Greta never knew why she’d done what she did – though it needed explaining, she had to know that – or why she had revealed her true identity to Gilbert without preparing him, on a sudden impulse, she who bragged so often that she was level-headed and thoughtful. She did it in good faith, she’d always been convinced of that, no doubt to put an end to a misunderstanding that had gone on for too long, for the education of this child who was smart for his age though fundamentally very naïve, but she would regret it for the rest of her life and often said to clients, if she thought they were understanding, or when depression struck, that she had lost a child sometime in the 1950s because she’d said too much.

As if it were intentional, the show wasn’t over when Greta and Gilbert went into the Coconut Inn late that night. The doorman – a simple-minded hulk who didn’t match his name, which was Gaspard Petit – told them that Madame Veuve was in good shape that night and that she’d decided to double the pleasure by encoring every number she performed, in their complete version, police surveillance or not. He had emphasized the word complete with a huge wink whose significance only Greta understood.

Greta had to be sure that Gilbert didn’t see his mother naked on the stage of the Coconut Inn, so she’d decided to go in and see where she was in her act before she crossed the club in the company of such a young child who was bound to attract the attention of the drinkers crushed by alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke. Or of the policeman on duty – no doubt bought by Maurice – who might forbid them to come in, out of bravado, to show Maurice that he still had a bit of independence even though, like several of his colleagues, he was on his payroll.

Madame Veuve, as if suddenly struck by nostalgia, had brought out all her old acts, though she’d renounced them for so long, and at that moment was in the middle of “Paris, reine du monde,” but minus the hoop-skirts or the powdered wig. Greta frowned. So she was doing her whole repertoire in her widow’s weeds? And when she’d finished undressing, the stripper left the stage, put on her black two-piece suit, her hat, her veil, her gloves and began again, changing nothing but the musical accompaniment – scratched old records she’d been dragging around forever? And the audience wasn’t complaining? After all, though, it was not so much the costume that mattered, in the end it was the stark naked woman, in spite of and because of the prohibitions, the forbidden fruit in all its glory, the fantasy never realized and always renewed, that made hearts beat and brought the blood up to the head, and it hardly mattered what had come before. Naked, Madame Veuve, formerly Peach Blossom, was the same no matter what costume she’d just taken off, and the men in the Coconut Inn didn’t give a damn that she’d stripped off her widow’s weeds instead of the elegant garb of a Marie-Antoinette. It was what they saw for some too brief seconds – the most beautiful thing in the world, the most exciting, the most inaccessible too – that mattered. They gazed at the large pink smudge that was moving on the stage, the darker triangle in particular, and every time, they were struck by their own insignificance. Never would they possess a beauty like her, that they knew, and they drowned their dejection in the alcohol that cost the least but hit the hardest. To forget their own helplessness.

And so Greta brought the child in before the crucial moment. Gilbert waved to his mother, who couldn’t see him. He craned his neck a little to look at all these men who’d come to see his mother beg them for money. He could see her though. It was strange to note how different she was when she was onstage. On the street with her hand held out and an insult ready to let fly she was an uncontrollable demon; there, with the pink spotlights, she transformed herself into an angel covered in diaphanous tulle whom you wanted to hold against your heart. His real mother, the one in his dreams, was that one, the beggar woman in an improved version. But the one who was going to join them in the wings later on, who swept into the dressing room, in search of a cigarette or a bottle of Bols as usual, would be very different: without the miracle of the flattering lights, she was once again the weeping widow to whom he had to be subjected every day for such a long time and who weighed on him more and more heavily.

There was no one in the dressing room. As Madame Veuve’s was the last act of the night – what was called on the poster in English the special feature and in French la vedette principale – the other girls had slipped away as soon as their acts were done to party somewhere else, with friends from the neighbourhood or clients of the Coconut Inn who’d noticed them, considered them, then hefted them like merchandise to be had for the lowest price possible. Strictly for want of anything else to do – she was afraid the evening would drag on forever – Greta sat at the other girls’ makeup table instead of in Madame Veuve’s cramped dressing room and started fiddling with everything on it – lipsticks, jars of cream, tubes of foundation, tweezers and toilet water in bottles of every shape and every colour. She sprayed herself with Jean Patou’s Moment Suprême, which took her back to her early days in the red-light district, during World War II, when Montréal Mayor Camilien Houde had been thrown into jail because he dared to publicly oppose conscription. When Greta arrived, the city had just been emptied of its men who’d gone to war in the old countries. Everything the hookers, male or female, could expect by way of customers – and this had been the case for years – was soldiers on leave or priests ashamed sometimes to the point of impotence and life, already, had shown itself to be a bitch and not easy.

