The Act of Contrition

The summer after our vacation in Rio, we went camping at Matane Provincial Park in the Notre-Dame mountains. I really wasn't in the mood; I doubt that Chantal was either. I tried to find excuses not to go, but it was the semester break and the kids wanted to go. Avril was twelve years old while Patrick was seven, so Chantal and I decided to make the most of it now while we could; the children would soon be a bored ados who didn't want to do anything with their family anymore, so we went camping. It was Chantal's idea, really.

What can you say about the Notre-Dame mountains? Dense and wooded like it was at the Conquest of 1759, but there are lots of trails now for both bicyclists and hikers. These mountains are part of the reason why Quebec is la belle province: tall trees and mountains; clear-running streams; animals of several species, if you're alert and they don't run off before you can see them. We even saw a solitary coyote along the Navigator's Route, by the side of the road near the Trois Pistoles River — the highlight of our trip up there. Chantal took a photo of it with her cell phone, but that was when she became silent. We had driven to the mountains mostly in silence. We made an effort to sing in order to pass the time, but that stopped about halfway through the trip; nobody was in the mood for it. Nobody felt like singing.

Chantal and I weren't talking. Oh, we hadn't been fighting lately, but there was still a tension that hung about us, sort of like the fumes from a chemical truck that had turned over on the highway and released its noxious cargo into the air. I was afraid that I might say the wrong thing, and I think that she was afraid of the same thing. So we weren't talking; it was better this way, we thought.

We arrived at our campsite towards dusk, put up our tents and started to unpack. Everybody knew the routine: camping gear in the tents and all the foodstuffs in the car with the windows rolled up so that the animals couldn't get to them. There were raccoons and black bears everywhere in the park, you know, as well as opossums and squirrels. The animals had lost their fear of man.

We had two tents, our sleeping bags, and a Coleman gas stove, in case they didn't want you making campfires in the middle of the summer, what with the drought and the danger of forest fires. We had other camping gear, of course, but you don't have to paint a picture: we were a family of four from Montréal, camping in the mountains for one week.

The kids were starting to get restless, so Chantal said to me: "Please be a dear and take the kids hiking while I make supper..."

The kids and I did some hiking along a trail, then we returned just before dusk. By the time we came back, supper was ready.

At night, after supper, we had a sing-along with other campers. That is, people sang songs and told campfire stories. Then a guy named David Poile told us the story of Rose LaTulipe, the young woman who was nearly seduced by the devil into being unfaithful to her betrothed, Gabriel.

The adults all knew the story. The setting is an inn, whose owner is Rose's father. As an adolescent, I was always amused by the image of our Rose, laughing in the arms of her demonic lover as he almost tips her upside down, legs high in the air, her petticoats and her skirt almost flying over her head like the petals of a tulip. Only I thought that the storyteller was a little risqué, the way he told the story before a public that included children. The way he told it, it was understood that Rose LaTulipe had actually betrayed her beloved in the flesh, though the littlest ones might not have understood his nuances.

His wife seemed to be a little uncomfortable as well, though she said nothing. Chantal was uncomfortable — for obvious reasons, I think. I wanted to object, but I thought, somehow, that the storyteller was going somewhere with his story.

The storyteller left his public in suspense just before the denouement, where Gabriel bursts in, catches them in flagrante dilecto, and must decide whether to forgive Rose her infidelities and continue with the wedding as planned, or let the devil carry her away to hell, where she will have to be the devil's wife forever. Instead of providing an ending to the story, Poile posed a few questions to the children: "What do you think Gabriel should do, eh?" he asked his public. "Should he forgive Rose LaTulipe, or should he let the devil carry her away to hell?"

The children were about evenly divided, those that took up the challenge. One boy, who was about twelve, said: "Gabriel can always find another and let the devil take Rose. As I see it, it's one lost and ten found."

The storyteller laughed and said: "Aren't we the ladies' man, eh?"

Finally, I objected and asked: "Was that last comment necessary, my friend? Was the entire story — or rather, the way you've told it — necessary?"

