Arvida

by Samuel Archibald

  When I saw it for the first time it was on behalf of a client. Armand Sénécal. He was going to buy it, and he asked me to inspect it first. I came along Rue Forster, turned up the driveway with its five hundred-year-old trees on each side, and parked in the turnaround at the end, right in front of an imposing residence that seemed really small under the trees. I let out a whistle, sitting alone in the car. I loved that house at first sight, and then a bit more with each defect I found there that would put Armand off. The roof was a disaster, and I would have bet anything that what was just under it was rotten too. The second and third floor walls showed clear signs of water infiltration. The basement was a humid cave, and you could tell just by the smell that the French drain was clogged. The tennis court in the back was nice, but it had been left untended for at least ten years. And then there was the icing on the cake. All across the property there were things the agent tried to pass off as sculptures, but that looked like junk picked up in a scrapyard: steel rods wrapped in barbed wire in the middle of a flower bed; big sheets of iron and copper soldered to look like African masks and fastened to stakes here and there on the front lawn; beside the tennis court there was an old yellow bus planted upright in the ground, with five big tractor wheels around it. A yellow bus sticking straight up in the air, I swear on my daughter’s head.

  Apparently the house belonged to the Villeneuve family, town notables who’d owned a number of businesses in the region, beginning with a rock quarry lower down on the hill, towards the Saguenay. Armand said there was an old path starting behind the house, which brought you there on foot. The house was the family’s summer home from about the 1910s to the 1960s. The last residents were Viateur Villeneuve, his wife Claire, and their four children. Old man Villeneuve was a pretty well-known local artist. He’d taught at the trade school, where they did woodwork and cabinetmaking. The children were gone, the old man was dead, and now Madame Villeneuve wanted to sell the house, which was too big for her.

  I asked Armand:

  “How much does she want for it, Madame Villeneuve?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “Well, if you pay two hundred and fifty thousand for that, you can be sure of two things. First, you’re going to regret it, and second, I’m going to go all over town telling everyone ‘Armand Sénécal has a heart of gold.’”

  Saying that about anyone around here is not exactly a compliment. Armand swore under his breath, then said:

  “How much would you give, at the most?”

  “A hundred and eighty five, maybe a hundred and ninety thousand. That’s if I had two hundred thousand more to sink into the renovations, and ten years of my life to spare.”

  He thanked me, and we each went our way. Two days later, Madame Villeneuve, in person, called me at my office. She sang me a chorus of insults. She even tacked on some “crisses” and “tabarnacs” that coming from her had the ring of responses committed to memory for Mass. When she’d finished her bit of theatre, I put in, “Madame Villeneuve, I’m going to tell you something. Your house, I want it. I’m going to give you a hundred thousand dollars for it, with a disclaimer clause in the act of sale. That way you’ll be sure that I’ll never go after you for a hidden defect. Talk to some people with their heads on straight, if you know any. They’ll tell you that you’ll never get more than that.”

  She hung up in my face. The next week I passed in front of the house, I turned around in the driveway, and I stopped the car. I found the house beautiful, with its roof broken up by attic windows, the grey asphalt shingles peeling away on top, the two dormers projecting from the front façade, the large cedar shutters, and the hoary whitewashed walls. I couldn’t help myself.

  I saw Madame Villeneuve peering out the window, through the curtains. I took off immediately. As if I felt guilty. I breathed a long sigh and for once decided to listen to the voice that always talks into my ear, telling me what to do, and that now was saying, “Forget it.”

  A year later, I was living elsewhere. I’d just finished moving with my wife and little girl into a house that I wasn’t crazy about, but that would do us for a while. The telephone rang. It was the good woman Villeneuve.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, Madame. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to know if your offer still holds.”

  The truth was, that it didn’t. I’d just transferred everything into the new house, and moved my office. But business was good, and I knew that it wouldn’t take long for me to refill my coffers. I also knew that if Madame Villeneuve were calling me now, it was because she’d spent a good year trying to sell her house.

  I said:

  “Yes, Madame, it still holds. Except that I can’t give you the money for at least three months. I’ll need time to sell my house here.”

  “I understand. That seems reasonable.”

  “But there’s one more thing: I’m not going to move my wife and daughter into your shithouse without doing a minimum of renovation.”

  She coughed.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’d like you out within two weeks.”

  “You want to pay me in six months and turf me out today. Is that it?”

  “Right.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Take your time, Madame.”

  That time I was the one who hung up. It was her son who called me two weeks later. He’d had the papers drawn up, and he was anxious for me to sign. He was in the Saguenay for just one week, enough time to move his mother into a retirement home and liquidate her possessions. At the notary’s, he offered to leave me the furniture or the objects already in place. I replied that they could keep their old rubbish, and that they were lucky I wasn’t charging them to remove the old man’s rusty totems from my property. I then asked him, just to make conversation, if his mother had had him close the deal because she was sick, and he replied:

  “It’s not that, no. She says you’re the coarsest person she’s ever met in her life.”

