“My brother, my daughter, I have the pleasure of telling you that the monument in memory of our beloved sister, Alma, whom the Eternal, our Creator, has received in His glory, will be ready to be inaugurated on the evening of the feast of la Saint-Jean, known as well as the time of enchantments.”
“Hallelujah!” replied his flock in unison.
“Now, my children, form a circle. And hand in hand, let us pray to our beloved sister Alma and ask her where she would like the monument to her memory to be erected.”
He gave one hand to Mélissa and offered the other to her father.
Rather than take it, Doctor Maras said to him:
“Thank you for your welcome and your love, but this is not the place where we will leave her ashes.”
A murmur of disappointment rose from beneath the fake palm trees.
“You sure gotta bitching black karma, ain’tcha!” Liza exclaimed, losing briefly her beatific expression and her affected accent.
Frère Isaïe, unaccustomed to being contradicted, glared at the rebel as if to intimidate him into retracting.
Doctor Maras turned his back on him and said to Zak, who was regarding him with clenched jaw:
“I thank you for your invitation and your drawings. But this oasis, welcoming though it is, is no longer my wife’s garden.”
10
A FEW MINUTES later, en route to Montreal, he said to his daughter:
“Carmen was right to be wary of Zak. Just like Pauline with her theatre, he only wanted the ashes to raise the profile of his sect, and he asked Raymond Cholette to call me and say that Alma had confided to him that she’d spent the most beautiful moments of her life in Saint-Hilaire.”
“That’ll teach you to listen to others instead of to your own heart,” Mélissa replied.
Her father did not defend himself or explain that to hear his heart he would first have to silence the doubts in his head. Instead he erased the visit from his mind. Except for the remark that his daughter had made to Zak: “I envy artists like you and my mother. Your path is already laid out by your talent.”
Why had she said that, when she’d just completed her first year of medical school? Surely it wasn’t sycophancy: that was not her way. He would talk about it with her later, at the house. When they had buried the ashes in the garden he would have plenty of time to broach the subject.
Unfortunately, a large envelope from Priority Post that appeared in the mailbox stopped him.
The envelope contained two sheets of paper.
The first was a hand-written note that read:
Here is the proof I mentioned. See you soon.
Carmen.
The second was a photocopy of an interview Alma had given to the Journal de Charlevoix. In it she spoke mainly about the comedy in which she’d acted at the summer theatre in La Malbaie two decades earlier.
It was the most wonderful summer of my life. Utter happiness. It was before the casino opened and we were the only attraction in town. Everyone came to see us and every night the other actors and I were invited all over and we ate and drank and danced until three a.m. I lived in my father’s house and that summer, I realized why I hadn’t stayed in France, where I’d been offered roles in both theatre and film.
The interview was dated barely a year earlier.
When Doctor Maras showed his daughter the two sheets of paper, she said:
“Here we go again!”
With a lump in his throat, her father replied:
“Don’t you think I’d have liked to know that she was happiest with me? ‘It was the most wonderful summer of my life.’ The most wonderful summer of her life! When she’d always told me that her most wonderful summer had been the one we’d spent in Greece, when you were five.”
Mélissa had never seen her father so disconsolate.
“She told me too that she’d spent the most beautiful summer of her life in Greece, papa,” she said. “So let’s bury the ashes here and that will be that.”
That was also his wish, poor soul, but being the kind of man he was, he replied:
“I have to be clear about it in my own mind. Your mother wanted her ashes to be buried in the place where she was the happiest, and I intend to respect her wishes.”
Two minutes later he called his sister-in-law to tell her they were coming. But when he hung up, Mélissa told him she wouldn’t go to La Malbaie with him and that this time, nothing would make her change her mind.
“You’ll come back with the ashes, like we did from Saint-Hilaire because deep down you know that you want to bury them here. Why should I drive for five hours for nothing?”
And so he got back on the road by himself, bringing with him the urn containing the ashes, convinced that he would leave them at La Malbaie, and he drove for five hours without a single glance at the landscapes that he crossed.
Without seeing either that all the evidence of Alma’s happiness provided by others was in the process of forging his own unhappiness and that of his child.
11
CARMEN HAD LAID out the plates and cutlery on the garden table, opened a bottle of wine, and ordered in the finest dishes because, unlike her sister, she hated to cook.
“I hope you’ll come more often now that the ashes will be here,” she told her brother-in-law. “You’re the only family I have. Alma is gone. Zak, I can’t even look at his photo. And this house belongs to your daughter. As I have no children, I’ll put it in her name.”
Unlike her first garden as a married woman in Saint-Hilaire, the one at the house where Alma had grown up was unchanged. It was actually more beautiful and four times the size of her garden in Montreal. In addition, the top of the cliffs offered an unbroken view of the harbour at Pointe-au-Pic and the St. Lawrence River that flowed a hundred metres below, immense. The gallery where Alma, as a young girl with eyes full of dreams, had announced to her parents that she wanted to become an actress was still there too, as was the grove behind which she had exchanged her first kiss. The boy, René Poitras, was the son of the woman who did the cleaning at the Joncas house. He opened a bar and restaurant and, during the summer when she’d acted at La Malbaie, after each performance Alma usually went there to eat and drink and dance.
