Gustave rubs his hands together over his empty plate.
“What is our friend serving us this morning?”
“Spinach omelette, my angel.”
“I love omelettes,” Hélène sighs.
“There’s never anything but good food on this table,” Armand adds.
Lucienne arrives carrying the frying pan with the omelette.
“Well, only natural, considering how much you’re paying…”
Marthe gives her a neutral look. Gustave is undaunted.
“And it’s just as natural to pay rent.”
“I agree,” Hélène adds, following the omelette’s progress with her eyes. “I’ve gained ten kilos since I came here. I live in Paradise.”
“But you haven’t gained weight, come on,” Gustave protests. “You haven’t…”
“Oh, that’s enough, Don Juan. Thank you for being more romantic than my bathroom scale…”
Busy cutting a portion of omelette, Lucienne snickers.
“A scale! Been a long time since I stepped on one of those…”
No one dares comment. Gustave clears his throat and says mockingly:
“But look at you. You’re looking mighty fine today, Lucienne. Going to a funeral?”
Lucienne immediately raises the frying pan over Gustave’s head.
“And how would you like your spinach?”
Hélène intervenes in a tone of mock anguish:
“Serve us, I beg you. You can deal with Gustave afterwards!”
Still threatening Gustave with her pan, Lucienne hesitates, then makes up her mind.
“Lucky for you the others are hungry…”
She undertakes the delicate task of serving, manoeuvring her ample bosom between the guests. Gustave appears to be waiting for the right moment to get in another one, the hint of a smile on his lips. The others wait as well, though silently, to be served and, when the time comes, praise the dish’s apparent quality. Lucienne accepts the compliments without a flicker, as though they were merely her due, and returns to her pots. Hélène passes around the croissants. Gustave takes two, Armand prefers bread, Marthe asks for the salt.
“Your omelette is delicious, Lucienne. What did you put in it?” Armand asks.
“Love, sweetheart. Love.”
“How much does that go for at the grocery store? Unless you buy it somewhere else…” Gustave suggests.
Lucienne does not answer. Marthe glances at Gustave, warning him not to go too far. He shrugs and returns to his plate. She immediately regrets the gesture—her second regret of the day, she notes, that everlasting professional reflex. She concentrates on her omelette, which is, indeed, delicious. Does love make Lucienne a better cook? She gobbles another bite, savouring Lucienne’s pleasure.
The wind pounds the shutters. Everyone offers an opinion on the days ahead, on the season dying and the one threatening to take its place. Gustave points out to Marthe that the roof of his cottage has still not been repaired; Hélène mentions a window that does not close properly; Armand helps himself to another slice of bread. Marthe promises to see to it and asks Lucienne if she can stop by old Bob’s. Lucienne nods. Then they discuss the morning’s programme as though it were necessary. Marthe listens while they agree on what has already been planned: a walk by the river, then choir practice, followed by lunch. It has been this way every Wednesday for nearly ten years. She has to resist pointing it out.
On Tuesdays, Hélène usually comes to help Lucienne prepare a few dishes, which they share between the house and the cottages. Some are eaten during the week, others frozen. Gustave hardly needs it—he can cook for himself and is even rather proud of his soups. Still, he always leaves with an extra portion for Armand, who can go a whole day on bread and coffee without even noticing. For the rest, everyone manages on their own. Only Wednesdays and special occasions bring everyone back to Marthe’s table.
“It’s the full moon, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Armand replies, “in Pisces.”
Gustave says nothing, but his expression speaks volumes about what he thinks of astrology. Hélène asks Armand what it might mean for her. Armand shrugs and says he has no idea. Gustave intensifies his look of disdain by chewing his croissant more vigorously.
