Before I bought the house (well, technically with my ex-wife, but she has been out of the equation for quite a while), I had some long talks with Marie-Rose, the owner.
For some reason, we really got along and it triggered her into telling me about her life.
Her husband had built the house on his own, and they had lived a very happy life under its roof — first with young children, and later with blooming teenagers — but that was before the cancer hit. It devoured her husband in a couple of years, and he literally died on the couch we were sitting in when she told me this.
Her new husband — an avid cigar smoker and very pleasant man whom I hardly understood when he spoke — then explained to me that they had actually met in the hospital ward where their respective spouses were regulars, as cancer patients. When the spouses had passed away, it seemed only natural to comfort one another.
Less than five years after that conversation, her second husband would also die from cancer (I guess the cigar-thing finally took its toll), on the same couch but in a new house.
Marie-Rose was an extremely devoted religious woman, and it was almost impossible for her to understand why she of all people had to lose two husbands to that terrible disease.
The house was enormous, and its entire second floor (of more than 1,500 square feet) still needed to get flooring, windows, isolation, electricity — you name it. But since the first floor was even more spacious and already had a number of large rooms, there never was a hurry to decorate the second floor, and the plans finally vanished when Marie-Rose’s first husband got sick.
One day, when I was removing old and very dusty styrofoam plates from that empty space, I found an old plastic bag with nudie magazines in it from the 1970s, hidden under an old wooden floor board. It must have been one of the final things he had done before he had to quit his activities on the second floor altogether.
Most probably he kept it secret for his religious wife, and maybe he thought that the floor board would keep his secret for many years to come — maybe even forever. But he never counted on the fact that he would die young from cancer, and that his house — his master piece — would be sold to a third party.
I met Marie-Rose many times after that, but I never told her about the secret her late husband and I shared over his grave —
Some things are better left untold.