“Yes, I’m better now. What about you? How are you?”
“I’m trying to get used to the fact that I’ll never see her again.”
“Aside from that?”
“Looking after the garden …”
Should he mention her studies and what Alma had said in her letter? He’d had a first sign in Saint-Hilaire when Mélissa had told Zak she envied artists because they didn’t have to worry about their future, it was all mapped out by their talent. He had intended to talk with her about it when they were back at the house but Carmen’s letter had prevented it and he was travelling again while his child was overwhelmed by her grief and, as well, by all her doubts about her choice of career. Even now, he hesitated to broach the subject because he preferred to talk about such important matters face-to-face rather than on the phone. And while he was still hesitating Mélissa said:
“When you’ve finished in Greece, call and let me know when your plane gets in. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”
“Okay. Would you like something from Leros?”
“A wave.”
He smiled.
“I love you, papa.”
He was annoyed with himself for not having said it first and when, in a flood of tenderness he finally replied, Mélissa had hung up.
24
GREECE: A UNIGUE EXPERIENCE.
The poster hangs above the carousel where passengers on the flight from CDG-Paris are waiting to retrieve their baggage. It shows a young couple embracing on a golden sand beach.
It has been years since Doctor Maras has looked at his photos from Greece. Had he known he would end up there he’d have brought one to better recall what Alma looked like that summer when death, for her, was merely a notion as abstract as the horizon.
“Excuse me, Madame,” a woman behind him says to another. “You’ve taken my suitcase.”
Doctor Maras looks at the conveyor belt and, when he realizes that half the suitcases filing past look like his, he starts running left and right to check the label on each one that resembles his which the passengers take off the carousel. He looks ridiculous, he knows it, but he doesn’t want someone else inadvertently leaving with Alma’s ashes, especially because it’s nearly midnight and everyone is anxious to go to bed. When he finally picks up his suitcase, he doesn’t let go of it, especially on the ferry for the island of Leros that he takes the next morning at the port of Piraeus.
The crossing takes eleven hours and the smells, the sounds, the commotion surrounding him, from the stampede of passengers toward the best seats to the long lines in front of the bar, recall a flock of images that come with no need for him to summon up a memory. Especially of the sky that in the past he would see every morning, equally pure and luminous, and the sea that made a person want to dream. And so he stays on the bridge, sitting on a bench with his suitcase at his feet, looking now at the traces of foam that the boat leaves behind, now at the gulls that follow the wake, now the islands and rocks that appear then disappear, just as a group of Japanese seniors block his view to have their pictures taken against the ship’s rail with, in the background, a huge incandescent sun sinking into the horizon.
A young Frenchman siting on the same bench with his girlfriend says to her:
“Why are they taking photos? They’ve got one foot in the grave!”
In the dining room he shares a table with an English tourist around his age and the only passenger who is not watching the television screens where in every corner one can see Redskins tying a missionary to a tree and saying to him: “If faith can move mountains, move that one!”
The Englishman chews slowly as he gazes at a postcard in front of his plate. It shows an ancient statue of a satyr with a lecherous smile, half-man, half-goat, with the beginnings of a potbelly, hooves, and an erection as long as his forearm.
“That’s Silenus, chief of the satyrs,” he explains to Doctor Maras. “Since life is what it is, if I had to give a human face to fate, I would choose Silenus. Look at him. His whole being reeks of irony. His smile. The way his left hand is placed on his hip. The way his right arm is raised. His erection. Standing as if giving the finger to all humanity. You bunch of suckers, it says. I don’t give a fuck about your piddling feelings, your piddling hopes and crappy certainties.”
He looks again at the postcard.
“I’m going to have it framed and put it on my desk.”
Doctor Maras goes back out on deck, still holding his suitcase. He gazes first at the Milky Way that flows from one end of the sky to the other, then at the darkness of the sea, while the boat sails on towards the past, with Alma beside him and the sleeping Mélissa in her arms.
Forgive me for doubting your love. The thought of losing my memories too, of seeing them replaced by a knot of bitterness for the rest of my life had totally unsettled me.
He goes on talking to his wife and the wind answers him, its breath laden with increasing clarity of the scents of the island where Alma intended to go the next summer and of which he can now make out the silhouette. A mixture of thyme and oregano that sixteen years earlier had led Alma cry out triumphantly, Cock-a-doodle-doo! And a rooster had answered in the middle of the night. Then another and another like a choir chanting at the top of their lungs a welcome to the young woman full of such vitality that like the sun, she filled with life every space she entered. And for her, he wanted to waken the roosters as she had done, but as they approached the harbour, there were more and more people on the deck and out of a sense of propriety he worried again about his suitcase so he wouldn’t lose it in the crush of passengers disembarking one after the other.
An hour later, he finally put down his suitcase in a hotel room in Alinda, the small town that hugs the shore of the bay of the same name.
He took out the urn, set it on the dressing table.
