“Alma Joncas is the very image of perfect happiness,” evoked her joy at acting in Paris where, as a young actress, she’d had a run of four months at the Théâtre national de Chaillot.
“Alma’s Bliss” talked about her affection for Mélissa, who was still a baby, and for her husband.
“Drunk on Happiness” a few months later recounted her nomination in Cannes for the award for best actress in a leading role, in a film by Serge Groslin.
Indeed, rare were the articles and interviews in which the word happiness did not appear at least once, whether it was about gardening, her childhood in La Malbaie, or her trips abroad. Even about the new kitchen she’d had put in. As if this woman, passionate by nature, loved everything she did because she only embarked upon that which excited her and added life to her life.
Bewildered and weary, Doctor Maras went out into the garden to freshen his thoughts.
Spring, heedless of the grief and torments of man, was scenting the air with lilacs.
In the sky sailed by a solitary cloud.
And for a moment the poor man thought he saw in it the face of his beloved.
She was looking at him reproachfully, as if to say: “I am the woman with whom for twenty-four years you shared the table, the bed, and the intimacy and you don’t know where I was happiest?”
6
THE NEXT MORNING, Doctor Maras announced to his daughter that he had made up his mind: He would bury the ashes in their garden.
“If Alma didn’t specify the place where she was happiest,” he said, “it’s because she trusted my judgment, for after twenty-four years of married life I knew her better than anyone else.”
But no sooner had he drunk his coffee than the phone began to ring and rang without let-up all morning. All the actresses in The House of Bernarda Alba called to tell him, each in turn, that Alma had been happiest when she was acting, more particularly at the Orphée. Some even swore that they’d heard her say, “as if she sensed that the end was approaching,” that actors’ ashes should always be left at their favourite theatre.
Doctor Maras also had a call from Raymond Cholette, a producer at Radio-Canada and, like Alma, a native of the Charlevoix region who agreed with Zak’s declaration.
“Show business is a small world,” he said, “rumours get around quickly, and when I got wind of the argument that broke out after the funeral yesterday, I felt that I had a duty to call you. Of course I’d have liked to see Alma buried at La Malbaie. But I have to confess that, when she called me a few months ago looking for work, she confided that she’d spent the most wonderful moments of her life in Saint-Hilaire.”
No one called in favour of La Malbaie and, when the bell rang just before noon, Doctor Maras thought it was the mail carrier come to deliver the conclusive proof that Carmen had promised to send him.
But when he opened the door he saw a sixty-something woman with hennaed hair and bracelets all up her arms.
“I’ve come to offer my condolences,” she said. “Alma and I saw a lot of each other in the past year.”
She gave him her card.
“If you ever need my services, don’t hesitate to come and see me. I live two blocks away.”
Doctor Maras looked at the card and frowned when he read: Madame Élias. Clairvoyant. Medium.
Many actresses ask for your Zodiac sign before they ask what type of work you do. Alma was an exception. Or so thought Doctor Maras, who believed he knew Alma better than anyone. He was less certain after Madame Élias had left, when he asked Mélissa if she knew that her mother consulted a clairvoyant.
“Yes, I knew,” his daughter replied. “Mama was depressed at not working and she wanted to find out about the future. She never mentioned those consultations because she knew you’d have laughed.”
Doctor Maras wondered if there were other things that his wife hadn’t told him and he called Aline Diamond, Alma’s agent and friend, to ask her.
Aline Diamond replied:
“You are all right to think that Alma was happiest in the places you’ve just mentioned. Over the years, depending on her mood, she recalled every one of them as being the site of perfect happiness. In my opinion, the best solution would be to scatter a handful of ashes in Saint-Hilaire, a handful at the Orphée, a handful at La Malbaie — and the rest in your garden.”
As a physician and surgeon, Doctor Maras was well aware of what the ashes of a human being amount to: barely two kilos of the calcareous part of the bones crushed and sifted, the rest transformed into gas and dust particles that fly away into the flames. Still he winced at the thought of scattering those two kilos of his beloved’s calcium to the four corners of the province.
“I’m going to put all the ashes in one place,” he told his daughter. “But the place that my heart and my mind steer me to isn’t necessarily the one that Alma would have picked. So I’m going to revisit each of the other three places before I make my decision.”
Without the slightest suspicion that with those words he would set off a chain of events that would change forever the course of his life and his daughter’s.
7
IT WAS ON the stage of the Orphée that he had seen Alma for the first time. She was playing Martha in Le Malentendu by Camus. The brother of the play’s director, a friend of Doctor Maras, had invited him to the première. The doctor didn’t know a thing about theatre and thought that the talent of an actress was determined by how well she could figure out what to do with the words that were lent to her so that for two hours the audience thought that she was someone else. But Alma had been so tragic and noble as a dejected girl without love that in her mouth every word became rich and sacred, every gesture took on a meaning that dignified it, and he was still profoundly overwhelmed by her performance when his friend took him backstage to introduce him to his brother, the director, and the actors.
