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

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.”

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 refutes 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?

“PAPA, WHERE DOtears 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.