Then he had dictated the funeral ritual, with Cain-Pierre as adolescent altar boy, the freshly picked fern, the engraving of a question mark. And Pachelbel. And the meeting of the circle for the reading of his letter to Vitalie. “You are my high priestess, Marianne, all the rest is yours.” He would have liked to order light as well, a Magritte sky, but that eluded them.
Yesterday, then, she had played the final game, when she left the hospital where François Dubeau had just died in his morphine sleep. Found the Pachelbel tape, substituted the Abbé of the Arts for the priest of the highest parish in Outremont, summoned the seven to the reading, called Vitalie whose name was Marie, who had had a straightforward voice and who would attend along with the adolescent altar boy, he was tall, he’d need a long surplice.
And this morning she was sitting at the foot of the bed, on the black comforter she would presently throw away, along with so many objects that would be passed on to no one. The letter to Vitalie was sealed inside a big brown envelope, an academic’s letter. It was heavy, he had written VITALIE in red ink.
He had been mistaken. He was absent. The capital letters moved, Marianne no longer recognized them. The François who had prepared this envelope had long since been absent, three weeks when she had watched over him, until the very outskirts of all his nights. If there had been a woman who was his wife, he ‘would have asked for her at the end, she would have finally appeared.
And then there are the great betrayals, and the small ones. Because he had wanted others to read the letter before Vitalie, why should Marianne not be the first? “You are my high priestess, Marianne, all the rest is yours.” Suddenly, she was no longer certain that he’d insisted it be sealed until the following day, until they had returned from the funeral. He had not pressed the point, at least.
The flap was barely moistened. With one finger she had lifted it without leaving a trace, she would seal it more firmly than he had, and they would see nothing, the people tomorrow, they would be holding their drinks, they would spy on one another, they would even consider it normal that Marianne had already read the letter to Vitalie, because it was public, because it was for them.
Marianne went into the living room, she spread the sheets of paper on the piano, she read it, standing, and reread it until darkness fell.
She had had a son at an age when others consent to a first kiss. She had been lucky that he hadn’t resembled his father, that above all he didn’t have the greasy eyes and the thick neck of the boy to whom she had consented and who’d made her come so well. François had been made in her own bed, on parish bingo nights, the Dubeau parents went every week and recalled the games every day, one spring she’d had her room to herself every Friday night, for an apprentice mechanic from the garage next door who knew how to manipulate her until she cried out before he did.
François came from there, moreover he too had an active sex life. She had brought him up without much interest until adolescence, she had lovers of the same sort as the father, never to marry, and she didn’t want another child. And then they’d met again in Outremont, Marianne made over by a man who was intelligent but disembodied, and François who left his trace on boys and in magazines. She was quite delighted with this subtle intellectual who was her son, who gave her his arm on Laurier Street, who chose the soaps, the wallpaper, the books she had learned to read at forty. He had even shown her how to love the man who had taken her away from Mentana Street, to stop regretting lovers who love you until you feel torn apart. She had finally learned to touch in a different way and to put words into kisses. All that had come to her through the child whom she had just returned to the desert.
And others loved him too. Those disciples she would entertain the next day, before she emptied out the apartment and made the blue cat disappear, they were preparing to keep him alive. Jérémie, Paul-Marie, Gérald, all of them enemies to some extent, in teaching and writing, had started to prepare a complete edition of the writing of François Dubeau, it would be entitled Baroques to evoke the famous digressions that kept the reader or the listener in a state of utter imbalance. On Mentana Street, she would never have believed that one day she would grant importance to memory. But today she was readying herself to live on it for thirty years. She would polish it along with them. Her son could not become François Dubeau who loved a woman, who was separated from his achievements. Light. A wisp of straw who would drift away, of whom only the lie would be remembered. She saw farther than he had, she was his mother. The lie he had wanted to be a truth to bequeath to them, he had wanted one or another of them to find salvation there, to understand better than he had. But it’s pointless, François. They will hush up even your imposture. It will not leave this place. It belongs to them.
And François had had no children.
Except that boy Cain, who had come so late into his life and whom he’d had trouble letting in. He would return whence he’d come, perhaps he in turn would meet his mother, after Marie had educated him. That would be desirable. It is always possible to remove a Corinne from her binding, Marianne, who had been taken between a municipal incinerator and a garage, knew that. Cain would be called Pierre again and he would go back up north.
As for Vitalie, her name was Marie. One of the roots of her own name. She must be choked off before she grew, before she became a part of oneself. A long brown woman who loves and who tonight, in her suburb with its English streetlamps, is doubled over from the greatest pain of all.
Tragic choirs cry out in the city. The high priestess is free to betray. No one dies of treason in our time, they would not know how. Boys expire because of some spit, because of a stomach ache that is felt sometimes in the heart.
