A Very Bold Leap (12 page)

“With the material you’re going to give me,” he’d ended, “I’ll write a dozen or so articles, all of which will say the same thing but in different words, and send them to various newspapers.”

“He writes for twenty-seven papers,” Pigeon-Lecuchaux announced triumphantly.

“Twenty-seven!” Charles exclaimed.

“As a freelancer, of course,” Robinard said, yawning. “And under different names. Otherwise it could get complicated…”

“What did I tell you, Charles!” the publisher had enthused. “Gaston makes a pretty formidable launching pad, don’t you think? He’s everywhere, like God. You can read him in the Valleyfield
Echo
, in
The Eye on Berthierville
, in the Drummondville
Projector
, in
The People’s Voice
in Clova, in the Lévis
Vigil
, the Arthabaska
Flash, The Vigilante
in Saint-Georges-de-Beauce. You
can even read him in
The Dawn Chorus
in Rivière-du-Loup. I can see the doubt creeping into your eyes: you’re waiting for me to mention
La Presse
and the
Montreal Journal
and
Le Devoir
, and the
Sun
, and the
Tribune
, and the
Daily
, and all the big papers, right? My dear boy, I keep them in reserve for Round Two. We start with the seedbeds, if I may put it that way, and then, when our message is properly sown in the provincial press, we hit Montreal and the other big cities. Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing. I know my job and Gaston knows his. You’ll be amazed by the results, you have my word!”

Charles stopped. Céline and Blonblon stared at their hands, thoughtfully. Then Céline stood up and refilled their three coffee cups. Charles took a mouthful and grimaced at the bitterness of the coffee that had been boiling on the burner.

“When I left the restaurant,” he said, “I was more discouraged than you can imagine. I felt like taking my manuscript, running it through a meat grinder, and pretending I’d never written it.”

Boff was sleeping under the table. At the word “meat,” he raised his head, sniffed the air a couple of times, detected nothing particularly interesting, then lowered his muzzle to his paws. He kept his eye on his master, however, whose face made him feel uneasy.

“Is that how things work with every writer?” Céline asked, appalled. “If that’s the case it’s awful — you can’t believe anything. It’s all a trick.”

“Oh, come on,” said Blonblon. “Of course it isn’t. You’re dealing with a couple of crooks, Charles. It’s obvious.”

“Well, then I’ve got two choices,” Charles said sarcastically. “The crooks… or nothing!”

Blonblon brought his cup to his lips and also made a face, but not because of the coffee. The very idea that the world was full of crooks of varying degrees of crookedness took his breath away. He took a second drink and the insupportable thought went away. He pointed a finger at his friend. “Instead of sitting here spinning our wheels,” he said, “why don’t you go talk to your notary friend, Michaud, and tell him the whole story. He knows about books. He can advise you on what to do. Give it a try, Charles.”

“Whatever you do,” Céline pleaded, “don’t breathe a word of this to Fernand. He’s got enough to worry about as it is. Promise me you won’t, Charles?”

Sitting behind his desk, Parfait Michaud pushed his chair back and hooked his thumbs in his belt.

“Charming, Charles — oops, sorry for the alliteration — but what you’re dealing with here is called Vanity publishing.’ Odd that no one told you about it before …”

“Vanity publishing?” the young man repeated. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“Well, it’s sort of the last resort for a writer who can’t find a publisher and is willing to do anything to get his book published. There are these vanity presses that charge the writer to put out his book. That’s what Otis Editions is. Simple as that.”

“Hmm, yes, I see,” Charles murmured sarcastically. “Publishers who play on the writer’s vanity.”

“Oh, come on, Charles! Not finding a publisher doesn’t mean you’ve written something worthless. Look at Proust, or Gide, or Henry Miller. There’s a whole list of them. My advice would be to keep trying to find yourself a … a real publisher. I don’t know a lot about the publishing side of things, but it does strike me that the five thousand dollars this guy is charging you is way on the high side. There are crooks everywhere, and it’s possible this Frenchman is one of them. I wouldn’t trust him. On the other hand,” he continued with a slightly forced smile, “you’ve never let me read the great work, have you? What are you waiting for? I’m crushed, my dear boy!”

“Sorry,” Charles replied, blushing. “I’ll bring you a copy.”

He asked Michaud a few more questions, then thanked him and left.

C
harles was so sure that Parfait Michaud’s assessment of his novel would be harsh that he didn’t bring him the manuscript, despite knowing that his decision would cause the notary to feel slighted. He did, however, take Michaud’s advice and went back to looking for a publisher. By spring he’d had three more rejections and was so discouraged that he’d stopped working on his second novel. One night, in a fit of rage, he grabbed every copy of
The Dark Night
he had in his apartment, took the stairs to the street two at a time, and threw the manuscripts into the back of a garbage truck he had heard approaching. The next day, to his great relief, he learned that Steve Lachapelle still had one copy at his place.

