Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

by Pan Bouyoucas

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks, his voice cracking with emotion. “You gave me detailed accounts of the rehearsals for Bernarda Alba, the divorce of one actress, another’s facelift. Why didn’t you say anything about your appointment with Groslin?”

  He calls his wife’s agent, Aline Diamond.

  “Do you know Serge Groslin?”

  “I know his films. Actually, he was in Montreal a few months ago to promote his latest. Alma must have mentioned it.”

  “All I know is that they saw one another …”

  “Surely she was going to tell you more when the contract was signed. Actors are so superstitious.”

  “Groslin had offered her work?”

  “Yes, the lead in his next film.”

  Hanging up, Doctor Maras says:

  “For months, years, you suffered because you weren’t working and I moved heaven and earth to console you, calm you, cheer you up. So that theatre people wouldn’t forget you I went with you to boring social events so that you’d go out and they would see you. All of a sudden you’re offered the lead in a film but you couldn’t share that good news with me? Why?”

  Unable to sit still he paces the room, plunges again into the labyrinths of memory, rehashes his thoughts, develops new hypotheses, turns the elements over in every direction, more and more surprised to be talking to himself.

  “It couldn’t be superstition. You told me everything, to get my opinion. About every person you called. Every step you took. Why didn’t you tell me about Groslin? And if he offered you a part, why didn’t he tell his wife? She didn’t seem to know you when I spoke to her. And why didn’t he say that he’d seen you in Montreal? Was Groslin superstitious too?”

  It was as if he were spinning his wheels.

  “If only you’d mentioned it!”

  When his daughter gets out of the shower and invites him to have breakfast with her, he is in such a state he can’t even drink his coffee.

  “Don’t tell me you’re thinking about René Poitras again!” Mélissa exclaims.

  He tells her about his phone call to Paris, his conversation with Aline Diamond.

  “So?” his daughter says. “Mama called everybody for work. When she found out that Groslin was in Montreal she contacted him too.”

  “Why didn’t she say anything to me? She used to tell me everything …”

  “Maybe she thought you’d object to her working with Groslin.”

  “Because he’d been chasing her twenty-five years ago? She went back to work with him after we were married.”

  “So why such a fuss about it now?”

  They were going in circles and instead of continuing like that, inflicting on his child his own doubts and concerns in addition to her grief, he decides to get some fresh air, taking with him the business card the clairvoyant had left him.

  15

  WHEN MADAME ÉLIAS saw the look on his face, she asked, concerned, how he felt.

  For the first time in his life, Doctor Maras replied:

  “Old.”

  The woman raised her right index finger, the bracelets that covered her arm jangling.

  “Tsk, tsk, don’t ever say you feel old. You must say that you feel you’re becoming wiser.”

  He snickered, then asked the clairvoyant if Alma had ever talked about her plans.

  “Sorry, everything that’s said within these four walls is confidential.”

  “I have to know. Alma asked me to scatter her ashes in the place where she was happiest but she never said where that was. I wanted to bury her ashes in our garden. Is that the wrong place? Am I deluding myself? Is it pretentious of me to think that her private happiness was limited to me? You have to help me find the answer. You’re my last hope.”

  Madame Élias thought for a moment, then said:

  “I know a way that will satisfy your curiosity and preserve my integrity. Let me collect my thoughts and Alma will tell me everything you need to know.”

  Doctor Maras was a man of a gentle nature who always spoke in the same calm tone he used when speaking with a patient. This time, he who even as a child had only twice raised his hand to someone and that was to defend his sister, was, as they say, foaming with rage. With flames shooting from his eyes, he said:

  “Do you take me for an idiot?”

  “No …”

  “Then don’t talk to me about communicating with Alma or I’ll stuff your bracelets down your throat.”

  Madame Élias began to tremble.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “your wife sensed that Bernarda Alba would be her swan song, the end of the dream, and she regretted that she hadn’t stayed in France where actresses of her age are still valued. So when she told me that Groslin was in Montreal I advised her to call him, especially because I could see in the cards a change in her destiny and that her life was approaching an important turn. ‘Right now you can change the star that governs your career,’ I told her. And I wasn’t mistaken: Groslin offered her a role in his next film. As a result the future was smiling on her again, as it had when she was taking her first steps as an actress, when Groslin had opened to her the gates of happiness and fame. I’m not saying that she was unhappy with you. She quite simply needed to make a choice: to bow to the destiny that age had in store for her or expatriate herself to work and dream again. But she didn’t know how to tell you that and she kept putting off the moment, because she loved you. I swear that on the lives of my children Alma loved you very much and she told me again and again that you were the best of husbands.”

  But Doctor Maras was already heading for the exit and he had stopped listening.

  16

  WHEN HE GOT home it seemed as if the flowers his wife had planted in the garden had rushed into bloom, opening to taunt him. When he finally went to bed that night, he felt the way he had as a child waiting for sleep, trying in the dark to imagine where the universe begins and where it ends.

