Franck shook his head.
“Alma was above all an actress. And I know a good number of actresses. I’ve worked with hundreds over the past forty years. They have an unhealthy need to be loved. And not just by their spouses. That’s why their careers always set the tone for every step they take, for all their relationships. The situation is even worse for actresses whose age has reduced their charm and their power of seduction. So any trick, any lie, and every form of cruelty are considered to be totally fair. Especially if Groslin had held out the possibility of a role that would have rebooted her career in Paris and taken her to the top again.”
“And why would Groslin do that?” Hélène asked.
“Maybe Ninon Conti doesn’t indulge his every whim.”
“That’s hogwash. Men Groslin’s age are interested mainly in fresh young meat that gives them the illusion of potency. Why would he bring here from Montreal a woman older than his own wife when Paris is overflowing with young things who’d be prepared to go down the Champ-Élysées on their hands and knees to nab a bit part?”
“Some men have perversions that not many women will submit to, especially Frenchwomen. And Groslin, from what people say, likes watching two chicks tickle one another.”
Hélène bursts out laughing.
“Now you’re delirious for sure. But what did Groslin do to you to make you go so far as to soil Alma’s memory and destroy the peace of her household?”
Doctor Maras wasn’t laughing now. He rose abruptly from the table and said:
“I’m wiped out. Please excuse me, I’m going to bed.”
“Good idea!” his sister said.
19
IT WAS BECOMING harder and harder for him to get over jet lag and his face was puffy from fatigue. He had not retired to the guest room to lie down though. As soon as Franck had mentioned the sexual perversion of Serge Groslin, his mind had rewound to the Orphée theatre, more precisely, just as Nicole Gouin was telling Pauline Brunet to put dear Alma’s ashes under her desk to have them always between her legs. And now, though he knew that one should beware of these associations of ideas, that the players in this game are nearly always wrong, he wondered for the first time in twenty-four years why his wife’s best friend was a lesbian. And as happens at such moments, the more he wondered, the more his mind drifted towards trivial matters that now took on a totally new meaning, until everything that had seemed clear and solid to him now showed itself to be dark and slimy.
Even the most insignificant chatter.
Alma was rehearsing Medea. One day she was complaining about the actor playing Jason who was constantly changing his acting style, which unsettled her; another day, she griped about the actor playing Creon, a skinflint, she claimed, who would hasten his own death to take advantage of a sale on coffins.
That night, Alma cursed the director who wanted to cut two of her lines.
“Medea exits once, intending to kill her children,” she explained to her husband. “But though she’s furious with Jason who has left her for a younger woman — she who abandoned family and homeland for him — she stops herself, comes back on stage and says: My heart is water at the sight of my children’s bright faces. I could never do it. No! I cannot do it. But Euripides, who knew a thing or two about women, was well aware that the rejected spouse kills not so much from love as from wounded pride, then has her say: What is the matter with me? Do I want to make myself a laughing-stock by letting my enemies off scot-free? And it is then that she exits and slits her children’s throats. She is fully aware of the reasons for her behaviour because she says: Alas! My own pride has brought me to misery. And that idiot wants to cut those two lines, cut her into a desperate dish rag, direct it for marshmallow-lovers because he can’t imagine that a woman could also be proud and that her pride could be even more powerful than mother love!”
Today, Doctor Maras remembers all that and wonders if Franck may have been right to say that Alma, embittered by her woes, had arranged, in a final act of revenge, to make her own presumed happiness her husband’s misery. Not only had he forced her to leave the suburbs for the city — she who had sacrificed a career in France to return to her own country’s wide open spaces — his wife’s face was now twice as wrinkled as his own, though she was four years younger, and every morning in front of her mirror complained that it was harder and harder to stick all the pieces together.
He obviously just had to set out onto that trail and memory, implacable tyrant, would start to collect and to misrepresent any number of clues to feed the voracious appetite for bitterness. And as everyone knows, when memory wakens, forget about sleep.
20
HE DOES NOT take a sleeping pill though and, the next day, his eyes are smarting when he goes into the Air France office to change his return date. Stopping along the way at the Théâtre national de Chaillot where, according to Alma, Groslin had lurked around her like a lovelorn boy. But she had not given in. Which was what she had told him and he’d believed her, though she had also said that you have to be something of a whore in her line of work.
Idiot! he thinks to himself now. Would Groslin have re-engaged her?
After he’s changed his return date, he goes to the 6th arrondissement, to the Hôtel Saint-André-des-Arts where Alma had stayed the first time she had worked in Paris. Like the Théâtre national de Chaillot, the hotel is unchanged since the days some years later when Alma had brought her husband there to show it to him.
She had told him:
“Pauline was in the cast and she stayed here too. At night, when we came back from the theatre we’d stop at the gelateria on rue de Buci for an ice cream cone before we went up to bed. You must try it, Alexandre, it’s the best in the world.”
The gelateria is still there, fifty metres away. But when Doctor Maras sits down at the café across the street, instead of seeing Alma and Pauline lined up for a cone after a performance, he sees them going directly up to their room on the arms of Serge Groslin.
He isn’t angry with her for that: He and Alma hadn’t met yet. He is angry with her for having hidden from him that she loved Groslin and having returned to Paris two years after their marriage to perform in his first feature film.
Come to think of it, even when she was working outside of Montreal she would call him every night to tell him about her day, imagining like all actors that the entire world would find it fascinating. But though he searches his memory he can’t find the slightest reference to Groslin’s first film. Why? Was she who lied so badly in real life afraid of giving away her feelings? Unless she was much less honest than she seemed and only revealed to him certain fragments of what she did and thought, which amounts to a kind of lie, doesn’t it?
All things considered, Franck was right: The woman whose table and bed he had shared for twenty-four years had never truly opened the doors to her heart, never truly let him into her other garden, the secret one. It was as though her status as spouse were merely another role she was playing, and today he chokes at the thought that every time she looked at him she could tell herself: You can see me, hear me, you can even enter my body but never will you be able to enter my mind.
Perhaps if he didn’t go to bed so early at night …
Alma always came home from performances overcharged and needing to talk while he, as a surgeon, had to get up every morning at five o’clock, perfectly rested.
How she must have missed while he was snoring not being with someone in her line of work, like Groslin, who’d have taken her for an ice cream after the theatre and listened to her recount her joys and anxieties all night …
He looks back at the gelateria across the street and now sees a mockery in every detail, from its name, Amorino, to the little cupid that symbolized its products, even in the way of eating the cones.
“I wanted so badly for my sister to see Paris too,” says an American woman at the next table.
“Why didn’t she come with you?” asks her female companion.
“She can�
��t, poor thing, her husband is still alive.”
Doctor Maras pays his bill and walks away, head bowed, and after walking for an hour ends up at Père-Lachaise cemetery where, with a map in hand and a lump in his throat, he visits the graves of Jim Morrison, Molière, Sarah Bernhardt and Edith Piaf, ending up at the columbarium, convinced that Groslin himself had photographed Alma and Pauline here and that on that day he and Alma had sworn to join each other there for eternity. And tomorrow, the director was going to confirm it to him.
Fortunately, he still has Mélissa.
Unless …
A thought takes hold of him, one of those thoughts that break a man for life. To check it, he takes out his pen and jots two dates on the back of his plane ticket so he can accurately calculate the number of months between Alma’s return from Paris after shooting Groslin’s first film and the birth of their daughter.
“Watch out, Monsieur,” shouts a teenager passing by with his buddies. “Every year a hundred people choke to death on their pens.”
His friends split their sides laughing. In other circumstances, Doctor Maras would have laughed too. This time, he rushes to the exit, gasping for breath even though he’s in the open air.
When he is finally back at his sister’s, no sooner has he crossed the threshold than Franck returns to the attack.
“So, Ninon Conti? Did you go?”
“No.”
“What a masochist!”
Doctor Maras nods, then shuts himself inside the guest room.
The urn sits on the bedside table. He looks at it and has the impression that he is gazing at the ashes of his life.
21
BE BRAVE, HE tells himself on Tuesday, as he leaves his sister’s apartment. You must learn to accept things as they are. Nothing lasts forever. Be brave, he tells himself again as he enters the café where Serge Groslin is waiting for him, tanned, alert, and as slim and graceful at sixty as a young tennis champion. Surely, he thinks, Mélissa would be more proud of a father so handsome, so talented, so famous …
“Doctor, my deepest sympathy.”
Doctor Maras thanks him, then explains without further ado why he has come to Paris.
“How touching,” Groslin says. “To look for the place where one’s beloved has been happiest and leave her ashes there. And you didn’t tell my wife on the phone to spare me. Your kindness touches me deeply. But I assure you, between Alma and me there was only friendship. And on my part, tremendous admiration for her talent, her intelligence and that rare and magical gift of hers: presence. For her courage too. Because it takes courage and great strength of character when, after people have praised you to the skies, they turn their backs on you. And so when I found out in Montreal that she was no longer working, I didn’t hesitate to offer her a part in my upcoming film.”
“When was it going to be shot?”
“Next spring.”
He’s not even surprised that I don’t know, thinks Doctor Maras as Groslin shakes his head and says:
“What a pity. She was wild about the subject too because she thought it was unacceptable that in the twentyfirst century, the past could still poison our present and threaten our future as it is doing in so many countries. That must stop. People should learn once and for all that we cannot advance by constantly looking back. Otherwise I feel sorry for children in the year 3000 who’ll have another thousand years of resentments to deal with.”