Doctor Maras had known all that for more than twenty years. Today though he wondered for the first time if that summer had been the most wonderful of Alma’s life because it had been the summer of her first love. The first man too who had given her cues when, at age eighteen, she had to memorize two scenes for her audition at the National Theatre School.
“Does René Poitras still have his restaurant?”
“Yes, all the food on this table is from René’s.”
“Alma must have eaten there often when she came to La Malbaie …”
“Every night. And when those two got together they could drink and laugh and gossip till breakfast.”
Doctor Maras pushed away his plate.
“It was a long drive. I’m too tired to eat.”
“Please don’t go to bed. I don’t often have the chance to eat with someone …”
The two sisters had little in common, and not just physically. As much as Alma was bubbly, exuberant and full of life, her sister was reserved, withdrawn and subdued. They had the same eyes, though, the same hair, and in other circumstances he would have begged Carmen not to leave the table, so much did her eyes and hair drown him in memories, to the point of imagining Alma in the flesh at his side. But tonight, though it was only nine o’clock and still daylight, he decided to go to bed and rose from the table, saying:
“Eat at René’s!”
He had always been able to control his feelings. One of the qualities that Alma admired about him — she who could blow up over the slightest thing and who had an art for making mountains out of molehills. It was clear that all of her husband’s qualities hadn’t been enough for her to be faithful to him. And as his sister-in-law had been the complicit witness to that infidelity, he couldn’t stop himself from saying
, viciously:
“Eat at René’s!”
Carmen, her voice weary now, replied:
“I no longer find his erotic obsessions funny. Maybe if I saw him, as Alma did, once every three years …”
Doctor Maras didn’t ask for details about those erotic obsessions, or why Alma was still interested in them, convinced that, so as not to exacerbate his pain, Carmen wouldn’t tell him the truth. And so the shadows that his sister-in-law’s words had cast in his mind became much more impressive that night than the reality they reflected, and around eleven o’clock, unable to toss and turn in the bed any more, he dressed without a sound and went to find the sex maniac who had dared to kiss the boss’s daughter at an age and a time when boys and girls would blush even if their shadows touched.
12
HE DID NOT have to look for very long. There were only two restaurants in the harbour, one of them called Chez René.
Nor did he have to search for his wife’s first lover. Like the harbour, the restaurant was plunged in darkness and silence, but its owner was sitting on his terrace, gazing at a freighter flying the Norwegian flag, the only one docked at the wharf.
The two men had only met once, some twenty years earlier. Since then, René Poitras had gotten so fleshy and was now so unlike the image he had kept of him that Doctor Maras wouldn’t have recognized him if the restaurateur, seeing him, hadn’t struggled out of his chair to offer — along with the foul stench of beer on his breath — his condolences. He looked so morose, Doctor Maras assumed that he too was grieving for Alma until the other man, in the same tone and with no transition, gestured vaguely towards the Norwegian freighter, saying:
“I waited all evening for a sailor to come down for a drink and offer me the charity of a kiss. They’ve got such muscles, their armpits are the only tender part where I could put my hand to fall asleep afterwards.”
Doctor Maras thought: What an idiot I am! He’s gay and ever since the kiss he’d exchanged with Alma he’d assumed his homosexuality, and his erotic obsessions that gave my wife such a good laugh were only about men.
Relieved, he explained to René Poitras why he had come to La Malbaie.
“La Malbaie for all eternity?” René Poitras snickered. “Did Alma have that many sins to atone for? Now Doctor, I’m not saying she wasn’t happy here. But La Malbaie for her was nothing more than a family album that she opened once every three or four years. Her first school. Her first communion. Her first kiss. And the boy who gave it to her had turned queer. Even the theatre where she performed isn’t there any more.”
“The summer theatre isn’t there now?”
“The government took it over and turned it into a casino. That’s why Alma gave an interview to the Journal de Charlevoix. To help the company get another space. Didn’t Carmen tell you?”
“No.”
“She was probably afraid you wouldn’t bring the ashes … Don’t be mad at her. She’s getting old and she wants so badly to have a man to think about. A decent man. There are so few around here … In fact, aside from beer and slot machines there isn’t much of anything. And Carmen rarely drinks and she hates gambling. Even Alma, the last time she came here, she suffocated, the way I suffocate twelve months of the year, and all she talked about was Montreal, Paris, the Aegean Sea …”
Recollecting the Aegean Sea reminded the restaurateur of the Norwegian ship. He returned his gaze to it and said:
“Ah, to bind his feet and wrists to the bars of his berth …”
But there wasn’t a living soul on the wharf, no one on the deck of the ship, only subdued light at two portholes.
“Maybe I should take a case of beer and knock on one of the portholes …”
“That’s what I’d do.”
“Do you think they’ll want someone old and fat and ugly like I am now?”
