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

“Come into the garden, my friends, let us pray that our beloved Alma, whom the Eternal has received in the splendour and bliss of heaven, shows us the earthly spot where she would like the monument to her memory to be erected.”

IN THE GARDENthey form a circle, they link hands, and intone a litany in which, after every line sung by the women, the men, ecstatic, respond with the same refrain.

A refrain that makes Doctor Maras shiver despite the blazing mid-July sun. Unless the shivers are caused by the atropine of which, as they had agreed, Simon had added a few drops to his glass of water. Only a few drops, of course, to slow down his heart rate, not speed it up, and to knock him out. Ever since Doctor Maras drained the glass, Simon has not taken his eyes off him and when he sees him falter he hurries to support him, crying out:

“Something wrong, Doctor?”

Mélissa spins around and, when she sees her father’s face turn red and only the whites of his eyes, her features come alive at last and she cries out:

“Papa! What’s the matter?”

Ah! The sound of that “papa.” Rain in the desert. And he smiles, in spite of the sudden nausea that strikes him, he smiles and while the singers, cut off in their mystical delirium, look on, absorbed and silent, he replies, drymouthed:

“It’s probably the heat, the emotion…”

Mélissa lays her hand on her father’s forehead, then on his pulse, but he is already collapsing in Simon’s arms — the young man has been standing behind him to break his fall. His eyes flutter briefly and, when they close abruptly, the crowd lets out a cry, two women nearly faint, and Frère Isaïe shrieks at Zak and his wife:

“Don’t stand there! Call an ambulance!”

He wants Doctor Maras to stay alive, at least until he has signed the hundred-thousand dollar cheque he promised. But Simon has already taken out his cell and punched in a number. And when the ambulance he calls finally arrives, Frère Isaïe grabs the urn and tells Liza to stow it somewhere safe. He would like to hold Mélissa hostage too, to make sure that her father will come back with the cheque, but when he suggests to her that it might be best if Zak were to go with her father in the ambulance, she dismisses him with a wave of her hand. In any event, the paramedics have already been ordered to let no one but the young woman come onboard. As Simon was supposed to drive Doctor Maras’ car back, they had also been ordered to administer an antidote — physostigmine or pilocarpine — in case of a paralysis of the respiratory tract.

All that’s left for Frère Isaïe to do is pray for Doctor Maras’ speedy recovery, and the others chime in, under the fake palm trees while the ambulance drives away at breakneck speed with siren howling, and Mélissa in the back at her father’s side.

“What got into you?” Alma asks her husband. “Taking that poison! It’s insane!”

A brief digression: ingestion of atropine also produces hallucinations. And in his delirium Doctor Maras sees himself at his fireplace, cleaning up whatever ashes are left from the logs, making little mounds of them, then stuffing these last traces of his nightmare into a garbage bag while Alma is reprimanding him rather than congratulating him for having taken away their child from the oasis at Saint-Hilaire.

“What if Simon gave you the wrong dose? And if your heart had given up? Did you think of that?”

“You’re the one who gave me the idea.”

“ After all the years and love I’ve given you and all your oaths to me , you dump my ashes under a stupid plastic palm tree to rush back to Leros to gawk in the moonlight at your Dutch matron’s boobs, and you have the nerve to say it was my idea? Rotten! Heart-rotten! That is the only word for you! ”

“You’re jealous.”

“Me?”

“When you start quoting the characters you played…”

“Don’t make me laugh. Jealous. Me. Of an overweight, middle-aged biddy.”

“You are jealous! Because I’m the man of your life? The one you were happiest with?”

“Spare me your male chauvinist ideas. All they do is prick my anger not my jealousy. Especially when I think about our beautiful garden. My Mélissa took such good care of it. Still you dumped my ashes in Saint-Hilaire, so they wouldn’t trouble your conscience when your rubenesque playmate comes here.”

“Alma, my love, that urn didn’t contain your ashes.”

“Oh Lord!”

“Now what?”

“When Mélissa finds out that it was just for show…”

“I would rather face her anger than her silence.”

“And what if she goes back to those idiots to take revenge for that mystification?”

“I’m going to reason with her, tell her about Stéphanie Filion. After that, if she still wants to go though with the Immaculate Conception con…”

“My house will be all yours and your whore’s. Ah! You should have left me at Père-Lachaise.”

“DON’T START THAT AGAIN!”

“You don’t have to shout…”

“I HAVE GOOD REASON!”

“You’re right. Relax. Mélissa needs you. We’ll make peace and I’ll let you sleep, okay?”

And so it goes. We always end up going to sleep. And so they did, each in his own world.

PAN BOUYOUCASis a Montreal prize-winning writer, playwright, and translator whose novels and plays have been translated into several languages. Two of his novels were written originally in English: The Man Who Wanted to Drink Up the Sea , which was selected by France’s FNAC as one of the 12 best novels of 2005, and The Tattoo , which was longlisted for the 2012 Re-Lit Award.

SHEILA FISCHMANis the award-winning translator of nearly 200 works of fiction from Quebec. She has been awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts and is a Member of the Order of Canada and a chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec. She lives in Montreal.

Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018:

Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Canada.

Original title: Portrait d’un mari avec les cendres de sa femme (2010)