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

Unable to sit still he paces the room, plunges again into the labyrinths of memory, rehashes his thoughts, develops new hypotheses, turns the elements over in every direction, more and more surprised to be talking to himself.

“It couldn’t be superstition. You told me everything, to get my opinion. About every person you called. Every step you took. Why didn’t you tell me about Groslin? And if he offered you a part, why didn’t he tell his wife? She didn’t seem to know you when I spoke to her. And why didn’t he say that he’d seen you in Montreal? Was Groslin superstitious too?”

It was as if he were spinning his wheels.

“If only you’d mentioned it!”

When his daughter gets out of the shower and invites him to have breakfast with her, he is in such a state he can’t even drink his coffee.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about René Poitras again!” Mélissa exclaims.

He tells her about his phone call to Paris, his conversation with Aline Diamond.

“So?” his daughter says. “Mama called everybody for work. When she found out that Groslin was in Montreal she contacted him too.”

“Why didn’t she say anything to me? She used to tell me everything…”

“Maybe she thought you’d object to her working with Groslin.”

“Because he’d been chasing her twenty-five years ago? She went back to work with him after we were married.”

“So why such a fuss about it now?”

They were going in circles and instead of continuing like that, inflicting on his child his own doubts and concerns in addition to her grief, he decides to get some fresh air, taking with him the business card the clairvoyant had left him.

WHEN MADAME ÉLIASsaw the look on his face, she asked, concerned, how he felt.

For the first time in his life, Doctor Maras replied:

“Old.”

The woman raised her right index finger, the bracelets that covered her arm jangling.

“Tsk, tsk, don’t ever say you feel old. You must say that you feel you’re becoming wiser.”

He snickered, then asked the clairvoyant if Alma had ever talked about her plans.

“Sorry, everything that’s said within these four walls is confidential.”

“I have to know. Alma asked me to scatter her ashes in the place where she was happiest but she never said where that was. I wanted to bury her ashes in our garden. Is that the wrong place? Am I deluding myself? Is it pretentious of me to think that her private happiness was limited to me? You have to help me find the answer. You’re my last hope.”

Madame Élias thought for a moment, then said:

“I know a way that will satisfy your curiosity and preserve my integrity. Let me collect my thoughts and Alma will tell me everything you need to know.”

Doctor Maras was a man of a gentle nature who always spoke in the same calm tone he used when speaking with a patient. This time, he who even as a child had only twice raised his hand to someone and that was to defend his sister, was, as they say, foaming with rage. With flames shooting from his eyes, he said:

“Do you take me for an idiot?”

“No…”

“Then don’t talk to me about communicating with Alma or I’ll stuff your bracelets down your throat.”

Madame Élias began to tremble.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “your wife sensed that Bernarda Alba would be her swan song, the end of the dream, and she regretted that she hadn’t stayed in France where actresses of her age are still valued. So when she told me that Groslin was in Montreal I advised her to call him, especially because I could see in the cards a change in her destiny and that her life was approaching an important turn. ‘Right now you can change the star that governs your career,’ I told her. And I wasn’t mistaken: Groslin offered her a role in his next film. As a result the future was smiling on her again, as it had when she was taking her first steps as an actress, when Groslin had opened to her the gates of happiness and fame. I’m not saying that she was unhappy with you. She quite simply needed to make a choice: to bow to the destiny that age had in store for her or expatriate herself to work and dream again. But she didn’t know how to tell you that and she kept putting off the moment, because she loved you. I swear that on the lives of my children Alma loved you very much and she told me again and again that you were the best of husbands.”

But Doctor Maras was already heading for the exit and he had stopped listening.

WHEN HE GOThome it seemed as if the flowers his wife had planted in the garden had rushed into bloom, opening to taunt him. When he finally went to bed that night, he felt the way he had as a child waiting for sleep, trying in the dark to imagine where the universe begins and where it ends.

But on waking he’d made up his mind: He would go to Paris and talk to Serge Groslin face-to-face. He made a reservation on a plane departing the next evening and called his secretary to let her know. As well, he phoned his sister in Paris to tell her that he would arrive on Sunday and asked her to make an appointment with Groslin for him on Monday. But not at his place: He didn’t want to talk about Alma in the presence of his wife.

“Do you really have to?” his sister asked. “Aren’t you going a bit too far?”

“In every image in my mind Alma and I are together. How could I go on living with those images while doubting the emotions they express?”

“All right, okay, I’ll call Groslin.”

When it’s Mélissa’s turn to get up, he asks her to take care of her mother’s garden while he’s away.

“There’s always the hope that she’ll come back with me,” he says, struggling to put a smile in his voice.

To his great surprise, this time his daughter does not try to hold him back or make him change his mind. On the contrary, she approves of his decision as if, seeing him so overwhelmed by doubt these past few days, she couldn’t ask him to doubt the rest of his life.

“She’ll come back,” she says quite simply, “and we’ll be able finally to live our mourning in peace.”

He feels bad at having again forgotten that Mélissa is grieving too and that once more he will be leaving her alone with her grief. To redeem himself, he promises her that after his return on Tuesday, whether he comes back with or without the ashes, he’ll talk to her only about the future. And the next day, before he leaves for the airport, he calls his daughter’s boyfriend to ask him to take care of her while he is away.

“It would be better for Mélissa not to spend those three days alone.”

“Why? What did she tell you?”

“What do you mean, why? She’s just lost her mother! Should there be something else?”

“No, no,” the other man replies hastily, as if sorry he’d asked the question. “There’s nothing else.”

Doctor Maras is not convinced and wants to make him say more, but his taxi has arrived.

The driver is one of his patients, Abdo Adaïmi, a Lebanese in his fifties who has congenital glaucoma and whose taxi always smells of mandarins or oranges. Abdo doesn’t know that his eye-doctor has lost his wife and, seeing his grim expression, he tells him a story to amuse him.

“Remember my associate, Georges Boutros, Doctor? Twenty-five years ago, during the war in Lebanon, he was clubbed in his left eye and you took out the cataract that developed there.”