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

“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.

HOW HE HASbeen 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.

Simon brings him a glass of water.

Once he has drunk the water, Doctor Maras smiles again and says: