PORTRAIT of
a HUSBAND
with the ASHES
of HIS WIFE
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PORTRAIT of
a HUSBAND
with the ASHES
of HIS WIFE
Pan Bouyoucas
Translated from the French by
Sheila Fischman
TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)
2018
Original title: Portrait d’un mari avec les cendres de sa femme (2010)
Copyright © 2010, Les Allusifs Inc.
Translation copyright © 2018 Sheila Fischman and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bouyoucas, Pan
[Portrait d’un mari avec les cendres de sa femme. English]
Portrait of a husband with the ashes of his wife / Pan Bouyoucas ; translated by Sheila Fischman. -- First edition.
(Essential translations series ; 42)
Translation of: Portrait d’un mari avec les cendres de sa femme.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-263-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-264-9 (EPUB). --
ISBN 978-1-77183-265-6 (Kindle)
I. Fischman, Sheila, translator II. Title. III. Title: Portrait d’un mari avec les cendres de sa femme. English. IV. Series: Essential translations series ; 42
PS8553.O89P6713 2018C843’.54C2018-900824-5C2018-900825-3
1
ALMA JONCAS WAS one of the most acclaimed, the most venerated actresses in all Quebec. Until the day she turned fifty.
A tough moment for any actress whose life marks time with her roles.
A tough moment too for her spouse who must constantly feed her self-esteem and her hopes so that she won’t collapse into depression.
Doctor Alexandre Maras, ophthalmological surgeon, mentioned the name of his wife to all the producers and directors among his patients. All replied that Alma was a great artist, that they would definitely call her when a suitable role came along. But Alma’s telephone was silent and all signs suggested that her age — too mature for a young lover, not old enough for a granny — would confine her to the worst fate that can be inflicted on an actress: invisibility.
Alma was driven to despair but refused to resign herself. Rather than let time mould her for the granny and old nurse parts, she decided to hurry things up by stuffing herself with everything that would make her put on weight.
Instead of filling out though, Alma began to lose the little bit of fat she had on her body.
She told her husband:
“I want you to put my ashes in the place where I was happiest.”
Doctor Maras scorned the resignation that actors are partial to when they’re not working and recommended that she see her doctor. But Alma was convinced that the stage was her sole salvation, that she just needed a good, meaty part and she would get her strength back.
Finally, the phone rang: Pauline Brunet, artistic director of the Théâtre Orphée and a friend of Alma, offering her the title role in The House of Bernarda Alba.
It was a role as beautiful as it was rare for an actress of her age, but exhausting too, and Doctor Maras feared for his wife’s health.
Alma replied that what was most exhausting in her line of work was not working.
And in fact as soon as she started rehearsals her eyes gleamed, her back straightened, her voice sparkled, and the butterfly that age was getting ready to turn into a caterpillar flew again.
On the night of the premiere, despite a severe bout of stage fright and stomach cramps, Alma played García Lorca’s tyrannical matriarch with such self-assurance that the next day, the critics couldn’t stop praising her performance, describing it as the most luminous moment of the theatrical season.
It was April 24, spring had finally arrived, the show was an overwhelming success, and every night when the curtain fell, applause and bravos called the star back onstage at least five times.
Alma was feeling a numbness in her extremities but could not for a moment imagine the heavy cost that her success would impose and didn’t speak to her doctor until the day after the last performance.
Her family doctor sent her to a cardiologist, who diagnosed a contraction of the aortic valve so far advanced that blood could barely flow between the left ventricle and the aorta.
In other words:
“You should have had an operation three months ago.”
Back home, Alma prepared a candlelit dinner and put on a yellow silk dress with a décolletage that was an enchantment, as much to please herself as to arouse her husband, because soon her torso would be butchered and never again would she be able to wear a plunging neckline.
Two glasses of wine later, intoxicated more by anxiety than by alcohol and the fragrant breath of lilac with which spring had filled her garden, she said to her husband:
“My love, make me fly. Even if the operation is successful, for a long time I’ll be nothing but a sea gull with broken wings.”
Her eyes were glowing but her shortness of breath and Doctor Maras’s expertise advised him not to comply. But he also knew that when his wife got something in her head she would pursue it until she was satisfied. He concentrated then on the pleasure he could give her without her having to exhaust herself.
Alma murmured, Yes, yes. Then, her face transformed by orgasm, she stiffened in her husband’s arms.
