He watched his mother for a long time as she slept. How would she react if she ever learned the truth? He’d often asked himself that question; he’d even come to the conclusion that she’d suspected something for ages now but kept postponing the explanations so she wouldn’t have to come to grips with a situation that would change so many things in her own life.

It wasn’t getting any cooler and he decided he should go to bed since he had to work the next day.

He slept amazingly well, woke up in a good mood and hummed on his way to work.

Jean-Marc

Jean-Marc

The moon was far from being full, but it was a glorious night with astonishing shades of blue that slowly ­succeeded one another in the empty sky, from the nearly white post-sunset hue to the navy verging on red of the encroaching night; with its disturbing greys that slithered and crept into everything close to the ground, blurring human silhouettes while accentuating the shapes of trees, the contours of bushes; its ambers too, soaring above the city and veiled in a humid mist that made Montreal look like an enormous Chinese lantern hanging in the void, unswayed by the slightest breath of wind. In the distance you could make out the St. Lawrence River, a black, irregular hole broken by the exaggerated straight line of the Seaway. The three bridges to the south shore, in contrast, were perfectly visible, their aerial ­structures like motionless ships.

I told Mathieu that when I’d started going up to the lookout at the Chalet on the mountain, when I was a child, the Sun Life Building was the highest in town. Montreal was just a small provincial city then, still absorbed by its Catholic complexes and its unhealthy fear of growth. Not that it’s now the world class super-metropolis of its dreams, but at least it’s a city that for the past twenty-five years has been trying to look like something, even if that meant ­getting shot down, which has happened more than once.

“We’d take the trolley up to Beaver Lake, along the Camilien-Houde Parkway which didn’t have a name back then, I don’t think, then we’d walk to here. Every Tuesday night in summer the symphony orchestra gave a concert. They’d put chairs out all around the Chalet and the orchestra played on the steps. The kids in my gang didn’t have any money, so we’d bring blankets and lie around the lookout. We couldn’t see or hear a thing but we were there. Sometimes we’d hug the stone wall that holds the place up, we’d stand just there, look, down below where we are now, we’d look down on the city while we tried to hear a few bars of the ‘Danse macabre’ or the ‘Capriccio Italien.’”