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

“Maybe I should take a case of beer and knock on one of the portholes…”

“That’s what I’d do.”

“Do you think they’ll want someone old and fat and ugly like I am now?”

This time Doctor Maras did not reply. Even sober, René Poitras must be very garrulous when the conversation had to do with him and his obsessions, and he’d only brought up the portholes to involve the doctor, as he must have done with Alma, in the delirium of his frustrations and his fantasies. Doctor Maras was quick then to hold out his hand, which the other man clasped reluctantly, saying:

“You should take the ashes to Paris.”

“Why?”

“Alma dreamed of being buried in Père-Lachaise.”

“She never told me that.”

“She couldn’t, Doctor. How could she have confessed without upsetting you that her time in France had been the most exciting period of her life, the time when she had tasted happiness most fully? Even on stage, so she said, she’d never given herself so completely. And every night, after every performance, before the sweet waves of applause from the Parisian audience, she felt that she could fly higher, ever higher.”

AH, ALMA, IFthere is life after life and the dead can observe the living, how you must regret your last wish!

You told your beloved husband: You will put my ashes in the place where I was happiest.

Since then there has been neither peace nor rest for him; he is constantly searching for that place. And just as he thought that he’d finally found it, he learns that he has slipped up again.

Do you see how laboriously he plods up the steep and winding road from the harbour to your childhood home? Can you make out in the darkness the distress in which you have sunk him? Can you hear how, word by word, he exhumes from his memory the account you had given him of your first visit to Paris, two years before your marriage, when you acted at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, with your friend Pauline Brunet?

“I was young and fresh and as lovely as a flower,” you had told him. “ Paris Match had devoted two pages to me. People turned around to look at me on the street. Waiters in cafés smiled at me. And in the theatre the director, Serge Groslin, hung around me like a lovelorn boy. Once, during a run-through, he jumped onto the stage and told me: ‘You are mine tonight or I’ll kill myself!’ But I didn’t give in. I’d heard it said that before opening night he got it off with all the new actresses he worked with and forgot them as soon as he was into a new project.”

Yes, that’s exactly what you’d told him.

And yet shortly after your wedding you went back to France where Groslin’s first film was being shot. And in the darkness that has covered his world, your Alexandre is wondering now if it is possible that the twenty-four years you spent with him had mattered less for you than those two brief stays in France when you were starting out.

Rather than let his imagination get carried away again, he leaves a note for Carmen, then gets back on the road to Montreal. And at the first red glimmer of dawn, as soon as he’d arrived at the house, being careful not to waken Mélissa, he goes through your papers for some clue that would confirm or contradict that new doubt, and he digs out six photos taken at Père-Lachaise: two of you looking at Molière’s grave, one at Jim Morrison’s, another at Édith Piaf’s, a fifth at Sarah Bernhardt’s and finally, you and Pauline at the columbarium, in front of the immense wall that holds the remains of a thousand more celebrities.

What should he deduce from that?

He is scrutinizing them again, as if the photos could speak, when Mélissa gets up. And when he tells her of his meeting with René Poitras, she blows up for the first time since you died.

“Honestly, papa, I hardly recognize you. You’ve been telling me for years not to trust hypotheses with no basis in fact, to always be sure that there’s tangible proof, a diagnostic sign, before drawing a conclusion, and here you are all shaken up by something you’re told by a drunk. And a frustrated old queen on top of it. Did René at least tell you when Mama confessed that she wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise? No? I’m not surprised. He saw Mama once every three years. How could he remember when she’d mentioned Père-Lachaise? If you ask me it must have been after her first trip to Paris, before she met you. And those photos confirm it: Pauline wasn’t there on the second trip. And it’s normal that, at the age she was then, Mama would have dreamed of being buried at Père-Lachaise. Every young artist passing through Paris dreams of being buried among all those celebrities. Then they go home and forget it. You want proof? Never in my whole life have I heard Mama mention Père-Lachaise!”

Mélissa’s way of thinking is logical, coherent, but he’s still not convinced. And when his daughter shuts herself away in the bathroom for her shower, he looks up Serge Groslin’s number in your address book and calls him at home, in Paris.

The director’s wife, the actress Ninon Conti, answers.

“You’re calling from Montreal?” she says. “Is that where you met my husband? He was there three months ago.”

Your Alexandre is so surprised at this last remark that for a moment he can’t say a word.

“It’s my wife and him who were old friends,” he manages to say at last.

“They’re not now?”

“My wife passed away two weeks ago.”

Ninon Conti offers her condolences, philosophizes a little about the ephemeral, then promises to tell her husband about your death.

“He’ll want to offer you his condolences. What number should he call?”

“Don’t bother, I’ll call again.”

And he hangs up, poor man — can you see him? — he hangs up, shaken.

NO ONE KNOWSwhat a day just beginning holds in store for us — Doctor Maras has had more than one proof of that in recent days — but this one, really, came out of the blue. And before he lets himself get carried away by another swirl of conjecture, he finds his wife’s date book, reads the March pages one by one, and on the eighth finds a note written at two p.m. which gives him the strange impression that he has suddenly become the witness to his own life: Groslin/Sheraton.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks, his voice cracking with emotion. “You gave me detailed accounts of the rehearsals for Bernarda Alba, the divorce of one actress, another’s facelift. Why didn’t you say anything about your appointment with Groslin?”

He calls his wife’s agent, Aline Diamond.

“Do you know Serge Groslin?”

“I know his films. Actually, he was in Montreal a few months ago to promote his latest. Alma must have mentioned it.”

“All I know is that they saw one another…”

“Surely she was going to tell you more when the contract was signed. Actors are so superstitious.”

“Groslin had offered her work?”

“Yes, the lead in his next film.”

Hanging up, Doctor Maras says:

“For months, years, you suffered because you weren’t working and I moved heaven and earth to console you, calm you, cheer you up. So that theatre people wouldn’t forget you I went with you to boring social events so that you’d go out and they would see you. All of a sudden you’re offered the lead in a film but you couldn’t share that good news with me? Why?”