finally had to admit that nothing could justify pardoning his violence. Love had turned into Stockholm syndrome. I had to get out, or I was finished.

  This story is an enigma, a trap. When I lose I lose, and when I win, I lose too.

  Autumn is near, the cold weather has come with its smell of falling leaves, the wind is starting to bite, heavy grey skies urge us into hibernation. You came in September three different times. The first time in my arms, we made love in the taxi. The second at my place, your whole being a cage because you didn’t want to be there from the very start. The third time without me, you came, you left, I refused all contact to preserve myself, because rejection was the last thing I could give you: reject your injunctions, reject your laws, refuse to see you one last time because I knew it was a trap, a way to catch me and start everything over again.

  You came back to Montreal to demand my time, one last walk, one last coffee, one last time in bed, you wanted to infiltrate my world again and get under my skin to destroy what I had spent months rebuilding, the remains of my life. During the weeks you were there, I left Coloniale Avenue and moved away, to the banks of the St. Lawrence River. Every day I ran on the path along the water, every day my body fought the pain of our failed love, running to escape myself, Cœur de pirate’s voice in my ears, telling how you’d wanted me, but now you want me gone, your arrow through my heart, a treasure among your dry bones.

  The St. Lawrence is our primitive self, and too often we look elsewhere instead of looking at it. You came back to Montreal after four months of absence to try to get your hooks in me again, and when I moved away to keep from running back to you and my own destruction, I turned to the river that had carried my ancestors to this place. You flew over it when you headed back east.

  You are a limb slowly cut away with a scalpel, the skin, muscle, bone, its phantom presence still felt after it’s gone. You won’t let go, you refuse my separation, you fight to keep from becoming the ghost that one day you will become because it’s just a matter of time, the time it will take me to heal and slice through the last vein.

  Our love is the most painful thing I have ever known. Leaving you is like climbing Mount Everest, wanting to be with you was my personal Fitzcarraldo.

  Time, for me, has turned inside out, summer for dying, autumn for rebirth. From now on, our season will be winter.

  The stuntmen of love don’t get a second chance, and I was the one who took all the risks. Now it’s over. I pull back my troops. I drop my weapons.

  There’s one bullet left. It’s the last one, the one we keep until the very last moment to escape the enemy and die by our own hand instead of falling into his.

  I won’t make love with you anymore, I won’t go back in thought to that little room in Ostia, you won’t haunt me anymore. One day you will hold this book like a dispatch from the front, a final letter you won’t understand because you don’t know how to read my words, they don’t resonate inside you, they break against you and shatter into pieces. But your madness will not have triumphed, since this book exists.

  The last bullet is for you.

  In addition to passages explicitly identified, this book includes quotations, sometimes modified, from Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; Silence of the Lambs; St. Augustine, Against Julian; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; the group Night Snipers; and Cœur de Pirate, “Oceans Brawl.”