Doctor Maras called 9-1-1, then did all he could to bring her back to life.
In vain.
2
AFTER THE PARAMEDICS had taken the body away, Doctor Maras called on her cell phone Mélissa, their only child, who had gone out that night with her boyfriend. He told her:
“I killed her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She wanted to make love …”
“That’s so sweet. She wanted to make love one last time.”
“But it killed her. I killed her.”
“No, papa, no, you helped her to die happy.”
The candles Alma had
lit were still burning in the dining room which barely an hour ago was filled with life. Doctor Maras didn’t have the heart to blow them out or to watch them burn up either and he went out into the garden to wait for their daughter to show up.
Alma’s garden …
During these past three years of waiting and worry, one bud was enough to make her forget every jobless winter she’d just endured. But gardening for her wasn’t a hobby indulged in when nothing was happening in her career to take her mind off her boredom. It was a passion to which she devoted herself as much as to her roles, fiercely and with extraordinary excitement, and even when she was working she spent her free hours raking, sowing, watering, weeding, pruning and staking.
“It’s pure creation,” she said of gardening. “True magic.”
The previous year her garden had won first prize in the Montreal in Bloom competition “for the impressive diversity of annuals and the synergy of climbing plants whose shapes and colours make a dynamic garden as a whole.”
This year she had opted for a diversity of vegetables and perennials which in her opinion would create an atmosphere full of gaiety that would win her her second first prize.
Next year, for their 25th wedding anniversary, she intended to plant two plum trees.
Doctor Maras recollected all that and when his daughter arrived he told her:
“She asked me to put her ashes in the place where she was the happiest so I’m going to bury them here, in her garden. She will stay with us for the winter and she’ll waken in the spring.”
Mélissa hugged her father and both of them finally allowed the tears they were holding back to flow.
3
THE FUNERAL WAS held six days later, at the church of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil where it seemed everyone who had worked with Alma over the past thirty years had come together to pay her a final tribute. Also present were the mayor of Montreal, the mayoress of her district, Quebec’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, some colleagues of Doctor Maras, some friends of Mélissa too, and of course Alma’s close family members: her unmarried sister, Carmen, a notary in La Malbaie where the three Joncas children had been born; her brother Zak, a sculptor who lived in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Hilaire, accompanied by his young wife Liza and Ezekiel, their six-year-old son; and two female cousins with their spouses. There was no one from the family of Doctor Maras because he had only one sister, Hélène, and she lived in Paris where she was responsible for academic and cultural relations at the Canadian embassy.
A homily was delivered by the officiant, followed by tributes. The first was from Zak. He had never seen Alma act in the theatre, only on television, yet he called her a great tragedian, because, he said, even as a child her back was always erect when she cried.
“Today though she is singing. Do you hear her?” he asked, pricking his ear towards the huge maple trees that surrounded the church, their dense foliage full of birds. “That chirping is Alma telling us she loves us and asking those who love her not to hold her back with sad thoughts because it is with an infinite joy that she is continuing on the road that leads to the Creator.”
Carmen, who wasn’t very fond of her brother, whispered into the ear of Doctor Maras:
“So the hypocrite speaks with the dead now, does he?”
Carmen would have liked her brother-in-law to speak in the name of the family, but all Doctor Maras would have said in public could be summed up in one sentence: She was my sun. Before that even crossed his mind he was rejecting it, because he still had another sun, his daughter, and he wasn’t going to go into lengthy explanations, he who was never long-winded and had always expressed his love better with actions than with words. And so he let the others celebrate Alma. It was perhaps the last time they would think about her whereas he would have her in his thoughts every day.
After Zak, Pauline Brunet, artistic director of the Théâtre Orphée, spoke about her friendship with the dead woman since their student days at the National Theatre School, then about Alma’s contribution to Quebec theatre. She also mentioned some of her accomplishments and concluded by uttering the line that every night made the audience shiver when Alma proclaimed it with her deep voice before the curtain fell on The House of Bernarda Alba:
And no tears. Death must be stared at straight in the face. Silence! Do you hear? Silence, silence, I say! Silence!
Those words took Doctor Maras right back to the moment when he had heard them for the first time, in their house. When she was memorizing a text Alma would sometimes repeat the lines while going about other business. Sometimes too she would ask her husband to give her her cues. At first he stammered, but with time he had gained confidence, sometimes letting himself get carried away by emotion, especially when there were rhymes.
