“How beautiful they are!”
Lucienne thrusts out her chest and presents the two pies she has taken from the oven.
“The secret, my dears, is all in the fat—not mine, but what I put in the pastry. One cup of fat for three cups of flour. Put plenty in, my girl,” she tells Marie-Claire. “It isn’t ointment!”
“Oof!” Hélène exclaims. “Welcome, hips.”
Lucienne shrugs.
“I could eat two of those for breakfast,” Marie-Claire remarks.
“Enjoy it. Once you’ve given birth, you’ll have so many stretch marks you won’t even want to think the word pie.”
“Lucienne!” Hélène protests. “Those are not things one says.”
“Don’t worry,” Marie-Claire replies, plunging her hands cheerfully into the dough. “My mother carried four children and she is as slender as I am.”
“Means nothing,” Lucienne says imperturbably. “Madame Boulerice in the village is thinner than you. Well, her daughter was like her before giving birth. Now she looks like a great big bag of crisps.”
“Lucienne…” Hélène and Marthe say in unison.
“We’ll see,” Marie-Claire retorts. “I’ll have my Antoine in my arms. That’s what matters.”
“Not forgetting your Luc,” Hélène adds.
“We’ve decided to get engaged at Christmas.”
The three women exclaim and, their hands covered in flour, kiss the young woman in turn.
“Hey, men!” Marthe calls towards the sitting room. “Our two youngsters are getting engaged over the holidays.”
They hear the men congratulate Luc and make the customary jokes.
“We can hear you!” Hélène calls.
“We can hear you too!” Gustave replies.
They laugh.
“Damn men. They’ll never change.”
“I certainly hope not,” Lucienne observes. “I like them that way.”
“I’m not getting involved in that,” Hélène replies.
“Neither am I!” Marthe insists, turning towards Lucienne. “What do we do after the pies?”
“Things that freeze well. Then we can take them out in a week for the meal.”
She shows them the contents of a saucepan.
“This will be for the stuffed buns. That’s good, my girl,” she tells Marie-Claire, who hands her the dough. “Could you make some maple fudge?”
“Er… I don’t really know how.”
“Misery of Holy Sugar! Traditions are being lost. What do they teach you in school? Damn Ministry of Education; they don’t know where true values lie.”
“Values have changed,” Hélène suggests. “Primo, we switched to metric. Secundo, healthy menus.”
“Oh, sure! People die anyway, and without ever learning the benefits of a good bout of indigestion from roast pork! Metric or not, there are desserts everywhere in the world—and fat people too.”
“And me? What can I do?” Marthe asks.
“Soup. For Armand. Here, I have the recipe. The dietitian gave it to me. You wouldn’t know it; there isn’t an ounce of fat in it, and it’s good.”
“You see?” Hélène concludes.
“But that’s for the gravely ill!”
“Changing the subject,” Hélène continues. “Any news from Dimitri?”
Lucienne brings out her Sunday smile and takes a few flamenco steps. The kitchen table trembles, as though called to witness the housekeeper’s happiness. The women laugh.
“He’s flying in and arriving just in time for the holidays.”
“He won’t be at sea?”
“No. He wants to be near me!”
“Ooooooh,” they chorus.
“What are you all getting so excited about?” Gustave asks, appearing with a garland in his hand. “Mmmm, it smells good in here!”
“We’re talking among women.”
“So you’re saying nothing,” he replies with the utmost seriousness.
All four women instinctively throw flour at his face. Being male, he dodges it, imperturbable.
“Have you finished in there?” Marthe asks.
“Almost. I’m a little hungry. Don’t you have one pie too many?”
“Here, catch this instead,” Lucienne says.
“An apple! What do you expect me to do with that?”
“Well, you eat it, you see?” says Hélène.
He raises the fruit.
“Humanity has suffered from the beginning because a woman gave an apple to a man.”
“Pfft!” Hélène replies. “Find something more original.”
“Well, I didn’t say it. The Lord did!”
“Triple pfft!” she retorts.
He tries to be conciliatory.
“You know I’m not serious for five cents, my dear.”
“Go and take care of your garlands instead of talking into the void.”
He bites into the apple.
“It needs brown sugar and cinnamon.”
“It’s a metric apple,” Lucienne replies.
“I don’t understand…”
“Never mind.”
“Shall we go and see your masterpiece?” Marthe suggests.
“After you, ladies.”
“No, you first!” Lucienne orders. “I don’t want you alone in the kitchen.”
They follow Gustave into the sitting room. Near the piano, the men have installed and decorated the large tree that Rémi and Luc cut the day before in the woods across the main road.
“It’s magnificent!” Hélène exclaims. “Tall and thick! Well done, boys. And for once there aren’t too many ornaments. Some years, I swear, the tree looked drunker than Gustave when he gets going.”
“A little respect for your elder. It’s Rémi’s fault. There was no way to do it crookedly; we decorated it like genuine f—”
“Gustave!” Marthe scolds.
“Fairies,” Rémi finishes.
“It is very fine as it is,” says Armand, seated in the armchair near the window.
“There, you see?” Gustave tells Hélène. “The pope has spoken.”
Marthe approaches the tree and breathes in its branches.
“Did you fill the water stand?”
“Yes, mistwess.”
Marthe looks at Rémi, who winks. She tells herself he has gained colour since arriving. The open air is doing him good. When he is not with Armand, he is outside, walking, playing handyman, bringing in wood, clearing the paths. “I’m rediscovering my roots,” he told her, a phrase she initially judged rather clichéd. “It isn’t so much the country,” he added, “but what is happening here.” She agreed. The days pass quickly in his company. He questions her, she questions him, they laugh together. “Is life smiling at you? — Is life speaking to me?”
Hélène sometimes joins them when she wants to emerge from her manuscript or from the many forms of care she provides Armand. “We should call him ‘Alarmand,’” she told them yesterday. “Sometimes he frightens me so badly. He drops like a stone, then gets up again smiling. He won’t last long at that little game, and the worst of it is that this is how he wants it.”
“How good it smells!” Hélène declares, imitating Marthe.
“Yeah, it’s clinging to our skin,” Rémi replies. He smells his hands, then holds them out to Luc so he can smell them too.
The gesture does not escape Marthe. The women return to the kitchen. Marthe approaches Armand, sits beside him and watches with him as the men restore order to the sitting room.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m all right.”
He smiles. She thinks he looks better, as though he truly enjoys playing with Hélène’s anxieties. He holds himself erect. Cancer has extinguished the whiteness of his gaze, but not the depth of the gentle blue of his irises.
The fire roars. It is bitterly cold outside. An Arctic wind has blown over the country for two weeks. The snow no longer falls, as Hélène predicted. What fell in November has hardened and dried.
“So, this is it? The paintings leave tomorrow?” Armand asks.
“Yes. One more thing done.”
“No regrets?”
“On the contrary. It must continue…”
“Exactly. It must continue, even if for me that means it must cease.”
He snickers. Marthe strokes his forehead.
“Where are you now?”
“What do you mean? In my acceptance of death?”
He said it loudly enough for the others to stop. He gestures for them to pay no attention.
“Will you walk me home?”
“Of course.”
“We’re leaving, boys.”
“Would you like us to help?” Rémi asks.
“No. My dear friend will do it. Thank you.”
“Hold his arm,” Rémi tells her. “He looks solid, but he isn’t.”
Armand tries to grumble, yet accepts Marthe’s help.
“That’s better,” Rémi remarks.
“Where is my coat?”
“In the same place as usual,” Gustave replies. “Under your cap.”
“And where is my cap?”
Gustave stops tidying and looks at him.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course not, old fool.”
They laugh. Marthe helps him into his coat, then puts on hers.
“I’ll make the soup later, Lucienne!”
“Forget it. I’ve already started!”
“Forgive me!”
“Don’t apologise. You’re the boss! And don’t tell me not to say things like that!”
Marthe hears them laugh in the kitchen.
“I’m leaving with Armand.”
“Behave yourselves. If you do wrong, do it properly,” Hélène calls.
“Right. We’ll put a sheet on the floor,” Armand adds.
“Fine programme!” Lucienne exclaims. “I never get that.”
“The sheet or the programme?” Marie-Claire asks.
Marthe closes the door on their taunts. At once, the wind pinches their cheeks.
“Brrr,” she says. “Weather to freeze on the spot.”
“To tell the truth, I no longer feel anything. My medication takes away every sensation.”
“You’re lucky, in a way.”
“I hope you aren’t serious,” he says gently.
“Forgive me.”
“I was joking.”
“Mind the step.”
He descends slowly, grimacing.
“Why didn’t you agree to proper treatment?”
“Don’t start again. Look at this beautiful afternoon sun instead. The Good Lord has taken neither my sight nor my hearing. That is fortunate.”
“Careful, it’s slippery.”
“I can see clearly. I just told you.”
“I’m clumsy.”
“I’m not doing it deliberately. Relax, my dear.”
“How can I relax when I see you in this condition?”
“I told you to look at the sun. Isn’t it beautiful? Blue, blue, blue, brown, blue, blue, white, white.”
“There’s red over there.”
“I was looking into the distance, not at the barn doors.”
She laughs.
“It is beautiful. In winter, one can see so much farther. It almost feels like a desert. Ah! Careful!”
Marthe catches him just in time.
“I’m all right, I’m all right. It isn’t the ice. I get dizzy more and more often.”
“You frightened me.”
“All that can happen is that I die.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Come now, be less nervous. We aren’t moving very quickly, are we?”
Armand surprises her with his good humour. He hobbles rather than walks, barely concealing his pain.
“I’m in no hurry,” she says to encourage him. “You seem well. We could sit over there for a while?”
She points to the bench near the great tree.
“Gladly.”
“Christmas in a week. Time passes quickly.”
“A great deal has happened in so few months,” Armand remarks.
“As though everything had to move.”
“We provoked it a little, didn’t we?”
“One does not provoke an illness.”
“No, certainly not. But the rest…”
“Sometimes I tell myself no, chance alone is responsible.”
“You’re speaking to an astrologer.”
“And the astrologer always told me that…”
“…the wise man rules his star; the ignorant man is ruled by it.”
“Precisely.”
He snickers again.
“I understand. The direction we have taken is always easier to see when we stop.”
He stops, indeed.
“Let me catch my breath.”
“We have all the time in the world. The day is so beautiful.”
She turns up the collar of her coat.
“I would have liked a whiter Christmas.”
“You’ll see. It will be like every year: snow will fall on the day the Christ Child is born.”
“Even at our age, we let ourselves be carried away by the magic of the holiday season.”
He begins walking again.
“We’d better hurry, or I’ll freeze on the spot without even noticing.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“The same as all of you: that I should accept better care.”
“We ought to force you.”
“But you don’t. Why?”
“Do you want my honest opinion?”
“Have we grown accustomed to anything else between us?”
“I have no duty to keep you alive if you don’t want to live.”
“But what else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What else? That isn’t your whole thought!”
“Perhaps…”
He growls.
“You think me superficial?”
“No. I’ll tell you. You don’t want to burden yourself with a dying man. You have other things to do. You’re moving; you want to shift the mountains preventing you from seeing your sun. You are right.”
“When people don’t want to be helped, we do not help them. We move them out of our path.”
“That’s rather harsh…”
“You wanted the truth. It does not prevent me from loving you—quite the opposite. I would have liked to take you travelling with me.”
“Hélène told me. I would have been a burden, even in remission. What do you intend to do with my cottage?”
“You aren’t dead yet, Armand.”
“It will happen. I predict it.”
She would like to tell him that such things are not discussed in the presence of the patient, but Armand’s frankness forces her not to lie.
