Canada is less a single setting than a country remembered from elsewhere: through an emigrant’s stories of snow and northern forests, through family secrets carried across generations, and through the wartime refuge offered to an exiled empress. These accounts make Canada a landscape of memory and displacement, as well as a point of connection between otherwise distant family histories.

A Northern Homeland Remembered in Cuba

Matilda’s Canadian origins survive in her descendants’ recollections of the country. Rodrigo remembers hearing that his great-grandmother came from Canada and spoke French. Her stories described houses buried under snow, winds that roared like beasts, and snow so hard it stung the face. When a few flakes fell in Cárdenas, she and her family consulted a geography book to find Canada on the map: a faraway place made suddenly tangible by the weather.

Maria, who had known Matilda, recalled a broader portrait of the woman behind those stories. Matilda was tall, forceful, and given to exuberant laughter. She spoke of hunting and fishing in dense forests and on immense lakes, and of sugar drawn from maple trees—a substance Maria found strange beside Cuba’s sugar cane. A tin of maple syrup that Rodrigo brought back from Varadero became a small, carefully preserved link to Matilda’s northern past: Maria rationed it by the half-spoonful on Sundays for years.

Migration and a Broken Family Connection

The memories also preserve the rupture behind Matilda’s departure. As a teenager, she left her home village after her mother died in childbirth and after she rebelled against the Founder. Her story passed into family silence; in Canada’s absence, snow and maple syrup became some of the few vivid traces of the life she had left behind. Loïc, encountering the family connection in Cuba, recognized the Canadian landscape in the stories and was astonished that a relative erased from much of the D’Anjou family’s memory had reappeared through Maria’s recollections.

Canada also enters the family’s history through adoption, though the events took place elsewhere. A record Loïc examined described a rescued infant found with a piece of jewelry and later adopted in Saint-Louis by a young French-Canadian couple. The child was baptized as Éloi; an unclear entry in the register helped produce the name Élie, and he became the Founder. The account ties the family’s Canadian-French identity to a transnational beginning rather than to a birth in Canada. Separately, the Founder confided that he himself had been adopted and knew nothing of his original family, a secret he kept from his descendants.

Refuge in the Province of Québec

Canada is also presented as a place of refuge. Loïc tells the Castelmonts that Zita, the last Empress of Austria, lived in the Province of Québec from 1942 until the end of the decade. A religious community provided her with a modest house outside Québec City, where she lived with some of her children, who studied at Laval University. Her circumstances were dignified but close to poverty. In this account, Canada offers shelter far from a former imperial home, extending the novel’s recurring association between migration, precarious belonging, and the stories families carry with them.