Here you are at last in the place where you were happiest. It seems a little strange to me, leaving your ashes on an island in the outer reaches of the Mediterranean where you lived for barely two months. But as Greece was a unique experience for you as well …
25
IT WAS AN obsession with her. When she wasn’t working or when the snow covered her garden and she had only house plants to water, Alma spent hours rummaging in flea markets. In time, she became acquainted with all the second-hand dealers in Montreal, such as Tassos, a Greek whose daughter wanted to study at the National Theatre School. Alma helped her prepare her audition and to thank her, Tassos offered her for an entire summer a house he had on the island of Leros.
“It’s on a hill, barely three hundred metres from the beach, and its terrace looks out on one of the most beautiful bays in the Aegean sea. Take advantage of it before the tourists discover it and spoil that island too.”
Sixteen years had gone by but Doctor Maras was sure that he would find the little house: He would just have to go up from the beach along the road they took to go swimming. The house — he still remembered — was on the right-hand side, surrounded by a small garden in which there was a well. And it was in that same garden that he intended to bury the ashes.
The next morning though, as he left the hotel after breakfast, he felt lost, so much had the village of Alinda been developed. Sixteen years earlier there were only two hotels and the houses were scattered tens of metres apart. Now there were eight hotels and as many new construction sites. A dozen bars as well, boutiques and two supermarkets, whereas to do their shopping back then, they had to travel four kilometres to the village of Platanos, the island’s capital, at the other end of the bay. Also, the number of houses had tripled and from a distance, all these new villas surrounded by enormous bougainvillea concealed from him the little garden where in the shadow of a vine on a pergola, while Mélissa was napping, he and Alma studied — she her next role, he the two or three medical books that he’d brought.
Fortunately there was the sea to guide him and by following the coast, he finally located the road that went up to the house between two hedges of oleander.
He had forgotten the oleander but when he spotted them another flood of images unfurled in his memory: Mélissa at five running ahead of him towards the water while the morning sun shone, already hot. Three hours later, she went back up the hill on her father’s shoulders, exhausted.
Behind them, Alma stopped along the way to admire a plant she’d have liked to have in her garden, but that could not survive in the Canadian climate, or to study another one that she didn’t know.
“I wonder what that is …”
And he, as fascinated by botany as Alma by ophthalmology, could only enlighten her once in two months.
“Belladonna.”
She looked at him, astonished, as the asphalt simmered under their feet.
“They extract atropine from it, an alkaloid that makes the pupils dilate.”
“Really?”
“During the Renaissance ladies in Italy put it in their eyes to make the man they wanted to seduce think that it was he who was stimulating their pupils. The men were so flattered that they only had eyes for women with dilated pupils like the eyes of a fawn, and that’s where the plant gets its name: beautiful woman.”
Alma, who when she was acting in a film or on television, put drops of collyrium in her eyes to make them brighter, asked him:
“Could you bring me some atropine from the clinic? I’ll use it on the next shoot, before a close-up.”
And Mélissa, perched on her father’s shoulders, added:
“Me too, I want some!”
At length he found the house, or rather the spot it had once occupied. Because the house where Alma, always the smart dresser, had spent two months wearing only shorts, T-shirts, and sandals, no longer existed. Nor did the garden where she, the self-confessed chatterbox, had spent hours without uttering a word. A clothing store now occupied the whole piece of land and had he not gone inside to make inquiries, he’d have thought that he’d come to the wrong place.
There was only one young woman in the store, busy arranging a display of brooches and pins.
“Yes, this is where Tassos’ house used to be,” she told him in English. “He left it to his children when he died and as Leros meant nothing to them they sold it to me. I had the house torn down and had this store built.”
It had been years since he’d thought about Tassos’ house, let alone about seeing it again one day. But when he found out that it was no longer there, he felt as if something was suddenly missing in the world and he hastened to get back on the road with the oleanders and to the shore where, while Alma was tanning in the sun, he had taught Mélissa to swim, to float on her back, and to dive.
“Papa, why does the sea taste like my tears when I cry? Papa, why is there an eye painted on both sides of the fishing boat? Papa, why do a man and a woman close their eyes when they kiss?”
She had even noticed that donkeys and horses had eyes on the sides of their heads and not on the front like cats and dogs.
“Why?”
She always came to him, confident that he would answer all her questions, fulfill all her expectations. And he was delighted to find in the eyes of his child this astonishment at the sight of small things that, as he aged, were no longer mysterious or interesting in his own eyes.
“Mama, why do birds sing? Other birds can’t hear them, they haven’t got ears.”
As if only her mother could answer questions about voice and hearing.
Today, her interest in anatomy was waning. But this was not the time to think about that.
26
HE TOOK A chair on the terrace of a café at the water’s edge, in the shade of a pine tree. The bay that stretched out in front of him was sparkling in the blazing sun. At the end of the bay, two hills rose up like two breasts, and in the valley between them stood the village of Platanos where they used to do their shopping. On the left breast, the Byzantine citadel of Kastro, which they had visited twice, rose up like a nipple.
