Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

by Pan Bouyoucas

  Far from reassuring him, his brother-in-law’s words alarmed him even more, making his memory explode with everything he’d ever heard about certain sects in Quebec and the United States: swindling, confinement, torture and barbarism, even murder. Like the Alliance universelle pour la Vie, those sects were all led by slick sycophants with a capacity for sniffing out a person’s weaknesses, for flattering his ego, for enhancing his self-image, hoodwinking and keeping under their thumbs with their hazy discourse men and women much older and more experienced than Mélissa. Once the fish had taken the hook, he was forbidden any contact with the outside world. Isolated and cloistered, some disciples had even let themselves be persuaded that their guru was the reincarnation of Christ. If he gave in to debauchery every night, it was solely to make him a “sinning Jesus” so that he could be an experienced magistrate when he would have to judge the sinners at the Last Judgment. Even more, one guru had convinced his disciples that there would be a tremendous cataclysm and that the only survivors would be those who would follow him into death. “True life happens afterwards,” he would repeat to them. “And those who go with me will taste the greatest gift of all: immortality.”

  Not surprisingly, that night when his body finally let go, Doctor Maras fell into a sleep filled with harrowing dreams. He only remembered the last one, for he had to wake up to escape from it.

  He is walking on a deserted beach. A skull lies on the sand. Is it Alma’s? He wants to tell her about his anguish. But as soon as he touches the skull to lift it and talk to it, he finds himself in a large room, round and white like an igloo.

  At the centre of the room, Silenus, the half-man and half-goat satyr, endowed with a huge paunch, hooves, and an erection the length of his forearm, is sprawled in a rocking chair.

  “Was it you that brought me here?” Doctor Maras asks.

  “Me?” Silenus says, bursting into loud drunken laughter — Wahahaha! — that shakes his erection like an enormous finger.

  Doctor Maras looks for an exit but doesn’t see a door or even a window.

  He turns to the satyr again and, as if he doesn’t notice the erection, tells him:

  “Okay, it’s my fault, it’s all my fault. Now show me the door so that I can go and save my child.”

  The satyr grabs a remote, presses a button, and Doctor Maras is suddenly propelled into the air where he begins to fly in a circle, like a scale model of a remote-controlled airplane. Dizzy, he shouts to the satyr to turn off the remote and put him down but he is going so fast that his cries emerge from his mouth like a buzzing drone.

  33

  ANXIOUS AS HE was, he was unable to perform his work as ophthalmologist and surgeon with the necessary clear-headedness and composure. He cancelled all his appointments and spent the day at home, reading everything he’d found about Frère Isaïe on the Internet. Above all he wanted to know if any disciples had been able to leave the Alliance universelle pour la Vie and if so why, but he found nothing. He could have called Raymond Cholette, but the film director’s intimacy with the sect made him suspect. So he called Paul Bienvenue, a journalist who had written a book about sects in Quebec. But he couldn’t help him either. At most he repeated what Doctor Maras already dreaded: To better manipulate a young recruit, a guru would control her every thought, every dream, every moment of her life, and the longer he held sway over the recruit, the harder it would be for her to free herself. And so he must act quickly: Vulnerable as Mélissa was just then, it would not take long before she submitted both body and soul to the authority of Frère Isaïe. But how could he persuade her to leave that imposter? She wouldn’t even speak to him.

  The more Doctor Maras pondered the situation, the more the house was transformed into a vast, creepy dwelling surrounded by a garden that gave him a pang every time he looked at it, for it represented the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. If anything happened to his daughter, even if he moved, the memory of that garden would flay him until he died, obscuring everything else he had done, and leave him with a single image of himself, that of a father who had contributed to the doom of his daughter. And Paul Bienvenue added to his distress when he called back at the end of the day to say:

  “I remembered something that happened three years ago, at the estate of the Alliance universelle pour la Vie in Saint-Hilaire. The death of a young disciple called Stéphanie Filion.”