Today the Orphée box office was closed, the lobby deserted. The theatre too. Save for a woman’s voice coming to him from the back of the corridor leading to the office of Pauline Brunet. A bad-tempered voice saying:
“So the diva wants her ashes left where she was the happiest. How touching! How romantic! How annoying! Yes, annoying! Because the only times I saw Alma Joncas happy were when she was pissing off everybody. And with her last wishes she’s still pissing us off from the other side of death.”
The voice was that of Nicole Gouin, a playwright in her forties whom Montreal’s entire theatre world had been praising to the skies ever since she’d enjoyed a certain success in Paris. Except Alma. Though she’d have given anything to go back on stage she had refused to act in a play by Nicole Gouin because she thought it was nothing but a sea of beautiful sentences every one of which claimed to hold a profound truth.
“I can’t take any more of those fancy, hollow lines where every snore is assumed to be an illumination,” she had told the dramatist. “I want a story, characters, conflict, not that mush about your every turd and fart.”
Alma wasn’t one to mince words and she was never reluctant to give free rein to her opinions. Which slams a lot of doors in the diffident small world of the theatre. But actress though she was, capable of every ruse and audacity on stage, off-stage she couldn’t lie and play-act to save her life. Once she had brought a tin of foie gras home from Paris. When the customs officer asked if she had any meat, she had turned bright red and was searched to the very linings of her suitcase and her coat.
Alma was just as incapable of pretending, or of holding her tongue at least, when for instance she was asked what she thought of a show. And when her husband criticized her once for having offended the artistic director of a theatre with her remarks, she had replied:
“Are courage and integrity the monopoly of the characters we play?”
“I’m not asking you to lie or to betray your convictions. You couldn’t do it and that makes me very happy. But sometimes it’s wiser to be right silently even if it’s just to avoid offending the convictions of others.”
&n
bsp; Alma tried silence.
A week later, she told her husband:
“I know you have to be something of a whore in this job but silence only fosters mediocrity. If a show is rotten, it’s rotten, and if I’m asked what I think I won’t say the contrary to keep my name on the guest list.”
That’s how she was made, Alma. An open book. And now Nicole Gouin was getting her own back.
“A theatre’s not a graveyard or a museum,” she shrieked at the end of the corridor. “But Alma Joncas never understood that. Which was why she defended her classics so fervently, with all their fake conflicts, their fake actions and subterfuges, when the duty of theatre today is to force spectators to plunge into the depths of their own subconscious to find their genuine self in the silence of silence.”
“This theatre is also a business,” Pauline Brunet told her. “A business that has been piling up debts ever since the budget cuts by the Culture Ministry and I doubt that during this recession we can absorb those debts by plunging into the depths of our subconscious. On the other hand, Alma’s ashes can double the number of subscribers. Quadruple them even if other actors announce that they’ll leave their funeral urns to us.”
“And where will you place your dear Alma’s urn? On stage, I suppose, and the audience will observe a minute’s silence before every performance. Or maybe you’ll keep it under your desk so you’ll always have her between your legs.”
“Don’t be vulgar, jewel. You’re talking about a dead woman who was also a good friend.”
“If you loved her that much, why not use her ashes to stuff your tits? She would always be next to your heart and I’d stop feeling as if I’m kissing prunes.”
“Stop, my love, you’re killing me.”
“Yuck! Just thinking about it turns my stomach. Your old prunes, the cracks in your skin, your oozing lips, your mouse squeaks — I feel as if I’m in a sarcophagus when I lie in our bed. For consolation, I had our theatre. Now you want to turn it into a mausoleum too. But I won’t let myself be buried in it!”
The office door opened wide.
And it was Pauline Brunet’s turn to shriek.
“I’ll do whatever you want! Come back, Nicole! I’ll do whatever you want!”
8
IN THE TIME it took to go home, Doctor Maras had erased Pauline Brunet and her theatre from his mind.
Mélissa was sitting at Alma’s dressing table. Shoulders hunched, eyes red and swollen, she was holding a brush that still contained the hairs her mother had left there the last time she’d used it.
“I miss her so much …”
He stroked her head and promised himself to decide quickly about the ashes so that he could look after his child who had also been hit hard by the tragedy.
“Still no word from Carmen?”
“No. But Zak called. He worked on Mama’s monument all last night and all day today and he invited us to Saint-Hilaire tomorrow to look at his sketches.”
As he had not received from Carmen irrefutable proof that Alma had been happiest in the place of her childhood, he wouldn’t have to go to La Malbaie. If he hadn’t received the call from Raymond Cholette yesterday, he’d have forgotten Saint-Hilaire as well and buried the ashes in the garden that night. He knew though that, if he didn’t see their first house again, the call from Raymond Cholette would always gnaw at him.
“What would you like for supper tonight?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Nor was he, all he wanted was to have something else to think about, to take everything out of the realm of emotion and back to the everyday so that it would feel as if life were continuing.
But his daughter chose to go to bed.
Twelve hours later, Mélissa was still shut away in her room and refusing to go with him to Saint-Hilaire.
“You haven’t set foot in that house since we moved to Montreal,” he told her. “You should see it again one last time. For Mama.”