Even today, when she tells this story, holding a beer and smiling sadly, she maintains that it was Gilbert who’d started everything, that it was his fault, ultimately, if she’d committed an act that she swore was not premeditated but that sprang from exasperation stretched out over too long a period of time, not from a will to instruct a child who was ignorant of the facts of life.

While she was perfuming herself, she’d seen her reflection in the mirror through the cloud of rice powder she’d just stirred up with a candy-pink powder-puff that made her want to sneeze.

Gilbert had brought his hand to his throat and said very softly, as if he were talking to himself, “I’ve got an Adam’s apple too.”

Then, with eyebrows in circumflex accents and furrowed brow, he looked at her. She understood that he had called for help and without giving it a moment’s thought, she’d given him a silent demonstration, probably for fear that she would lack the words for explaining clearly to him the difference between those with an Adam’s apple and those without, and consequently, what she was.

She said just one thing before she started. She was looking at him in the mirror where, she still remembers, there was a crack because one night one of the girls in a fury had flung a prop or a bottle of perfume, and she’d murmured, “Take a good look at this, Gilbert, later on you’ll understand …”

And as the child looked on with alarm, she had removed every trace of the woman that for years, she’d been playing like a role in the theatre, to earn her living, yes, but also because she needed it and because she liked the mask that she painted onto her face every day in the hope of forgetting the man she didn’t want to be: first, she pulled off the false eyelashes, then she removed most of the makeup with a cream that smelled like cucumbers, after that the eye shadow, the glue that hid her real eyebrows and the lipstick that extended onto her cheeks. She rubbed quickly, like someone used to doing it. Her forehead was longer, her cheeks rounder, her mouth practically non-existent, her chin flabby and drooping. Something between a man who doesn’t take good enough care of himself and a woman who has given up any hope of being beautiful.

She no longer looked like herself. Not at all. Already she was not the Greta Gilbert loved so much and his eyes were wide with surprise. Alarmed, almost. He’d often seen his mother without makeup, but never a transvestite – in fact he didn’t even know that they existed, though he’d been hanging out with a bunch of them for years. Without her makeup, his mother was less beautiful but still the same; Greta though had been transformed into something he’d never seen and wished he hadn’t now. Another person. He didn’t want her to be a different person from the one he knew. He didn’t want there to be two of her. He just wanted Greta. His second mother. His chosen mother.

She had looked him in the eyes for a long moment, though, before administering the coup de grâce, shaken by doubt, by the sudden thought that it might all be pointless. And that she was going to lose him forever.

Then, hesitantly, hands trembling, she took off her wig and the nylon stocking with which she tied back her own hair.

She turned towards him, bent over, held out her arm to stroke his cheek.

Still, he didn’t understand.

Greta’s eyes filled with uncontrollable tears. Tears of regret. Already.

“Gilbert … You must have learned about it in school but maybe you’ve forgotten … Women don’t have an Adam’s apple. Men do. And I’ve got one so I’m a man. Like you. d’you understand?”

Gilbert didn’t answer, he was frozen in a grimace that could mean various things: fear, disgust, terror. But still not fully understanding.

“My name is Roger, Gilbert. Roger Beausoleil. That’s my real name. It’s just here that I’m Greta, when I’m working … No, that’s not true. It’s never Roger any more. It’s time you knew that and that you learned to accept it. You’re big enough. You’re old enough. Tell me you’re big enough and old enough and that you understand …”

And the words came. With disconcerting ease. The right words, the most effective, the clearest, put in the right places and used with a mastery she didn’t know she had. She explained everything: hookers, drag queens, what they were doing when Gilbert thought they were waiting for the bus, why they did it but not how because after all, it was too soon for those details. She’d taken long minutes to explain everything, hands on the child’s knees or stroking his cheek while she rubbed his forehead with the tip of her thumb. And he’d listened all the way through, without flinching.

Was she telling him things he already knew but had never wanted to see, or was he totally taken aback? She couldn’t read it on his face and was already cursing herself for being the one to tell him, the one who’d burst his balloon now that he knew and could never again pretend not to. All at once, she would have preferred to erase everything so that the time she’d spent on those damn explanations would have never existed, to put on her false face again, and her wig, make a funny face and tell Gilbert, Come on, sweetheart, we’re going to treat ourselves to the biggest hotdog on the Main! And take off with him while promising herself to keep him ignorant as long as possible.

Too late.

When Madame Veuve came back she saw them facing each other, motionless and silent. She knew right away that something irremediable had just happened and without even bothering to go to her dressing room to change, she grabbed Gilbert by his shirt collar and took him out of the Coconut Inn.

He never talked to Greta again.

By choice.