In a converted parish hall in east-end Montreal, the last prompter in the city sits behind a slot in the scenery and keeps a notebook on an old actor's famous pause, trying to learn when silence is acting and when it is panic. One February night, with the snowblowers out on rue Ontario, the silence comes exactly where it should, and nothing she has measured can tell her it is wrong.
by Bengionian Representations, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The slot was eleven centimetres long and three high, cut at the eye level of a seated woman into the back of the flat that stood behind the stove. From her stool Nadia Benhamou could see a strip of stage the width of a kitchen: the stove itself, which was painted plywood with a real iron lid on top and a red bulb inside, the end of the table, and the chair where Léon Dufresne sat in the first act to mend a net and did not sit in the second. Beside her, on a music stand bent back to the horizontal, lay the book. A clip lamp with two layers of blue gel put enough light on the page to read by and none on the flat. Her left forefinger kept the place. Her right hand held a stopwatch that had belonged to the company's first stage manager and still carried, on a strip of yellowed tape across its back, the words NE PAS PRENDRE.
The Salle Frontenac had been a parish hall until 1989. It seated a hundred and forty people when the fire inspector was in the house and a hundred and fifty-two when he was not. Behind the stage a loading door gave onto the lane, and in February the cold came under it in a flat sheet that you felt at the ankles through two pairs of socks. Nadia kept her boots on during the show. Nobody could see her feet.
There was no other prompter working in any theatre she knew of in Montreal. There was a stage manager on book during rehearsals, as everywhere, and after opening night the book went into a drawer. The Compagnie du Passeur kept a souffleuse because Aimé Robidoux, who was seventy-nine, had written one into his contract in 1994 and into every contract since, and because the company had been founded fifty-one years ago to put on the plays of Clément Houde, and Aimé was the last actor alive who had been in the first production of Le Passeur. He had played the son then. He had played the father for twenty-two years.
Thérèse Cayer had sat on this stool for thirty-eight seasons. In October, three weeks into rehearsal, she had gone down on the ice outside the Frontenac métro and broken her hip in two places, and the stage manager, Guylaine, had looked round the rehearsal room and seen Nadia, who was twenty-nine, who had done two years at the theatre school in Saint-Hyacinthe before understanding that she would rather be near a stage than on one, and who had been hired to run the sound board.
Madame Cayer taught her the job by telephone from a rehabilitation centre in Laval, in three calls, each of which ended when a physiotherapist came into the room.
"On ne souffle pas un silence," she said in the first call. "On souffle une panique." You do not prompt a silence. You prompt a panic.
"How do I tell which it is?"
"You'll know."
In the second call, perhaps because she had been thinking about the question in the meantime, she gave more. "He has his pauses. Everybody knows his pauses, the critics write about nothing else, the one in the second act especially, before Tu m'as menti deux fois. Those you leave alone. When he's lost, the thumb of his right hand goes looking for the seam of his trousers. When he's acting, the hands don't move. Watch the thumb."
In the third call she said: "Un souffle de trop, c'est deux trous." One prompt too many and there are two holes in the play: the one he was in, and the one you made. Then the physiotherapist came.
Nadia bought a school notebook with a blue cover at the Jean Coutu on Ontario and ruled it into columns in pencil. Date. Pause (s). Pouce. Séché. Date, the length of the famous pause, whether the thumb went to the seam, whether he dried anywhere in the performance. She added a fifth column in the second week and headed it Autre, for anything else, and in it wrote things like école secondaire, balcon plein and veuve de Houde, rang B and porte de chargement ouverte, 11 min.
By the last Saturday in February she had thirty-one lines.
The pause before Tu m'as menti deux fois had run as short as four seconds, on a Wednesday matinée with two classes from a school in Rosemont in the house, and as long as nineteen, on the night the playwright's widow sat in the second row with a cane across her knees. Most nights it fell between eight and thirteen. The thumb had gone to the seam on nine nights. Aimé had dried on two: once in the first act, reaching for the name of the parish priest, and once in the third, on a line about the price of diesel. On only one of those two nights had the thumb moved at all.
She had given him the priest's name, le curé Gauvreau, in a breath through the slot, and he had taken it without turning his head, as if it had just come back to him. The other time she had waited, with the line ready on her tongue, and on the fourth second he had found it himself. She remembered the line in her mouth for a long time afterwards, like a lozenge she had forgotten to swallow.
Nine thumbs; two dries; one thumb among the two dries. She kept the column because Madame Cayer would ask about it.
The director, Benoît Lacasse, had wanted the pause fixed. He had sat in the fourth row through the previews with a stopwatch of his own, and after the second Tuesday he came up onto the stage during notes and said that tonight's had been the one. Eleven seconds. The light going down on the stove at nine, the way Aimé had held it two more, the way the house had stopped breathing.
"Give me Tuesday every night."
