Arvida

by Samuel Archibald

  He claims others are ignorant, and proclaims his own superiority;

  He lies;

  He makes false statements in order to worm out the truth;

  He’s egocentric;

  He can be jealous;

  He cannot tolerate criticism and denies evidence;

  He doesn’t take into consideration the rights, needs, and desires of others;

  He often waits until the last minute to give orders to others or to have them act;

  His reasoning seems logical or coherent, while his attitudes do not;

  He flatters you to please you, offers gifts, will without notice do anything for you;

  He generates a feeling of unease or of not being free;

  He is very effective in attaining his own goals, but at the expense of others;

  He has people do things they would probably not have done of their own free will;

  He is constantly the topic of conversations, even when he’s not present.

  She’d underlined almost everything. I couldn’t talk to her about it right away, because that evening we were entertaining her friend Monique and her retard husband.

  The same night, I waited for her in bed with her book in hand, and I asked:

  “Danièle, will you be so kind as to tell me who you know that’s such an asshole?”

  She gave me her pinched little snobby look, as if I were the most pathetic case on earth.

  “Gilles, it’s obvious. That’s all about you.”

  Danièle had magical powers: she could make me furious even when she said exactly what I thought she was going to say. I remember punching the wall, hard, and asking her at the top of my voice if they were going to bring out a second volume to talk about women who were fucking liars and fucking parasites.

  We heard Julie crying. Danièle called me a bloody madman and then did what she usually did. She took the little one and went off to Quebec City for the weekend. To her sister’s. That was something else I could never figure out about her, her being able to persuade herself that she was protecting her daughter by loading her into a car to drive for two hours when she was halfway drunk.

  I stayed on alone with the yapping dog and old quarrels suspended in air along with the Villeneuve family’s ancient dramas. That’s the weekend something happened in the house, the only thing I could never explain to my daughter.

  *

  We talked on the phone two or three times in the course of the weekend, Danièle and me. I don’t even remember what I said. It was just a ritual, a penance I had to perform every time, so Danièle could get up on her high horse. I promised to be careful. I said that maybe we’d go for counselling somewhere. Above all, I didn’t raise my voice once during the calls. The girls came back Monday while I was at work. When I showed up, Danièle and Julie were outside. Danièle stayed on the lawn, while Julie came up to hug me, and asked:

  “Papa, have you seen Mélodie?”

  “Mélodie? I tied her up outside this morning. Maybe I brought her in, too. She’s not in the house?”

  “No.”

  We searched around a bit, calling her name. While Julie wasn’t looking, I mimed to her mother over her shoulder my taking a swig from a bottle, and I shrugged my shoulders. In fact, I hadn’t seen the dog since Sunday. The little one was concerned. At supper we reassured her, telling her that the dog had perhaps run away. That papa had maybe forgotten to close the patio door at one point, it had been hot over the weekend. After three days, my wife began to wonder whether the dog had been hit by a car.

  I printed up flyers at the office, with a photo of the dog and our telephone number on it. We went to put it up all over the neighbourhood, once Julie got home from school. There were no calls. We began to tell the little one that Mélodie must be dead. She was ten years old, after all. Maybe she’d got sick. Maybe she’d decided to go and hide in the woods to die.

  On Saturday I was at my workbench in the basement, when Julie came to find me. She said:

  “Papa, I’d like to show you something while mama’s not here.”

  “Right away?”

  “Yes. I think I found Mélodie.”

  I took off my goggles and put them down on the sawhorse. “I’m with you, my lovely,” I said, and we went outside. We walked out behind the swimming pool, to the edge of the woods. Julie rooted around in the branches a little, before saying, “It’s here.” A chill went down my back when I saw that she’d found the path leading to the old Villeneuve rock quarry. We walked up to the barrier I’d built almost two years earlier. The little one leaned out over it. “Be careful,” I said. “Don’t worry,” she replied. “Don’t worry, just look.”

  Down below there was something in the hole. The body of a little disjointed animal afloat in the black water, black as well, but another, duller, black. I took a deep breath, and then I asked:

  “Julie, I promise you that we’ll go see if it’s Mélodie. Over on the other side, though, because the path gets dangerous here. But first I want you to tell me why you came here.”

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  “Julie. Tell me.”

  “Because it’s the lake where Thibeau and Vallaire Villeneuve died.”

  I shut my eyes and clenched my fists and I felt Julie clinging to me.

  “Papa, listen to me. It’s not mama who told me, I swear. It’s that big Christine at school. Don’t be mad, papa. Don’t be mad.”

  We went back to the house to pick up gloves and a shovel and a big burlap bag. We took my car and went round by the old town. The quarry’s blocked-off entry gave onto a little road bordering the Saguenay, gloomy as it always was on a cloudy day. I pried the padlock off the gate with a crowbar, and we went in. We threw rocks into the water until Mélodie washed up on shore. I told Julie to look away.

  We buried her behind the swimming pool shed that night. The little one was sad for about a week. After that she calmed down, and the whole house grew calm as well.

  As if it had accepted a sacrifice.