The others indulge in talk, as she likes to call the babbling of old friends. She is only half listening, feeling rather nervous. Someone asks her opinion and she pretends to be surprised. No one waits for her answer. She casts a quick glance at her surroundings. The full Moon? Where is her Moon again? Scorpio? Yes. “A woman of broad emotional range, passing from laughter to tears without warning.” Armand had explained that her Sun in Pisces was “ill at ease” with a Moon in Scorpio, “as if a hole had been pierced in the bottom of an ocean and all the water were draining through that gaping wound towards some unknown manifestation of the unconscious.” She swallows a bite of omelette.
Despite the distance, she can hear the fire crackling in the living-room hearth. She realizes she would have liked to be alone this morning. She holds her breath, then releases it. Too many images. Too much noise. Some days are like that… She sighs. She can hear that as well, inside her head, inside her old grey machine: the sighs, the creaking of muscles and bones.
The crackling fire keeps time with the contradictions in her thoughts. Nothing inside her has changed. Yes, everything has changed; everything resembles childhood, only the clothes have been transformed, like the trees—yes, like the trees and the leaves that return, as death approaches, to haunt the withered branches. You can be so foolish. In her mind, she appropriates the words Hélène directs at Gustave. Life is foolish, Gustave offers. They both know they are wrong, yet seem content with what they have just said. Marthe places one hand on the table. The crackling fire draws her attention once more. Déjà vu. Léo. The fire… they used to make love beside the fire. Now and then, a fine ember managed to leap over the screen and burn their skin. They never flinched. Their passion was too strong, the sensations too numerous. Will she ever manage to forget all that? Perhaps, yes—but Léo’s presence? She studies her furrowed hands. Like sand dunes, desire is worn down by the force of the wind, only to form again a little farther on, a little softer. She often tells herself she can no longer distinguish between the vales of desire and the thirst of meandering valleys. Even so, she misses his presence. She hungers for him.
“Coffee, everyone?”
Without waiting for an answer, Lucienne serves them again.
“You’re in quite a hurry, Lucienne…” Gustave says.
“Every Wednesday, you give me the same old line, Gustave. Jealous?”
Hélène pretends to be exasperated.
“Will you two ever stop?”
Lucienne thrusts out her chest.
“He started it!”
“Children! Children!” Armand snickers.
“I wouldn’t mind another croissant,” Gustave announces.
“Not good for your figure,” Hélène teases.
“My figure?”
He stands and displays his belly.
“This isn’t supposed to be a straight line! See? It’s naturally round! Proof…”
He pulls his shirt from his trousers and shows them his navel.
“…it was round when I was born!”
He sits down again, proud of his retort. Before taking a bite, Hélène adds maternally:
“Tell that to your doctor.”
Dejected, Gustave throws his napkin on the table.
“We’re all old…”
“Speak for yourself,” Hélène concludes, taking the last croissant.
They laugh.
“Pass me the sugar, Marthe?”
She starts.
“What? Oh, the sugar, yes…”
She hands it to him, registers the conversation, pretends to respond and eats her breakfast while absently returning to her memories. One day, watching her breasts with the fire in the background, Léo had told her, “You’ve got a volcanic bosom… When we have a baby, we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t get burned…” She loved those moments when Léo saw her as a painting. And she did have very beautiful breasts in those days. Then again, Léo had a devil of a cock. They were more than that, of course, and yet too much of that.
She lowers her eyes and looks at the eggs she has barely touched. It is so long ago now; he never gave her that child. But she had the other one in their first year. She is furious at allowing herself to be drawn into the game of melancholy. At her age! Her friends chatter merrily. Noticing her lack of appetite, Lucienne pats her shoulder.
“Gotta eat your breakfast or you won’t grow…”
Marthe smiles. The others stop talking. When Marthe does not eat… Gustave furrows his brow, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Thinking about a handsome young man?”
She smiles again.
“I was thinking about my first years with Léo, and how I met all of you…”
She cannot tell whether her remark creates discomfort or an understanding silence. Léo’s departure is almost never mentioned in their conversations. Only Lucienne continues making noise, her way of saying that she understands. Never caught off guard, Hélène raises her glass of orange juice.
“To love!”
The two men need no urging and invite Marthe to join them. She obliges gladly. In his bass voice, Gustave sings out:
“To our loves, our deaths, our lives!”