  That same afternoon, I went to see the empty house. It was there and it was mine. My humble abode. I’d always dreamed of a house like that, and now I had it. It would take me five, ten, twenty years to fix it up the way I wanted, but that didn’t matter because I’d dreamed for forty years of putting my family into a house like that.

  No one believes me, but I managed not to say anything to my wife and daughter for quite a while. I sold the other house through contacts, scheduling visits for when my wife and daughter were out. For five months I did the work in secret, contracting out a few of the jobs. After a while my wife began to think I had a new mistress. I had the tennis court in the back taken out and a swimming pool dug, I had the foundations set right, and I plastered over the strips I’d taken out with the chainsaw. I restored the outside walls and had them painted yellow, a beautiful bright yellow, a bit mustardy, to contrast with the green shingles I’d installed on the roof. I dismantled old man Villeneuve’s sculptures and sold off the pieces as scrap. A lot of people called me a barbarian for doing that, but I have to say that I offered them for free to all the museums in the region as long as they’d come to cart them away, and not one said yes. I painted inside as well. My friends came to help me out from time to time, and at the end I think the whole town knew I’d bought the house except for my wife and my little girl.

  One Sunday afternoon, I said, “We’re going on a picnic.” Danièle asked:

  “Where?”

  “Miville Grenier’s new house. Seems it has to be seen.”

  My wife gave a whistle when we went in, and my daughter said:

  “Wow, it’s beautiful here.”

  My wife asked:

  “He’s not here, Miville? I don’t see his car.”

  “No, he wanted me to do a bit of inspection.”

  My wife toured the house. The second floor was st
ill very much a work in progress, but the first was liveable. That’s what I was banking on. She explored the outside too, in a state of bliss. The little one was running all over with the dog. Danièle said:

  “They’re lucky, Miville and his wife. They’re going to have a really beautiful house.”

  I threw her the keys and I said:

  “Just as well, because it’s not Miville’s house. It’s yours.”

  She looked at me wide-eyed, as if she didn’t understand.

  “Don’t give me that,” she said.

  “I mean it.”

  I remember everything after that, but not in order, I remember it like it was all happening at the same time. My wife jumping into my arms, my wife going to get Julie and telling her “It’s our house, it’s our house!”, the dog yapping, everybody running around. She can say whatever she likes, she’ll never take that moment away from me. Never mind if my ex now says she found the house too big and too old and it was all wrong because the little one was already scared the very first time she saw it. It’s not true. She was happy that afternoon. I was the best husband and father in the world and we were happy, all three of us. And it stayed that way for a while before things really went bad.

  It’s funny, because I remember Danièle’s smile, and Danièle’s smell and her taste, I swear, but I can’t any more say a kind word about her. I figure I wouldn’t speak so badly about her if I hadn’t loved her so much. She’s gone now, and my little girl’s gone, and I’m living in the house with another woman. I don’t love it the way I did at the beginning even if today it’s my house, my very own house. It’s not the same as when I was fixing it up.

  Not many people will understand me, but there’s something strange about taking over an ancestral domain. This wasn’t my first house, but it was the first that made me feel like I had to wrest it away from somebody. Before I took advantage of the Villeneuves’ decline and snapped it up, three generations had lived in the house, never doubting that it was theirs by right. When a man buys a place like that, he buys the nest and protective shell of someone else, someone else’s wiring, and someone else’s ideas, and he has to decide how far he’s going to go to become that person, how much of that man he’s prepared to graft onto himself. And there’s no getting around it. Two men had inherited the house. From the little I knew, it was Hermenégilde Villeneuve who’d built it at the turn of the century as a summer house for the family, Médéric Villeneuve who’d modernized it and turned it into a principal residence, and Viateur, the artist, who’d let it run down to the point where I was able to buy it.

  It was Médéric, in particular, who haunted my thoughts while I was going over his improvements. That he might have delegated many of the jobs to someone else didn’t even occur to me. People like me, they hone their skills at an early age on the cabins and then the houses of the men in their family. By the time I’d made my first purchase, there was a lot I could already do. Médéric, it seemed, had learned everything on the job, on just this one site. I could date the work by the differences in quality. The plumbing was impressive, even if it had started acting up in old age. The wiring was done any which way. He’d used newspaper to insulate some of the walls I tore down. I smoothed out the pages to see what was written there. Hardly anyone will believe me, but there was a lot of talk about the Cuban embargo and the Warren Commission. The carpentry was beautiful. The roof had been well built at the time, but Viateur had let it run down.

