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

He was searching for a clue, a lead. There were dozens in Alma’s declarations that brought him more blurriness than they dispelled.

“Alma Joncas is the very image of perfect happiness,” evoked her joy at acting in Paris where, as a young actress, she’d had a run of four months at the Théâtre national de Chaillot.

“Alma’s Bliss” talked about her affection for Mélissa, who was still a baby, and for her husband.

“Drunk on Happiness” a few months later recounted her nomination in Cannes for the award for best actress in a leading role, in a film by Serge Groslin.

Indeed, rare were the articles and interviews in which the word happiness did not appear at least once, whether it was about gardening, her childhood in La Malbaie, or her trips abroad. Even about the new kitchen she’d had put in. As if this woman, passionate by nature, loved everything she did because she only embarked upon that which excited her and added life to her life.

Bewildered and weary, Doctor Maras went out into the garden to freshen his thoughts.

Spring, heedless of the grief and torments of man, was scenting the air with lilacs.

In the sky sailed by a solitary cloud.

And for a moment the poor man thought he saw in it the face of his beloved.

She was looking at him reproachfully, as if to say: “I am the woman with whom for twenty-four years you shared the table, the bed, and the intimacy and you don’t know where I was happiest?”

THE NEXT MORNING, Doctor Maras announced to his daughter that he had made up his mind: He would bury the ashes in their garden.

“If Alma didn’t specify the place where she was happiest,” he said, “it’s because she trusted my judgment, for after twenty-four years of married life I knew her better than anyone else.”

But no sooner had he drunk his coffee than the phone began to ring and rang without let-up all morning. All the actresses in The House of Bernarda Alba called to tell him, each in turn, that Alma had been happiest when she was acting, more particularly at the Orphée. Some even swore that they’d heard her say, “as if she sensed that the end was approaching,” that actors’ ashes should always be left at their favourite theatre.

Doctor Maras also had a call from Raymond Cholette, a producer at Radio-Canada and, like Alma, a native of the Charlevoix region who agreed with Zak’s declaration.

“Show business is a small world,” he said, “rumours get around quickly, and when I got wind of the argument that broke out after the funeral yesterday, I felt that I had a duty to call you. Of course I’d have liked to see Alma buried at La Malbaie. But I have to confess that, when she called me a few months ago looking for work, she confided that she’d spent the most wonderful moments of her life in Saint-Hilaire.”

No one called in favour of La Malbaie and, when the bell rang just before noon, Doctor Maras thought it was the mail carrier come to deliver the conclusive proof that Carmen had promised to send him.

But when he opened the door he saw a sixty-something woman with hennaed hair and bracelets all up her arms.

“I’ve come to offer my condolences,” she said. “Alma and I saw a lot of each other in the past year.”

She gave him her card.

“If you ever need my services, don’t hesitate to come and see me. I live two blocks away.”

Doctor Maras looked at the card and frowned when he read: Madame Élias. Clairvoyant. Medium.

Many actresses ask for your Zodiac sign before they ask what type of work you do. Alma was an exception. Or so thought Doctor Maras, who believed he knew Alma better than anyone. He was less certain after Madame Élias had left, when he asked Mélissa if she knew that her mother consulted a clairvoyant.

“Yes, I knew,” his daughter replied. “Mama was depressed at not working and she wanted to find out about the future. She never mentioned those consultations because she knew you’d have laughed.”

Doctor Maras wondered if there were other things that his wife hadn’t told him and he called Aline Diamond, Alma’s agent and friend, to ask her.

Aline Diamond replied:

“You are all right to think that Alma was happiest in the places you’ve just mentioned. Over the years, depending on her mood, she recalled every one of them as being the site of perfect happiness. In my opinion, the best solution would be to scatter a handful of ashes in Saint-Hilaire, a handful at the Orphée, a handful at La Malbaie — and the rest in your garden.”

As a physician and surgeon, Doctor Maras was well aware of what the ashes of a human being amount to: barely two kilos of the calcareous part of the bones crushed and sifted, the rest transformed into gas and dust particles that fly away into the flames. Still he winced at the thought of scattering those two kilos of his beloved’s calcium to the four corners of the province.

“I’m going to put all the ashes in one place,” he told his daughter. “But the place that my heart and my mind steer me to isn’t necessarily the one that Alma would have picked. So I’m going to revisit each of the other three places before I make my decision.”

Without the slightest suspicion that with those words he would set off a chain of events that would change forever the course of his life and his daughter’s.

IT WAS ONthe stage of the Orphée that he had seen Alma for the first time. She was playing Martha in Le Malentendu by Camus. The brother of the play’s director, a friend of Doctor Maras, had invited him to the première. The doctor didn’t know a thing about theatre and thought that the talent of an actress was determined by how well she could figure out what to do with the words that were lent to her so that for two hours the audience thought that she was someone else. But Alma had been so tragic and noble as a dejected girl without love that in her mouth every word became rich and sacred, every gesture took on a meaning that dignified it, and he was still profoundly overwhelmed by her performance when his friend took him backstage to introduce him to his brother, the director, and the actors.

Today the Orphée box office was closed, the lobby deserted. The theatre too. Save for a woman’s voice coming to him from the back of the corridor leading to the office of Pauline Brunet. A bad-tempered voice saying:

“So the diva wants her ashes left where she was the happiest. How touching! How romantic! How annoying! Yes, annoying! Because the only times I saw Alma Joncas happy were when she was pissing off everybody. And with her last wishes she’s still pissing us off from the other side of death.”

The voice was that of Nicole Gouin, a playwright in her forties whom Montreal’s entire theatre world had been praising to the skies ever since she’d enjoyed a certain success in Paris. Except Alma. Though she’d have given anything to go back on stage she had refused to act in a play by Nicole Gouin because she thought it was nothing but a sea of beautiful sentences every one of which claimed to hold a profound truth.

“I can’t take any more of those fancy, hollow lines where every snore is assumed to be an illumination,” she had told the dramatist. “I want a story, characters, conflict, not that mush about your every turd and fart.”

Alma wasn’t one to mince words and she was never reluctant to give free rein to her opinions. Which slams a lot of doors in the diffident small world of the theatre. But actress though she was, capable of every ruse and audacity on stage, off-stage she couldn’t lie and play-act to save her life. Once she had brought a tin of foie gras home from Paris. When the customs officer asked if she had any meat, she had turned bright red and was searched to the very linings of her suitcase and her coat.