“Don’t joke about it.”
“It is a way of taming it, Marthe,” he says in a lower, sadder tone. “And you have thought about the cottage, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Lucienne could live there if she cannot adapt to life with her Greek.”
“She’s leaving? When?”
“In spring, probably.”
“Ah! I’ll be dead.”
“Armand!”
“What! Armand! Let me say what I want, for God’s sake!”
They reach the bench. She helps him sit. He immediately takes her hand.
“The full moon soon. It always affects me greatly.”
“And what does your birth chart say about this one?”
He turns towards her, breathless.
“A full moon is too fleeting a phenomenon to indicate anything in itself. Sometimes it acts as a trigger, like a spark.”
“Which side are you on? The wise man’s or the ignorant man’s?”
“The wise man trying to put out his own eyes.”
He lowers his head.
“There is not much that can interest me now, you see. I wait, then wait some more. Rémi surely told you that I asked him to undress for me the other day.”
He takes his time continuing, as though searching for air along with his words.
“Well, my desire and my sorrows have dried up, like the rest of my body.”
He waves his hands to indicate the landscape.
“All this—the beauty, the cold, passing time—I admire it, but I also tire of it.”
He raises his eyes. For a moment, she thinks he is about to faint.
“All of it has become more than tolerable,” he repeats. “It has become indifferent to me, grey. The morphine, no doubt… I should have started it sooner. I think I am ready to die. I am in too much pain anyway.”
He snickers and coughs.
“All my life I complained that I hurt too much. It was nothing compared with true pain. You treated pain of the soul… That’s charming, incidental.”
“Incidental?”
“Yes, devoid of interest!”
“Isn’t that rather reductive?”
He looks at her with gentle eyes.
“I no longer have to become better, my dear Marthe. I am leaving the world of progress.”
“Rémi told me you showed him a journal.”
“He told you nothing more?”
“No,” she lies.
“We talk a great deal about eroticism, the flesh…”
“And what have you written in this journal?”
“My fantasies. I read him passages, and we compare them with his.”
“Is it instructive?”
“Shall we go in? I’m beginning to feel cold, and if I say so, my arse must be frozen!”
“Agreed.”
“What am I learning?” he says, rising painfully. “I told you: everything is becoming equal to me—not grey, only one and the same colour. It approaches peace. I know it is fragile, and I quickly grow impatient when someone disturbs my silence. I should have gone to a monastery to die, but…”
He stops and turns sharply towards the river.
“Here will do perfectly.”
“What are you saying…”
He resumes walking.
“I am saying the truth, what everyone knows.”
“You’re almost too calm.”
“It’s the morphine. I told you.”
“Don’t lie to me, Armand.”
“I may get off the train sooner than people think, Marthe. I don’t want to suffer through a death agony!”
“Don’t shout.”
He smiles.
“You cannot know, my dear. Listen to me instead of protecting yourself. It would be so much more wonderful to leave as though falling asleep. One lies down, prepares to dream beautiful dreams, but never wakes. One no longer knows whether what one sees is a ghost, one’s childhood vanishing into the earth, or one’s dreams being consumed by fire.”
“Be quiet. It is my turn to ask you to look at the sun.”
“But I see it, even there, in that shadow moving ahead of us. Do you see? It is my shadow, and it reminds me precisely of how I see death: as though the sun were behind me and I were therefore walking inevitably towards it, towards darkness.”
He pats her arm.
“I am not black, Marthe.”
“Let’s say you’re dark blue.”
He snickers.
“That’s it, dark blue. Do you remember that lovely little book you once gave me, I Heard the Owl Call My Name[^2]? I reread it the day before yesterday. I didn’t think I had the strength, yet I made it through. It made me cry… Yes, I can still cry. Everything may have become equal to me, but I can feel that the boat continues sailing. I am like the young priest in the book: I see the tree fall, and I understand… I submit.”
“And the journal?”