  “Why didn’t Detective Sergeant Ferro say anything about it?”

  “Maybe to keep you from worrying. Actually, the police had concluded it was an accident. I didn’t refer to it in my book either or I’d have been prosecuted for libel.”

  “What happened to Stéphanie Filion?”

  “At Saint-Hilaire, every resident is responsible for a daily task: cooking, the vegetable garden, laundry … Stéphanie Filion did the housekeeping. According to witnesses her hands were wet when she picked up a worn electrical wire …”

  “And you don’t believe that version?”

  “According to Stéphanie Filion’s mother, her daughter called her the night before to tell her she was pregnant by Frère Isaïe. She wanted her mother to make her an appointment for an abortion. She couldn’t do it herself; Frère Isaïe watched her like a hawk. Not only did he think abortion was murder, he wanted Stéphanie to keep the child and persuade the other members of the sect that he’d been conceived by theogamy and was the new Messiah.”

  “Why didn’t she go along?”

  “She’d stopped believing in her guru. Again, according to her mother. One night while he was sleeping, Stéphanie had discovered piles of comic books under his bed. Leafing through them, she’d realized that it was from them that he lifted his grand statements and his ideas. She had also discovered that he suffered from chronic constipation.”

  “A vegetarian?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And the police did nothing?”

  “You can’t arrest someone for eating meat and reading comics on the sly. Moreover, police forensics had confirmed his version of the accident. And Stéphanie’s mother was heavily into the booze and she tended to ramble. In fact it was her alcoholism that had driven her daughter to look for another family. Feeling rejected, the mother could have made it all up to take revenge on the parent whom her daughter had preferred to her.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I spent enough time studying sects to know that morality and cover-ups always go hand in hand. But the law can’t do anything unless there has been a punishable offence or if a complaint has been lodged. And you can’t lodge a complaint. Your daughter is an adult in the eyes of the law and she went to Saint-Hilaire of her own free will.”

  34

  DID YOU KNOW, Alma, where you were the happiest? Probably not or you’d have named the place. And because you couldn’t decide where you were the happiest you wanted your husband to decide for you. Look what that led to. Not only has he lost his wife, because you hadn’t consulted your doctor as he had asked you, your dithering about where you’d been the happiest may now rob him of what is dearest in the world to him.

  “That’s all I need!” the poor man cries out. “For that son-of-a-bitch to add to my woes by honouring my daughter with his blessèd seed! If I want to see my child again, I’ll have to concede that the fruit of her womb is the new Messiah! Even worse, if Mélissa refuses to give in to that megalomaniac’s demands, cruel and vindictive as he must be, she’ll end up like Stéphanie Filion. Ah, why did I bring her to Saint-Hilaire? Why didn’t I just bury the ashes in our garden?”

  He wants to call Carmen and Pauline and all the others and tell them that if they hadn’t misled him with their asinine suggestions, he wouldn’t have gone to Paris. Then he tells himself: “You could’ve ignored them, you moron. So don’t add to the mess you’ve made of things. Instead of lighting into the others, find a way to warn your daughter of the danger she’s in; save her while there’s still time.”

  But search though he may, poor man, as soon as an idea comes to mind, he re
futes it, sweeping it aside either because it would only lead to his arrest or because it would alienate his daughter even more, until she would accede willingly to the desires of her spiritual father, just to spite the biological one. And as if he weren’t suffering enough from being surrounded by the vestiges of his life as father and husband, now there is a new convoy of images in his mind, with Frère Isaïe murmuring his esoteric crap while driving his sanctimonious cock into his beloved daughter. His helplessness is so profound and his mood so dark that tears come to his eyes.