  Things went on that way for a while. My wife decorated and decorated. The house quickly turned into a labyrinth of little pedestal tables and shelves and tiny end tables with little knick-knacks and little lamps on top and little feet underneath. Dozens of goddam little feet to stub your little toe on in the dark at four in the morning. My daughter made note of every creaking door and every wailing pipe, in her book of mysteries. She took dozens of Polaroids. Photos of nothing. She took them against the light or in complete darkness until she had one strange enough to paste into her notebook. She dyed her hair black and put on black lipstick and she seemed on her way to buying all the black clothes her size in the whole world. I remember saying to myself, “Christ, if she could only get interested in boys a little.” I remember regretting that a lot when the tomcats started circling her, later on.

  My wife had finally decided not to move our bedroom upstairs. She said she wasn’t comfortable sleeping on a different floor from her anxious daughter. So I decided to renovate, building apartments overhead, along with Denis Harvey, Alain Laganière, and Yvon Bouchard. That kept me busy for a few months. We worked hard at night and on weekends. Sometimes we ordered in Saint-Hubert barbecue instead of going downstairs. My wife never seemed happy cooking us supper, in any case. And sometimes we ended the day a bit drunk and I let the guys go, saying “I’m going to clean up a bit,” then I watched them through the big front windows, taking off in their cars, and I lay down there, right on the floor, with my shirt rolled up into a ball for a pillow. I was never in a rush to leave the construction site, with its good smell of beer and wood shavings, just to go and join my frigid wife in her giant bed.

  One Tuesday, I had to go to Lac-Saint-Jean to inspect a factory in Chambord. I asked Danièle if she wanted me to cancel. “No, that’s fine, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take care of the little one.”

&nb
sp; I had a feeling something wasn’t quite right.

  When I got back three days later, the girls were gone.

  It took two weeks for Danièle to tell me where they were. With her sister in Quebec City, obviously. They’d be coming back, but not to the house. She’d take an apartment because she needed to think. That apartment, I helped her find it, I painted it, and I paid for it for six months. I’m just saying. I went to pick up Julie twice a week to go to a restaurant and then a movie. She didn’t want to sleep at the house any more. Neither of them talked to me much about the dog, afterwards. Either they’d mourned for it normally, or they knew I wouldn’t be a good audience for their paranormal theories. Meanwhile, I’d finished the lodgings on the second floor, and put tenants into them. And no one ever complained about anything, including the mother and daughter who lived in the apartment where Thibeau’s and Vallaire’s room used to be.

  I put up with my wife’s little fit of independence for almost a year. Until people in town began telling me there was another man in the picture. Over the telephone, I asked her to explain.

  “I don’t know if it’s serious with that man, but you really don’t seem to want to change, Gilles.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “I’d like us to get along but I don’t know what you want.”

  “I think for starters, you’d have to acknowledge your drinking problem, and sell the goddam house.”

  “Yes, but you, what are you ready to do to put things back on track?”

  “What do you want me to do, Gilles? I’m not the one who’s sick.”

  I saw red. The little voice in my head told me to shut up, but I opened my trap anyway:

  “I’m going to tell you something, my lovely, and you can put that in your pipe. I’m always going to drink because I like to drink and anyway there’s no man in the world who could put up with a goddam crazy woman like you and still be on the wagon. And I’ll never give up my house. Never.”

  I hung up. Maybe she called back but I wouldn’t have known because I completely destroyed the phone, slamming down the receiver. It took ten years before we saw each other without lawyers being present.

  *

  Today Julie’s almost thirty. She has two little girls and a husband. They’re in Montreal. I would have liked them to stay in the area, but what can you do? Since she left for Montreal at the age of nineteen, she’s come to see me every time she’s been back to the Saguenay, but she never wants to stay long in the house, and not once has she slept there more than one night. Yesterday, the whole family arrived together. I talked with my son-in-law, who I don’t know very well, the older girl spent all day in the swimming pool, while the smaller one, who’s not even a year, amused herself in her baby saucer in the shade under a big umbrella. At night we put the girls to bed and ate outside, all four of us, my wife, my daughter, my son-in-law, and me, with crab claws on the barbecue.

  It was a really nice day.

  We ate like pigs and laughed and my daughter even told some stories out of her adolescence, and then letting her go on, as though nothing were up, I went in to get her mystery notebook. She gave a yelp when I showed it to her, all embarrassed. We talked about knocks in the wall from the plumbing, floors that squeaked, and blurred photos. Still, at one point she said:

  “You can laugh, but you never found an explanation for the dog.”

  “Ah, your Mélodie... she must have fallen, what can I tell you?”

  My wife didn’t know the story, so Julie told it to her. After that I changed the subject, as usual. I said, “You didn’t know, eh, Roxanne, that you lived in a haunted house?” I made myself laugh and told them that Roxanne thought there was a vampire in the basement, an evil creature but not really nasty, a kind of spirit who bled the life out of people’s veins, bite by bite. I even had a friend who taught at the University of Quebec and wanted to interview her about it because he’d never heard of people believing in vampires anywhere else but in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

  *

  That time when Danièle took off to Quebec City with my daughter, and when Mélodie disappeared, I didn’t sober up much for the entire weekend. I don’t recall everything, but I do remember pacing up and down in the house having imaginary arguments with my wife, and I remember ripping a lot of shelves off the wall and throwing all kinds of stuff onto the floor, and having to pick it all up on Sunday. Saturday night I went to bed early with a big headache.

