“You realize that you’re accusing your husband of something horrible. That’s serious.”
“You don’t take your own life because of a scratch. Jonathan had a reason for doing what he did. I can’t believe that it was just on impulse. He was only sixteen years old and he dreamed of becoming an actor. Something had already killed him before his suicide.”
“Did you witness anything?”
“To discover your child hanging in his room: you can’t imagine the pain that causes. But not to know why he did it, that robs life of all its meaning.”
“Alice, answer me: do you have any proof?”
“No.”
“Did Jonathan ever mention anything improper that took place between his father and himself?”
“No.”
“Did you question Antoine?”
“I tried to dozens of times, but the words wouldn’t come. I was petrified as soon as I tried to bring up the subject.”
“There’s no way that I can believe it. How did you come up with something so unlikely?”
“After Jonathan’s death, I was living in a kind of suffocating fog. If only he’d left a letter. One little sentence would have been enough. I questioned Antoine. He replied that he was as lost as I was. And then …”
“What?”
“His attitude seemed strange. Something in his voice, in his silence. I sensed no particular emotion on his part. No tears, no anger.”
“He was, like you, in a state of shock.”
“That’s what I told myself. Time had to do its work. But the more the weeks passed, the more he behaved as if Jonathan had never existed. He avoided everything that reminded him of our son. I thought at first it was his way of protecting himself. But not for long. He seemed relieved, in fact. As if Jonathan’s death had lifted an enormous weight from his shoulders. I know, it made no sense to think that, but I remembered that he’d behaved similarly after Félix’s death. When he proposed early on this ‘existentialist experimentation,’ as he called it so smugly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I guess I wanted to prove to him that I was just as emancipated as he was. It was simply a game with no consequences. And we were so young and so selfish. But I fell in love with Félix on reading his letters. They were luminous, filled with beauty and compassion.”
Alice shuts her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, a tear rolls down her cheek.
“Félix didn’t set himself on fire. In fact, his body was pulled out of the Saguenay a few days after Antoine had told him everything about the letters. Antoine never admitted that he was partly responsible. ‘Everyone is free to dispose of his life as he wishes; it was his choice, not ours.’ Antoine repeated these kinds of thoughts to me, and I didn’t have the courage to contradict him. He impressed me with his philosophical flights. I wasn’t able to distance myself, I began to think like him. Félix’s death didn’t concern me. Living with a sense of guilt was too painful. I hung on to Antoine. I’d understood nothing about what really happened. Now it’s all clear. He loved him too.”
“Who loved whom?”
“Antoine was in love with Félix. That’s why he destroyed him. As he destroyed his own son.”
“What you’re saying makes no sense.”
“You’re right, it makes no sense. But it’s what he did.”
“I can’t imagine that he could have abused his own son.”
“It’s the sort of thing no one wants to imagine.”
“Especially Antoine, an intelligent, cultivated man. You yourself often talked to me about him with admiration.”
“Everyone admires Antoine: his family, his colleagues, his students. But I know now what he hides within himself.”
“You say you know it, but how?”
“It’s the way he conducts himself. There are times when I’m able to get near it, to see it. It’s unbearable. It works its way into every breath I take. I can’t tolerate him approaching me, touching me. Everything in his body, his skin, his gaze, his odour, his hands, especially his hands, condemns him. He’s foul. That something that’s so despicable, it’s inside him. He is that thing. Promise me you’ll publish my novel as is.”
“It’s too dangerous, Alice. You’ll have to change the names, cover your tracks. Antoine will recognize himself.”
“Don’t you understand, that’s the whole reason I wrote it? I constructed it like a trap made up of mirrors, like one prison that contains another. Once read, I want the novel to close in on him so that he can never escape.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
She looks into Louis-Martin’s eyes for the first time since she has arrived.
“I’ll only ask you for one thing: make your decision quickly. I’m going to leave Antoine.”
She gets up. Louis-Martin holds her back.
“And how are you going to end the novel? You wanted to talk about that. Are you going to have Antoine die?”
“I don’t know yet. I would so much have wanted to know if Jonathan, before hanging himself, forgave him. Me, no.”
She leaves. Louis-Martin picks up the manuscript again, leafs through a few of its pages. He sighs. Looking at the photograph of Alice hanging over his desk, he wonders if what he’s holding in his hands is not the product of a tormented mind, of a ravaged heart.
* * *
The movers have just left. Alice looks out the living-room window at the retreating truck. She has emptied most the house of most of its furniture. There’s nothing more in Jonathan’s room, or in her “aquarium.” But she has left intact their bedroom and the attic where Antoine has installed his own office. She doesn’t want to take anything that might remind her of her private life with her husband. For the last time, she closes behind her the door of this house where she has lived for twenty years. She will not return.