Aimé was sitting in Léon's chair with his shoes off, drinking soup out of a paper cup. The café across the street sent a thermos of it over at the interval. "Si je te donne mardi tous les soirs," he said, "mardi va mourir."
"It won't die. It'll be good every night."
"It will be the same every night. That's not the same thing." He drank. "Some nights it wants to be short. I don't know which until I'm standing there. If I go there knowing it's eleven, I'm not standing there. I'm counting."
Lacasse let the note go, which was not like him. Nadia put a small star beside Tuesday's eleven in the notebook. The star meant nothing afterwards. On the Wednesday it was six and on the Thursday fourteen, and the house had been exactly as still for the one as for the other.
Le Passeur was set in 1972, in a kitchen at Sorel, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, in the house of a man who had worked the car ferry across the river for thirty years and would be retired from it in the spring. His son Rémi had gone north after a fight in 1961 and had not been heard from. His daughter Gisèle had stayed. That was the play: the father, the daughter who had stayed, and the one who hadn't, who never came on.
In the second act, on page fifty-four of the book, Gisèle came in from the yard with the mail and said, Assieds-toi, papa. Sit down, Papa. The stage direction said Il ne s'assoit pas, and Aimé never did. He went to the stove. Then Gisèle told him that eleven years ago, in March, a letter had come from Sept-Îles, in Rémi's hand, asking whether he could come home; that she had read it, and had not shown it to him, and had not answered it; that she had it still. The speech ran down the foot of fifty-four and over onto fifty-five. It ended, Je l'ai gardée. I kept it.
Then the pause.
Then, Tu m'as menti deux fois. You've lied to me twice.
People had been arguing in print for fifty years about what the second lie was. Houde had declined to say, and then he had died.
At the top of fifty-six Gisèle answered, Je ne te demande pas de me pardonner, I'm not asking you to forgive me, and Léon said, Le traversier part à six heures, the ferry leaves at six, which was either the cruellest line in the play or the kindest, depending on the night. The whole of the third act was the crossing: Léon taking the ferry over for the last time with the letter in his coat, to go north and look for a man who had written eleven years ago and not since. Without the letter there was no third act. There was an old man taking a ferry.
Nadia had put the start of the stopwatch on the é of gardée. By the thirty-first night her thumb moved without her.
On the last Saturday in February there were a hundred and forty-seven in the house. The snow had started at four in the afternoon and stopped at seven, and by the interval the city had put the orange signs up along rue Ontario for the night's clearing. Guylaine said on the headset that they'd hear the machines in the lane during the third act and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Laurence Gagné, who played Gisèle, had had a cold since Tuesday. She stood in the stage-right wing between entrances with a mug of hot water and honey and a scarf over her mouth, and before every entrance she took the scarf off and gave it to the assistant, and after every exit she took it back.
The second act went well. Aimé was in a light mood; he had been in a light mood since the soup, when he had told Laurence a long story about a production of Le Passeur in Rimouski in 1981 in which the ferry, which was played by a rolling platform, had rolled into the orchestra pit with the Gisèle of that year still on it. Laurence had laughed until she coughed. In the first scene of the second act he found a new thing to do with the mail, turning each envelope over to look at the back before he put it down, and Nadia wrote enveloppes on her wrist with the pencil because she had no room on the page.
Gisèle came in from the yard. The snow on her shoulders was paper, as every night.
"Assieds-toi, papa."
Aimé did not sit. He went to the stove, a metre and a half from the slot, and stood there with his back to the flat, and Nadia could see his right hand hanging at his side and the dark wool of his trousers, which in the blue light looked black.
"Je ne te demande pas de me pardonner," Gisèle said.
Nadia's thumb pressed the stopwatch.
The silence came where the silence belonged. It had the length and weight of the pause, and the house had been trained by the first act to receive it. A man in the third row settled back. Somewhere at the rear a program slid off a knee and nobody picked it up.
Nadia's left forefinger was at the foot of page fifty-four, on the first line of the letter speech. Her eyes went to the top of fifty-six and found Je ne te demande pas de me pardonner there, and came back to her finger, and went across again.
Three seconds. Four.
Laurence stood at the table downstage right with the mail still in her hand. She was looking at Aimé, which was right; Gisèle looked at him all through the pause. Her face was in the right place. From out front there was nothing to see.
Nadia looked at his hand. The thumb was where it had been, curled loosely against the side of the forefinger. It did not move toward the seam. It was the stillest hand she had seen on him in thirty-one nights.
Six seconds.
She thought of the notebook and knew what it would say. Six was short but not unusually short. The hands were still. Nothing in any of the columns she had ruled would tell her that anything was wrong.
He was not lost, then. He was standing in exactly the right place, knowing exactly where they were, which was on the wrong page.
Seven. Eight.
His next line was Tu m'as menti deux fois, and it could not be said. Nobody had lied to him yet. After that came Le traversier part à six heures, and that could be said, and the act would close on it, and after the interval he would take the ferry across the river for no reason with nothing in his coat.