  But on waking he’d made up his mind: He would go to Paris and talk to Serge Groslin face-to-face. He made a reservation on a plane departing the next evening and called his secretary to let her know. As well, he phoned his sister in Paris to tell her that he would arrive on Sunday and asked her to make an appointment with Groslin for him on Monday. But not at his place: He didn’t want to talk about Alma in the presence of his wife.

  “Do you really have to?” his sister asked. “Aren’t you going a bit too far?”

  “In every image in my mind Alma and I are together. How could I go on living with those images while doubting the emotions they express?”

  “All right, okay, I’ll call Groslin.”

  When it’s Mélissa’s turn to get up, he asks her to take care of her mother’s garden while he’s away.

  “There’s always the hope that she’ll come back with me,” he says, struggling to put a smile in his voice.

  To his great surprise, this time his daughter does not try to hold him back or make him change his mind. On the contrary, she approves of his decision as if, seeing him so overwhelmed by doubt these past few days, she couldn’t ask him to doubt the rest of his life.

  “She’ll come back,” she says quite simply, “and we’ll be able finally to live our mourning in peace.”

  He feels bad at having again forgotten that Mélissa is grieving too and that once more he will be leaving her alone with her grief. To redeem himself, he promises her that after his return on Tuesday, whether he comes back with or without the ashes, he’ll talk to her only about the future. And the next day, before he leaves for the airport, he calls his daughter’s boyfriend to ask him to take care of her while he is away.

  “It would be better for Mélissa not to spend those three days alone.”

  “Why? What did she tell you?”

  “What do you mean, why? She’s just lost her mother! Should there be something else?”

  “No, no,” the other man replies hastily, as if sorry he’d asked the question. “There’s nothing else.”
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br />   Doctor Maras is not convinced and wants to make him say more, but his taxi has arrived.

  The driver is one of his patients, Abdo Adaïmi, a Lebanese in his fifties who has congenital glaucoma and whose taxi always smells of mandarins or oranges. Abdo doesn’t know that his eye-doctor has lost his wife and, seeing his grim expression, he tells him a story to amuse him.

  “Remember my associate, Georges Boutros, Doctor? Twenty-five years ago, during the war in Lebanon, he was clubbed in his left eye and you took out the cataract that developed there.”

  “Yes, I remember him.”

  “He’s in jail.”

  “Why?”

  “A couple of months ago he picked up a fare who wanted to go to the corner of Monkland and Royal, in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. When he realized that Georges was Lebanese too, he started telling him that he was going to get it off with a married woman he’d met in a bar where she hung out when her husband was at work. She wasn’t hot but she was submissive and compliant, he said … You hear these things in a taxi, Doctor … You have no idea what tales our fares tell us. At first, Georges only half-listened. But the more the guy said about what he was going to do to the woman he was on his way to get it on with, the worse Georges felt for her and for her husband. Until they arrived at the corner of Monkland and Royal. The guy paid Georges, with a tip as big as the prospect of the pleasures he was going to experience, then he got out. But Georges didn’t leave. He lived in the same neighbourhood and he wanted to see which of his neighbours’ houses the guy would go into. And what doorbell do you think he saw Casanova ring?”

  He laughed.

  “I tell you, Doctor, there are coincidences that make a man really believe in the existence of Satan …”

  Doctor Maras did not laugh at all. In fact, if Abdo Adaïmi wanted to cheer him up he’d only managed to make him gloomier. And now it was with a sombre face that, as soon as he was buckled into his seat, he asked the flight attendant not to let anyone wake him up before arrival, then he gulped a sleeping pill to give himself a rest from his thoughts.

  17

  HE LANDED AT Charles de Gaulle on Sunday morning. Hélène and her husband, director of photography Franck Rondot, had the day off and had come to meet him.

  In the car, Hélène informed her brother that she’d made an appointment for him with Serge Groslin on Tuesday afternoon.

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “He left for Marseille yesterday and won’t be back till noon on Tuesday.”

  He was going to stew in doubt for another day and just thinking about it made him choke. Hélène knew that and it pained her to see her brother so broken. But she also knew that only Groslin could take him out of the abyss into which Alma’s last wishes had cast him and said nothing.

  Franck was driving.

  Suddenly he said:

  “If it was me, instead of torturing myself I’d go and find that son of a bitch’s wife.”

  Doctor Maras did not react.

  Neither did his sister.

  Franck raised his voice.

  “Groslin must’ve told his wife about whatever feelings Alma still had for him, even if it was just to brag. I know him.”

  The other two still said nothing.

  Franck glanced in the rearview mirror.

  “If you’re afraid of confronting his wife, I’ll go with you.”

  “I’ll wait till Tuesday,” Doctor Maras finally said.

  “Do you think Groslin will tell you the truth? Coward that he is, he’ll be super careful not to reveal anything for fear that you’ll smash his face. And that scum won’t just take the mickey out of you. What a great idea for a film, he’ll say, a guy looks for the place where his beloved was the happiest to scatter her ashes. And as soon as you’re gone, he’ll jot down everything you told him to pass on to his buddies or use in a film, never overburdening himself with scruples as you do.”

  “Maybe so. I’m still waiting till Tuesday.”

  Franck turned towards his wife.

