Félix straightened up and dropped his rosary into his pocket.
“Her body was never found. Her parents’, her two brothers’, and her sister’s were all pulled out of the mud. But not hers. A month ago they found a victim’s body as far away as the baie des Chaleurs. Someday, maybe, Anaïs will turn up. She’ll stop travelling deep in the icy water and rest here for good, here in this grave.”
“Travel? You mean rot.”
He immediately regrets his remark, but Félix doesn’t seem upset. He explains that they had placed a big photo of Anaïs in her coffin.
“Can I tell you a secret? Last year I was doing my classical studies at the Séminaire Saint-Augustin de Cap-Rouge. I decided to continue here to be closer to Anaïs.”
Félix takes a flower from the vase sitting on the monument. A rose, astonishingly fresh. He pulls off a petal and puts the flower back in the vase. He keeps the petal in his hand for a moment, then brings it to his nose. Antoine thinks it’s rather phony.
“Was it you who brought these flowers?”
“Yes, this morning.”
“There’s something I don’t get. You left Cap-Rouge to get closer to a dead girl. But why here? Why go to the trouble of crossing the parc des Laurentides? You said it yourself, her grave is empty. You wanted to get closer to her photo? For all you know, your cousin could’ve been eaten by scavenger fish.”
“Her soul is here, that I know. Her soul is hovering very close by. Makes sense, her parents are here, her brothers are here, her sister is here. Where else would Anaïs be?”
“First of all, the soul has to exist.”
Antoine walks Félix to the student residence and goes back to his own apartment, which he’s just rented on rue du Havre, in the town centre. He didn’t want to stay with his parents any longer. He thinks that at his age, it’s high time he spread his wings and left the nest. Better to live meagrely but with freedom of movement. To make it to the end of the week, he steals some of his food.
Although it’s late and he is tired, Félix doesn’t go straight to bed. He takes his pen, opens the journal that he’s been keeping since he was fourteen, writes to Anaïs. He thinks that he can sense her presence like a gaze slipping over the words that he traces in black ink.
Anaïs, you can’t be simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Dying doesn’t mean to disappear, it is to appear elsewhere. I hear your laughter in the wind that blows through the trees. In the morning I sometimes find traces of your smile on the window of this room – so sad, so grey, so stifling. So much cement around me. I met a strange guy. I talked to him about the heart of Thích Quảng Đức. He listened very attentively. I had the impression that he was laughing at me. But he’s not like the others. I think he’s angst-ridden. Terribly angst-ridden. And I find that amusing. I mean, it’s good to know that such angst exists. His name is Antoine. He lent me his linguistics notes. His writing is atrocious. I really couldn’t decipher it. Maybe he suffers from a derangement of the senses (Rimbaud, remember?). In any event, his hand is certainly deranged to have such handwriting. I brought you flowers. Till tomorrow.
* * *
Before going inside, Antoine sits on a bench overlooking the Saguenay. The wind has come up, carrying odours of mud and earthworms. Antoine likes the wind, its impatience. Ever since his hair has been as long as Robert Plant’s, he appreciates even more the surge of his ideas, scattered by the autumn squalls. Smoking one last cigarette, he can’t help thinking about the corpse of that girl, Anaïs. Maybe it’s nearby, in the dark depths stirring at his feet. Like many people in the region, he cried at the tragedy of May 4. But his tears, he recalls a little mischievously, weren’t being shed for the victims of Saint-Jean-Vianney.
That night, the whole family is watching a hockey game, Montréal–Chicago, on TV. Except him. He is in his room finishing À la recherche du temps perdu. He had borrowed Proust’s masterpiece from the municipal library. For several days in a row he barely eats, too absorbed in his reading. It seems to him that he’s living on another planet, to the point where he has the impression that the people around him are speaking a foreign language. He perceives it as some unusual material escaping from their lips. Antoine will have that sensation again when he drops acid some weeks later. Proust’s novel disorients him in the literal sense of the term: he has lost his country and floats now, like an astronaut, in a space-suit of labyrinthian, sinuous phrases that protect him from everyday preoccupations, cut him off from the boulevards and neighbourhoods that he crosses on his way to school. He glides along the repetitious reality of the days that keeps life from being an adventure. When he is reading, he lends his body to the search of the narrator, young Marcel, and to his capture of the past where sparkle like rare flowers, deployed shamelessly, proper names that excite his imagination: Odette Swann, the Baron de Charlus, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Madame Verdurin … Antoine is sixteen years old, but when he turns the final page of the novel he has lived for a hundred years, years heavy with life, with accumulated anguish, with frustrated hopes and gutted illusions, all stolen from Proust’s novel. That’s why he cannot hold back his tears. It’s over. No more pages to read. Proust is merely dust and his characters nothing but the dust of dust. But he, in his room, is throbbing with blood, with ideas, desires, and