The man become all serious. "I'm sorry, monsieur, if I have offended you," he said, indignant, "but as I see it, this story has always said much about us Québécois as a nation. We are a devout people, I think, one that tries to be merciful, but one who can see the humour in life as well. But each generation must find an ending for itself. I myself am a man of religion, a deacon of the Catholic Church. Voilà, my blonde, Yvette, and our three children — the reasons why I'm not a priest."

There was some laughter among the other campers at our fire as he gestured with his right hand towards his wife, who was blonde with pale skin and clear blue eyes, and the children sitting next to him; she looked to be pregnant with a fourth child, though not very far along.

"I hope to instill in these little ones the values that we have always held as a nation," he said. "As a Christian nation..."

His wife laughed agreeably and said: "Now now, don't get carried way, David! You know that the Bloc no more shares our Christian values than the Liberals...."

"Well, I have an ending," I said facetiously. "Why not have Rose LaTulipe spend half the year with the devil in hell and half the year on earth with Gabriel, like Proserpina with the Roman god Pluto and her mother Ceres. That way, both the devil and Gabriel can use her. Then, if she has lived a virtuous and Christian life in her six months here on earth every year, she can go to heaven after she dies."

But my daughter, Avril, shook her head and said: "No, papa, I think it's better to forgive, because we all make mistakes. Where would we be if our parents never forgave us after the first time we disobeyed them?"

My son, Patrick, readily concurred: "I'm always bad," he said, "but maman always forgives me..."

Chantal rubbed Patrick's shoulders, kissed him on the back of the head and whispered something into his ear. Then she spoke for the first time: "I think that he should forgive her," she said slowly, "but she must be patient with him. She hurt him very much, you know, and it will take some time for the hurt to heal."

Then she looked up at me and said in a low voice: "Healing always takes time, Robert..."

Yes, it would take a lot of time. Our marriage was still reeling from our Christmas vacation in Rio, where both of us committed adultery. She had a fling with the taxi driver who had picked us up at the airport. They met at the beach, and then went all the way to his place in the "North Zone" of Rio and did it there. Oh, I put two and two together — she had love bites on her neck. I don't have to draw you a picture. She tried to deny it at first, though she admitted it in the end.

For a while, there was some anxiety about her being pregnant; she wasn't sure who the father was, or if she was pregnant.

Me, I met a Brazilian woman at the beach. We went to her hotel room, where she "welcomed" me to Brazil. My wife, a very beautiful woman even in her middle thirties, was more beautiful than this woman, whose name was Flora, but I was drawn to Flora like a fly to fly paper. I was in a trance as I followed her back to her hotel room, where we broke the Sixth Commandment in the bedroom.

Oh, Chantal suspected immediately; she insisted that she had "tasted" Flora when we did that night. "Must be," I replied, "it was saltwater from the sea."

I had jumped into the ocean immediately after I was done with Flora, to conceal the smell in my beard, but Chantal doesn't miss much — she knew right away that something was wrong. Eventually, I admitted what I had done as well, after we were home from Rio. She slapped me across the face when I admitted it.

Our sexual life was different now; there was a certain aggression to it, a certain animal frenzy. Sometimes, I wanted to tear into her breasts with my teeth while shaking my head like a dog. When her praline was exposed, I sometimes wanted to tear into that as well. She, on the other hand, seemed to want to hurt me. She would squeeze my pine hard with her hand, while looking up at me to see if my faced betrayed any pain. Then she would smile malevolently.

Though she was only of average size, she was incredibly strong, with the body of a swimmer from years of swimming laps in a pool. With the muscles of her vagina, she could squeeze very hard — she could hurt you. When I took her from behind, en lèvrette, she would scream long and hard into a pillow when she came, so that she children wouldn't hear it. However, I'm sure that the children heard it anyway.

We were like Adam and Eve in paradise in Milton's Paradise Lost, after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit and their marital relations had changed from love and intimacy to animal lust.

That night, while the kids were asleep, we sat by a fire, talking about anything, yet talking about nothing at the same time. She was subdued, and I felt the same. We knew what we wanted to say, but we didn't know how to say it. Finally, I just said it.