He loathed that kind of argument, playing on emotions, but he didn’t have the heart to leave her there, moping in her bed. To mollify her he reminded her of all the love that her mother had invested in their house in Saint-Hilaire, all the sleepless nights spent rocking her baby, all the hours she’d devoted to playing in the garden with her little tot. He even told her what he’d heard at the Orphée the night before and for the first time since Alma’s death, they both laughed.
An hour later, Doctor Maras was not laughing at all.
On both sides of the highway to Saint-Hilaire apple trees in blossom covered the ground as far as the eye could see. The air was perfumed, and dazzling light filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Just like the day when Alma had brought him to see the house that she wanted to live in. She became impassioned at the thought of moving to Saint-Hilaire, as if she intended to redecorate the entire region. She talked and quivered so much behind the wheel that it was not the landscape but his life that Doctor Maras saw passing before his eyes.
“Zak was probably right,” he finally admitted. “In every image of your mother that I have from then she was brimming over with enthusiasm and joy, with energy and a sense of purpose.”
Mélissa squeezed his hand. It was her turn to raise her father’s morale.
“Wait and see the garden,” she told him. “Everything depends on the state it’s in.”
9
ALMA AND ALEXANDRE’S first house …
The front was still the same, the street too. Deserted, as it had been long ago. Never had he got used to it. Yes, in Saint-Hilaire the gardens were bigger and more fragrant, the birds chirped all day long and at night the sky was starrier, but he needed to hear human voices, to see people, and not just behind the wheel but here they never went on foot. Didn’t even need to walk the dog. It was more oppressive during the long winter months when the snow muffled the few human sounds that came to him in summer. Besides that, he had to go to bed and get up an hour earlier to arrive at the hospital where he operated every morning, while in the evening no sooner would he arrive home than already it was time to put his child to bed.
Zak and Liza greeted them with open arms. As did their guests. There were around twenty, including Raymond Cholette, the Radio-Canada producer to whom Alma had confided that she’d spent the most wonderful moments of her life in Saint-Hilaire. There was also someone with the look of an apostle, whom Zak introduced as Frère Isaïe, spiritual leader of the Alliance universelle pour la Vie, a movement based on justice and peace, wherein members would come together around a global union wherein all creatures would be esteemed and loved for what they were.
“That’s all very well,” Doctor Maras said to his brother-in-law, “but why is he here? Why are all of them here?”
“Why, for Alma,” Zak replied. “And for you and Mélissa. They love you.”
“I hope they don’t start hugging and kissing me,” Doctor Maras said to his daughter.
“You’re the one who insisted on coming, so be quiet,” she responded.
A table had been set with salads, fruit, and pastries because, like his biblical namesake, Frère Isaïe dreamed of the lion eating straw with the ox and insisted that all the members of his Alliance be vegetarians like him. But before they tackled the buffet, Zak invited everyone to come to his studio to look at sketches of the monument he suggested putting up in memory of his sister.
“I’ve never worked so fast or got such good results in such a short time,” he told them. “It’s as if Alma were guiding my eye and my hand.”
Everyone was impressed. Even Mélissa who, seeing her uncle in a new light, told him:
“I envy artists like you and my mother. Your path is already laid out by your talent.”
“You too, young lady, you will do great things,” Frère Isaïe said, clasping her shoulders. “I see your aura. An aura as dazzling as the ones with which we adorn the saints on icons.”
Liza was listening with a beatific expression as if golden eggs were emerging from the mouth of her spiritual father.<
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“Frère Isaïe has the gift,” she murmured to Doctor Maras. “I’d always suspected that I came from another world. Frère Isaïe has confirmed it.”
Meanwhile, Frère Isaïe was saying to Mélissa:
“There are two kinds of individual: those who think that they could walk on water if they put their minds to it and those who have to be constantly reminded that they have two feet. That’s all you need to understand, my child, and the talent the Creator has given you, that gift which is hidden in you, will blossom just as mine has done, late in the day as well, after I had a vision.”
Mélissa, who adored that kind of story, forgot her sorrow for a moment and asked the man to tell her what had happened to him. And while he was describing the vision that had transformed his life and the others were attacking the buffet, Doctor Maras made his way to the garden.
Had it not been for Mont Saint-Hilaire facing him, he’d have sworn that he had taken the wrong exit.
While everywhere else the trees were in blossom, Alma’s once luxuriant garden was now a desert. Literally. The three neighbouring gardens too. It was not only the fences separating them that had been torn out but also the trees and shrubs, to make the four lots into one flat, open field that had been covered with sand. As well, in the very centre had been planted palm trees made of some synthetic material, as if to create an oasis.
In vain Doctor Maras tried to picture Alma as a young actress, a young wife and mother; the only image of her that he could see was the last one he had held onto — Alma at her moment of bliss murmuring: Yes, yes, before she expired.
As a result, the anguish that had gripped him as he approached Saint-Hilaire fell away and when his daughter joined him, he smiled at her again. He also smiled at the guests who were emerging from the house behind his daughter. He smiled at Zak and Liza who had erased every sign of Alma from their property. He even smiled at Frère Isaïe who, addressing Melissa and her father, said:
Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife Page 2