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

“You’ll come back with the ashes, like we did from Saint-Hilaire because deep down you know that you want to bury them here. Why should I drive for five hours for nothing?”

And so he got back on the road by himself, bringing with him the urn containing the ashes, convinced that he would leave them at La Malbaie, and he drove for five hours without a single glance at the landscapes that he crossed.

Without seeing either that all the evidence of Alma’s happiness provided by others was in the process of forging his own unhappiness and that of his child.

CARMEN HAD LAIDout the plates and cutlery on the garden table, opened a bottle of wine, and ordered in the finest dishes because, unlike her sister, she hated to cook.

“I hope you’ll come more often now that the ashes will be here,” she told her brother-in-law. “You’re the only family I have. Alma is gone. Zak, I can’t even look at his photo. And this house belongs to your daughter. As I have no children, I’ll put it in her name.”

Unlike her first garden as a married woman in Saint-Hilaire, the one at the house where Alma had grown up was unchanged. It was actually more beautiful and four times the size of her garden in Montreal. In addition, the top of the cliffs offered an unbroken view of the harbour at Pointe-au-Pic and the St. Lawrence River that flowed a hundred metres below, immense. The gallery where Alma, as a young girl with eyes full of dreams, had announced to her parents that she wanted to become an actress was still there too, as was the grove behind which she had exchanged her first kiss. The boy, René Poitras, was the son of the woman who did the cleaning at the Joncas house. He opened a bar and restaurant and, during the summer when she’d acted at La Malbaie, after each performance Alma usually went there to eat and drink and dance.

Doctor Maras had known all that for more than twenty years. Today though he wondered for the first time if that summer had been the most wonderful of Alma’s life because it had been the summer of her first love. The first man too who had given her cues when, at age eighteen, she had to memorize two scenes for her audition at the National Theatre School.

“Does René Poitras still have his restaurant?”

“Yes, all the food on this table is from René’s.”

“Alma must have eaten there often when she came to La Malbaie…”

“Every night. And when those two got together they could drink and laugh and gossip till breakfast.”

Doctor Maras pushed away his plate.

“It was a long drive. I’m too tired to eat.”

“Please don’t go to bed. I don’t often have the chance to eat with someone…”

The two sisters had little in common, and not just physically. As much as Alma was bubbly, exuberant and full of life, her sister was reserved, withdrawn and subdued. They had the same eyes, though, the same hair, and in other circumstances he would have begged Carmen not to leave the table, so much did her eyes and hair drown him in memories, to the point of imagining Alma in the flesh at his side. But tonight, though it was only nine o’clock and still daylight, he decided to go to bed and rose from the table, saying:

“Eat at René’s!”

He had always been able to control his feelings. One of the qualities that Alma admired about him — she who could blow up over the slightest thing and who had an art for making mountains out of molehills. It was clear that all of her husband’s qualities hadn’t been enough for her to be faithful to him. And as his sister-in-law had been the complicit witness to that infidelity, he couldn’t stop himself from saying, viciously:

“Eat at René’s!”

Carmen, her voice weary now, replied:

“I no longer find his erotic obsessions funny. Maybe if I saw him, as Alma did, once every three years…”

Doctor Maras didn’t ask for details about those erotic obsessions, or why Alma was still interested in them, convinced that, so as not to exacerbate his pain, Carmen wouldn’t tell him the truth. And so the shadows that his sister-in-law’s words had cast in his mind became much more impressive that night than the reality they reflected, and around eleven o’clock, unable to toss and turn in the bed any more, he dressed without a sound and went to find the sex maniac who had dared to kiss the boss’s daughter at an age and a time when boys and girls would blush even if their shadows touched.

HE DID NOThave to look for very long. There were only two restaurants in the harbour, one of them called Chez René.

Nor did he have to search for his wife’s first lover. Like the harbour, the restaurant was plunged in darkness and silence, but its owner was sitting on his terrace, gazing at a freighter flying the Norwegian flag, the only one docked at the wharf.

The two men had only met once, some twenty years earlier. Since then, René Poitras had gotten so fleshy and was now so unlike the image he had kept of him that Doctor Maras wouldn’t have recognized him if the restaurateur, seeing him, hadn’t struggled out of his chair to offer — along with the foul stench of beer on his breath — his condolences. He looked so morose, Doctor Maras assumed that he too was grieving for Alma until the other man, in the same tone and with no transition, gestured vaguely towards the Norwegian freighter, saying:

“I waited all evening for a sailor to come down for a drink and offer me the charity of a kiss. They’ve got such muscles, their armpits are the only tender part where I could put my hand to fall asleep afterwards.”

Doctor Maras thought: What an idiot I am! He’s gay and ever since the kiss he’d exchanged with Alma he’d assumed his homosexuality, and his erotic obsessions that gave my wife such a good laugh were only about men.

Relieved, he explained to René Poitras why he had come to La Malbaie.

“La Malbaie for all eternity?” René Poitras snickered. “Did Alma have that many sins to atone for? Now Doctor, I’m not saying she wasn’t happy here. But La Malbaie for her was nothing more than a family album that she opened once every three or four years. Her first school. Her first communion. Her first kiss. And the boy who gave it to her had turned queer. Even the theatre where she performed isn’t there any more.”

“The summer theatre isn’t there now?”

“The government took it over and turned it into a casino. That’s why Alma gave an interview to the Journal de Charlevoix . To help the company get another space. Didn’t Carmen tell you?”

“No.”

“She was probably afraid you wouldn’t bring the ashes… Don’t be mad at her. She’s getting old and she wants so badly to have a man to think about. A decent man. There are so few around here… In fact, aside from beer and slot machines there isn’t much of anything. And Carmen rarely drinks and she hates gambling. Even Alma, the last time she came here, she suffocated, the way I suffocate twelve months of the year, and all she talked about was Montreal, Paris, the Aegean Sea…”

Recollecting the Aegean Sea reminded the restaurateur of the Norwegian ship. He returned his gaze to it and said:

“Ah, to bind his feet and wrists to the bars of his berth…”

But there wasn’t a living soul on the wharf, no one on the deck of the ship, only subdued light at two portholes.