‘Hmmm. We kept in touch after that, sporadically. And when I came back to Montréal, she paid us a visit. It was Sylvia she fell in love with I think.’
‘Your wife.’
‘No, no, not my wife. Nor me.’ He chuckles again. ‘Our daughter. Sylvia.’ Tenderness illuminates his face. ‘I don’t blame her. Sylvia was, is, imminently loveable. Madeleine sent her presents. Every year. At Christmas. On her birthday. And when it was possible, she came to visit. It made me think she was hungry for a child.’
I weigh the thought and wonder at its density. ‘She never mentioned a child to me. Never.’ It comes out with a disgruntled harshness and Giorgio casts me an uneasy look.
‘No, well… Were you close in these last years?’
‘We were friends.’
Perhaps I don’t say it with the right intonation, for silence falls between us, thick with the tangled creepers of memory and melancholy and yes, suspicion. When I can peer through them, I notice that the other guests have left and we are alone in the room. Giorgio’s mood, too, has shifted. When I lean towards him, he arches back abruptly as if his thoughts had coalesced into mistrust.
I search for an ordinary voice. ‘How was Madeleine when you last saw her?’
He doesn’t answer for a moment. He seems to be choosing his words, gauging my reliability. ‘Not at her best,’ he says at last. He stands. ‘I had better let you get some sleep. Your room’s at the very top of the stairs. It’ll be open.’
I hold him back. ‘Did she say anything…anything that led you to suspect…’ my words trail away.
His eyes glint in the candlelight. Shadows leap across his face. I have the sudden sense that Madeleine has told him something about me, confided too much, even if she omitted to mention our marriage. ‘Did she?’
My hand is tight on his sleeve. I only notice it when he shrugs me off with surprising force. I fold my vagrant hands into stillness and insist again, ‘Did she?’
Giorgio rubs his arm, considers me. ‘Not much more than the papers reported. Her distress at the assassinations.’ He hesitates and in that hesitation I know that he is hiding something. Mme Tremblay’s words about an Italian or a Spaniard, a foreign accent, bound into my mind. Sandro or Giorgio. Why not? A desperate affair with a renegade priest. No. My imagination is running away with me. Nonetheless, I am about to press him when he announces with a cold clarity. ‘She was thinking of hiring a bodyguard.’
‘A bodyguard!’
‘Yes. To keep the more invasive fans at bay. You know what it’s like these days. The boundaries have gone. The boundaries between private and public. People just don’t recognize them. It used to be so clear. There used to be one’s mind, one’s nearest and dearest, the confessional for the intimate and the rest was a separate sphere. Public. Formal. Now it’s all mixed up.’
He studies me with unnerving intentness and when I don’t answer, he elaborates. ‘People see someone like Madeleine on the screen, see her in their own living rooms acting out intimacies, and they get confused. They think they know her, can phone her, intrude on her. No boundaries.’
‘Yes.’ I gulp the last of my wine.
‘In any case, Madeleine was thinking of getting a bodyguard. Apparently her stepbrother had been trying to convince her for months that she needed one, had offered himself for the job since he was out of one. Had been pestering her.’ He shifts uneasily, starts to place glasses and plates onto a tray. ‘Madeleine told me he made her feel creepy. She didn’t like him and she was wondering whether she might hire someone else without getting him too worked up. She couldn’t make up her mind.’ He frowns, gives me an edgy look. ‘I should have persuaded her, instead of joking that she wasn’t her stepbrother’s keeper.’
With an air of embarrassed apology, he adds, ‘Madeleine liked it when I made unpriestly jokes. But we really should go up. Have you got a bag?’
I shake my head. ‘I stopped on impulse,’ I offer as explanation.
Giorgio’s eyes are suddenly moist. ‘Like Madeleine.’
The room is small and sloping with a scrubbed pine ceiling which dips right down to the narrow bed. A child’s room. I open the window to the stars, gaze at the brushy outlines of the firs and take a deep scented breath. Somewhere an owl hoots.