  “They’re something else, these Canadians, eh? He’s been given horns and he’d rather mope and feel sorry for himself than upset the wife of the guy that cuckolded him. Finally I understand why you’ve turned out as many great men as we’ve produced seal hunters.”

  Hélène observed her husband for a moment.

  “You seem to be mad at Groslin.”

  “I’m just trying to help your brother. Obviously, even though he’s a doctor he doesn’t know what cowardice can lead to. At first, it seems easy. You invent a thousand reasons for not putting your words into action. But you always pay the price in the end. Pimples, ulcers, insomnia, cancer …”

  18

  FRANK WOULDN’T LET the matter go. While Doctor Maras settled into the guest room, washed, and called his daughter to tell her he’d be coming home a day later, his brother-in-law, an assiduous reader of scholarly works as well as fiction, consulted several in search of arguments that would help him convince his guest to go and see Ninon Conti. And at dinner that night, all puffed up with his finds, he asked:

  “What is happiness, Alexandre? What in your opinion is the meaning of that word?”

  Because of jet lag, fatigue, and his torments, Doctor Maras had trouble focusing his thoughts and, caught off guard, he spluttered.

  Franck burst out laughing.

  “You’re hilarious! You’re trying to find the place where your wife was happiest and you don’t know the meaning of the word?”

  “You aren’t going to start bugging him again with that,” Hélène said.

  “Feeling his pain won’t lighten his suffering,” her husband replied. “As long as we’re at it why not drive nails into his hands and pour him some vinegar to quench his thirst?”

  Then he launched into an exposition that quickly revealed the extent of his knowledge both general and specific.

  Reduced to silence by his brother-in-law’s verbal avalanche, Doctor Maras, whenever an argument came to the tip of his tongue to defend the happiness he had experienced so often when he was back home with his wife and his daughter, for example, after a good day’s work, he would think to himself: That’s too superficial, and choke it back. Hence, when his sister finally asked her husband if one had to conclude that happiness on earth is a figment of the imagination, even if his whole body wanted to cry out No, he waited for Franck’s reply with the expression his patients wore when they were waiting for his diagnosis.

  “Happiness is merely an idea,” Franck read in a psychiatry text. “Only pleasure is concrete, as is displeasure. And one of the most complex and most interesting points in psychiatry is the coexistence of pleasure and pain. Masochism is the most obvious form of that state.”

  Doctor Maras protested:

  “I came to Paris out of duty.”

  Franck turned toward his wife and, savouring every word, said to her:

  “Typical reply of a masochist, like the saint or the soldier who devote themselves to a noble cause, regardless of the danger and pain involved. And Alma, knowing her husband’s sense of duty, arranged through her last wishes to make him pay for all the years she’d devoted to him rather than to her career.”

  Doctor Maras protested again. Yes, he said, like everyone else Alma had her faults and she could occasionally be nasty, especially when she heard the excessive flattery that less talented actresses received for roles that she was no longer offered. She could also prove to be jealous and possessive, especially when she saw the way young women made eyes at her husband. But never, ever had she in a calculating way caused harm to another. “What is it about young girls?” she said quite simply. “To keep in shape they just have to flutter their eyelashes.” Yes, she had humour and wit, even if she preferred to play tragic roles. Alma also had a big heart, even when it was at its sickest.

  Franck looked his brother-in-law up and down with an appearance of pity.

  “She had a big heart … Of course, you know everything that was in it. You would swear to it, wouldn’t y
ou? Either you’re more naïve than I thought or you’d circumvent the truth to spare your memories and go on deluding yourself. Goddammit! Put aside your emotions as if you were treating a patient, and just think about yourself for once. What do we know in actual fact about the hearts of others, Alexandre? Really? What do we know about the hearts of others aside from what they want us to see? Alma was intending to leave you. Had she told you? No. And because death would prevent her from coming to Paris and whereas you had a strong, dependable heart and were going to stay alive to enjoy it, she thought up those last wishes to piss you off from her funeral up until yours. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  Doctor Maras suddenly recalled what Nicole Gouin had said to Pauline Brunet: The only times she would see Alma happy were when she was pissing everybody off, and with her last wishes she pissed off everyone even after her death.

  “Anything’s possible,” he said finally.

  Franck put his hand on the hand of Doctor Maras.

  “If you don’t want Alma’s so-called happiness to become your hell, at least have the balls to dig up some courage and see Ninon Conti tomorrow. She’s the only one who will tell you the truth. She’ll even help you pay back her bastard of a husband for his treachery, if you tell her that he intended to give Alma a role that he hadn’t offered to her first.”

  Doctor Maras, whom wine made more nostalgic than aggressive, recalled two verses by Racine that he’d learned back in the days when he helped his wife to memorize her lines and said:

  Too long I’ve shown you love’s violence

  To lapse into a dull indifference.

  Franck took away his hand.

  “People are pissing you off and you laugh?”

  “Leave him alone and think, will you?” Hélène told her husband. “A woman of Alma’s age doesn’t cross out a marriage with a stroke of a pen overnight. She doesn’t even want to look any more, all she desires is to keep what she has.”