“It intrigues you?”
“A little, yes.”
“I will give it to you when the time comes. Here we are at last. It isn’t locked.”
“It never truly was.”
Katou comes to her master.
“There’s my beautiful cat. Have you decided to leave your windowsill? She doesn’t move much these days. Rémi cannot approach her, incidentally. One would think she is jealous. Would you sit me there?”
She takes him to his usual chair. She helps him remove his outer clothes. He sits, pulls towards him the small table that serves as his desk and shows her the birth charts.
“I drew Rémi’s chart. Interesting. It seems the two of you are made for one another.”
“Amusing.”
“You never believed in astrology, did you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!” he says playfully as she settles him comfortably and brings a cushion for his back.
“Would you like water?”
“Gladly. And my pills, there.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them!”
“Are you sure?”
“All of them!”
She takes the bottles, returns with a glass of water and reads the labels. She understands nothing except the instruction “take as needed.” She places the bottles on his table.
“Thank you.”
“You aren’t taking them?”
“Not immediately. Sit down. Now take my hand.”
“It’s warm.”
She touches his forehead.
“You have a fever.”
“I know.”
He looks out the window.
“You have grown old.”
“You mean I am growing young backwards.”
He watches her reaction.
“Some cultures consider white the colour of death,” he says. “Who is right, do you think? We who close our eyes and see black, or they who die looking at the sun, blinded?”
“Which would you prefer?”
“Not to hurt, full stop. The rest… if we are no longer there to see the colour of nothingness, what purpose does it serve? It serves only the living, to soothe their ignorance of the thing. You know, I was thinking again about the seven deadly sins of our very Catholic childhood. Do you remember them?”
“Pride, greed, gluttony, envy, lust, anger, sloth.”
“One sin is missing from that list: ignorance.”
“Yet blessed are the innocent whose hands are full.”
He smiles, but waves the statement aside.
“Blessed because they are blind? True happiness, my dear, comes when we decide for ourselves to close our eyes because we have seen. The ignorant are not happy, merely unaware, and often because of the other sins. Ignorance is the ultimate escape… So much the better if they feel nothing. I say they are only dogs drooling for their many masters. My ignorance was my greatest sin. I’m tired.”
He closes his eyes.
“I’m tired. You cannot know how tired—tired of waiting for this death.”
“It will always arrive too soon for me.”
“You’re selfish.”
He turns towards the window.
“Knowing you are dying gives you wings and makes you rude. Forgive me.”
“I understand, Armand.”
He looks at her.
“I don’t believe you do.”
She rises.
“Leaving already?”
“I would like to write to Léo one last time.”
“Tell him he hurt all of us.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell me that surprises you.”
She sits again.
“I have thought too much about my own sorrow. Is that it?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. We have known him a long time too. His departure left a great void. He could have ended his life quietly with us. He tore the canvas we were painting together; he disturbed our world. A shame he turned his coat.”
“He isn’t mad.”
“Yes, he is. I would never have left you.”
She smiles.
“Go and write your letter. Ask Gustave if he will come and play cards with me. Rémi is on duty tonight.”
“On duty?”
“It’s Victor’s night.”
She laughs.
“Ah! Rémi talks to you that way about Victor?”
“Yes, but only to hide his love for him.”
“He tells you?”
“Why, you’re as wicked as I am!”
“Wicked!”
“Admit it!”
She bursts out laughing.
Wicked! He called me wicked! Can you imagine, my dear Léo?
But first, should I not greet you, as is proper at the beginning of a letter? It shows what you are missing, what has been unfolding in this manor for the past few months.
She feels cheerful but distrusts the intoxication. He will find her superficial; she decides not to care, aware that she is still trying to present him with too perfect and serene an image of herself.
I am speaking of Armand, whom I left this afternoon. We were discussing the young people now living in your cottage, the one looking after Armand and the other sleeping in Rémi’s bed.
She is too cruel. No, not cruel enough.