Remember? We came here to eat on nights when the moon was full to watch it rise between the two breasts. Bare coloured light bulbs shone above the tables. One night you asked for them to be turned off for a few minutes for a better view of the moonrise. When it finally appeared, you were so stirred that you pulled off your dress and in your underwear dove into the path it had traced on the surface of the water all the way to our table. Come in, you cried. I hesitated to leave Mélissa alone. She’s asleep, you shouted. And we won’t be swimming all the way to Turkey!
He stared at the water for a long moment, while the intermittent song of the cicadas reverberated amid the needles of the pine tree overhead.
I could easily leave your urn at the bottom of this bay, but the water is so clear that a swimmer would spot it …
He brought his gaze back to terra firma.
How about the beach?
Alma adored lying in the sun and she could sunbathe all day. He enjoyed the sun, for the pleasure of sitting in the shade, of gazing at the play of light on the water or in the pine trees that lined the shore, and daydreaming — as much as one can daydream while watching a fiveyear-old at the water’s edge.
This morning he didn’t see a single child. It was June, school was not yet over. He saw no adults either, neither on the sand nor in the water. He was the only customer at the café, and on the road that hugged the shore, the only outsiders were a man in his sixties walking on the shady side and pushing a woman in a wheelchair, the same age as he, humming to her an old tune by Aznavour and farther away, a woman dressed all in white and wearing a broad straw hat, who was strolling toward him, her gaze going from one feature of the landscape to another. And it was not until she walked past the café that he recognized the fiftyish tourist he’d run into at breakfast in the hotel dining room. She recognized him too and gave him a smile, which he returned.
No, the beach is not a good idea. There are no swimmers now, but soon the schools will be closed, hundreds of children will be digging with their shovels in the sand. If not that, the waves would expose your urn one day.
The waitress finally arrived, handed him the menu with a smile, then left again.
So what do we do?
Just then he heard the slow chiming of a bell sounding the knell in the distance.
He said to himself: It’s true — it’s suddenly come back — there was a little cemetery not far from the house where we were living. For sure no one will build a store or a hotel there. I’ll go this afternoon. They’re probably burying someone right now.
He called the waitress and without looking at the menu, ordered fried calamari, a salad and a half-litre of retsina, like in the good old days, then luxuriated once more in the melancholy slide show of his memories. But once he’d been served, he barely touched what he ordered when he realized that from now on there would be no one to travel with, or even to share his meals.
27
THE ALINDA CEMETERY stretched over the side of the mountain, a hundred metres from the house where they had lived. It was a small cemetery surrounded by cypresses, tall and straight as church candles, which held some fifty graves as well as an ossuary. Near the entrance, a teen-age boy with tear-filled eyes was gazing at the photo of a young girl that adorned a brand new headstone. Farther away, sitting on a grave of which the marble bore the mark of several winters, an old lady was talking to the photo of an old man as if she were telling him: Yesterday we celebrated our grand-daughter’s wedding. I hope that she’ll be as happy with her husband as I was with you.
Doctor Maras was thinking: It’s a magnificent view. You can see the bay, the place where Tassos’ house was, the path we took to the beach, the little café where we waited for the full moon …
He stepped inside the chapel where he spotted the tourist dressed all in white who’d smiled at him earlier, at the water’s edge. She was looking at the icons and, when she noticed him, she smiled at him again. Again he smiled back, then asked if she spoke English or French.
She was Dutch and knew both languages. A little Greek too, she added.
“I’m looking for the priest. Have you by any chance seen him?”
“No. He’s probably still having a siesta. He knows better than anyone that the dead can wait, don’t you think?”
With that joke she tried to start a conversation, but he excused himself and left the chapel to look for someone who could show him the priest’s house. But the man had arrived and was talking to the young boy as if pleading with him to go home and let the dead girl rest in peace.
“They’d loved one another since primary school,” he confided in English to Doctor Maras when he approached to explain why he had come to Leros.
The priest replied:
“I’m so sorry but I can’t accept your wife’s ashes for two reasons. We can’t inter a Catholic in an Orthodox cemetery. Also, my church is opposed to cremation.”
Doctor Maras walked out of the cemetery with heavy tread, the shadow of his body preceding him, growing longer and longer as if it were the ghost of his beloved searching the ground desperately for a place to rest. But no sooner had he gone twenty metres when he heard a voice behind him calling:
“Monsieur, monsieur!”
It was the Dutch woman, running toward him, gasping for breath.
“I heard you talking with the priest.”
Yet another who was going to tell him how romantic and touching was his reason for coming here …
“May I take the liberty of suggesting a place?”
She pointed to the mountain that overlooked the cemetery, the village, and Alinda Bay.
“There is nothing but rocks. You won’t have to ask anyone’s permission, no one will search for anything there, and I know where you can get a shovel.”
He gazed at the mountain and his face lit up with a smile.
“Yes …”
He looked for the sun in the sky.
“You won’t have time today.”
Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife Page 6