Loïc Bolduc—Rodrigo Lerbier

Loïc Bolduc and Rodrigo Lerbier’s relationship turns a chance meeting in Cuba into a startling discovery of kinship, then binds that new family connection to the dangerous history of the D’Anjou cameo. They begin as strangers speaking after a religious ceremony; by the end of their conversation, each recognizes the other as a cousin. The discovery offers Loïc an unexpected living link to a branch of his family that had crossed from Canada to Cuba, while Rodrigo’s later effort to return the cameo gives their bond a practical test that ends in another theft.

A Chance Conversation in Havana

After the ceremony, Manuel brings Loïc and Laurence to meet Rodrigo, a Yoruba priest and diviner. The group walks through the Havana night toward the bus that will take them back to Varadero. Rodrigo speaks French, learned through years of work in Varadero’s shops and hotels, and conversation comes easily. Loïc feels an immediate sense of fraternity with him, something he understands as exceeding a general connection between Latin peoples. That unaccountable ease precedes any knowledge of their family relationship.

Loïc asks Rodrigo about Yoruba religion, then abruptly asks whether stones can contain curses. Rodrigo is momentarily disconcerted. He wonders whether Loïc might be an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or whether he has somehow learned the story of the cameo in Cárdenas. Rodrigo suspects Manuel may have told him something, but conceals his unease and answers cautiously: stones can concentrate powerful energies, positive or negative.

In explanation, Loïc tells Rodrigo part of his family’s story. He describes a jewel of unknown provenance that belonged to his great-grandfather and that, he believes, brought harmful effects upon the family. He offers examples but withholds that the jewel is a cameo, and that it disappeared in New York on September 11, 2001. The disclosure is deliberately incomplete: Loïc shares enough to make the object’s history intelligible as a family burden, but not enough to reveal its full identity or recent fate.

The Cameo and an Unspoken Recognition

As the two men continue down the street, passing a building marked with cabalistic inscriptions, Loïc suddenly experiences a brief rupture in ordinary perception. The surroundings vanish; he sees himself deep within the Earth, swept through a gravitational rush of stones and rocks toward a vast central forge, where horrible, distorted figures flicker into view. The vision lasts only seconds, but Rodrigo notices the sudden flow of energy passing through Loïc.

They are close to a Yoruba altar where the malevolent cameo is displayed. Rodrigo connects Loïc’s experience to the stone and senses an occult relation between them, though he cannot determine what that relation is. Their connection thus takes shape on two levels at once: an inexplicable familial affinity is moving toward conscious recognition, while Rodrigo reads Loïc’s physical and visionary response as evidence of a link to the very object that has brought him to Cuba.

The conversation also stirs Rodrigo’s memories of his great-grandmother, Mathilde. He never knew her, but his mother often spoke of her during his childhood, recalling stories of the Canadian woman’s memories of houses buried beneath snow, subzero cold, howling winds, and hard snow that stung the face. Rodrigo remembers one occasion when a few snowflakes fell in Cárdenas and he and his mother consulted a geography book to locate Canada, the country from which Mathilde had come. These inherited fragments make Canada more than a distant place: they give Rodrigo a personal, if incomplete, history that becomes crucial to recognizing Loïc.

The Discovery of Their Kinship

Rodrigo tells Loïc that Mathilde came from Canada, though he cannot recall what his mother said about her family name. As they walk, Rodrigo notices an unknown person following them and trying to keep to the shadows of buildings. Given the repression against dissident circles in the capital, the presence makes him uneasy. The encounter therefore unfolds under both personal and political uncertainty: a new intimacy is forming while Rodrigo remains alert to possible danger.

Loïc, meanwhile, remembers that a daughter of the Founder had fled her father’s home and ended up in Cuba. Her name was Mathilde. He asks whether Rodrigo’s great-grandmother might have been a D’Anjou. Rodrigo’s tentative recollection of the name gives Loïc the opening to connect the family histories. Loïc explains that his mother was a D’Anjou and that she had an aunt, her father’s sister, named Mathilde. He recounts what he knows of her flight to the United States and her meeting with a man who brought her to Cuba, probably before 1900.

The exchange transforms Rodrigo’s childhood stories into a genealogical bridge. What had been a vague memory of a Canadian ancestor now aligns with Loïc’s account of a D’Anjou woman who crossed into Cuba. Loïc realizes that they may be relatives and says so; Rodrigo is shaken by the possibility. He embraces Loïc and recognizes him as a cousin. Their kinship is not established through documents in this encounter, but through the convergence of a family name, a remembered migration, and a history Loïc can supply that Rodrigo himself had not retained.

Kinship and the Attempted Return

The bus waiting to take the group back to Varadero interrupts their conversation. Loïc has to leave his newly discovered cousin, but the two promise to keep in contact and meet again. The scene ends not with a settled family reunion but with an intention: the relationship has been named and welcomed, while future contact remains a promise.

Later, Rodrigo tells Loïc that the cameo is his and that he had wanted to give it back so Loïc could take it to Montréal. He explains that the object had been temporarily hung on the wall, as it had been in Havana. When Rodrigo enters the place of worship, however, the cameo is gone. The break-in appears directed solely at the jewel: nothing else has been stolen or vandalized. Loïc, who has followed Rodrigo inside, does not understand at first what has happened or why Rodrigo calls it his cameo.

The failed handover gives the cousin relationship a concrete but unfinished consequence. Rodrigo’s intention is to return the family object to Loïc, tying kinship to an act of trust; the theft prevents that act from being completed and renews the cameo’s pattern of disappearance. The evidence does not identify who broke in or establish what happens to the cousins’ promised contact. Their reunion remains inseparable from the mystery that first brought them together: a shared ancestry has been uncovered, but the object connecting their family histories remains beyond their reach.