I think over the things Giorgio has said and wonder about what he has omitted. The fact that Madeleine failed to tell him that we were married comes back to plague me and I chase it away. After all, outside our closest circle, not so very many people were aware of it, even way back then. Shortly after the wedding, Guillaume moved to Chicoutimi and Colette went home to Quebec City. And Madeleine and I left for France. Perhaps, if we hadn’t gone, everything would have been different.
The theatre troupe had been invited to the Avignon Festival. Madeleine was as thrilled as if a beaming Santa had appeared in her room with a bagful of lavish toys. She wanted me to come along. She wanted me to give her courage for what she imagined as an exacting and sophisticated public. It would also be our honeymoon - though when I intially arranged to take my holiday to coincide with the Festival, the notion of marriage hadn’t yet occurred.
We set off before the others in order to spend a few days alone in Paris. It was my first trip abroad and I was as excited as Madeleine. France, after all, was my mythical home - home of the language I spoke, of the literature and ideas I had imbibed.
I bought a pile of guides and scoured the Plan de Paris. I read Le Monde and Le Figaro even more assiduously than usual for months beforehand as well as any number of Paris magazines and journals so that I became as familiar with the disputes in the Chambre des Deputés and President Pompidou’s utterances as I was with the political scene at home.
We arrived in Paris on June 30, 1973. The airport bus deposited us at the Invalides. We left our cases and walked. For three days, we did little more than walk. Arm in arm under a deep blue sky limpid with fluffy clouds we drank in the delights of the city. For some inexplicable reason, neither books nor films nor Madeleine’s enthusiasm, had quite prepared me for the beauties of Paris. Everything astonished me - the curling sweep of the river and the changing vistas each and every bridge provided; the clustered zinc roofs; the bustle of the streets with their dance of flirtatious glances; the theatre of the cafés where we were both spectators and spectacle.
The rest of the world disappeared. There was only the miracle of Paris with Madeleine: the tiny fifth floor room of that hotel in the cinquième from which, if we craned our necks, we could see a streak of river and the spires of Notre Dame; the breakfast tray poised between us on the bed - flaky croissant and crisply fresh baguette and large bowls of café au lait, consumed so greedily that they seemed to augment our appetite for each other; the forays into boutiques where we pretended to be rich tourists and Madeleine paraded frisky dresses and serious suits and exotic hats before my supposedly discerning eyes.
On the fourth day, we took a train to Avignon. Our hands clasped we watched the French countryside unfold before us like a series of ever-changing tableaux, their pigments deepening as we moved south.
‘Happy?’ Madeleine asked, curling into me.
‘Blissful.’
‘So you won’t be bored when I have to abandon you for work?’
It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms and I bristled a little. ‘How could I be bored in the midst of all this? And I have my articles to do, remember? I’ll be scurrying to performances.’
‘Ours as well, I hope.’
‘Yours first of all.’
I had contracted with my paper to do a series of letters from the Festival. My initial thought had been that this would help to cover expenses. In the event, it helped to cover other things as well. From the moment we walked through the walls of the old city and found our hotel, Madeleine was immersed with her troupe. They were opening in two days time and since they worked on a near cooperative basis, there was everything to do - check out the theatre, make sure all the props for both shows had arrived safely
, do a run through in the new space, make some time for publicity and interviews.
I didn’t like to be a hanger-on, so I kept myself busy. I read through the sheaves of material the Festival office presented me with and did some necessary boning up. Cultural journalism was not my usual beat. I noted press conferences and performers and directors available for interview. I made appointments and scoured the city and attended events, as many as three a day. I learned how to write in the thronging cafés on the Place de l’Horloge. Our airless room was too small for any activity which didn’t take place on the bed. Apart from the theatre, that was the only place I saw Madeleine. I didn’t mind. Every day was an adventure.
The reviews were as ecstatic as Madeleine herself. They talked of a new discovery from their plucky sister province. They raved over the daring approach of the troupe, subtleties of interpretation none of us had ever properly considered. Madeleine was feted and grew more beautiful with each deserved compliment. Both shows were sold out.
On the last night of Lulu, she tumbled into bed with a euphoric smile on her face.
‘Look.’ She flourished a card towards me.
I read a name I didn’t recognize. ‘Who is it?’