Why is he telling him all that? Doctor Maras knows, from having lived with an actress and become familiar with her circles, those people get carried away easily and can talk about the project they’re working on as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. But Groslin puts too much emphasis on the words past and stop for it to be idle chatter. Doctor Maras lets him hold forth then on the different theatres of war and extermination throughout the world, analyzing every one of his sentences, every intonation. But despite his seeming affability, the other man is still vague and Doctor Maras is no further ahead when Groslin has finished demonstrating that the most highly developed countries are those that pay the least tribute to the past. Now, his tirade finished, he looks at his watch and asks for the bill. Doctor Maras concludes then that the man has told him everything that had driven him to write his screenplay, either to point out, without taunting him, that the world was being torn apart by war and there was no reason to be troubled over a personal drama so insignificant compared with those of thousands of other people, or quite simply to prevent him from asking questions, and now he was going to dash on the pretext that more important matters awaited him.
As it happens, Groslin is already getting to his feet, pretending to be sorry he couldn’t stay longer.
But Doctor Maras doesn’t let himself be thrown. He looks the director in the eye and says:
“You may have finished with the past but the past hasn’t finished with me. If you don’t want it to poison my future, tell me, in your soul and conscience: Where should I leave Alma’s ashes?”
Groslin shrugs.
“I don’t even know what was the happiest point of my own life. In France, some cemeteries reserve a corner for a memorial garden, where people can scatter the ashes of their dead and come back to visit them, like a grave. For me, all of Paris, all of France, the entire planet have become my memorial garden. Because every time I think that I’ve found that moment of fullness in one place, I recall ten more that are engraved in my memory and are equally dazzling.”
I should have gone to see his wife, thinks Doctor Maras, as the other man exclaims:
“Oh, I nearly forgot …”
He takes two folded sheets of paper from his pocket.
“I got this letter two weeks ago. I reread it before I came here and I thought that you’d like to have it.”
He glances again at his watch.
“One last question. Do you remember in what month you shot your film with Alma, twenty-two years ago?”
Serge Groslin reflects for a moment, then says:
“July. I remember because we’d shot one scene during the Bastille Day celebrations.”
It wasn’t nine months as he had thought but eleven months before Mélissa’s birth. Still, after Groslin left, he hesitates for a long moment before he unfolds the paper, as if his entire past depended on their contents. His future too.
22
THE DATE ON the letter was the one when Alma had learned that she had to have surgery, and her long, slanted handwriting, usually so clear, was forced, jittery, agitated.
Dear Serge,
You can’t imagine how thrilled I was at the prospect of working with you again — and in front of the camera. Unfortunately, it won’t be possible: a narrowing of my aortic valve is so advanced that I’m to have emergency surgery the day after tomorrow. Even if I survive, the convalescence will take months, if not years. In case my heart packs it in, before I go I want to thank you for your offer and your friendship.
These past few days I’ve often wondered what kind of career I’d have had if I had slept with all the directors who wanted me. After all, we have just one life and my life has taught me that what’s important is not what we deserve but what we are bold enough to take. But I soon console myself with the thought that, unlike lots of actresses who think about nothing but their career, I will grow old with a man who loves me and whom I adore and a daughter who will give me even more joy when she gives me grandchildren.
Laugh if you want at my lack of ambition but on the eve of my surgery I have just one regret: not seeing Paris one last time and most of all, the island of Leros in the Aegean Sea where, with Alexandre and Mélissa who was still a child, I spent the most beautiful two months of my life, thinking about nothing except enjoying this world and its light. After our shoot next year I intended to bring them there. It would have been my surprise gift for our silver wedding. But if I wake up from my operation the day after tomorrow, I will ask my husband to take me there as soon as I can travel. I doubt that Mélissa will want to come. She has
other fish to fry this summer. If she could talk about it with her father I wouldn’t worry. But she doesn’t dare tell him that medicine bores her for fear of letting him down.
Pray for me. Three more months of grace, three more months of life, to see Paris and Leros again, and above all to look after my little darling who is suffering right now the way we suffer at her age when we don’t know what it is we want from life.
My very best to Ninon.
Love,
Alma
23
FOR A LONG moment he stared at the two sheets of paper and saw again his final image of her: Alma at the very moment of orgasm, murmuring Yes, yes, and then expiring.
Half an hour later he changed his return date for Montreal once again and bought a ticket for Athens. There was an airport on the island of Leros now but he decided to go there by boat as he’d done with Alma and Mélissa sixteen years before.
“Well?” Franck asked when Doctor Maras returned to his sister’s place to pack. “Was I right? You should have talked to Ninon Conti?”
“No. Alma told me everything I wanted to know.”
Hélène was still at work and he told her on the phone that he was leaving that same evening.
“If only she’d told me that it was in Leros …”
“You’d have concluded that, ever since then, she’d never been so happy with you.”
“That’s true …”
“You have to think about yourself now, Alex. A dead woman, no matter how much you’ve loved her, is no companion for a living man.”
Doctor Maras also called home to tell Mélissa that he would be delayed again.
“Are you relieved?” his daughter asked. “You won’t be coming home with the ashes but at least it will be settled; you won’t have to look any more.”
Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife Page 5