All this time, Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux was inundating him with phone calls. Charles fended him off as best he could, saying he had decided to continue to work on the novel.

“Better is the enemy of good, my friend,” the publisher warned him one day. “If you pull at too many threads, the whole fabric will come unravelled in your hands. Let it go, for the love of… It’s time to give birth! If you don’t, the damned thing will just fester inside you forever! I need that manuscript soon; otherwise I won’t have time to attend to it properly. If you only knew how many people are chasing after me, begging me to publish their work…. Sometimes I have to go into hiding if I want to get anything done.”

Pigeon-Lecuchaux took out his calculator again and gave Charles a new price: four thousand, four hundred dollars.

“I’m only offering you this ridiculously low price because I admire your work so much. Any lower and I’d be losing my shirt — and my pants, too!”

On the fourth of May, Charles relented, and agreed to sign a contract.

There remained the business of finding the money. He had nine hundred and forty-two dollars in his savings account. Céline had filled her mother in on the situation, after making her swear not to tell Fernand, and Lucie managed to come up with three hundred dollars. Céline herself chipped in two hundred. Steve Lachapelle, in a spontaneous display of friendship that touched Charles deeply, promised to give up smoking and hand the money over to Charles — five dollars a week. If the truth be told, he secretly pinched cigarettes from his mother’s packs. Blonblon had closed his repair shop some time before and was devoting all his efforts to his studies, and so was strapped for cash; nonetheless, one fine day he turned up and handed ninety-five dollars over to Charles, saying he was sorry he couldn’t come up with more.

That still left Charles far short of the forty-four hundred. Despite the unlimited enthusiasm he claimed to have for the work of his young author, Pigeon-Lecuchaux refused to go ahead until he had the entire sum in hand.

It was Blonblon who got the project rolling again, although totally by chance. One afternoon around mid-May, he and Steve were walking home from the Cegep when he saw a cardboard box sitting on the sidewalk beside a pile of green garbage bags, awaiting pickup. Out of curiosity, he opened it. Inside were three dozen small glass jars, all neatly arranged, and empty but with their cardboard lids intact; they were a bit dusty but otherwise in excellent condition.

“Delisle yoghurt!” Steve exclaimed. “Wow! They must be pretty old. I don’t remember seeing anything like them in the grocery stores. They must go back to when my mother was a little girl. Maybe we could sell them to an antique dealer.”

Blonblon picked up the box. He had a good instinct for nosing out collectibles, and his room was full of all sorts of curious objects. The box was quite light, and he decided to take it home.

A few days later, he happened to show the jars to Charles.

“I’ll bet you could make a few bucks with these,” Charles said after looking them over.

Blonblon was dubious.

“They must go back quite a few years,” Charles insisted. “At least to the
1950s, maybe earlier… Who knows? Maybe the Delisle company doesn’t have any and would pay a lot to put them in its museum. All those big companies have their own museums, you know.”

“Well, take them, they’re yours,” said Blonblon. “Sell them for five thousand dollars, give Pigeon-Lecuchaux his money, and give the rest to me,” he added, laughing.

The next day, with the box under his arm, Charles took a bus out to the head offices of Delisle Dairy Products, in Boucherville, and after a great deal of explaining, succeeded in meeting with one of the managers, a large, burly man with an energetic, jovial manner. His dark hair was cut short, and he had a strangely blunt nose and large, ham-coloured splotches on each of his cheeks. His eyes widened when he saw the jars, but he quickly assumed a more blasé look — too late, though, for Charles had noted his initial reaction.

“Don’t tell me you’ve come all this way to waste my time with this junk,” he said to Charles, trying to repair the damage.

Charles’s face turned deep red and he stood up to leave the room.

“Okay, okay, don’t get your dander up! Sit down, we can talk about this.”

The two men smiled at each other and the negotiations began.

Charles said he wanted three thousand for them, and the manager offered five hundred. Half an hour later, Charles left the building with a thousand dollars in his pocket, proud of his negotiating skills. He decided to split the money fifty-fifty with Blonblon, who refused to take his half, saying it was his contribution to the first edition of
The Dark Night
.

When Lucie heard the story, she was so amazed by her adoptive son’s ingenuity that she went to a cupboard, removed a manila folder from it (the contents of which were known to no one but herself), and took it to the Credit Union; she came home with a cheque for five hundred dollars, which she gave to Charles with a broad smile.

“You can pay me back whenever you can,” she said. “I can say I helped out a writer once in my life.”

He was still about fourteen hundred dollars short, but Pigeon-Lecuchaux was accommodating. The next day Charles signed a contract with Otis Editions, one clause of which stipulated that the Author would pay the Publisher the sum of twenty-five dollars per week until the entire Debt was cleared, in default of which by the Author the ownership of the Work would revert to the Publisher.

