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  Antoine pushes away the papers. He has read enough. The terrace of the Fleur d’oranger is nearly deserted now. As he is paying, he wonders if his wife had done the right thing by signing her books with another name. Did “Livingston” have a greater power of attraction than “Tranchemontagne”?

  * * *

  Early in her career, Alice decides to sign her books with a pseudonym. Antoine’s not enthusiastic, considering the reference to the famous book by Richard Bach too obvious.

  “A novel written by a Livingston,” he explains to her, “announces from the start adventures as tumultuous as the raging waves hurtling into the cliffs of Scotland.” Subsequently, she is deliberately vague about her family and keeps readers guessing about her real background. She enjoys letting them imagine a life far off the beaten track. She refuses to put her birthplace on her book covers. Of course everyone in the publishing world knows she was born in Chicoutimi. Alice thinks that a book becomes more popular, especially abroad, if a certain mystery surrounds the author’s life. She boldly claims that she was born in Africa, where her mother presumably followed her father, who was then a chargé d’affaires. Her publisher refuses this biography, considering that it would leave her open to dangerous curiosity. Alice agrees with him, over time and with the success of her books. But she persists in her desire to be a woman hard to track down, preferring a minor lie to the entire, boring truth.

  As he leaves the terrace of the Fleur d’oranger, Antoine suddenly remembers that he has not yet replied to his son. It’s been five days since Jonathan left a message on his voice mail. He throws his papers into a municipal trash can and asks himself why he didn’t leave them at the restaurant. Another client could have savoured the juicy gossip about John-John. He goes home and calls Jonathan. His son has some big news and invites him to come for a drink. He’s so insistent that finally his father agrees to drop in that evening.

  Jonathan lives in a condo that he’s just bought in Plateau-Mont-Royal. It’s a large, third-floor apartment, newly renovated. From his bedroom window you can see the cross on the mountain. It’s the first home Jonathan has owned. Ever since he left the family house he has shared apartments with friends, rarely staying long in the same place. Antoine has never visited his son or met the people with whom he lived. Alice, in contrast, never stopped seeing him, making sure that he has everything he needs. Antoine knows this but has never brought up the matter with her. If Jonathan were in a difficult situation, his father would find out soon enough. He hadn’t been pleased when his son packed his bags on his eighteenth birthday without the slightest explanation. Since then, he had only seen him at Alice’s funeral. Her death, instead of bringing them closer, had driven them even further apart. They had quickly dealt with the question of inheritance. Jonathan now enjoys a certain financial security. The success of Terre profanée, the TV series he performs in, promises better days thanks to a totally unexpected career as a promising actor. Because a year before his mother’s death, his life had suddenly taken on the appearance of a fairy tale. By chance, he’d found himself in bed with a director, a man both well known and well regarded in the TV and film world. Frédéric Létourneau is responsible for a good dozen important productions: films, TV series, documentaries. He’s into everything. He likes to jot in notebooks scattered ideas that he’ll often rediscover months later. Some become brilliant sketches that will be finalized by experienced scriptwriters. All that’s left to him is to direct them.

  The Oka Crisis sensitized Frédéric to the demands of First Nations. His ancestors were invaders and their settler descendants continue to be: in 1989, Oka’s town council decides to transform an old Indigenous cemetery into a golf course. In August 1990, the Mohawks swing into action: roadblocks, barricades. Frédéric awakens to the fact that he is the son of those whites who have destroyed a civilization, a culture, who have usurped a vast territory, relegated their survivors to reserves, driven them into unemployment, alcoholism, suicide. He is surprised that he doesn’t know a single member of a First Nation. He has never had one as a friend, a classmate, a colleague. He has spent time with Pakistanis, Brazilians, Haitians, never with a Kanien’kehá:ka, a Cree, an Innu. Why?

  Ten years later he directs Terre profanée, in which we see something rare in Québec, Indigenous characters in a blockbuster series. Inspired by the events in Oka, it moves the conflict to a forested area of Abitibi. Here, it’s not about a cemetery or a golf course. The major issue is the forest. To get their supplies of trees, pulp and paper mills practise clearcutting, which devastates thousands of hectares of forest. Frédéric knows his subject: an Indigenous community, to save its ancestral hunting and fishing territory, blocks the company’s dirt roads and takes up arms. This beginning of a synopsis is not enough to convince a production company to risk millions in the venture. The project metamorphoses into a forest Romeo and Juliet, with a First Nations tinge. The territorial conflict is coupled with a love story between the son of the company’s owner and the daughter of an Indigenous Chief.

  Frédéric meets Jonathan just as casting for the series gets underway. They meet in a boutique. Opening the door of a fitting room, Frédéric stumbles on Jonathan trying on a pair of jeans. An hour later they’re making love.

  Some months after that, Jonathan sets foot on a film set for the first time.