  Can you see them, Alma, can you see his tears? If there is anything you can do to stop them, don’t you think that now is the time? Otherwise it would vindicate Nicole Gouin who still thinks that your last wishes were only meant to piss off the living so that they would go on talking about you long after your passing. I’m sure you had a few scores to settle with some people, but with your own husband? “He’s the most upstanding, the most considerate man in the world,” you would tell your friends. “When I give up hope about people I just have to think about him and I am reconciled with humanity.” What has happened since then? Were you angry with him because he had a strong heart, as Franck maintains, and would be staying alive to enjoy it? Even if it were true, do you have to imitate Medea and destroy your child too in order to make your husband pay for it? “My Alma was funny and witty, even though she preferred to perform tragedy,” he says about you still. “She had a big heart as well. Sick perhaps but big to the end.” Could he have been wrong about that too?

  35

  “PAPA, WHERE DO tears come from?”

  She was ten years old. She no longer toddled along behind him, asking question after question, but sat across from him to talk and listen to his answers, face taut with concentration.

  “Tears come from the tear glands, which are under the bones, there, above each eye. They travel along small ducts and bathe the eyes to keep them moist and protect them from infections, then they seep towards the inside corner of the eyes and from there into the nose. When there are too many tears because a person is angry or sad, they run down onto the cheeks.”

  “Why are they salty?”

  She’d forgotten the explanation he had given her on Leros a few summers before.

  “Tears are salty because they come from the circulation of your blood. And our blood contains salt because long, long ago our ancestors came from the sea. When you cry because you’re sad, the composition of your tears changes but we don’t yet know why.”

  “When I grow up I’m going to be a doctor like you and I’ll find out why.”

  She adored TV series about medical teams and, while her friends envied her having a mother who was an actress, after she saw the production of Romeo and Juliet in which Alma played Lady Capulet, Mélissa only commented on the scene in which Juliet swallows a potion that will make her appear to be dead.

  “Is there really a potion like that? Does the heart stop beating? No? So if Romeo had put his ear against her chest he’d have heard her heartbeats? Why didn’t he? He was always talking about his heart when he saw her, why didn’t he think about it? Good thing they didn’t have children. Romeo might talk like an angel but you couldn’t really count on him in an emergency as we could count on papa.”

  Doctor Maras sank into the deepest despair when the memory of that scene made the embryonic thought form in his head. He turned it over and over, studied it from every angle, and when he was finally convinced that it could serve his objectives, he thanked his wife for having put her pride aside that one time and accepted a supporting role. Then he blew his nose vigorously to get rid of the tears still there and, having got his voice back, and his composure, he called Saint-Hilaire and this time asked for Zak.

  He told him:

  “Does your offer still hold?”

  “Change your mind again? How come?” his brother-in-law demanded, voice full of mistrust.

  “Mélissa convinced me that her mother was happiest in her garden.”

  “You have a garden.”

  “The house is too big for me now that Mélissa is gone so I’m going to sell it.”

  Zak could understand that but he remained on guard.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow for the ashes.”

  “I want to put them into Mélissa’s hands directly.”

  “She is not ready to go out yet.”

  “I’ll bring them to Saint-Hilaire, with her things. Will she be there tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  Doctor Maras smiled. A few hours earlier the world had turned into a purgatory, where he had nothing left to lose but his remorse and pain. Now he felt that the world was being renewed, its light returning. He called Simon, his daughter’s boyfriend, to tell him that Mélissa was at the oasis of the Alliance universelle pour la Vie, in Saint-Hilaire, and that he would need his help to get her out.

  He also called 911 to reserve an ambulance. Called his secretary too and asked her to bring him a flask of atropine, the alkaloid extracted from belladonna. Next, he piled logs in the fireplace and lit a fire. In the middle of the summer. And while the logs burned up and produced the ashes that he needed, he went from one window to another and opened them wide so that the scents and sounds of life would enter and fill his house once again.

  36

  HOW HE HAS been waiting for this moment! How impatiently does he head for Saint-Hilaire the next day! And when finally he walks into Zak’s place weighed down by the urn and with Simon lugging a big cardboard box, what a burst of love and tenderness does he feel rising in him when he sees his child again!

