Fortunately, the pastor is a moderate and his attitude rubs off on his flock. He preaches tolerance, mutual support, modesty. The congregation is not afraid of him, so the nave is suffused with a certain degree of warmth. As a result, Marie and Ariel can manage a few seconds of contemplation, while sharp-angled forms rain down on them like wedges, the slanting shadows of stained glass windows where stylized Jesuses walk on the water and sink for the third time.
The topic of the exercise: “what my name means.” After questioning their family on the subject, the pupils must present, in French, the origin of their given name and surname. With her little feet firmly planted in front of the class, Sophia says that her given name means “wisdom.” Marco talks about his Venetian ancestors and the explorer Marco Polo. Junior admits he was astounded to learn that his first name refers to his father’s, a fact of which he was unaware for the first seven years of his life because during that time he was just called junior. Lastly, Angel explains that she was baptized in honour of an aunt who had met with a serious accident.
Stepping closer to congratulate her for her presentation, Marie notices some oddly shaped black-and-blue marks on Angel’s forearm. In addition, the little girl’s chin is scraped, a wound that Marie had ascribed to an ordinary childhood mishap. During the written exercises, she discreetly tries to get a glimpse of Angel’s knees under her yellow skirt. There, too, the skin appears to be rubbed raw, and Marie suddenly gets the impression Angel’s small chocolate-coloured body is covered with scars. Recalling Ariel’s remarks about Angel’s father, Marie spends two days looking for a way to broach the question with her. She finally decides on the direct approach.
“Angel, sweetheart, you certainly have a lot of bruises!”
Quite unexpectedly, the child breaks into a grin, rolls up her sleeves, and displays her marks as if they were trophies.
“I got them during training! It’s not for wimps!”
“I see! What sport do you play?”
“It’s not a sport. They’re exercises my dad makes me do. To be stronger.”
“Like… like a soldier?”
“Yes. You know, Mrs. Leblanc, we’ve got to be ready for war.”
Marie solemnly nods her head and lets the little girl scamper away. Waiting for Angel outside is Monette Vernon, who lifts her off the ground to kiss her. Under a grey sky, the school buses stir like exhausted dinosaurs; the kids’ small feet stamp on the indifferent ground. Watching the mother and daughter as they move away, Marie slowly brings a piece of chalk to her mouth and bites into it. “And what does my name mean?”
The rain is coming down in small, grey, icy packets when the news hits Rockfield: the company that was expected to build the biomass processing plant has dropped the project. Despite months of effort, of transformations and investments on the local level, the managers have decided to defer the plan indefinitely.
This is more than enough to demoralize the townspeople. After decades of disappointment, this new failure seems to partake of the natural order of existence. Now it’s back to vacant afternoons, empty bank accounts, boredom, and the bleak sound of trucks rolling by without stopping anymore. Ariel is the only one who refuses to be discouraged by the decision. And the only one convinced that he alone can change the course of events. Rather than daunting him, the bad news has spurred his ambitions even further.
Within a week he succeeds in contacting a record number of townspeople and convincing them to carry on the campaign among their friends and relations. Yoked to his mobile phone, he creates a virtual movement that grows into a groundswell within a few days. At first Marie balks at getting involved, but she eventually gets swept up by the rising tide and endeavours to rally the other teachers and the students’ parents. Sunday night sees hundreds of people crowding into the school gym. Adolescents desert the abandoned quarry that is their secret meeting place; the elderly leave their too-cozy armchairs. Even the military personnel, ordinarily standoffish about civilian matters, have let themselves be carried along by their colleagues’ idealism. Marie spots Richard Vernon among them, with Monette on his arm looking twice as small beside her giant of a husband. Marie’s heart clenches as she imagines the father forcing his daughter to do a series of exercises meant for elite soldiers and pictures the little girl crawling through mud or striding over fences to make him happy.
“My friends,” Ariel says to get the assembly underway, “whether we’ve been lied to or whether they simply changed their minds doesn’t really matter. What matters is that over the past number of months we’ve learned to pool our energies. What matters is what we decide to do with them now.”
His tone of voice and the applause that greets these introductory remarks remind Marie so much of his electoral speeches that her head starts to spin. It’s as though she can once again see the cameras flashing, smell the sour odour of calculated stress, the sweat of the strategists and image-makers. Ariel remains oblivious to this apparent revisiting of the past. Standing before the crowd alive to his optimism, he is aglow.
He asks the townspeople: What do you want to do? How do you think you can improve your situation? What are your dreams? Terms like “cooperative” and “public project” ring out; Ariel’s new collaborators take notes to keep track of the increasingly excited conversations. At midnight, an hour that most of Rockfield’s inhabitants haven’t seen in years, the enthusiastic assembly disperses, creating a human fireworks in the parking lot. Ariel is in the doorway, thanking every participant and wishing them all goodnight. Richard Vernon walks past and completely ignores him.
“Your colleague — what’s eating him?” Marie asks.
“Who knows? I’m amazed he showed up in the first place. It’s not his style.”
Once the hall has emptied, Ariel’s associates join him to go over the most interesting suggestions. One is to build a large collective greenhouse that could provide the community with food security and give jobs back to idle farmers. Another involves self-financing a private wind farm and selling the energy to the state, an idea that has already proven very lucrative a little farther west. Ariel sees the dreams he had as prime minister slowly taking shape again, nourished by a spirit of solidarity and a sense of initiative that he had never witnessed in all his years in the Labour Party. So it’s true: revolutions are all about small-scale actions.
Spring has returned with, in tow, all the vagaries of weather gone awry. They spend long hours on their porch watching the rolling clouds and the patterns that the wind etches on the tender grasses. The heat rises in whorls on the horizon. What Ariel sees there are white sails, or Marie. For her, the asphalt seems to be littered with gold nuggets, or there is Ariel soaring before her eyes. The world has become a collection of signs through which their love manifests itself, a distant respiration where they can safely love each other. Marie caresses all that is yellow; Ariel embraces the mist that forms on a glass filled with a cold liquid. She plunges her hands into a bag of almonds; he blows softly on the skeletons of dandelions. Their symbols are manifold and so intricate as to render any inventory difficult to compile. The secret code of twins who chose one another; the litany that reiterates the only possible bond.
As May tips over into June the northern lights jockey for space and stretch out their bare legs in the premature heat. In the fields Marie and Ariel perceive the manes of yawning lions and the horns of emaciated zebus. It’s said that one truly belongs to the plains the day one catches sight of animals that have never lived there. After two summers in this northern savannah, a complex menagerie appears before them, circling in the vicinity of their house when the sun sets or when it reaches its arms out toward morning. Hand in hand, keeping watch day after day, Ariel and Marie discover that surviving has again become living; their hearts at ease, they are poised in a fine equilibrium, finally at home in this fenceless landscape.