They all laugh, partly to drive away the darker ghosts. Armand yawns.
“Sleep badly?” Marthe asks.
“Me? Not very well, actually,” he says, going no further.
“I slept straight through the night,” Gustave continues.
“You were snoring. Scared your dreams away.”
“I suppose you were listening at my door?”
“No need,” Hélène says. “I’m sure they could hear you on the other side of the river.”
Marthe does not take her eyes off Armand, who seems to pretend not to notice. Sleep still clings to his face, his features bearing the marks of a bad night. No doubt yesterday’s supper disagreed with him, or he fell asleep in front of the television and woke only at dawn. All at once, he seems older to her than the others. Death can already be sensed in him, she thinks, if only in the way he has taken lately to running a hand over his forehead, as though thinking too hard—or thinking into emptiness. What has he seen in the stars? Beside him, Hélène appears ten years younger. Her blond hair, green eyes, oat-coloured skin and gently convex nose evoke the still evenings of early September. She sits straight in her chair, elbows on the table: a beautiful woman, without a man. That is not necessary, is it? Marthe listens to the fire crackle for a moment. Yes, it is necessary. Someone: a soul, a voice, a pianist playing a smooth melody, a romance from time to time in the absence of daily passion, but someone. Everyone knows this. Or at least something: God, for instance, or poetry, art. Her thoughts grow muddled. It is more complicated than that; how is it that, at her age, she still clings to simple answers? Because memories themselves are simple?
Lucienne has already cleared and cleaned everything. Only the coffee cups remain on the table, but no one is in any hurry to leave. Gustave talks about his daughter in Manitoba, who wants to marry a computer specialist. He has remained a handsome man, she thinks—not her type, but handsome all the same.
Hélène asks Gustave if he will attend the wedding. He shrugs.
“Probably not. Who gets married in the dead of winter? Manitoba must be even colder than it is here…”
And off the conversation goes in that direction, already lost in the labyrinthine pleasure of talking merely to pass the time.
Lucienne gets ready in her room. No one has noticed her, absorbed as they are in wondering, with the greatest irony imaginable, whether Manitoba has running water. Marthe looks at them all once more, her friends and tenants.
They moved into the cottages ten years ago now. Former patients of Marthe’s, they had met through the appointments that brought them together in the waiting room in town. A little like the characters in that play by Tremblay, they had taken to meeting after their sessions at the café across the street, and one day invited Marthe to join them on the pretext of celebrating one of their birthdays. Friendship, their pain and their confidences had eventually dissolved the professional boundaries between them.
Lucienne had arrived two years before them. Marthe had been looking for someone to help keep up the house, which had grown too large as Léo prolonged his stays in Europe and she herself went on seeing her patients. Lucienne was only meant to stay a few months. Twelve years later, she still occupies her small room behind the kitchen and still insists she is only there because she is paid to be.
The wind pounds against the windows of the house. She emerges from her brief reverie, once again surprised by the sudden resurgence of her memories. She stands. Gustave gives her his factory-manager look.
“Where are you going?”
His headmaster look, she corrects herself.
“To check the fire. It sounds strong.”
“You’ve always been afraid of fire,” Lucienne says. “That fire’s fine. I started it myself this morning.”
“Exactly,” she replies. “You always put too much wood on.”
“Someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”
“Leave her be, Lucienne. Marthe has always had ants in her pants,” Armand says.
“May I?” Marthe asks, amused.
Gustave stands.
“Armand, one rises when a lady leaves the room.”
Armand, a mouthful of bread between his teeth, stops chewing and consents to stand, though not without difficulty, she notices.
“Oh, piss off,” she says ironically.
“I like it when she talks that way,” Gustave comments. “Turns me on.”
Armand sits down again.
“The only time you feel any pleasure is when someone breaks your ribs,” Hélène concludes.