She picked up the pencil and put it down again.
Laurence was six metres away, across the width of the kitchen, with a hundred and forty-seven people between her and the back wall. A whisper that reached Laurence would reach row C. Madame Cayer had cut the slot here, behind the stove, because this was where he stood for the pause; and because he stood here, he was the only one she could reach. What she had to give was not his line. It was Laurence's.
Nine. Ten.
She leaned in until her lips were at the edge of the slot, where the plywood was worn pale, and breathed rather than said it.
"La lettre de Rémi."
Aimé did not look round. He never did. At eleven seconds he reached out and lifted the iron lid off the stove with its little handle, and looked down into it at the red bulb, and held the lid there, and Nadia saw his back rise once and settle. Then he put the lid back. It made the small iron sound it made every night in the first act when he stoked the stove and had never made in the second.
He said, to the stove, not to his daughter:
"Et la lettre de Rémi, Gisèle?"
Nadia's thumb stopped the watch. Houde had not written it. There was no line on any page of the book that began Et la lettre. Nadia's finger stayed on fifty-four, on Il y a onze ans.
Across the stage Laurence's face went, for part of a second, completely white, and then it was Gisèle's again, and more than that. She put the mail down on the table very carefully, envelope by envelope, as though it might break.
"Il y a onze ans," she said. "Au mois de mars."
She did the whole speech. Her voice was rough from the cold, and at Sept-Îles it broke on the vowel, and she went on through the break without stopping. Nadia had heard the speech thirty-one times from this stool and had never heard it like this. It went down the foot of fifty-four and over onto fifty-five and Nadia's finger went with it, word by word, and she did not need the book for any of it.
"Je l'ai gardée."
She looked down at the watch, which said fourteen, and cleared it, and started it again.
It was the shortest the pause had ever been. Aimé turned from the stove on the second count and looked at his daughter, and on the third he said it.
"Tu m'as menti deux fois."
Nadia stopped the watch and did not look at it. On the far side of the stage Gisèle said that she was not asking to be forgiven. Léon said that the ferry left at six. The lights went down on the kitchen in their usual nine seconds, and in the dark the stagehands came on for the change, and somebody at the back of the house began to clap before the rest of the house was ready and then stopped.
In the corridor at the interval Laurence caught Aimé outside the dressing room with the scarf in her hand.
"Aimé, je suis désolée, j'ai sauté toute la—"
"Quoi?" He was unbuttoning his waistcoat. "C'était très bien. You found something in the letter tonight. Keep it."
"I didn't find anything, I skipped—"
"Keep the voice, I mean. The cold. Don't take the honey before the second act tomorrow." He went in and shut the door.
Guylaine came down the stairs from the booth with the headset still round her neck and found Nadia at the coffee urn. "What happened in the letter scene? My second act ran twelve seconds over."
"Il a pris son temps," Nadia said. He took his time.
Guylaine looked at her for a moment and then wrote something on her clipboard and went back up the stairs.
The third act ran long. The machines came into the lane during the crossing, as Guylaine had said they would, a grinding under the floor of the house and then a roar, and Aimé stood at the rail of the rolling platform with his hand inside his coat and let the noise go by as though it were the river. He did not dry. The thumb went to the seam twice, both times while he was standing still with nothing to say.
At the curtain call he came off stage left, past the flat, and without breaking step he knocked on it twice with a knuckle, just below the slot.
Rue Ontario was closed from Frontenac to Papineau. The sign trucks had come through with their sirens an hour before to clear off the parked cars, and now the souffleuse was working its way along the north side of the street, a squat orange blower eating into the bank of snow at the curb and throwing it in a white arc, twenty feet up and over, into the open box of a dump truck that crept along beside it. The truck matched its speed exactly. The driver was not looking at the road. He was looking at the arc, and every few seconds he moved the truck up by a half metre so that the snow kept falling into the middle of the box and none of it fell on the street.
Nadia stood on the corner with her bag until the pair of them had gone past. Then she walked down into the métro.
On the platform she sat on the bench and took out the blue notebook and opened it on her knees and ruled the thirty-second line. Date. She wrote the date. Pause. She had two numbers for it and wrote them both, one above the other, 14, and under it 3. Under Pouce she wrote non. Under Séché she held the pencil over the square for a while and then wrote nothing, because she did not know, and would never know, whether he would have turned to the stove and asked his daughter about the letter if nobody had said anything through the slot.
The train came into the station and stopped and opened its doors, and she did not get up.
She went back to the top of the page, to the headings, and drew a line through Pouce, and above it, in small capitals, she wrote PAGE.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Octōbrēs (28 September 2026), ā Repraesentātiōnibus Bengiōniānīs per mystērium cōnscientiae renātīs.
Bengionian Representations, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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