Together with two other residents, he organizes a public meeting to which he invites industry spokespeople. Taking on the impromptu role of moderator, he welcomes them on behalf of the people of Rockfield, gives them an overview of the community, and questions them. Then, after getting hold of documents specifying the conditions that need to be met for the plant to be built, he sets up a citizens committee to ensure that the city fulfills every condition. Locations must be proposed, road repairs demanded, water drainage problems solved. The town’s elected officers, delighted by this unhoped-for help, encourage these initiatives. Soon, volunteer work is being organized on a colossal scale in an atmosphere of contagious enthusiasm. A handful of townspeople travel to Regina to petition for their cause and ask for investments. After a few weeks, the entire town is mobilizing around a single objective: to revive a moribund region.
From day to day, Ariel grows more effervescent, more radiant. His best efforts to preserve the extra weight that serves as his disguise are unsuccessful. The excitement melts away the kilos. His voice regains its previous timbre. He is vibrant. And increasingly recognizable despite his altered face. With every passing day his beard looks more and more like a ridiculous postiche on the face of the man who seduced the nation; Marie is afraid to see him unmasked yet cannot bring herself to clip his wings. She would prefer to start her life over again a hundred times rather than confine the man she loves to the desolate trance of exile. There is no taking the Ariel out of Ariel. No matter how many pseudonyms are affixed to him, he remains the one who leads. He will always find a mission, even in the midst of nothing.
Little by little the house fills up. Meetings are held there, neighbours stop by to leave cookies or a spray of flowers, borrow books or just chat. Out of shyness and a wish to protect the little privacy that belonged to her, Marie had jealously kept the doors of their former home shut, thus depriving herself of the joys she is now discovering — a kitchen full of friends, loud voices, shoes heaped up in the hallway, and the kind of solidarity that people at the top are not entitled to. Children roll around in the cruddy snow of their yard. A neighbour shares the fish she caught under the ice. The local lush comes to drain their bottles and spin a few yarns. Quite unexpectedly, life is rekindled.
Oddly enough, Ariel has trouble sleeping not when he is distraught but when he feels hopeful again. His intense involvement in the community not only mitigates his grief at having lost his place among the governing elite, but also brings him solace for his political disillusionment. His new project keeps him up late into the night; it is a vital hub foiling his regrets. As the long wakeful hours tick past, he misses his cat Wretch. He pores over the international magazines and watches the daily news reports to the point of nausea. When his head is too full of the noise of the world, he turns to more rustic occupations. He reads novels, discovers old records abandoned by the former residents, cleans the attic, does a few bodybuilding exercises. Then, in the depths of the night, he drifts toward Marie.
He stands in front of her room to listen to her breathing. The breath humans produce when they sleep is prodigious. It dives into the deepest reaches of their being and, upon exhalation, raises the treasures and monsters buried under accumulated crusts of civilization. Dense, troubled, insightful, Marie’s breathing is a masterpiece. To come nearer to it is the only moment of purity available to Ariel from now on. Their physical proximity is always steeped in pain; every surge of desire is accompanied by disgust. Rare and difficult, sex has become the site of a self-loathing equal to their mutual love. But when he looks at her silky arms lying on the sheet, discerning her breast and pubis under the muslin, he is unable to feel regret about anything. One life would not be enough for him to turn Marie into simply a sister.
On other nights he just sits down at his wife’s desk. He holds the pencils between his fingers, leafs through her books, most of them textbooks, a few of them collections of poetry in a dying language; he whiffs the pages that her pointed forefinger has ranged over. Then he rests his cheek on the back of the chair that welcomes Marie’s thoughts day after day. This is how he likes to love her — in her absence, in the imprint that her existence leaves on the night.
In the course of one of these little rituals, he discovers a file folder bearing an accursed name: Eva Volant. For several minutes, Ariel remains stock-still, unable to contain his anger. He was too devastated by the events to say anything when Marie went on her trip to the southern United States. But he continues to disapprove of all efforts aimed at finding their mother. For him, surviving means keeping her out of the picture. How could their so very fragile daily life overcome this strident reminder of their biology? It is already dangerous enough to maintain their love without which they would both be lost; chasing after Eva Volant amounts to juggling with knives.
In the end, he opens the folder and pulls out a sheaf of documents whose cloying smell puts him in mind of the fall floods. He finds the adoption papers, the fateful lines that overturned their lives an eternity ago, it seems to him. Then there are letters and forms testifying to Marie’s investigation, all dated before their move to the Prairies. A considerable sum of work, Ariel sadly acknowledges. Marie was truly determined to resolve the question of their origins.
Under the forms he stumbles on a sheaf of blackened sheets of paper. He brushes his hand over them, leaving his fingers stained with fine soot. Portraits — all different but all alike — in which he recognizes here Marie’s mouth, there her chin, both their eyes, the hair of one of them, the cheekbone of the other, their nose, their forehead, a sharp wrinkle that he might recognize reluctantly, an earlobe suggesting a familiar texture. With small, uncertain touches or broad, desperate strokes, Marie has tried to reconstitute their mother’s face, conjugating all possible combinations. Ariel cannot help thinking that this visual genealogy lacks one essential component: the face of the father. But the thought is too dizzying and he drives it away just as Marie must have with a stroke of charcoal.
He silently returns the papers to their original place in the folder, but not without first pilfering one of the sketches, the simplest one, the one in which Marie dared to put a smile on Eva’s face, an embarrassed smile or possibly the sneer of those who dice with destiny. He folds the portrait and unthinkingly slips it into his wallet, then he picks up his guitar and plays a tune so old it might be telling their story, their mother’s story, the story of all who one day doubted their humanity.
They go to church. It’s impossible to avoid this monument to consensus built during the reform period and therefore afflicted with an architectural style at once unbridled and conventional, somewhere between a temple and a shopping mall — the mandatory style of contemporary believers. They would have preferred to stay neutral with respect to religion, but Marc advised them to swell the Christian ranks and not turn up their noses. In small Prairie communities, suspicion starts with impiety.
They therefore show up each Sunday at the church square and join the assembly of neighbours and colleagues, young soldiers eager for absolution, students and their stubby-nosed, thick-legged parents. Ariel and Marie sit in the back like dunces. The church is the only place where they once again have the feeling they are making an exhibition of themselves. True, they are constantly playing a part, but the part is confined to an alias and a disguise. The rest is far from being as scripted as their life in Montreal and Ottawa. Only in church do they still act in ways that remind them of politics. The right answer at the right moment, standing up and sitting down at the same time as the others, nodding one’s head, giving the appropriate look. As she plays the game and sees Ariel making an effort to remember how to cross himself properly, Marie realizes how intolerable it was for her to play the Prime Minister’s wife.