No Other Life (10 page)

‘Hardware?’ I said to Henri. ‘What’s happened to the lumber business?’

‘It’s secondary now. Times have changed, remember?’

But had they really? We drove into the town and it was as though I had never left. I saw the familiar white-painted wooden houses, the wide front porches, the high, slanting roofs. We passed through the commercial streets of the town with their old-fashioned shop fronts, higgledy-piggledy corner grocery stores and the Quebec Liquor Commission outlet, its floors piled high with cartons of beer. We reached a quiet square. Standing alone in a white rectangle of untrodden snow, was the grey stone church with its tall silver spire where I, an eight-year-old altar boy, served my first Mass. Had anything changed here? I remembered
Maman
telling me about the Great Depression when hungry families queued for free soup and men went door-to-door looking for a day’s work. But what did they know of despair? No one starved, no child played in filthy water, no one’s twelve-year-old daughter offered herself for sale. What if I had been an altar boy in La Rotonde?

We drove into Rue du Fort. Half-way down the street was the house where I was born. Several cars were parked outside and when we walked up the narrow, snow-cleared path to the front door I saw a jumble of overshoes in the hall, a sign that there were many people inside. In the front sitting room were my sister Justine, her husband Robert, Aunt Marie, Aunt Isabelle and many people whom I did not know. I was embraced and introduced, offered coffee, told that I could not see
Maman
just yet as the doctor was with her. I sat, half-hearing what was said to me, my eyes fixed on a familiar oleograph of Christ crowned with thorns. I remembered, as a child, sitting in different parts of this room, trying to avoid that portrait’s stare. But, no matter where I moved, His eye was on me.

A uniformed nurse appeared and said that I could go up. When I went out to the hallway a young man was coming downstairs. He smiled at me and, putting his hand on my shoulder, said, ‘I’m Dr Pouliot. It’s wonderful that you managed to get here in time. I’m afraid it won’t be long now.’ He pressed my arm and, as he moved away towards the overloaded coat rack in the hall, the nurse beckoned me to follow her upstairs.

My mother’s bedroom was as I remembered it from childhood. There were two painted statues on the mantelpiece, one of Jesus, one of Mary. A red votive lamp burned between these effigies and the room itself had a faint, sickly smell, reminiscent of stale flowers. In the high, old-fashioned bed in which I was born, my mother lay, surrounded by pillows and cushions. She was tiny in age, her skin translucent, as though lit by some flame flickering within her body. When I kissed her I saw that her white hair now barely covered her pink, domed skull. I sat down beside her, holding her hand.

‘
Maman
, it’s me. Paul.’

When I spoke, she looked up, as though seeing me for the first time. Easing her hand free of mine, she lay back on the pillows, her breathing suddenly harsh. I looked at the nurse who hovered behind us but the nurse smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s all right, Father. I’ll leave you now.’

My mother watched the door close, then pulled herself up into a sitting position.

‘Paul, I couldn’t . . .’ She stopped, in mid-sentence. ‘Paul, I want to ask you . . .’

‘What is is,
Maman
?’

‘It’s the end for me.’

‘No, no,’ I said, foolishly.

‘Father Demarais has given me the last rites. So I know it’s over. Paul, I’m afraid.’ She began to weep.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ I told her. ‘No one wants to die, but no one is more ready for death than you are. Soon, you will be in heaven.’

When I said that, she lifted her head and stared at me. Her face was the face of a stranger, frightened, despairing. ‘No, Paul, no!’

Was there some sin, real or imagined, which made her think this? ‘Why,
Maman
?’

‘Do you remember when you were a little boy and did something bad? I would say to you, “Remember, Paul, the Man Upstairs is watching you.” Do you remember that?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I was wrong to tell you that,’ my mother said. ‘There is no one watching over us. Last week, when I knew I was dying, I saw the truth. Paul, I have prayed all my life. I believed in God, in the Church, I believed I had a soul that was immortal. But I have no soul. When we die, there is nothing. That’s why I sent for you. I must speak to you – you of all my children. Paul, listen. You must give up the priesthood. When I think how I guided you towards it, when I think of the times I told you how happy it would make me if you became a priest. If it weren’t for me you might be a doctor doing useful work like your father and Henri. You’d be married, you’d have children. You would not have wasted your life telling people something which isn’t true. Please, Paul. You’re forty-seven years old. It’s not too late. Promise me. Leave the priesthood now.’