Marthe leaves the kitchen and crosses the vestibule to reach the living room. The fire is indeed too strong. Lucienne, who always feels the cold, has once again put on too much wood. It does not matter, of course. Marthe smiles, even laughs, helped along by Gustave’s indecent remarks about sexual pleasure.
She takes hold of the poker, opens the screen—it needs oiling—then bends down. She is old; she must take her time or her spine cries out. She stirs the logs, breaking open the pockets where too much air feeds the flames. The heat feels good. It is like love; a caress is an ember. And Léo is one of those logs she pushes deeper into the fire…
Has she not mourned him? Of course she has. It has already been five short years. She has performed the intelligent arithmetic of pros and cons, wrongs and responsibilities. She has repeated to herself what she repeated so often to her clients: let go. The clinical file is closed. And so there is everything else… everything beyond understanding. No, she corrects herself, everything beyond reason—namely, all that is essential and all that is useless.
She gives the log one last push, closes the screen, replaces the poker on its stand and returns to the kitchen. At that very moment, Lucienne emerges from her room, hat on her head, handbag tucked under her arm. Lucienne will never be delicate. And yet…
The others are laughing. Where has the conversation got to now? They are talking about Nunavut. Armand says that, if he has to die, he would like to die beneath the snow. Hélène adds that it would be good to die to the sound of whales.
“On your deathbed, you won’t be able to hear whales!”
“My dear Gustave,” Hélène jokes in a serious tone, “just before I die, you’ll have to throw me into the ocean!”
Gustave does not seem convinced.
“And have you thought about the lawsuits?”
“What lawsuits?”
“If you’re not dead yet, I can’t drown you!”
Hélène sighs in dismay.
“All this is sadly lacking in poetry…”
“Hitler would have liked you!”
“You’ve got some nerve, comparing me to Hitler!”
Armand stands and points towards the window.
“Shh…”
Their eyes follow his gaze; startled, they rise in turn. A bird, its body upright, tries to remain motionless by beating its wings rapidly, as if waiting for someone to let it in. It flies off, returns, strikes the pane and tumbles onto the windowsill.
“Oh, the poor creature…” Hélène says fearfully.
They draw closer and watch the bird’s strange behaviour without moving. Marthe wants to open the window. Hélène grabs her arm.
“No! Don’t do that…”
Marthe questions her with a look. Hélène smiles sheepishly.
“…it’s bad luck.”
Without answering, Marthe opens the window. They scatter as the bird bursts inside with a shrill cry, bringing the violent wind with it. It circles the kitchen several times. Lucienne remains pinned against her counter, crying out each time the bird passes. Hélène has taken refuge behind Marthe; Armand and Gustave are amused. The bird alights for a moment on top of the kitchen cupboards, lets out another cry, then flies back the way it came. Hélène immediately closes the window. A feather drifts through the air; Armand catches it in flight.
“Looks like a chickadee,” he ventures. “Do chickadees stay here in winter?”
Gustave shrugs.
“Dunno, but if it’s that lost, it won’t make it through the season.”
Hélène is troubled by something else.
“It gives me the shivers.”
“Don’t tell me you’re superstitious!” Gustave scoffs.
Armand comes to her defence.
“Leave her alone. We’re all superstitious about something, you most of all. What about you, Marthe? Are you superstitious?”
Marthe continues looking outside, searching for the bird.
“I don’t know, Armand. I don’t know anymore.”
She would have liked to say that yes, today she would not mind believing in the whims of fate, believing that dreams are, in some fashion, guarantors of the day to come. Bad luck? Is it a good omen or a bad one? The bird believed its path had to pass through here… it persisted. Was it a sign? From the window, she can see Léo’s now unoccupied cottage.
She drives away the strange thought and returns to her friends, whom a still breathless Lucienne, her hat on her head, is serving more coffee.
“It’s strange,” Armand begins. “I dreamed about a bird last night. It was enormous and looked like a swallow. As big as an elephant, in fact.”
Marthe’s mind is elsewhere, with the bird and also with her memories. Léo, Léo. It rhymes with oiseau. Too sentimental. Too foolish.
