Pan Bouyoucas - Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

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 you? 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:

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.”

Franck shook his head.

“Alma was above all an actress. And I know a good number of actresses. I’ve worked with hundreds over the past forty years. They have an unhealthy need to be loved. And not just by their spouses. That’s why their careers always set the tone for every step they take, for all their relationships. The situation is even worse for actresses whose age has reduced their charm and their power of seduction. So any trick, any lie, and every form of cruelty are considered to be totally fair. Especially if Groslin had held out the possibility of a role that would have rebooted her career in Paris and taken her to the top again.”

“And why would Groslin do that?” Hélène asked.

“Maybe Ninon Conti doesn’t indulge his every whim.”

“That’s hogwash. Men Groslin’s age are interested mainly in fresh young meat that gives them the illusion of potency. Why would he bring here from Montreal a woman older than his own wife when Paris is overflowing with young things who’d be prepared to go down the Champ-Élysées on their hands and knees to nab a bit part?”

“Some men have perversions that not many women will submit to, especially Frenchwomen. And Groslin, from what people say, likes watching two chicks tickle one another.”

Hélène bursts out laughing.

“Now you’re delirious for sure. But what did Groslin do to you to make you go so far as to soil Alma’s memory and destroy the peace of her household?”

Doctor Maras wasn’t laughing now. He rose abruptly from the table and said:

“I’m wiped out. Please excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

“Good idea!” his sister said.

IT WAS BECOMINGharder and harder for him to get over jet lag and his face was puffy from fatigue. He had not retired to the guest room to lie down though. As soon as Franck had mentioned the sexual perversion of Serge Groslin, his mind had rewound to the Orphée theatre, more precisely, just as Nicole Gouin was telling Pauline Brunet to put dear Alma’s ashes under her desk to have them always between her legs. And now, though he knew that one should beware of these associations of ideas, that the players in this game are nearly always wrong, he wondered for the first time in twenty-four years why his wife’s best friend was a lesbian. And as happens at such moments, the more he wondered, the more his mind drifted towards trivial matters that now took on a totally new meaning, until everything that had seemed clear and solid to him now showed itself to be dark and slimy.

Even the most insignificant chatter.

Alma was rehearsing Medea. One day she was complaining about the actor playing Jason who was constantly changing his acting style, which unsettled her; another day, she griped about the actor playing Creon, a skinflint, she claimed, who would hasten his own death to take advantage of a sale on coffins.

That night, Alma cursed the director who wanted to cut two of her lines.

“Medea exits once, intending to kill her children,” she explained to her husband. “But though she’s furious with Jason who has left her for a younger woman — she who abandoned family and homeland for him — she stops herself, comes back on stage and says: My heart is water at the sight of my children’s bright faces. I could never do it. No! I cannot do it. But Euripides, who knew a thing or two about women, was well aware that the rejected spouse kills not so much from love as from wounded pride, then has her say: What is the matter with me? Do I want to make myself a laughing-stock by letting my enemies off scot-free? And it is then that she exits and slits her children’s throats. She is fully aware of the reasons for her behaviour because she says: Alas! My own pride has brought me to misery . And that idiot wants to cut those two lines, cut her into a desperate dish rag, direct it for marshmallow-lovers because he can’t imagine that a woman could also be proud and that her pride could be even more powerful than mother love!”

Today, Doctor Maras remembers all that and wonders if Franck may have been right to say that Alma, embittered by her woes, had arranged, in a final act of revenge, to make her own presumed happiness her husband’s misery. Not only had he forced her to leave the suburbs for the city — she who had sacrificed a career in France to return to her own country’s wide open spaces — his wife’s face was now twice as wrinkled as his own, though she was four years younger, and every morning in front of her mirror complained that it was harder and harder to stick all the pieces together.

He obviously just had to set out onto that trail and memory, implacable tyrant, would start to collect and to misrepresent any number of clues to feed the voracious appetite for bitterness. And as everyone knows, when memory wakens, forget about sleep.

HE DOES NOTtake a sleeping pill though and, the next day, his eyes are smarting when he goes into the Air France office to change his return date. Stopping along the way at the Théâtre national de Chaillot where, according to Alma, Groslin had lurked around her like a lovelorn boy. But she had not given in. Which was what she had told him and he’d believed her, though she had also said that you have to be something of a whore in her line of work.