I was feverish, I felt like chewing my nails, which I hadn’t done for years and, more seriously, I’d have quite willingly got drunk, though I hardly drink any more. Oh yes, I’d have quite gladly got bombed . . . A good weekend of adolescent boozing, complete with vomiting, dirty jokes, smutty songs, the works. Another form of escape, needless to say. What would we do with Sébastien for two days?

Nightmare!

I’d wolfed my chicken, greasy french fries, sauce, bread, mocha, and Pepsi too fast, without thinking . . . and of course I got indigestion. We were off and running. I could see the weekend coming in pretty well the same colours: queasiness followed by heartburn, nausea, and full-fledged panic.

Mathieu came in around nine forty-five, all smiles.

“I’ve solved your problems. This time, anyway. I’ll take Sébastien to my mother’s place tomorrow. They haven’t seen each other for months. And we’ll sleep over!”

Mathieu

Mathieu

Sébastien was asleep on the living room sofa. Rose was holding his left foot, which protruded from the quilt, her thumb scarcely touching the sole so she wouldn’t tickle him, the rest of her hand wrapping his foot like a blanket: Sébastien’s toes emerged from his grandmother’s hand the way his head did from the quilt.

Mathieu had a very clear recollection of his mother’s mania for warming feet. She’d done it to him so often when he was a child, on this same sofa, while they watched Les Beaux Dimanches on Sunday night or those TV serials that “started too late.” He would lie beside her, under the same sort of quilt, maybe this very one, which had come to them from her mother, a great Gaspesian artist who had salvaged every rag in the county in order to produce the star-­patterned pieces that had made her reputation, under which you felt so secure; he would pretend to fall asleep during “Septième Nord” or “De neuf à cinq” and arrange himself so he could extend his foot towards her . . .

That thumb on the soles of his feet, that gentleness, all the tenderness concentrated on such a tiny surface . . . The soles of his feet tingled. He wished that he could become again the child who had once been so easily consoled, that he could lie down next to Sébastien and sleep, knowing that a light, beneficent hand would imprint upon one of the most sensitive spots on his body—he was very ticklish—a ­magical, soothing sign of her complicity.

He had wounded his mother deeply and he knew it, but he was the one who wanted consolation!

Rose let go of Sébastien’s little foot and blew her nose. Mathieu didn’t feel like pursuing the conversation, but it had to be brought to an end: you don’t leave such an ­important scene unresolved, you have to see it all the way through or not provoke it at all. (He’d already put it off for so many years!)