‘
Maman
, you’re wrong. You didn’t make me a priest. I was the one who decided it. And you will go to heaven. You
will
.’

‘No.’ She lay back on the pillows, her eyes not on me but on the red votive lamp flickering between the painted plaster statues on the mantelpiece. ‘There is no other life,’ my mother said.

Again, I reached for her hand and held it, the skin loose as a glove over her small, aged bones. Words of pious reassurance stumbled through my brain, mechanical as a doctor’s promise that what is about to happen will not cause pain. There are things one says to those who fear death, whose faith is weak, whose courage has forsaken them. But they would not help my mother. Her words mocked all pretence. I raised her hand and kissed it, that hand which had fed and washed me, which had lifted me from my crib. She tried to speak but, instead, gasped and coughed, her breathing harsh and shallow. Speechless, she stared at me in desperate pleading. I rose, ran to the door and called the nurse. In a moment the room was filled with people. As they moved her in the bed, her nightgown twisted about her shoulders, revealing her withered breasts. I averted my eyes and, facing the mantelpiece, saw, as though in mockery of her agony, the painted statue of Jesus, its index finger pointing towards the bleeding heart painted on its breast. Below the statue the flame of the little red votive lamp flickered behind its heart-red glass. Soon, this room would be empty. Someone would blow the flame out.

Later that afternoon, we family members knelt around her bed to recite the rosary. I led the prayers. Facing me, Justine prayed, her head bowed. She was forty years old, the mother of a boy and two girls. Henri, dutifully mouthing Hail Marys at the foot of the bed, was also a parent. Were her children and grandchildren the only true continuation of my mother’s life? I looked at
Maman’s
dying face, her eyes shut tight, her breathing harsh as she fought to fend off that absence which had already entered the sickroom.
There is no other life.
My voice continued to recite the familiar prayers. The rosary ended, we rose and left the room. When next I saw my mother it was at six o’clock that evening in answer to an urgent summons from the nurse. We crowded into the sickroom. Faces turned to me, waiting for me to raise my hand in blessing and pray for the repose of my mother’s soul. I made the sign of the cross but found I could not speak.

On the island of Ganae the night is never silent. In the slums that adjoin our residence, there are no cars or trucks and so the noises of night are medieval. Voices quarrel, shout, sing drunken songs. Dogs bark. Roosters, wakened untimely, crow in darkness. Footsteps sound loud in the narrow, filthy streets below my bedroom window.

But that night in Ville de la Baie, as I lay in the attic bedroom of Henri’s house, the only sound to be heard was a soft plop as a slab of melting snow slipped off the high, sloping roof above me to fall into deep drifts in the garden below. In a funeral parlour three streets away, my mother’s body waited burial, her voice stilled, that voice which, in sixty-seven years of daily prayer, praised and honoured a God who, in her last hours, deprived her of that ultimate consolation of religion, belief in a life after death. Until now, nothing my mother had ever said or done would have made me suspect she could harbour doubt. Nor were her dying words the panic of someone facing the mystery of death. She had been as certain in her unbelief as, all her life, she had been certain in belief. In the darkness and silence of that night before her funeral, a sad and terrible question crept into my mind. Why did God fail her at the end?

Next morning I said Mass for the repose of her soul. Afterwards, funeral cars drove us out of the town along the ice-sealed banks of the Saguenay River to the Cimetíre St Martin, its gravestones like scarecrows in a white waste of snow. There, hard permafrost earth had been spaded up from my father’s grave to make room for my mother’s coffin. As we stood, a small deputation of the living in that white field of death, I thought of another funeral, four years ago, the funeral of fifteen-year-old Daniel Lalonde, shot down by a colonel of the Garde Présidentielle. Again I heard Jeannot’s defiant voice as he stood over the grave. ‘God is with us!’ Was it a warning to those who would oppress the poor? Or was it a cry of despair, calling on a God who may not be there?

