The Autoroute rescue: the metal-hatted woman frozen before the truck

pivotal · UNDATED (Marathe's legless early twenties)

• When: UNDATED — Marathe's early twenties, after the train that took his legs and during the "invasion on paper" era of his telling
• What: The founding event of the marriage, and of Marathe's whole doctrine of chosen love — attested solely in his own telling. Cresting a hill above a Provincial Autoroute in his suicidal, "moribund" period, Marathe saw far below "a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat" standing transfixed in the middle of the road before an oncoming truck, "clutching her—pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of her would explode from the terror." Without thought he released his brake and careened down the slope: "I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed." They tumbled down the far embankment, tipping the chair, injuring one of his stumps, and knocking away her thick metal hat — the moment he first saw she had no skull. Marathe insists on the reversal: it was she who saved him — the un-thought choice of something outside his own pain "with one blow broke the chains of the cage", ended his moribund despair, and made him "then, adult." He also insists the choice itself, not any later feeling, was the love: "The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute—this was the love." [Attribution note: entirely Marathe's account to Kate Gompert, drunk, in "Swiss" disguise; the hilltop is named "Switzerland's Mont Papineau." No narrator or second witness corroborates the rescue.]