Six
O UTSIDE THE CHURCH MARIANNE DUBEAU trembled for nearly an hour, though her hand did not shake. All those children. All those boys and girls the same age as François, and his heartbreaks. She had taken leave of him at the Hotel-Dieu, he was merely a dead man with a tired body who no longer heard or saw her. But these forty-year-old children still had some colour in their cheeks, a smile in their eyes, a stiffness in their shoulders. They were alive. Never again would François pour water or wine for her, or call her in the middle of the day. His voice was already gone, the sound switched off.
I betrayed him, I deceived him, I killed him. Father, Abbé of the Arts, grant me absolution. See the scratch along my wristbone, you think you see an old woman’s vein grazed by a knife. The kitchen. A grater. A thorn, summer is starting and the rosebushes are aggressive. But it’s the wind. I went around the house, broke all the windows along its length, a thin, feminine man could have slipped inside, I invented the lover who steals his lover’s final breath. It was dawn, I had the night at my fingertips, it eluded me for it was running away. I hurt myself, it was time. I was never hurt by François, he was mygarrote against life. I’m barely scratched, give me the absolution you grant to all usurpers, I am Marianne, that is to say nonexistent and white and empty. Mother of a stillborn child. Thus did I abort him and it’s very cold between the legs and there is blood on the hands. And words which came from him like seed and which I burned. Before his body were his words.
Marianne had washed her hands, dressed in her clinging monk’s habit, walked to the church. There was the Mass for the dead, the adolescent altar boy, and the pretty brown woman who laughed before she cried and whom Marianne did not greet because she knew who she was. Then the fire, and the ashes. A very small, square box for her to dispose of. François had left it to her. No cemetery, he had wanted the church to touch them all, to bring them together, and to imagine them breathing his end. But afterwards, nothing. God was the fern, a joke. “You will stow my dust in the buffet, or offer it to the municipal incinerator, I would rather like to end up where I was born.” It mattered little to him. Ashes are ashes, nonexistent and grey and empty.
There was the return to Rockland Avenue, the comedy before these children who were François’s fr
iends and hence his enemies. And Bérangère, who had perhaps seen through the lie but who would turn it into a poem, what did she know about the enormity of the betrayal, about the Vitalie whom Marianne had just struck off?
The glasses are empty, still, they have drunk, it was a great Bordeaux and they’re poor. There is some left. Marianne drinks. On the very white wall, nearly a metre wide, the Betty Goodwin is extinguished because it is two o’clock and the light is moving west. The title is in French, il y a certainement quelqu’un qui m’a tuée. I am a woman whom someone surely has killed. But at the root of the belly flows black blood, which could be the terrible swelling of a man, rapist or victim of rape. The woman-cow moreover has no breasts, she sags, naked, over broken limbs, the scrawniness of the arms moans all the way to the face, which is blind. The legs though are beautiful, rounder, almost thighs, with joints that have a delightful hollow in the back of the knees. Someone has killed while caressing this creature from behind, the buttocks inverted, neither woman nor man. Marianne touches the paper knees, they belong to her and to François and to Marie. Who knows.
They are pink verging on yellow. This piece will go to Marie in place of words. She will have it shipped to her and will even offer her the ashes so she can spread them beneath the hammock, onto the bed of peonies, but she mustn’t suggest that. Marianne must have read nothing about François-Vitalie and their games before death. Marianne will write a note, very dignified, very much the mother, that will express the last wishes, so false that it won’t show. “François asked me to send you this piece by Betty Goodwin, the most important one in his collection. And his ashes. Please believe in this expression of his love or of his friendship, which I was unaware of though I can guess that in the one case or the other, it was intense. Marianne Dubeau.”
That would be the proper thing to do. Vitalie in her suburb would receive the note and the picture and François’s dust, and at the same time the scratch would fade from Marianne’s wrist. Everything would close in again. The bedroom window would have long since been replaced, and the silence too, among all of them, the children and the others, and Bérangère would have gone on to other writing.
Four o’clock. On Rockland Avenue, a school bus drops off other François who chirp and shove angry Vitalies. A Toyota pulls up behind it. The woman who gets out of it, parked illegally, is brown and slow. She knows the address. She has rung the bell, she has seen the light from the lamp that Marianne has just switched on, a mistake on the day of a funeral, one must survive. She is there, Vitalie, the only one, half of the ball that is rosy pink and rose, standing erect against the doorpost, she has François’s eyes before they were extinguished, she has taken them. She asks for the letter he had promised her stage left, on leaving her to go and die. “I was expecting it to come today but it’s late. Do you have it?”
Marianne holds the door, her son is absent, she is cold. “A letter? No.”
About the Publisher
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as "Publisher of the Year."
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