“
Dura lex sed lex”
commented Pigeon-Lecuchaux, who liked to thumb through the red pages of his dictionary. “The law can be tough but fair.”

In his eagerness to become a published author, Charles accepted all Pigeon-Lecuchaux’s conditions without querying any of them. He could feel the laurels of fame already encircling his brow; as he walked back to his apartment, he caught himself wondering why no one stopped him to offer their congratulations.

The Quiet Rip-Off
(as the publisher retitled it) came out at the beginning of June, printed on thick, yellowish newsprint that smelled slightly of mould, and bound in a two-colour cover of astonishing ugliness. Charles winced when he saw it, but dared not express his disappointment.

The launch took place on the 15th of June in a bar called Les Bobettes Folichonnes, on boulevard Saint-Laurent. The bar was painted in vibrant colours, the walls decorated with an impressive array of women’s slips and men’s boxer shorts; its clientele consisted mainly of out-of-work revolutionaries, laid-off clerks, part-time students, and intellectuals in search of a cause. All of Charles’s friends and acquaintances were there, as well as many of their friends and acquaintances, and for a while, at least, there appeared to be almost a crowd — a first for Les Bobettes, which for the past two years had been squirming under the menacing eye of its banker.

Charles sat at a table, prey to the usual first-time author’s jitters. He signed seventy-seven copies of his book, figured he must have sold an additional thirty, talked to everyone but noticed no one, and remembered nothing of the evening except that he had been happy, convinced that he had finally entered the world of the celebrity. Everyone drank a great deal of cheap wine out of plastic cups, and for twenty minutes dined on bowls of free chips and pretzels, which after that they had to pay for. Fernand was wearing a black suit with blue pin-stripes along with a blood-red tie, an outfit that put off Les Bobettes’s owner because it reminded him of his banker. However, the hardware-store owner rapidly rose in the barman’s estimation when he picked up everyone’s beer tab. Even Bernard Délicieux was kind enough to make a brief appearance, despite the fact that he was working under a pressing deadline.

When he saw Charles’s book, his disappointment showed. “Everything that goddamned Pigeon-Lecuchaux does is slipshod, isn’t it? Why the hell does he bother?” He thumbed through a copy, put off by the cheap paper, the
narrow margins, the thin ink job, the small typeface. Then, setting it down before Charles, he smiled.

“Would you do me the honour, my dear author, of an inscription?”

And as Charles bent over the book, tongue between his teeth, racking his brains for an original, witty phrase, Délicieux leaned towards him and added, “You know, Charles, nothing begins without a good start…”

At six o’clock Pigeon Lecuchaux called for silence, and after several appeals — for alcohol always loosens the vocal cords — the room became quiet enough for him to deliver a short, sonorous speech in which he praised “this young, spirited Canadian literature — or should I say
Québécois
literature — that has brought such a breath of fresh air to our old French culture,” then turned the spotlight on Charles in particular, “our newest romantic hero,” from whom, they could be assured, they had not heard the last. He stopped, extended his hand to the young author, and invited him to say a few words. Charles, as red as a ripe tomato, thanked everyone for coming and could then think of absolutely nothing else to say. He stammered the one or two inane phrases that came to his lips, said he hoped they would all enjoy reading the novel, and sat down.

Half an hour later, the tables had been cleared and the ashtrays wiped clean. It was over. Dull, ordinary life reasserted itself. Fernand and Lucie invited the young author and a dozen others to a nearby Italian restaurant; Charles found himself sitting between Céline and Henri, across from Blonblon and Isabel; Steve was beside Monsieur Victoire (who was sporting a tie for the first time in ten years) and Rosalie, who had come in from the Laurentians with Roberto and had put on a considerable amount of weight. Pigeon-Lecuchaux held forth from the head of the table. On his left, Roberto, looking pink and healthy, kept casting annoyed glances at him; on his right sat a young, strangely beautiful woman who had come with the publisher but whom no one else knew and who hadn’t uttered a single word all night. The publisher ate and drank like a soldier on leave, talked a great deal about his past triumphs, made a few not very funny jokes, then took his leave of the assembled guests along with his silent friend, saying he had “a mountain of paperwork to do before the morning.”

That night, Charles went to bed feeling sad, somehow. He couldn’t say why. “Hey, you!” he chided himself before going to sleep. “You’re a writer now. Cheer up!” But he remained unconvinced.

Two weeks went by. Charles went to work at the hardware store, hung around with Céline, went out with his friends. Newspapers came and went, television programs marched by. No one seemed aware of the existence of
The Quiet Rip-Off
, or of its author. As far as the general public was concerned, it might as well have been published on the moon.