Marie watched Ariel’s resignation alone, dry-eyed and glued to the screen of her laptop. She could never compare their situation to the sexual scandals that shook the world of politics with clockwork regularity. Still, hearing the contrition in her husband’s voice, seeing his wan complexion and his shoulders drooping in mortification, she had to admit he resembled the hundreds of men before him who had seen their careers disintegrate and slip through their fingers as they stood behind a plain lectern, sometimes flanked by a spouse, who clenched her teeth to hold down the bitter pill she was being made to swallow. Such people, no matter their misdeeds, were all to some extent the same; they had been forced, one way or another, to disclose facts that by their very nature should have remained secret. Sex, though socially acceptable, is not supposed to be described in public, detailed, analyzed, dissected. These defeated human beings mourned, not the end of their aspirations, but the fact that a space of intimacy had been forever altered, that a pleasure, wiped out by an avowal, was as dead as a wish uttered out loud. She came to pity all the infidels, closet homosexuals, Sunday nudists and other outsiders, even the most perverted, of which she now was one. Yet she envied them. Once the scandal had blown over, they could go back to a semblance of normality. For her and Ariel no such thing could ever exist again.
At night the northern lights wave like flags and shake the sky with supernatural vibrancy. Still, it’s hard to forgive this firmament, where everything seems to be written, and those distant constellations, which, even before the invention of fire, were recounting their misfortune. Ariel and Marie spend a great deal of time watching the stars, questioning Castor and Pollux.
They might have chosen Patagonia, the Kamtchatka Peninsula, or the Kerguelen Islands, but Ariel refused to leave the country. Unable to persuade him to go into exile, Marc resigned himself to helping them find an adequately remote community, and to weave a discreet security net around them. All that was left for them to do was to fashion new identities for themselves.
Ariel is now known as Albert Morsehead, and Marie has become Anne Leblanc. Marc provided them with false papers, new fingerprints, artificial irises, and other necessary biometric devices. But because their faces had been plastered across the screens of North America for weeks, they had to attend to their more superficial physical attributes. Marie underwent a minor nose reconstruction as well as a reshaping of her eyebrows. With her hair dyed blond and cut short, she was unrecognizable. Ariel’s case was somewhat more complicated. In spite of major plastic surgery, a beard, eyeglasses, and a different accent, something of the former prime minister persisted.
Marie was the one who suggested he put on fifteen kilos. This simple idea was the missing piece of the camouflage. Ariel was nowhere to be seen in the new, bulkier body, as if he were concealed in his own flesh. In any event, in this region of vast distances, where neighbours are recognized by virtue of their cars more than their faces, no one studies them up close. The inhabitants of central Saskatchewan have become so scarce they hardly look at each other and are identified from a sideways glance at their hairdos, their voices, the unique vibration of their presence, always perfectly distinct from someone else’s.
The town of Rockfield is a place where one quickly feels at home but to which one never belongs. “Too windy, too flat,” Ariel notes. Very soon the cashiers in the stores recognize Marie (or, rather, Anne) and call her by her alias, and the waiter at the café remembers that Ariel takes two sugars in his coffee. Both of them find this fabricated life deeply comforting. Here, no one will photograph them surreptitiously, no one will cover their house with graffiti. No one will shoot at them.
Marc, who still has friends in the army, helped Ariel find a job on the military base located in the vicinity. It involves introducing recruits to international politics and law. The young soldiers put him in mind of tight shells that crack open upon discovering the complexity of the world, the magnitude of the underflow that shapes its movements and tremors. The job, chosen by default, has grown on him. He likes giving these men, barely out of adolescence and the insulated world of rural traditions, a horizon, however condensed, and enabling them for a brief moment to enjoy an informed view of the countries where they will soon serve as cannon fodder.
As for Marie, she teaches French to kids who are completely untouched by the notion of the founding peoples and the bilingual imperative, now virtually obsolete in a province long ago swallowed up by the majority. Fortunately, they are also too young to understand their parents’ disdainful remarks about the “lazy people’s language,” and they have no reservations about singing the old-fashioned songs that Marie teaches them: Il était un petit navire, À la claire fontaine, Alouette, and so on. She takes pleasure in watching them recite the confused syllables with open mouths or lean over the coloured keyboards, typing away with wondrous dexterity, their pudgy fingers hopping effortlessly from key to key like ignorant, agile little birds.
Sometimes Ariel comes to meet her at the end of the day and stations himself near the classroom door to watch her, pale and eager in front of her captive audience. Then he contemplates his own reflection in the glass door — fat, bearded, disappointing — and once again realizes she is worth all the failures, all the humiliations, all the relinquishments. Marie, his half of the world.
Ariel’s mother could not stop crying and his father clenched his teeth so hard that a fine snow might have appeared between his lips had he not pressed them together so tenaciously. The Leclercs, for their part, paced up and down and shuddered — the outward expression of their ineffable distress. In both cases it was not easy to know whether their families were reacting to the drama itself — the unmentionable word incest—or something else. Marie suspected her parents were no less horrified by their circle having learned their daughter was adopted, a fact that contradicted the notion of a bloodline as strong and pure as the water of the last glaciers. As for the Goldsteins, Ariel wondered if they were in fact mourning the fall of their angel, the end of their dreams of glory. One night on his way to the bathroom he even overheard his mother whispering, “None of this would have happened if he had become a dentist.”
“You’re going to divorce,” Martial declared in a tone that was more imperative than interrogative.
“We have no choice; the law obliges us to dissolve the marriage.”
“But you are still living together?”
“Until the dust settles and we’ve sold the house,” Marie replied half-heartedly.
The truth was they had no wish to separate. There was no one anymore who could look at them in a way that was unmarred by disgust. They were their only refuge.
In the meantime, Marc investigated, slowly but determinedly retracing the steps of the scandal to its source. The Canada of shining tomorrows was dead and a culprit had to be found, a traitor to be crucified in the history books or, at the very least, a name to be placed on a list of enemies and slipped into the inside pocket of a jacket, over the heart.
In March the snow does not melt so much as evaporates, leaving the fields dry and dirty. Then in June the pitiful wisps of grass that remain catch fire here and there, speckling the plain with orange-coloured nests of desire. In August the temperature drops inexplicably and the ground freezes, imprisoning thirsty spiders and snails in the frost. In October, the rain awaited since the spring equinox finally decides to fall, trapping the houses in a turbid lake.