No, you detest me now; and your deep art
Fears to owe a thing to my fond heart.
He had spoken those words by Racine with such ferocity that Alma had laughed so hard he could see her tonsils.
Today, while actors and actresses were singing Alma’s praises, one with an anecdote, another reading lines from one of the characters she had played, Doctor Maras, thinking back to the past, told himself: “Never again will I give her cues, never again will I hear her wonderful laughter in the house.”
4
AT THE RECEPTION following the religious service, when Zak learned what Doctor Maras intended to do with Alma’s ashes, he told him:
“You’re right to want to leave them in a garden. My sister adored gardens and the mere scent of freshly-mown grass would make her heart race. But the garden that Alma liked best is the one you had in Saint-Hilaire. Her Montreal garden was more a consolation than a pleasure because these last years both her work and her health experienced only lows.”
The house in Saint-Hilaire was the first one Alma and her husband had lived in. Subsequently they had sold it to Zak because Doctor Maras, who had grown up in a densely populated part of Montreal, couldn’t get used to the suburbs. Which was why Zak went on to say:
“On the other hand, when you were living in Saint-Hilaire, her career was at its peak, she was young and so much in love that she held your hand even when you were on your bikes. It was there too that she became a mother and in that garden that she saw her child take her first steps. The house isn’t yours any more but it doesn’t belong to strangers. It belongs to her brother. I will put in a beautiful corner for her in the garden, and you and Mélissa will be able to come and visit her as often as you want and observe the changing seasons with her, as she loved to do when she was alive.”
Hearing that, Carmen told her brother:
“Alma chose to live in Saint-Hilaire because the open spaces, the orchards, and the wooded hills all reminded her of the countryside at La Malbaie where she’d spent the most wonderful moments of her life when she was a child.”
“You’ve got a hell of a nerve,” Zak said, “to claim today of all days that Alma wasn’t happy with her husband and their child.”
“That’s not what I said,” Carmen replied. “Anyway, if Alma was happiest with Alexandre and Mélissa, why do you want her ashes at your place?”
“I just explained why!” her brother said.
Those two couldn’t abide each other at all and they were about to resume their name-calling when Pauline Brunet interrupted:
“You two obviously didn’t know your sister very well or you’d realize that she was happiest when she was working. That was where she found meaning and justification for her life: on a stage, in her dressing room, in the wings, backstage. It was that environment with its smells, its commotion, its lights that brought her the greatest satisfaction. So much so that she gambled her health on Bernarda Alba rather than stay at home observing the changing seasons, watering plants and talking to them. Listening to you one would think you never saw her on stage. You probably never did, or you’d have known that Alma never wept, neither with her back erect nor bent double nor lying down. Alma wasn’t one of those pathetic actresses who make up
their eyes with glycerine as if talent were measured by the quantity of tears an actor can shed.”
“I live too far from Montreal to come to evening performances,” Zak said.
“I don’t like dramas and tragedies,” Carmen said. “But I’ve seen all the comedies Alma performed in, in Quebec City, Chicoutimi, and La Malbaie. And the theatre in La Malbaie is a stone’s throw from her childhood garden.”
“What?!” Pauline Brunet said, with the contempt of the director of a repertory theatre for light comedy. “You want to scatter the ashes of a great actress like her in a summer theatre?”
“Certainly,” Carmen replied. “And I have proof that it’s what my sister would have wanted.”
Then she left, promising her brother-in-law that she would send him the next day, special delivery, irrefutable evidence that Alma would have wanted her ashes buried at La Malbaie.
Zak left the reception two minutes later, saying he was going to draw the monument that he would erect in his garden to receive the ashes of his favourite sister.
Pauline Brunet also hastened to leave, to convene the board of the Orphée and discuss with its members the best way that her theatre could honour the ashes of Alma Joncas.
5
DOCTOR MARAS WAS a man who once he had taken on a task also took on all its demands, all its repercussions. But the task had to be clear, for he loathed anything vague, anything confused. And so he spent the rest of the day and a considerable part of the night turning the pages of the past in search of a word, a phrase, or an anecdote that would have dispelled the doubt that Zak, Carmen, and Pauline Brunet had sowed in his mind. Conscientious and meticulous, he read the reviews in the press devoted to his wife and listened to recordings of interviews she’d given on radio and television.
He was searching for a clue, a lead. There were dozens in Alma’s declarations that brought him more blurriness than they dispelled.
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