Affairs of Art (11 page)

Six

O
UTSIDE THE CHURCH MARIANNE DUBEAU
trembled for nearly an hour, though her hand did not shake. All those children. All those boys and girls the same age as François, and his heartbreaks. She had taken leave of him at the Hotel-Dieu, he was merely a dead man with a tired body who no longer heard or saw her. But these forty-year-old children still had some colour in their cheeks, a smile in their eyes, a stiffness in their shoulders. They were alive. Never again would François pour water or wine for her, or call her in the middle of the day. His voice was already gone, the sound switched off.

I betrayed him, I deceived him, I killed him. Father, Abbé of the Arts, grant me absolution. See the scratch along my wristbone, you think you see an old woman's vein grazed by a knife. The kitchen. A grater. A thorn, summer is starting and the rosebushes are aggressive. But it's the wind. I went around the house, broke all the windows along its length, a thin, feminine man could have slipped inside, I invented the lover who steals his lover's final breath. It was dawn, I had the night at my fingertips, it eluded me for it was running away. I hurt myself, it was time. I was never hurt by François, he was mygarrote against life. I'm barely scratched, give me the absolution you grant to all usurpers, I am Marianne, that is to say nonexistent and white and empty. Mother of a stillborn child. Thus did I abort him and it's very cold between the legs and there is blood on the hands. And words which came from him like seed and which I burned. Before his body were his words.

Marianne had washed her hands, dressed in her clinging monk's habit, walked to the church. There was the Mass for the dead, the adolescent altar boy, and the pretty brown woman who laughed before she cried and whom Marianne did not greet because she knew who she was. Then the fire, and the ashes. A very small, square box for her to dispose of. François had left it to her. No cemetery, he had wanted the church to touch them all, to bring them together, and to imagine them breathing his end. But afterwards, nothing. God was the fern, a joke. “You will stow my dust in the buffet, or offer it to the municipal incinerator, I would rather like to end up where I was born.” It mattered little to him. Ashes are ashes, nonexistent and grey and empty.

There was the return to Rockland Avenue, the comedy before these children who were François's friends and hence his enemies. And Bérangère, who had perhaps seen through the lie but who would turn it into a poem, what did she know about the enormity of the betrayal, about the Vitalie whom Marianne had just struck off?

The glasses are empty, still, they have drunk, it was a great Bordeaux and they're poor. There is some left. Marianne drinks. On the very white wall, nearly a metre wide, the Betty Goodwin is extinguished because it is two o'clock and the light is moving west. The title is in French,
il y a certainement quelqu'un qui m'a tuée. I am a woman whom someone surely has killed
. But at the root of the belly flows black blood, which could be the terrible swelling of a man, rapist or victim of rape. The woman-cow moreover has no breasts, she sags, naked, over broken limbs, the scrawniness of the arms moans all the way to the face, which is blind. The legs though are beautiful, rounder, almost thighs, with joints that have a delightful hollow in the back of the knees. Someone has killed while caressing this creature from behind, the buttocks inverted, neither woman nor man. Marianne touches the paper knees, they belong to her and to François and to Marie. Who knows.

They are pink verging on yellow. This piece will go to Marie in place of words. She will have it shipped to her and will even offer her the ashes so she can spread them beneath the hammock, onto the bed of peonies, but she mustn't suggest that. Marianne must have read nothing about François-Vitalie and their games before death. Marianne will write a note, very dignified, very much the mother, that will express the last wishes, so false that it won't show. “François asked me to send you this piece by Betty Goodwin, the most important one in his collection. And his ashes. Please believe in this expression of his love or of his friendship, which I was unaware of though I can guess that in the one case or the other, it was intense. Marianne Dubeau.”

That would be the proper thing to do. Vitalie in her suburb would receive the note and the picture and François's dust, and at the same time the scratch would fade from Marianne's wrist. Everything would close in again. The bedroom window would have long since been replaced, and the silence too, among all of them, the children and the others, and Bérangère would have gone on to other writing.

Four o'clock. On Rockland Avenue, a school bus drops off other François who chirp and shove angry Vitalies. A Toyota pulls up behind it. The woman who gets out of it, parked illegally, is brown and slow. She knows the address. She has rung the bell, she has seen the light from the lamp that Marianne has just switched on, a mistake on the day of a funeral, one must survive. She is there, Vitalie, the only one, half of the ball that is rosy pink and rose, standing erect against the doorpost, she has François's eyes before they were extinguished, she has taken them. She asks for the letter he had promised her stage left, on leaving her to go and die. “I was expecting it to come today but it's late. Do you have it?”

Marianne holds the door, her son is absent, she is cold. “A letter? No.”

About the Publisher

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as "Publisher of the Year."