“Surprised?”
“’Specially to learn that you die in the very first pages, and that I’m the one who delivers your elegy, quoting Confucius!”
“To write one’s own death is every author’s fantasy.”
“Alice, your manuscript disturbs me. You shamelessly paint a picture of yourself and your husband. You haven’t even bothered to change your names.”
“I did in the passages from A Pure Heart.”
“All right, but not for the rest of the novel. You didn’t even change mine. Fiction? Autofiction? And then you talk about your son as if he were still … alive.”
“I had no problem imagining myself dead, but where Jonathan was concerned, it was too hard, I couldn’t.”
Louis-Martin picks up the manuscript and weighs it in his hands.
“Can I know where the truth is hidden in this novel that swallows another?”
“It’s hidden in the title.”
“Impurity?”
“Yes.”
“You realize that you’re accusing your husband of something horrible. That’s serious.”
“You don’t take your own life because of a scratch. Jonathan had a reason for doing what he did. I can’t believe that it was just on impulse. He was only sixteen years old and he dreamed of becoming an actor. Something had already killed him before his suicide.”
“Did you witness anything?”
“To discover your child hanging in his room: you can’t imagine the pain that causes. But not to know why he did it, that robs life of all its meaning.”
“Alice, answer me: do you have any proof?”
“No.”
“Did Jonathan ever mention anything improper that took place between his father and himself?”
“No.”
“Did you question Antoine?”
“I tried to dozens of times, but the words wouldn’t come. I was petrified as soon as I tried to bring up the subject.”
“There’s no way that I can believe it. How did you come up with something so unlikely?”
“After Jonathan’s death, I was living in a kind of suffocating fog. If only he’d left a letter. One little sentence would have been enough. I questioned Antoine. He replied that he was as lost as I was. And then …”
“What?”
“His attitude seemed strange. Something in his voice, in his silence. I sensed no particular emotion on his part. No tears, no anger.”
“He was, like you, in a state of shock.”
“That’s what I told myself. Time had to do its work. But the more the weeks passed, the more he behaved as if Jonathan had never existed. He avoided everything that reminded him of our son. I thought at first it was his way of protecting himself. But not for long. He seemed relieved, in fact. As if Jonathan’s death had lifted an enormous weight from his shoulders. I know, it made no sense to think that, but I remembered that he’d behaved similarly after Félix’s death. When he proposed early on this ‘existentialist experimentation,’ as he called it so smugly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I guess I wanted to prove to him that I was just as emancipated as he was. It was simply a game with no consequences. And we were so young and so selfish. But I fell in love with Félix on reading his letters. They were luminous, filled with beauty and compassion.”
Alice shuts her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, a tear rolls down her cheek.
“Félix didn’t set himself on fire. In fact, his body was pulled out of the Saguenay a few days after Antoine had told him everything about the letters. Antoine never admitted that he was partly responsible. ‘Everyone is free to dispose of his life as he wishes; it was his choice, not ours.’ Antoine repeated these kinds of thoughts to me, and I didn’t have the courage to contradict him. He impressed me with his philosophical flights. I wasn’t able to distance myself, I began to think like him. Félix’s death didn’t concern me. Living with a sense of guilt was too painful. I hung on to Antoine. I’d understood nothing about what really happened. Now it’s all clear. He loved him too.”
“Who loved whom?”
“Antoine was in love with Félix. That’s why he destroyed him. As he destroyed his own son.”
“What you’re saying makes no sense.”
“You’re right, it makes no sense. But it’s what he did.”
“I can’t imagine that he could have abused his own son.”
“It’s the sort of thing no one wants to imagine.”
“Especially Antoine, an intelligent, cultivated man. You yourself often talked to me about him with admiration.”
“Everyone admires Antoine: his family, his colleagues, his students. But I know now what he hides within himself.”
“You say you know it, but how?”
“It’s the way he conducts himself. There are times when I’m able to get near it, to see it. It’s unbearable. It works its way into every breath I take. I can’t tolerate him approaching me, touching me. Everything in his body, his skin, his gaze, his odour, his hands, especially his hands, condemns him. He’s foul. That something that’s so despicable, it’s inside him. He is that thing. Promise me you’ll publish my novel as is.”
“It’s too dangerous, Alice. You’ll have to change the names, cover your tracks. Antoine will recognize himself.”
“Don’t you understand, that’s the whole reason I wrote it? I constructed it like a trap made up of mirrors, like one prison that contains another. Once read, I want the novel to close in on him so that he can never escape.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
She looks into Louis-Martin’s eyes for the first time since she has arrived.
“I’ll only ask you for one thing: make your decision quickly. I’m going to leave Antoine.”
She gets up. Louis-Martin holds her back.
“And how are you going to end the novel? You wanted to talk about that. Are you going to have Antoine die?”
“I don’t know yet. I would so much have wanted to know if Jonathan, before hanging himself, forgave him. Me, no.”
She leaves. Louis-Martin picks up the manuscript again, leafs through a
