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

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…

IT WAS ANobsession 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.