‘He’s a producer. He’s produced Chabrol, a host of others. And we’re invited to a party. Next week. At his house. About forty minutes from here. In the country. He’ll send a car.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, we.’ She tickled me. ‘I told him about you.’
‘And?’
‘And…’ She romped and bounced on the bed, once again the little girl from Ste-Anne. ‘He says there might just be a part for me in his new film.’
I can honestly say that at that moment, I was as happy as Madeleine. The magical word ‘film’ - uttered not by a provincial like ourselves, but by someone resonantly called a producer - catapulted us into a world that was far bigger and richer than even our imaginations had dared to draw. The colours in it were at once brighter and more subtle. The voices had more gradations of timbre and texture. The fragrances were more intense. We were no longer bound by the mundane limits of home. Suddenly our domain had become the mythical arena of the movies, boundless and varied, grand in action and heroic with excess.
That night we made enchanted love under a canopy of our own stars - Godard and Truffaut and Vadim and Fellini and Hitchcock. Anouk Aimée, Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Belmondo, Brando, Taylor and Beatty. On and on, we invoked our constellations until exhausted we slipped into triumphant sleep.
On Tuesday evening, a Rolls Royce of creamy vastness awaited us at the door of the theatre. We grinned at each other and like two practised cons sashayed towards its open door and leaned with pretended languor into the smell of leather. We drove under a star-encrusted sky through a mysterious landscape of cypress and entangled vines. When we stopped we thought we might already have arrived on a film set.
Set half way up a promontory, the burnished ochre walls of the house glowed softly in the night. Voices drifted from the illuminated paths of the sculpture-studded gardens, mingled with the sound of water plashing into fountains. Vast urns of geraniums and pansies and lavender scented the air.
We walked silently towards an elevated terrace where people lounged and clustered. At the base of a steep set of stone steps, we paused in momentary trepidation. Madeleine squeezed my hand. Then, taking a deep breath, she walked up ahead of me, her gait deceptively relaxed, fluid. She was wearing a brief white slip of a dress which set off the perfection of her tawny legs, the grace of neck and shoulders. As she stepped into the light of the gathering, I watched her as if on a stage - watched the swing of her hair over her shoulders, the shy, sensual flicker of a smile, the outstretched hand which found its way instead to the arm of a thick set man who bent to kiss her. An anxiety I couldn’t give a name to tugged at my entrails. I Ieapt up the stairs two at a time.
Madeleine introduced me to Roland Martineau, who surveyed me from lazy, hooded eyes, as if I were rather smaller than him, though in fact I towered above him. We exchanged a few words. A glass of champagne found its way into my hand. Gestures were made in the direction of a buffet table. And then with smooth urbanity and without my having quite noticed that it had happened, I was effectively handed over to two women who lounged in wicker bath chairs at the far corner of the terrace.
Natalie Barret and Micheline Renault were both jet-haired and doe-eyed and as elegant as fashion plates. Their bracelets jangled over bronzed, bare arms as they spoke. Chains of looped gold swayed with their gestures. They drew me out and in with cool charm.
But at first I didn’t pay much attention to our conversation. I watched Martineau. He was showing Madeleine off, introducing her here, there, and everywhere. I could feel him gauging her value in people’s responses. I saw Madeleine throw her head back and laugh her rippling laugh. Her eyes sparkled. Her skin glowed in the mellow light. There was a quality about her which wasn’t only beauty. It drew the gaze and held it.
‘Yes, she’s not bad, your compatriot.’ Natalie must have been reading my mind. ‘I think our little Napoléon may indeed have made a find this time.’ It was said humorously, without malice.
‘You work in the movies?’
‘I run a casting agency. And Micheline works for Gaumont. Script department.’
‘Are you interested in film?’ Micheline asks.
‘Of course. But only as a spectator.’
‘The industry’s very small in Québec,’ Natalie offers, as if that were the only conceivable reason.
We begin to talk about Québec and I begin to feel increasingly patronized, as if I inhabited some remote, underpopulated terrain in the vicinity of the North Pole where igloos were the main form of architecture and trapping the primary activity. Perversely, as we move towards the buffet, I slip into slang and they titter over my locutions, point out the English and wholly unFrench structure of my sentences, the archaic usages.