  I worked so much before we moved in and so much after that I hardly noticed the time. I finished the swimming pool and the terracing in the back so my wife could have a place to entertain, but little by little I realized that she was getting tired of living in a construction site. She griped about the water coming out of the faucets either too hot or too cold, she griped about the lights that didn’t go on and the bulbs that flickered, she griped about the rooms that were less well insulated than in the old house, and the drafts, she griped about the creaking floors and the knocking pipes. I think she’d always found old houses beautiful without understanding what it was like to live in one, the work it demanded, and the lack of comfort, at least for a while. I suppose it was stupid on my part not to have seen it coming. It was always the same thing with her. We’d bought a cabin in the woods because she thought it would be fun to go there, but we never did go except to make four trips weighed down with supplies so she could be as snug as she was in town, and could ward off flies at all times. One year I rented from a buddy a villa in Venezuela that I’d thought of buying so we could go away every winter, and teach Julie to dive and to speak Spanish. Danièle thought it was the best idea in the world until she saw her first lizard, and realized that the meat was not wrapped in cellophane at the market. Christ, she couldn’t even sleep in a four-star hotel—I’m talking about in North America—without bringing along her own pillows, her own shampoo, and a disinfectant for the bathroom. Just to be sure.

  The little one was doing okay, I think. Until one night. I was putting the cover over the swimming pool, when I heard her cry out. It had to be almost midnight, and she’d been asleep for about two hours. She cried and then her dog yapped and yapped and I ran to her bedroom. Danièle was already there. The little one was all in a sweat in her bed. The damn dog wouldn’t stop barking. I gave it a good kick in the side and that made it yap even more, and my daughter cried even louder. Danièle gave me a black angry look, and said:

  “Get out of here, Gilles, get out.”

  I left. I made myself a big Cutty Sark with lots of ice. Danièle came to join me about an hour later.

  “It’s all right, she’s calmed down. We have to do something, Gilles.”

  “Something about what?”

  “To purify the house. I’m going to ask Jacqueline Martel if she knows someone.”

  “Will you please tell me what you’re talking about?”

  “We’re seeing things. Your daughter’s seeing things.”

  “Seeing what, for God’s sake?”

  She looked at me as if I were slightly retarded.

  “Ghosts, Gilles. Your bloody old house is full of ghosts.”

  I tried to stay calm, but I was livid. I must have told her she was crazy over and over again, with lots of bad words mixed in. My wife behaved with her daughter as if she’d been born to be her best friend. She did everything with her, and told her everything. Once, while I was consulting on the Côte-Nord, they’d watched The Exorcist together. Holy shit, Julie was nine years old. Danièle had never read a book in her life that didn’t talk about past lives, or chakras, or abductions by extraterrestrials, or spontaneous combustion, or women whose children were stolen by Arabs, all that kind of bullshit. A whole library chock full of charlatans and scaremongers. The books were lying around everywhere, and my daughter read them all day long as if they were Tinker Bell fairy tales.

  “I’ve had nothing to do with that, Gilles, I swear.”

  “Right. Like with Thomas, I suppose.”

  That had been one of our biggest blow-ups before this particular night. The little one was just four years old. I’d come home from work and given her a bath while reading the newspaper and checking in on her from time to time. She was talking to someone while I wasn’t watching her. I noticed that two or three times.

  “What’s your friend’s name, Julie?”

  “He’s not my friend, he’s my little brother. He’s called Thomas.”

  I almost puked. I had to hide myself on the other side of the door, in the hall, so the little one wouldn’t see me like that. Thomas was the name my first wife wanted to give to our child. She’d always been sure it would be a boy, and at the hospital they’d confirmed that that was the case. Then we had a car accident on the way home from her parents’ in Lac-Saint-Jean. She was twenty-six weeks pregnant. I was driving, and yes, I’d been drinking. But it was another car that hit us because of the freezing rain. It was a pretty bad collis
ion, but no one suffered any serious injuries except for Diane, who had a big bloodstain on her dress. We prayed all the way to the hospital but it didn’t help. They removed the dead baby from her belly, and performed a curettage. Diane was half dead too, and I left her there and went back home. I got drunk and I took the baby’s room apart with a sledgehammer before putting everything, the clothes, the diapers, the toys, and the hunks of wall, into five big garbage bags. We separated six months later, about the same time I met Danièle. A little after, if you want to know the truth.

  When I saw there was nothing magical in all that, I went to talk to Danièle, but she didn’t feel bad about it or anything. Back then she’d wanted to have another child. Not me. I figured that just the one had made her crazy enough, the way things stood. She answered me in her curt little tone of voice:

  “She had to know that she’d already had a little brother.”

  I clenched my fists and shut my mouth and waited for her to apologize but she never did, not once, during the seven or eight months that Julie went on calling her imaginary friend by the name of my stillborn son.

  I don’t want to speak badly of her, but it wasn’t just the paranormal and stuff like that. The first time I took her out of her village to my favourite restaurant in Old Quebec, Danièle ordered lobster with a glass of milk. A year after we were married, she called me at my office in a state because she was missing a special kind of salt for the recipe she was making for supper. She wanted me to go and find some, super fast, at the fine foods place in the lower town. I said okay, even if I had a thousand things to do more urgent than that. I picked up a writing pad and asked her what kind of salt she needed.

  “Optional salt,” she said.

  “Are you kidding me, Danièle?”

  In her book, it was written “One teaspoon salt (optional),” and she’d spent all morning freaking out over that.