Your paintings leave tomorrow. They will be auctioned in two months. Thank you for not objecting. Victor, my curator (and Rémi’s lover), has prepared a handsome catalogue entitled The Archambault Collection: The Sexual Years. I allowed him to tell our story and, naturally, to present the magnificent Casimir Effect with the various texts we gathered. As you can see, I am doing the exact opposite of what I announced.
Your Red Painting is the reason. But should we call it Flight towards Augusti? Victor, always Victor, made the discovery. I noticed nothing, though in my defence I no longer entered your cottage, which I nearly set on fire one evening of genuine madness.
Marie-Claire and Luc, the two young people living in your cottage, helped us devise an original staging worthy of your works, so have no fear. In the evening, there will be handsome ephebes beside each painting, which may be viewed at the Museum of Fine Arts for a month before the auction. The people there agreed on the spur of the moment to create this happening, as they call it, especially since I am giving them all your sketches and the books in which you drew something.
There again, I contradict myself. In fact, I burned only a dozen books. Symbols finally exhausted me. As for the Red Painting, Victor offers a skilful and entirely false interpretation of the mysterious presence of that name beneath my own. The critics and journalists will conduct the rest of the investigation. I leave you free to invent whatever you wish, for I have no desire to attack that boy, or young man. How old is he, incidentally? How long have you been deceiving me? Or rather, how long have I been your summer mistress? Always? Was I truly so blind? I will probably never understand your gesture, since you maintain silence around your secrets.
I had the ambitious naïveté to believe in your love. Allow me now the audacity to doubt it, even if you do not care.
Who was I to you? I would have liked you to possess the decency to tell me. I fear, however, that you lack the courage. I had the patience to wait five years before becoming truly angry with you; it took these young people living around me to remind me that unexplored fields lie ahead. I will never concede that you were right, never approve of this abandonment. Your demons make life too easy for you, Léo. You certainly possess genius, but you have no heart. I was doubtless the only person to see your true face, because I allowed you your freedom. I wager that woman is not so understanding.
How I resent myself for having loved you. I feel dirty, with a filth that has nothing to do with desire.
You will answer that we doubtless share the same shadow. Very well. I, however, possessed the decency—yes, the decency—to remain honest. To love you.
Now it is too late. Go fuck yourself, Léo, with the most vicious swine you can find. Fortunately, my blood and my waters will have been of no use to you.
She signs, does not reread herself, folds the sheets, slips them into an envelope and seals it. She rises resolutely, leaves her office, crosses the sitting room and throws the envelope onto the table where outgoing correspondence is placed.
“I’m going upstairs,” she calls to Lucienne.
“O.K. Good night.”
“Good night,” Rémi and Victor echo.
“Oh, you’re both there? I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.
She climbs the stairs, enters her bedroom, locks the door, goes into the bathroom and stops before the large mirror above the sink. She calls herself as witness, judge of her anger. Her hair is dishevelled. A little more and she would have torn it out. She undresses and steps into the shower. Under the water’s rectilinear force, she manages to calm herself.
She goes to bed as soon as she has dried, but keeps her eyes open for a long while, thinking again of the sins Armand described.
Pride: she was proud to be Léo’s companion.
Greed: did she want to keep him for herself?
Gluttony: how could she not love his lips, his intoxicating gaze?
Envy: envy? That is no sin. It is only the shadow of pride.
Lust: she smiles. Blessed are lovers with damp skin. That is no sin either. And memories—are they an unacknowledged form of Anger?
There remains Sloth: that is surely the Ignorance Armand spoke of. He confuses it with Innocence, that ostrich with its arse high in the air and its head buried in the other sins.
Her mind calms and once again mingles genres and codes. The Ten Commandments, the Eightfold Path, the Four Agreements. Enough there to dream about.
[^2]: Margaret Craven (Dell, New York, 1980). When one of his priests is diagnosed with a terminal illness, a bishop decides to send the young vicar among Indigenous people in Western Canada to accelerate his education.