  Vincent leaves Philippe’s room around midnight. It’s Friday night. Usually he would be with a group of friends at a tavern called Let’s Talk Business, close to his downtown apartment. An odd name for a place that’s smoky and noisy, full of students, venerable alcoholics, aging hippies, where no businessman has ever been seen. But Vincent has better things to do. Back home, he rolls himself one last joint and, comfortably ensconced in the armchair picked up on the sidewalk one day, abandoned by its owner, he opens the metal box that Philippe, despite his reluctance, has finally entrusted to him.

  From the very first letters he gets an idea of the woman who forms rounded characters in violet ink carefully lined up on delicate, nearly transparent paper that gives off the ghost of a scent. Vincent pictures a girl with long blond hair, unassertive, not beautiful but pretty, with big, startled eyes. A moment later he has a sense that he can hear her voice. She whispers. She recites simple sentences that glide effortlessly across the paper. Laure describes the sunsets that she likes to gaze at, the happy barking of her little dog when she was a child, her eagerness to become an adult and take charge of her life, the emotion that will fill her when she discovers the vastness of the world. She addresses Philippe with infinite tenderness and unites her destiny with his through the good they will do together. Yes, together they will do as much good as possible because the world is suffering so. They must help the destitute, the disinherited. Laure imagines herself crossing distant lands at Philippe’s side and asks him about his knowledge of geography. She shares with him her moments of grace, which occur daily. She describes an apple, its perfect form, its cheerful colour, the happiness she feels when she bites into it, slowly savours it. She is ecstatic about the yellow eyes of a cat she sees along her way. She copies out sentences that she finds in novels in which heroines question themselves on the meaning of life. She underlines the words she regards as important: future, beauty, love, light. She goes over what makes her happy: thinking about Philippe; sniffing the odour of books; of her pencil case; of the earth after a heavy rain; praying to God. Laure loves so many things and there are so many things to love in this world. She has only to open her eyes when she wakes up to marvel at the light of day that seeps in, like a faithful treasure, between her bedroom curtains. She is alive, and the mystery of life fills her with constant joy.

  Vincent puts the letters back in their little metal coffin. Laure’s murmur continues nonetheless. It sleeps in the eddy of her voice.

  Antoine takes a quick tour of his son’s condo, makes a few enthusiastic remarks about the new windows, the hardwood floor in the living room. Jonathan urges him to admire the view of Mount Royal. Antoine e
xclaims and congratulates him on his choice. He has good taste, and it’s an excellent investment.

  Then, silence.

  Antoine wishes that he hadn’t come. He is relieved to see his son in great shape, radiant even. He should be delighted, but he can’t be. Jonathan has him sit in the living room, offers a beer. Antoine becomes nervous. Jonathan brings the beers, takes a drink, and immediately starts to talk about the phenomenal success of the series Terre profanée. He can’t get over it. People stop him on the street to ask for autographs.

  “I’m happy for you. On the phone you said that you had some big news for me.”

  Suddenly Jonathan’s expression is serious. He holds tight to his glass of beer. Antoine smiles at him foolishly.

  “I’m in love with someone. A man. And … he’s exactly your age. There. I think I’ve told you the most important parts.”

  Antoine doesn’t say a word. Jonathan downs his beer in one gulp.

  “I didn’t want you to find out from someone else. Or the papers.”

  “Because you’re famous now, I understand.”

  “He’s a lot more famous than I am. He’s the director of Terre profanée.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “It’s your life. Do with it what you want. You haven’t shown me the bathroom.”

  “Just to the right of the bedroom.”

  Antoine makes his way there and hastily shuts the door behind him. He is physically in pain. He wets his face, pulls himself together. When he turns around to go out, he discovers that he is facing a huge poster for Terre profanée pinned to the door. Jonathan is embracing the female star of the series, in a halo of light. A promotional poster counting on the youthful beauty of the two actors. With his fingertips Antoine brushes Jonathan’s face on the glossy paper. He chokes slightly. Goes back to the living room, trying to think of what he can say to his son, but no words come. Jonathan regards him, waits.

  “I’ll be going now.”

  Father and son don’t say another word. Jonathan makes a move toward Antoine to embrace him, but his father acts as if he hasn’t seen. Once the door is closed, Jonathan feels miserable. He expected so much more from his father. He would have preferred anger, indignation, rejection – anything but that non-reaction. He phones Frédéric. Frédéric is out. He doesn’t leave a message. Turns on the TV. Lands on 2001: A Space Odyssey. He remembers having seen it at a repertory cinema that his father dragged him to. He’d been subjected to constant comments. Antoine absolutely insisted that he grasp the metaphysical range of the film. He considered the opening scene a classic, as necessary as Plato’s writing or an excerpt from the Bible. “To understand Kubrick’s intentions, watching the film’s not enough, you have to think,” he whispered to his young son, annoying the spectators sitting near them. “Man is neither the beginning nor the end of all things. Man appeared, he will disappear, but even so the universe won’t cease to exist. Something is superior to Man, even if it’s only light whose speed cannot be surpassed. The great power of the film is giving a concrete form to that superior entity. You see, it’s represented by a rectangular black object, a monolith that gives off a mysterious energy.” Jonathan couldn’t take any more explanations and left in the middle of the screening, swearing that never again would he go to a movie with his father. It’s not until several years later that he is now seeing the end of the film, on TV.