  About ten o’clock, the dog started to yap. I came out of the bedroom and found it sitting right in the middle of the living room, head in the air, barking at nothing. It lay down when it saw me coming. I petted it a little, talking softly, and it followed me into the bed. It didn’t stay for long. I felt it steal off, and half asleep, I heard it, from time to time, coming out with its big dumb yaps.

  From when she was born to the age of eleven, more or less, my daughter had her Jack. He was a German shepherd mixed up with all sorts of other things. I’d picked him out of a farm dog’s litter, at Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. My daughter was still in her mother’s womb. Julie and Jack had been a great love story. We often stayed in the country when my daughter was little, so that Jack was her constant companion. Even later, when we were living on city streets where there were more children, she often preferred to stay all alone with Jack.

  Two weeks after Jack’s death, my wife turned up with a little miniature schnauzer. “The best little dog in the world,” she said. A friend had given it to her, neglecting to mention that it yapped with all its might at the drop of a hat. She didn’t especially like dogs, my ex-wife, and in fifteen years of cohabitation, I don’t think I saw her scooping up droppings more than five times. But she had the firm belief that for a child, life without a dog was no life at all, and it would require another mutt for Julie to be consoled. I’m not sure that was true, and I would have preferred her to consult me beforehand, at the very least. I’m the one who’d trained Jack, and I’d kept him groomed, and I’d had him immunized, and to tell the truth I could have used a little dog break before taking on another.

  Mélodie really had no chance with me. I didn’t much like that dog. Her yapping didn’t help, for sure, especially after my wife and daughter had started using it as evidence for there being something wrong with our house.

  In short, I disliked the dog, and it got on my nerves more and more when it started howling its head off. I went down mad as hell to the living room and delivered it a good big kick in the side. I never liked hitting dogs, but for a long time, with her, I hadn’t been able to restrain myself. She got up and came in between my legs while continuing to yip at the top of her lungs. I chased her all through the house, and she ended up making one bad move, crossing in front of the staircase leading to the basement. I was right behind her and was able to give her another kick in the side that sent her tumbling down the stairs.

  I went down after her very slowly. The dog was making high-pitched noises. She tried crawling again but I whomped her with my foot a third time, hard, and now I heard bones crack. She peed on the cement floor from fear, and lay down in submission. I grabbed her by the neck. I could say that I was mad or possessed by the twin devil of Vallaire and Thibeau Villeneuve, but I won’t say that. Because it’s not true. I didn’t see red and I didn’t see black. My anger was white, and everything was perfectly clear in my head. I wasn’t even drunk. That was the most terrible moment, when I understood in the same instant that I could stop, but that I wouldn’t, because in every fibre I was serene in what I was doing. The dog wriggled around. I shook it one way and then the other, and when I had a good grip, I squeezed with all my strength. Men in the past invented spirits, vampires, and werewolves, so as to accuse them of crimes they committed themselves, and I was no better than them, no better than anyone. It wasn’t a spirit or a demon that killed Mélodie, it was just me. Me, my madness, and my bare hands.

  I left the dog there with its tongu
e sticking three inches out of its mouth, and its eyes almost popping out of their orbits. I went to bed, and the next day, when I woke up with the sun, to fumes of alcohol, I was able not to think about it for at least ten minutes. Then it came back, and I told myself that the old quarry would be a good place to get rid of the body. I walked there carrying the dog in front of me, letting the branches and thorns scratch at my bare arms and face, and I heaved it down without even glancing at it one last time.

  I never told anyone and I’ll always deny it. My wife and my daughter have brought up the subject a lot, but each time I’ve said “The dog fell in the hole, give me a break with that.” You may think I’m making a confession by telling this story, but it’s not true. I’ve changed it just enough that no one will know me, and if by some stroke of bad luck my daughter recognizes me anyway, I’ll say, “Are you crazy?”

  I’ll always deny having done it, and I’d give the same advice to any man who perpetrates a similar abomination. Deny it to your dying day. Swear on the head of your parents, swear on the head of your wife, swear on the head of anyone except your children, and swear on their heads too if you have no choice. Invent a story, tell a pack of lies, put a curse on your eternal soul, but for the love of God keep your mouth shut.

  *

  Something odd happened yesterday. Julie slept in the house, and in the morning, she found nothing strange. Her eldest had woken in the night after a nightmare, and she’d made a big commotion, and her father had had to put her back to sleep, but this morning my daughter didn’t say it was the fault of the house, or of Thibeau and Vallaire, or I don’t know what. We ate breakfast together outside, it was a lovely morning. Roxanne and I are leaving on vacation the day after tomorrow, so just like that I said, “Hey, if you want you can take the house for the week with the girls. Our pleasure.”

  I waited for Julie to burst out laughing. But she and her guy looked at each other, normally, and then she said:

  “We’ll think about it, papa. It’s true this would make a super place for us to stay when we’re in the Saguenay.”