“Fantastic, we can do the Festival together. I’ve never done it with somebody. Usually I’m all by myself . . . But I warn you, I take it seriously . . . No breaks, no hanging around, nothing but films all day long . . .”

I swore I felt the same way, while asking myself if I really wanted to spend ten days staring at a movie screen. Another treat for Mélène and Jeanne.

I walked him to the Laurier Métro station. We hesitated before taking our leave. We walked around the station a couple of times, talking about this and that, about nothing actually, because our minds were elsewhere; mine was at any rate. I wanted to see him the next evening and I was searching for a reason. And hoping he felt the same way.

As he was about to enter the station I found it.

“Listen . . . If you get off on romance, tomorrow night’s the greatest show on earth, at the chalet on the mountain . . . It’s the August full moon. Or almost.”

Sniffing a pretext, Mathieu smiled.

“A little fresh air before ten days’ seclusion . . . Call me at Eaton’s tomorrow afternoon . . . I’ll let you know if I’m feeling romantic.”

He came over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Meanwhile, thanks for tonight. You must know how good it’s been for me . . .”

Thirty-nine years old and I melt at a kiss on the cheek!

That, I thought, is something I won’t tell the girls.

Mathieu

Mathieu

The humidity was unbearable. There wasn’t a breath of air in the apartment; Mathieu, dazed and dripping sweat, poured himself a glass of Contrex water and went to sit on the balcony. His mother was already out there, dozing in her chaise longue.

What he’d told Jean-Marc over dinner had awakened some old demons, reopened some old wounds that had been very hard to treat, that he’d thought were almost healed, more definitively scarred over. By putting up a wall between that period of his life which had been at once so terrifying and so exhilarating and his present life, more ­passive, almost vegetative, he’d been able to forget the intensity of the pain, the gravity of the dilemma in which he’d found himself, as well as his doubts, his certainties, all the questions, the outbursts of self-affirmation, the other, far more violent outbursts of rebellion as he came to terms with a revelation that he didn’t understand and refused with all his might, while experiencing it with an intensity that stunned him.