At the end of the fall term, Marie takes advantage of the parent-teacher meeting to apprise Angel’s mother of these incidents.
“My husband is in the army,” the mother explains. “We’ve changed cities four times since Angel was born. Even though we think we’ll be here for some time, she’s constantly afraid of moving again. Whenever she says goodbye to people she’s fond of, she has the feeling it’s the last time.”
“I see. Your husband works on a military base?”
“Yes, he gives combat training to recruits.”
“Mine teaches them politics.”
“Oh, Albert Morsehead! Richard often talks about him. They get along well, I think. You should come over for a meal!”
After accepting the invitation Marie asks about Angel’s remarkable aptitude for French. The mother smiles.
“I don’t know who she takes after. Certainly not me, and her father even less. In the neighbourhood where I was born in Savannah, French was as rare and exotic as Pakistani is here.”
“You’re from Georgia? How did you end up here?”
“When you grow up near a military base you fall in love with soldiers. When I met Richard he was in training near where I lived. I was smitten.”
When she returns home, Marie recounts her meeting to Ariel.
“Richard Vernon? Yes, I know him. He’s a bruiser. Gives the recruits a rough time.”
“His wife invited us for dinner.”
“Well, find a way to beg off. He’s the last person I’d want to socialize with.”
Looking out over the empty plain that surrounds them, Marie sighs. Their life seems so spare. There’s no room even for friendship. Ariel gently squeezes her shoulder.
“That’s not true,” he says. “It just takes longer when you start from scratch.”
As Ariel expected, he found Emmanuelle in a vast loft perched on the top floor of an abandoned factory, the kind of place that bolstered the image of the impoverished artist but which only the wealthy could afford. Despite the large windows, the room appeared dim. Pewter mobiles floated a few metres above the floor like swords. Curled up in a red leather armchair, Emmanuelle was dreamily contemplating her works of art. She started when Ariel walked in.
“They’ve burnt down our house.”
Stretching her legs, she turned toward him, the defiance already showing in her eyes.
“Fire is cathartic.”
“It was all we had left, Emmanuelle.”
She stood up, walked over to a table littered with empty glasses, and poured herself a purple liquid.
“Antioxidant?” she offered.
Ariel shook his head. Her lips moistened with purple juice made her look like a vampire.
“We’re leaving tomorrow, Marie and I. Oddly enough, you’re the only person I wanted to see before going.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. I’ve come to call you to account.”
Swinging her endless mane of hair, Emmanuelle turned her back to Ariel and stepped toward a window. Hochelaga — the livid reptile, the many-headed snake — uncoiled at her feet. Montreal had already begun to fade in Ariel’s mind, like the world of Peter Pan, its outline dissolving as one stops believing in it. Emmanuelle kept silent; Ariel pressed the point.
“You couldn’t stand having to share Marc? To see him devote himself to a cause bigger than you?”
“You all think I’m so jealous and possessive. You just don’t get it.”
Setting her glass down on an empty pedestal, she approached Ariel with measured steps.
“It was an artistic gesture, Ariel. That’s all. When I learned you were brother and sister, I immediately grasped the beauty of your story. The grace of loving striving to reconstitute itself by any means, like water cutting a path through solid rock.”
“How poetic. Couldn’t you have just kept your metaphors to yourself?”
“I wanted to create an event. Today’s art resides precisely in such performances. Reality and the actions that disfigure it. To place one’s finger on an object teetering on the edge of the abyss. Delivering that message was so easy, a flick of the finger, really. And the face of the country was changed.”
“For the worse.”
“It’s inappropriate to assign a moral label to this work.”
Ariel exploded.
“Stop talking about it like a piece of art,” he bellowed. “You’ve ruined our lives!”
He would have liked to slap her, to point the mouth of a giant canon at her skinny body and blast a hole through it, and then blow up her appalling sculptures one by one. Unimpressed by Ariel’s rage, Emmanuelle gave him a smug half-smile.
“No, your lives were already ruined. I gave you a chance to live as you choose. If the secret had stayed hidden, you would have spent the rest of your miserable existence loving each other secretly, repressing that love. But now you are going away together. What will you do? Disappear? Change your identities? You’ll grow old side by side. It’s more than you could have dreamed of if you had hung on to your position as prime minister.”
An ominous grating sound went out from the far end of the loft, and as if by magic one of the more substantial mobiles overhanging the loft came loose. It twisted in mid-air before crashing down on the cement floor in a metallic clang and a shower of sparks. Emmanuelle took a few steps toward the mobile and stopped short, perplexed, as though wondering what was left of her piece. When she turned to come back to Ariel he was already gone.
No agriculture worthy of the name has existed on the plains for the past ten years. People still sow seeds and keep little kitchen gardens as a matter of form, but autumn usually yields just a few shrivelled potatoes, peas as hard as gravel, and ghosts of tomatoes. The proudest — or richest — farmers equipped their operations with complex irrigation systems only to throw in the towel a few years later, as exhausted as their fields. These days, the towns just barely scrape by with populations that skim over the topography more than they inhabit it. The places where ancient traditions connected people to the land have become transient landscapes that remind Ariel of American desert towns where nothing ever seems to put down roots.
This means stores with boarded-up windows. Hospitals shut down and doctors you need to drive for hours to see. Families that leave without bothering to sell their now worthless properties. People without work, and dreams either crushed or forgotten in a corner. Only the military base keeps on providing employment and sustenance to a part of the town, which nevertheless continues to empty as steadily as an hourglass.
One winter morning, the daily routine on the plain is upset by a rumour. While people are prepping for another year of exasperating extremes, the word goes out that a biomass conversion plant may be built in Rockfield. This fast-growing industry is apparently looking for a central location where it could process all of the province’s waste.
Though impossible to confirm, the rumour races through the military base, the school, the shopping mall and the church — the cardinal points of the town’s social life.
This is the moment when something that was slumbering in Ariel awakes. His sense of community, his instinct for crowds. His urge to hold the reins. The electronic devices in the house gradually come to life again; the news rings out every hour in the kitchen, research files linger on the computer. Ariel comes back into the world.