"What do we do now?" I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and said: "I don't know, Robert. If you don't forgive me now, do you think the devil's going to carry me away to hell like Rose LaTulipe? And what good would that do if he did?"

I didn't reply. A man who has been betrayed by his blonde wants — has the need for — an act of contrition, but when she asks forgiveness, is it enough? No matter what, you can't change the past, but you have to reinvent it somehow or you can't move on. In order to forgive, you must forget the wrong against you with the ease of the evildoer: "I couldn't have done that," says the evildoer. "You're right," says the one who was wronged. "Must be, I was mistaken..."

Chantal and I have always exchanged excuses: the one will ask forgiveness for something, and then the other will ask forgiveness for something else. That way, we have both admitted our wrongs and tried to make amends for them.

As she sat on a log before the dying embers of our little fire — of David and Yvette Poile's fire, actually — I did something that I hadn't done before: I knelt in front her, put my arms around her lower legs and laid my head upon her knees. Then I said that I was sorry. I was sorry for what I had done in Rio, and all the other things that I had ever done since we had been married; I was sorry that I was a bastard sometimes.

She only kissed me on my head and covered me with her arms and her torso; I felt the nipples of her breasts against the top of my head. "I'll try to forgive you too," she said, "but you must be patient with me..."

When I looked up at her, she held my head in both of her hands and kissed me twice on the lips. Then she looked into my eyes, smiled and said, ironically: "I won't let the devil take you away to hell, Monsieur LaTulipe..."

Just then, what looked like multi-coloured lightning started to flash in the north. Your first reaction is a terrified one: "Oh, shit, what's happening?" Then you're struck with a sacred awe the moment when you realize what it really is.

No matter how many times you have seen it, you can't believe what is happening when you first see it. Is this the way the world ends: with lights of all different colours flashing and zig-zagging across the sky, or with little white dots and green beams descending from heaven? No wonder the ancients were afraid! We were both afraid, yet struck with a terrible sense of beauty as something otherworldly — something that we cannot understand. Somehow, the meteorologists telling us that this phenomenon is caused by a disturbance in the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the planet cannot explain away this mystery.

Okay then, you can predict the next time there will be sunspot activity, but who understands the relationship between the Aurora Borealis in Canada and a tsunami in Asia on Boxing Day a few years later? Who knows how it will affect a man and a woman watching it?

For a moment, we forgot the uncomfortable drive to Matane Provincial Park, the boorish storyteller, and our awkward attempt to come to an understanding; we even forgot Rio. We forgot about all that in the sun's baptism with its ultraviolet rays, in heaven's anointing us with its colours. We forgot everything. Some things are bigger than we are, you know — like the sky and its many colours.

Having been married twice, I know from experience that you never know what you're getting into when you first get married. If you knew, you might run out of the church screaming like a madman, or come to wish that the car had overturned while en route to your honeymoon, crushing you both to death while you were still happy.

Some things are beyond all understanding, like the forces of nature, or a woman who commits adultery and then crawls on her hands and knees to beg forgiveness. I don't understand that woman any better than I understand the Aurora Borealis. I only know that she has the compulsion to slide down bannisters and throw mashed potatoes at everybody during supper.

There's a logical explanation for everything, but logical explanations aren't always enough. When the parishioners ask the Reverend David Poile why God lets tragedy happen to them, they don't want a lot of science, but peace and understanding. They're looking for some kind of sense in life.

Under the Aurora Borealis, with the sky flashing like crazy, we exchanged our excuses, me, with my head on her knees, her, with her torso shielding my head as if to protect me.

Then I felt a single tear fall on the bald crown of my head. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'm sorry that I have ever hurt you..."

I was sorry too, for everything.

There was just the sky above us, with flashes like multi-coloured lightning, and then it stopped. It might have lasted twenty minutes.

When we made love in our little tent, we did it slowly, taking our time, but she gasped when I first penetrated her. Then we cuddled after we were done, her, with her head in the curve of my shoulder.

"I would like another baby," she said afterwards.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

She merely nodded.

I felt absolved, but so did she, I think. But healing always takes time, though we felt healed that night.

*****