This time Doctor Maras did not reply. Even sober, René Poitras must be very garrulous when the conversation had to do with him and his obsessions, and he’d only brought up the portholes to involve the doctor, as he must have done with Alma, in the delirium of his frustrations and his fantasies. Doctor Maras was quick then to hold out his hand, which the other man clasped reluctantly, saying:
“You should take the ashes to Paris.”
“Why?”
“Alma dreamed of being buried in Père-Lachaise.”
“She never told me that.”
“She couldn’t, Doctor. How could she have confessed without upsetting you that her time in France had been the most exciting period of her life, the time when she had tasted happiness most fully? Even on stage, so she said, she’d never given herself so completely. And every night, after every performance, before the sweet waves of applause from the Parisian audience, she felt that she could fly higher, ever higher.”
13
AH, ALMA, IF there is life after life and the dead can observe the living, how you must regret your last wish!
You told your beloved husband: You will put my ashes in the place where I was happiest.
Since then there has been neither peace nor rest for him; he is constantly searching for that place. And just as he thought that he’d finally found it, he learns that he has slipped up again.
Do you see how laboriously he plods up the steep and winding road from the harbour to your childhood home? Can you make out in the darkness the distress in which you have sunk him? Can you hear how, word by word, he exhumes from his memory the account you had given him of your first visit to Paris, two years before your marriage, when you acted at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, with your friend Pauline Brunet?
“I was young and fresh and as lovely as a flower,” you had told him. “Paris Match had devoted two pages to me. People turned around to look at me on the street. Waiters in cafés smiled at me. And in the theatre the director, Serge Groslin, hung around me like a lovelorn boy. Once, during a run-through, he jumped onto the stage and told me: ‘You are mine tonight or I’ll kill myself!’ But I didn’t give in. I’d heard it said that before opening night he got it off with all the new actresses he worked with and forgot them as soon as he was into a new project.”
Yes, that’s exactly what you’d told him.
And yet shortly after your wedding you went back to France where Groslin’s first film was being shot. And in the darkness that has covered his world, your Alexandre is wondering now if it is possible that the twenty-four years you spent with him had mattered less for you than those two brief stays in France when you were starting out.
Rather than let his imagination get carried away again, he leaves a note for Carmen, then gets back on the road to Montreal. And at the first red glimmer of dawn, as soon as he’d arrived at the house, being careful not to waken Mélissa, he goes through your papers for some clue that would confirm or contradict that new doubt, and he digs out six photos taken at Père-Lachaise: two of you looking at Molière’s grave, one at Jim Morrison’s, another at Édith Piaf’s, a fifth at Sarah Bernhardt’s and finally, you and Pauline at the columbarium, in front of the immense wall that holds the remains of a thousand more celebrities.
What should he deduce from that?
He is scrutinizing them again, as if the photos could speak, when Mélissa gets up. And when he tells her of his meeting with René Poitras, she blows up for the first time since you died.
“Honestly, papa, I hardly recognize you. You’ve been telling me for years not to trust hypotheses with no basis in fact, to always be sure that there’s tangible proof, a diagnostic sign, before drawing a conclusion, and here you are all shaken up by something you’re told by a drunk. And a frustrated old queen on top of it. Did René at least tell you when Mama confessed that she wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise? No? I’m not surprised. He saw Mama once every three years. How could he remember when she’d mentioned Père-Lachaise? If you ask me it must have been after her first trip to Paris, before she met you. And those photos confirm it: Pauline wasn’t there on the second trip. And it’s normal that, at t
he age she was then, Mama would have dreamed of being buried at Père-Lachaise. Every young artist passing through Paris dreams of being buried among all those celebrities. Then they go home and forget it. You want proof? Never in my whole life have I heard Mama mention Père-Lachaise!”
Mélissa’s way of thinking is logical, coherent, but he’s still not convinced. And when his daughter shuts herself away in the bathroom for her shower, he looks up Serge Groslin’s number in your address book and calls him at home, in Paris.
The director’s wife, the actress Ninon Conti, answers.
“You’re calling from Montreal?” she says. “Is that where you met my husband? He was there three months ago.”
Your Alexandre is so surprised at this last remark that for a moment he can’t say a word.
“It’s my wife and him who were old friends,” he manages to say at last.
“They’re not now?”
“My wife passed away two weeks ago.”
Ninon Conti offers her condolences, philosophizes a little about the ephemeral, then promises to tell her husband about your death.
“He’ll want to offer you his condolences. What number should he call?”
“Don’t bother, I’ll call again.”
And he hangs up, poor man — can you see him? — he hangs up, shaken.
14
NO ONE KNOWS what a day just beginning holds in store for us — Doctor Maras has had more than one proof of that in recent days — but this one, really, came out of the blue. And before he lets himself get carried away by another swirl of conjecture, he finds his wife’s date book, reads the March pages one by one, and on the eighth finds a note written at two p.m. which gives him the strange impression that he has suddenly become the witness to his own life: Groslin/Sheraton.
Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife Page 3