They introduce me to some friends, make me speak for them and soon I am at the centre of a linguistic sideshow, amusing the natives. Although I have partly brought it on myself, this makes me angry. I wonder why I have spent so much of my adult life making a case for the French language, struggling for its pre-eminence, when our cousins across the Atlantic can only snigger when I open my mouth.
My third glass of champagne finished, I have the irresistible desire to be unpardonably rude. Like some country yokel, I point at the cheese platter and ask in my best joual why there is a smell of shit coming from the plate. ‘Pourquoi c’a pu comme d’la sacré merde?’
Suddenly Madeleine is at my side, her arm through mine.
‘There’s a wonderful pool,’ she says. ‘And a closetful of bathing suits. Shall we have a dip?’ She smiles her ravishing smile. She speaks her unaccented Parisian French.
Natalie stares at her. ‘So you’re not from Québec?’
‘Oh yes, just like Pierre. We’re neighbours.’
Madeleine tugs at my arm and we walk beyond the crowded terrace, down a fir-banked path. It abuts on a glistening pool of pale green. In the soft breeze, the water laps and sparkles like a bed of illuminated crystals.
To the side there is a small white cabin. Madeleine pulls me inside. She gives me a teasing smile and plants a soft kiss on my cheek. In less than a moment, she stands naked before me. My blood races. I reach to embrace her, to touch the soft golden thatch which suddenly seems to me to hide the centre of the universe. But she eludes me. With a pout, she slips on a white bikini bottom, edges her breasts into a top which might as well not be there. And then she is gone.
I follow more slowly, find a pair of black trunks on a hook and lumber out of my cream suit. I hang it up carefully. It is the only one I have brought with me. My head feels a little fuddled with the champagne. I tuck my socks into the jacket pocket and when I hear voices approach, hide my underwear and hastily don the trunks.
I come out just in time to see Madeleine perform a perfect dive. Her body arcs and cuts into t
he water, disappears into froth, only to reemerge a few steps from me. Her head is as sleek as a seal’s. She waves me in and I plunge. We swim a few lengths side by side and only when I re-emerge at the far end of the pool do I notice the man stretched on the deck chair. His arm behind his head, he is staring at Madeleine with a dark, silent intentness. His absorption makes me realise he has been there for some time.
From the way Madeleine shakes out her hair, I sense that this whole spectacle has been enacted for his eyes. Not that she looks at him. She pretends oblviousness to his presence, even as she hoists herself gracefully from the pool and sets out for a second dive.
When she is back in the water, I put my arms proprietarily around her. I kiss her. She kisses me back, archly, playfully. I don’t know how I know this is part of the game. Maybe my skin tells me.
This time when Madeleine emerges from the pool ahead of me, the man comes towards her. He has a hawk nose and mobile lips which are curled now in an ironic smile. In his hands, he carries a large striped beach towel. He wraps it slowly round Madeleine, whispers something I can’t make out in her ear and walks away. His movements are brisk, spry, in contradiction to his earlier concentration.
Madeleine stands there, looking into the middle distance. There is a serene but enigmatic smile on her lips. When I take her hand, she shivers, then starts to run past the pool into the darkness of a leafy copse. Under its cloak, she topples breathlessly to the ground and pulls me after her.
‘Now,’ she murmurs. She licks the moisture from my face, arcs against my weight. ‘Now, neighbour.’ She laughs.
I have the odd sensation that somewhere those intent eyes are still watching, perched in a tree perhaps, or behind a shrub, or perhaps simply there, hidden within Madeleine’s own tawny gaze or my darker one.
Madeleine’s skin is cool and hot at once. She shudders beneath me. In the pleasure of that, I lose both those eyes and myself.
Cold air gusts through the small attic window and chills my skin. I am lying naked on top of the narrow bed and staring up at the knots in the sloping pine ceiling. I don’t remember having got undressed. I don’t remember lying down here. I don’t remember the roughness of the woollen blankets beneath my back. How many other things are there about my life that I don’t remember as I tune into Madeleine?
The Dead of Winter Page 16