She goes to the columbarium, places a rose in front of her son’s urn, and waits motionless. In a few moments, Antoine will return from the college. He told her this morning that his course dealt with the mystery of being human.
“You’re going to talk to them about what?”
“Always the same thing. Reason, instinct, the difference between man and animal.”
“And in your opinion there is a difference?”
He shrugged his shoulders and left.
* * *
She would like to believe in God, in the immortality of souls. She cannot. She lights a candle in the columbarium chapel. She doesn’t cry. Her tears have dried up. All that’s left to her are memories. The beautiful, radiant ones. And those that tear her apart. She doesn’t know how she was able to close her eyes for so long to what truly mattered. There were hints, however, details that could have awakened suspicions before it was too late. She also is to blame, that she knows.
Nervous, she looks at her watch. Six o’clock. There, now he’s back from the college. He’s parking the car in front of the house, climbing the front steps, taking his key, opening the door, and immediately sensing that something is different. It’s the silence. Silence born from absence, from emptiness. He takes a few steps, enters the living room. There is no more furniture, no carpet, no paintings on the walls except for one, which is now immense. His heart is beating faster. She’s certain that in that moment his heart is beating faster. On the floor, he sees a book. He bends down to pick it up. On the cover is a reproduction of the same painting, a maelstrom of blotches that suddenly makes him afraid. He closes his eyes for a moment.
Then he opens Impurity.
Photo by Donald Winkler
Sheila Fischman is the award-winning translator of some two hundred works of contemporary fiction from Québec. Along with Larry Tremblay, her authors include Hubert Aquin, Anne Hébert, Gaétan Soucy, Marie-Claire Blais, François Gravel, Michel Tremblay, and Christine Eddie, among others. She has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English Translation fifteen times, and she has received the Molson Prize in the Arts. A Member of the Order of Canada and a ch
evalière of the Ordre national du Québec, she lives in Montréal.
Photo by Bernard Préfontaine
Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor, and Kathakali specialist. He has published more than thirty books as a playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist. His acclaimed theatrical works have been produced around the world. In 2006, he was awarded Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Prize for his contribution to theatre. The same year, Éditions Gallimard published Piercing, a collection of three of his short stories. In 2008, Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre premiered at Espace Go in Montréal, and was nominated for Best Production 2007–2008 (Montréal) by the Association des critiques de théâtre du Québec. Tremblay was a finalist in 2008 and in 2011 for the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. In 2010, Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Project produced Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre, translated by Chantal Bilodeau; the same year, his play The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi was produced at Montréal’s Festival TransAmériques. In 2012, the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, in partnership with France Culture, awarded his play, War Cantata, the Prix SACD for best world play written in French. It also won the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Québec in 2012. His play Child Object was also staged in 2012 in Québec City by Christian Lapointe. His plays, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, The Ventriloquist, and Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre are considered classics.
Tremblay has also published several highly acclaimed novels, including The Obese Christ (2012), The Second Husband (2019), and The Orange Grove (2013), which won the 2014 Prix des libraires and sixteen other prizes in Canada and Europe, and is now published in twenty countries. In 2017, he won the 2017 French-Language TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award for Même pas vrai with illustrator Guillaume Perreault.
Until 2019, Larry Tremblay taught acting and dramatic writing at Université du Québec à Montréal’s École supérieure de théâtre. His website is larrytremblay.ca.
Also by Larry Tremblay
NOVELS
The Bicycle Eater*
The Obese Christ*
The Orange Grove
Piercing*
PLAYS
Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre*
Talking Bodies: Four Plays*
The Ventriloquist*
War Cantata / Child Object*
POETRY
158 Fragments of a Francis Bacon Exploded
* Published by Talonbooks
© 2016 Larry Tremblay
© 2016 Éditions Alto
Translation © 2020 Sheila Fischman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free 1-800-893-5777.
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Interior design by andrea bennett, cover design by Typesmith
Cover photographs by Claudia Dea, Mystery Black White (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr; Ricardo Lago, Book 8 (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr; Hajo Schatz, Caged by the Monsoon (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr
Talonbooks acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This work was originally published in French as L’impureté by Éditions Alto, Québec City, Québec, in 2016. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Impurity / Larry Tremblay ; translated by Sheila Fischman.
Other titles: Impureté. English
Names: Tremblay, Larry, 1954– author. | Fischman, Sheila, translator.
Description: Translation of: L'impureté.
Identifiers: Canadiana 20200158783 | ISBN 9781772012477 (Softcover) | ISBN 9781772012958 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781772012965 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8589.R445 I4613 2020 | DDC C843/.54—dc23
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