  There aren’t so many people in the house this time and the greeting is not so warm, as if they suspect him of coming back, and with his daughter’s boyfriend in tow, only to persuade her to return with them. And when he approaches Mélissa, Frère Isaïe approaches as well to hear what he is going to say. But Doctor Maras merely asks his daughter how she is.

  “I’m fine,” she snaps, without embracing him.

  He goes on smiling all the same, quickly dispelling the anxiety of the blowhard who’s keeping an eye on him and that of his flock who suspiciously are checking out Simon and the second box that he’s taking out of the car. Doctor Maras asks for silence and then, calling on everything he learned from Alma when he gave her cues, he says with a very serious look on his face, but without a frown and with his emotions under control:

  “My wife, God rest her soul, asked me to leave her ashes in the place where she had been the happiest. I wanted to bury them in our garden. Zak told me that was the wrong garden. Others said it was the wrong city, the wrong country even. By inclination or because I’ve been conditioned by my profession, I could not do things by halves. I had to check out every hypothesis before I made any decision. And so I ended up at the outermost reaches of the Mediterranean. If I brought the ashes back to Quebec it’s because I concluded that what made Alma happiest was her child. And as that child has decided to move in with you I would like to leave her mama’s ashes here. Your garden isn’t my wife’s any more but it’s still an oasis of love, virtue, and harmony, and as Alma did for thirty years as a thespian, the inhabitants of this oasis are working to ennoble people’s minds.”

  The inhabitants in question are so flattered, moved, and reassured that it might well have ended with hugs and kisses all around. Mélissa alone seems more surprised than convinced by her father’s spiel. She has always known him as a man who says what he thinks, in few words, clear and precise, and here he is smoothtalking his hosts because he certainly hasn’t changed his mind about the oasis any more than a cat would about water, or seen God, whom she hears him mention for the first time in her life, on the road to Leros. But why is he doing all this? she wonders, looking him over to plumb the depths of his thinking while her papa, turning to her now, says:

  “Mélissa, since you have listened to your heart and your heart has told you to settle here, I’ve brought your clothes in these boxes and in this urn, your mama’s ashes. Not only will they stay
with her beloved daughter, my wife will have a magnificent monument that will prolong her existence by showing to posterity the place where she is buried.”

  No, he has never spewed out so much baloney, even as a teenager trying to impress a girl. But the life of his child is at stake and he is ready to do and say anything to gain the trust of her jailer and free her from his influence. And to achieve his ends, after giving the urn to Mélissa, he allows himself one last blast of hot air because as a physician, he knows that it’s all a matter of dosage and that if the dose is wrong, a tranquillizer can become a poison.

  “Since your heart also tells you, my child, to pursue your education here,” he says, “I will pay to the Alliance universelle pour la Vie the hundred thousand dollars that your mother and I had set aside for your schooling.”

  “Oh!” say the others, as if they’ve seen an angel fly by.

  “Brothers, sisters,” says Isaïe, the great mystifier, now himself totally mystified. “Our greatest joy is to see an ever-growing portion of humanity rallying to our cause. Today that joy is all the greater because along with the ashes of our dear sister Alma we are welcoming among us a man of a type that is increasingly rare in this world corrupted by lies, selfishness, and deceit, a principled man who is highly intelligent too, and generous to boot. May he whose name is the flower which attracts the bees that have gone astray achieve all his desires, the very summit of prosperity, and prolong the number of his years in perfect health.”

  “Amen!” the others agree.

  Mélissa still says nothing.

  Ah, children. Doctor Maras knew that they are much less lenient than a parent is with them but still he’d hoped that his daughter would react, if not to the boxes of clothes then at least to the promised donation of a hundred thousand dollars to the Alliance universelle pour la Vie. But Mélissa is blinded by her resentment and her pride, unaware of the heavy toll they could demand of her. Her father who is well aware of that decides then to go into action. He rubs his chest, grimacing, as if he were having heartburn, then asks Simon to bring him a glass of water.