  In the final sequence, the prehistoric grottoes give way to space travel. The mysterious black monolith is in orbit around the planet Jupiter. Astronaut David Bowman leaves his spaceship onboard a capsule to observe the immense object with its perfect geometry. But as he gets closer, he is sucked up by it, propelled into a corridor of cosmic colours and landscapes, strange and fabulous. Then, with no transition, the astronaut finds himself in the body of an old man, his own. Ever stranger, the scene unfurls in a chamber with decoration reminiscent of the splendours of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century France, it’s hard to know. Lying on his death bed, Bowman tries to touch the black monolith that has appeared in front of him. And then he passes from a prematurely old man to the state of a fetus. A fetus teleported into space inside a transparent bubble!

  Jonathan loses the thread of the story. To be honest, he has been wondering for a while now if the TV channel has been using a defective copy, poorly edited, with entire sequences missing, making the storyline totally nonsensical. Which doesn’t stop him from bursting into tears at the incredible image of a fetus closed within its globe of light, orbiting the earth. Overtaken by a stifling nostalgia, he feels a desire to be back in his mother’s womb, the way the astronaut David Bowman has gone back to the womb of the universe.

  On April 5, 1994, the Nirvana frontman blows his brains out. Jonathan is fourteen years old. Looking into the mirror in his room he’s surprised to see tears flowing for this man whose music he has only vaguely heard. A famous couplet, though, comes to his lips. The lyrics talk about wanting to have a father, but instead only having a dad.

  As if a rotten floorboard were collapsing inside him, painful heartbeats reverberate in his chest. Sobs shake him. It’s clean, brutal, he too suffers from a secret wound, from filth that contaminates his life. He too could put an end to his days, like Kurt Cobain.

  Over the following days, he recites Cobain’s life like the life of a saint. The singer had left a heartbreaking letter of farewell. His blood had contained three times the lethal dose of heroin. His daughter had just been born. The tragedy of his life had been his parents’ divorce when he was nine. He had wished he could live in a normal family. He dropped out of school two weeks before graduating. His mother ordered him to get a job or leave. He absorbed every drug imaginable. He told about having to sleep under the Wishkah River Bridge. Jonathan closes his eyes and pictures Cobain, dirty, alone, wrecked from drugs, sleeping under a gigantic iron bridge. The scene fascinates him, saddens him, attracts him. He repeats “Wishkah River” to himself like a mantra and lets his mind drift over the sweetness and the pain locked inside those two words. Jonathan has no idea where that bridge is located. He hasn’t bothered to look it up. He prefers to make it appear behind his eyelids and to sleep under a memory of it. He listens to Nirvana’s recordings in a loop and immerses himself in the creepy world of songs fed by incurable despair. The world is sick. That must be said, cried out. And the body is the most visible place to display the sickness of the world. The body, his body, the body that makes him ashamed.

  Jonathan has Antoine’s blond hair and Alice’s green eyes: a combination from which the purity of his features takes all of its singular force. He tells himself that in a few years he’ll look like Cobain: deep gaze, long blond hair. Every report that he reads about his idol gives weight to his pain, words to its beginning. He shuts himself away in his unhappiness, no longer smiles, no longer gets enthusiastic. He is no longer the sunny, narcissistic, only child who has benefited and suffered from the excess of attention that his parents, by force of circumstance, have given him. He is no longer interested in anything, he who wanted to learn everything. He stops his piano lessons, his karate classes. School doesn’t interest him. He doesn’t talk, doesn’t answer his parents’ urgent questions. One night Antoine, alerted by a neighbour, picks him up at the end of an alley. He disappeared two days earlier. Antoine contacted the police to report that the boy had run away. Alice was on a book tour in France for her latest novel. Antoine told her nothing, to keep from worrying her. When he finds Jonathan, he’s asleep on soiled cardboard. His clothes reek of urine. Antoine bombards him with questions. He wants to know if he’s using drugs, whom he hangs out with, why he’s doing this homeless number when he lacks for nothing. Is it to punish his parents? Has he thought about the anguish his father has been living for two days? Does he even have a heart? Antoine takes him home, runs a bath for him. Undressing him, he notices a number of small sores on his arms and legs. He questions him again. No answer. Jonathan seems to be absent
from himself. Antoine puts him in the tub. The surface of the water is weighed down with grime. Antoine gets undressed, joins his son in the bath. Soaps him, rinses him, holds in his arms his little seagull whom he’s nearly lost, whom he no longer recognizes. Finally, Jonathan looks at him. Softly he sings the first verse of Nirvana’s “Rape Me.”

  As soon as he has finished his second coffee, Vincent goes to the student residence. Philippe has insisted that he return Laure’s letters as soon as possible. When his friend opens the door, Vincent notices that Philippe seems nervous.