Precious moment I see you, Caroline Lamarche (translation: Katelijne De Vuyst), Vleugels, Bleiswijk 2024. 104 pages, 23.95 euros.
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Sound artist, composer and performer Margarida Guia died of breast cancer in 2021, aged 48. She was deaf in one ear and wanted to dedicate a project to it: Dialogue with the inaudible. Caroline Lamarche wrote an extremely tender tribute to her good friend, that ‘goldsmith of sounds’, beautifully designed as always by Vleugels publishers. The impressive The End of the Bees was previously published by the same author.
Just as Guia embroidered with sound, Lamarche does so delicately with language. The whole is a prose poem: narrative with poetic precision in ordinary language, where medicine ‘chokes on its poor vocabulary’. Everything starts relatively optimistically with breast-conserving surgery. Then metastases plus pain, a lot of pain and chemo. To a pain clinic where a specialized nurse unexpectedly has a lyric soprano and sings Bach to her. What remains is palliative care.
Her resistance shatters the author: “Some people grow stronger as they grow weaker, / the fire that consumes them is like an accelerated spring.” A key sentence in the book. Because despite all the troubles, the zest for life shines through the dialogues between the ladies. Everything in them that thinks, feels. Lamarche didn’t write a pathetic tearjerker. It is more the minimal music of powerlessness. It is no coincidence that Philip Glass and Samuel Beckett appear; for example, the title is taken from Beckett. With slow eyes, Lamarche registers that Guia looks at herself with disgust at what is happening ‘in the trench where the flesh festers and ferments’.
The care providers also belong to the powerless. Doctors are too eager to believe in defensive weapons, ‘the modern cannons that penetrate the body like the clay in Verdun’. While the treatment of a patient falls short: ‘Isn’t anyone who stops treating a sick person / and then sits at the bedside of the next person without a word / a white-handed criminal?’