Hard clods of earth fell like stones on my mother’s coffin. Father Demarais sprinkled Holy Water on her grave and spoke the final sentence. ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ Were those words her true obituary?

‘But you’re not leaving so soon?’ Justine asked me. ‘Surely you can stay one more night?’

We were in her house. Most of those who were at the funeral had been invited back for coffee. A boy and two girls, my nephew and nieces, were handing around plates of sandwiches and plum cake. They smiled at me familiarly, those young strangers, as did many others who greeted me in the expectation that I would remember them. But I did not. Sometimes a name came back and I looked at a face in alarmed curiosity, trying to discern the lineaments of a boy or girl who was once my friend. I smiled, I made the small change of conversation, an actor in a role I could no longer play. Now that my mother was dead, I would not come here again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told Justine. ‘But it’s mid-term at the college. I must get back.’

I signalled to Henri who was waiting to drive me to the airport. As we put on our overshoes in the hall, one of my nieces ran out to tell me that there was a telephone call. ‘A Father Monceau. He’s calling from Jamaica.’

Father Monceau was our Provincial for the Caribbean area. ‘I’ve been tracking you down,’ he told me. ‘How is your mother?’

I told him I had just come from her funeral.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said. ‘May she rest in peace. I’m afraid I’ve called you for another reason. I wanted to reach you before you returned to Ganae. I’ve been asked to send you to Rome at once. I think it will be easier for you to fly directly from Montreal.’

‘Rome, Father?’

‘Cardinal Innocenti, who is Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, is conducting an investigation into the case of Father Cantave. Archbishop Pellerat is already in Rome. Will it be possible for you to get to Montreal tonight?’

‘As a matter of fact, I’m on my way there now.’

‘Good. Then you could be in Rome by tomorrow evening. If so, you’d be ready to meet with the Cardinal on Saturday.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘One more thing. This hearing is informal and confidential. At this time it’s better that Father Cantave doesn’t know about it. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Good. Well, safe journey. Oh – I will remember your mother in my prayers.’

5

‘The Cardinal has little English,’ Monsignor Giobbi informed me. ‘He has fluent French, so the proceedings will be conducted in that language. Especially as Archbishop Pellerat will be present. My own French is rather rusty. I may have to rely on your help.’

Monsignor Giobbi was the head of our house in Rome and a professor at Gregorian University where, among other subjects, he sometimes lectured on South American liberation theology. Monsignor Giobbi, a Sicilian, did not reveal his thoughts. I did not know if he was accompanying me as the head of our house or as a witness for or against Jeannot.

It was nine a.m. Across Rome on the stroke of the hour church bells rang out, calling the faithful to worship. The doors of the Vatican ante-room opened and Father Sykes, an English priest who was the Cardinal’s secretary, beckoned us to follow him. He led us down a long corridor lined with portraits of cardinals from another age and opened the doors of a large, high-ceilinged drawing room. It was winter in Rome. Under an ornate mantelpiece, a fire burned in a huge grate. Around the fire were grouped armchairs and a sofa, covered in blue brocade. Seated there were four clerics, all of whom looked up as we entered. Cardinal Innocenti rose, peering at me over gold-rimmed half-spectacles. He was a small, stooped man in his seventies, his silver hair almost shoulder-length beneath his crimson skullcap, giving him the look of one of those medieval cardinals whose portraits we had seen in the corridor. The other clerics rose, following his lead. One was black, tall, a bald eagle who stared at me with no word of greeting. And yet he was my Archbishop, Étienne Pellerat, head of the Ganaen hierarchy. Monsignor Rinaldi, the papal nuncio in Ganae, nodded to me but did not speak. The Cardinal and the fourth cleric, an unknown monsignor, greeted me in Italian.