“I was in town, you know, in my old apartment, the one overlooking Laurier Street.”
The others nod, absently sipping their coffee.
“The bird was circling me clumsily. I could hear those huge wings beating the air…” He imitates the bird: “flacloush, flacloush.” Then he continues: “It came down towards the roof of the house, almost falling. Three enormous nestling heads emerged! The bird had built its nest on my house! That was when I noticed a strange object on the ground. As I came closer, I realized it was a severed hand. In the dream, I knew the hand belonged to a homeless man. And then I found other parts of the body.”
“Charming,” Hélène comments.
Armand falls silent, looks at Marthe and smiles. The others wait. Armand continues:
“I woke up terrified. Death suddenly seemed so close.”
“Our turn will come soon enough,” Gustave says, as blunt as ever.
“Yes, that’s true,” Armand concedes reluctantly, taking the time to sip his coffee. “But it hit me then. Sometimes life has a strange way of telling you things…”
He pauses, gestures with his chin towards the window and says no more. Gustave also looks at the window, seemingly unimpressed by the coincidence, and gives everyone the smile that announces a bad joke.
“Well, I had a dream, if you can believe it! I dreamed…” (he pretends to search his memory) “about my feet! They were enormous!”
“But they are!” Hélène says, laughing.
Gustave goes further.
“Even more enormous, I tell you! So enormous that they… that they made a noise like thunder when I walked.”
He strikes the table with his fist; the cups jump and threaten to spill.
“Naturally, as I walked along, my legs were spread wide apart and I was naked, with a hard-on like a stallion. And who do I see on the horizon? Lucienne!”
They burst out laughing as Lucienne throws her dishcloth at him. Marthe notices that Armand is struggling to smile.
“Seriously, Armand…” she says softly.
They fall silent. Armand looks at his friends.
“We can go so quickly,” he says, his shoulders sagging.
Hélène takes his hand. Gustave crosses his arms in a show of boredom, yet speaks warmly:
“Hélène is sixty-seven, Marthe seventy-eight, Armand is too old to have an age, and I’m seventy-two.”
“You and Armand are seventy-one, Gustave.”
Gustave shrugs and continues more harshly:
“There’s nothing I can do for you, Armand.”
He stands. Armand also shrugs and looks at Marthe with an ambiguous smile.
“Well! You bunch of old fogies, how about we take our little walk and talk about all this beside that magnificent river? In any case, I’m sure Lucienne can’t wait for us to get the hell out of here. Isn’t that right, Lucienne? You didn’t dress like that for us!”
Lucienne wiggles her hips. Gustave examines her shamelessly.
“Look at that. Sixty years old and still with the hollows of her hips sculpted by men.”
“Come to my bed, sweetheart. I’ll show you.”
Gustave pinches her cheek.
“I’d love to, honey, but at my age I can hardly manage to piss, so…”
“Oh, Gustave, I’m sure you still play with it now and then,” Hélène scolds.
“Play with it? I can think about Lucienne’s breasts all I want, my heart isn’t strong enough to pump the blood from my feet all the way up there!”
“Ah, the feet rise to the surface again,” Armand says sarcastically. “See, Gustave? You think about death too. All the time.”
“How do you figure?”
Armand is utterly serious.
“Our feet are what will go through that door first when we’re dead!”
Gustave refuses to be outdone.
“Watch me, Armand!”
He opens the door and raises his right leg high, carefully placing his foot across the threshold.
“I’m alive, Armand! And my feet still go first!”
The wind rushes into the house. It is not truly cold, only violent. Hélène pulls her cardigan around herself; Gustave settles his cap firmly on his head, followed by Armand, who has an almost identical one. Marthe adjusts the thick shawl around her shoulders.
Imitating Gustave, Hélène steps outside, ostentatiously placing one foot through the door. Armand leaves without a word. Marthe says goodbye to Lucienne. They walk away from the house while the maid finishes tidying up, whistling to herself.