A Very Bold Leap (23 page)

W
earing a dressing gown and slippers, Parfait Michaud carefully filled two glasses of port and handed one to Charles; the young man thanked him with a slight nod of his head, still surprised by this unexpected meeting at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. Wedged into a sofa chair, he stared covetously at a stack of compact discs on a sideboard to his right, transformed into a luminous column by a ray of sunlight coming through the window. He wondered how much such a collection of CDs would cost.

“Since you’re in a hurry, Charles, I won’t beat around the bush. Fernand told me yesterday that you’re about to take off on a trip around the province with a
preacher
. You’ll forgive my asking this, Charles, but…
have you taken leave of your senses?”

Charles gave a start and the port danced in his glass.

“Not at all,” he said dryly.

“I’m glad to hear it. But I’m afraid it doesn’t quite ease my mind, not in the slightest. Have you considered the amount of trouble you could be getting into?”

“I don’t see any trouble.”

“Charles, Charles, don’t underestimate these people, or their powers of seduction… and I’m using the word in its larger connotation, my dear fellow. You laugh, but you may soon be laughing out of the other side of your mouth. These people are master manipulators, Charles, the best in the business: they’ve made a profession out of it.”

“I’m nearly twenty-one years old, Parfait,” said Charles, derisively.

“I know you are, and I know you are an intelligent, cultivated young man. More than that. But that doesn’t change anything. Plenty of men more savvy and experienced than you have fallen victim to their sort of brainwashing.

It’s a science, Charles. I read a book about it. Given enough time and opportunity, these people can indoctrinate anyone. Haven’t you heard about the experiments in the Soviet Union? And China? And in the States? They take a free man and turn him into a consenting slave. It’s simply a matter of having the patience. Who is this preacher-man, anyway?”

“His name is Raphaël Grandbois. He should have gone into politics. He talks as well as Pierre Bourgault.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?”

“He’s promised he’ll never hound me with questions of religion.”

“Of course he has! What do you expect him to promise? That’s part of their strategy. Small steps, one foot after another.”

“If I ever feel I’m getting in over my head, all I have to do is call it quits, simple as that.”

“Yes, it may seem like that now, because you’re a free man. But how long will that last? That’s the question.”

Charles’s response was to laugh.

Sitting across from him on the sofa, the notary shrugged his shoulders in a discouraged fashion, then stretched out his legs and took to studying the ceiling. His glass of port, posed on the armrest, assumed a dangerous angle. Charles leapt from his chair and caught it just as it was about to fall.

“You see?” he said, still laughing, and leaned over Michaud. “I see everything.”

Michaud thanked him with a curt nod and took the glass. Charles sat back down on his chair and studied the notary. He made a pitiful sight.

“Parfait,” he said quietly, with unaccustomed tenderness, “believe me, you’re getting worked up over nothing. I want to travel with this guy because it’ll be interesting, I know it will, but it will also be educational. I’ll learn a lot. That’s important to me, Parfait. Can’t you imagine what it’ll be like? Travelling all over Quebec for six months or a year! I want to learn about life from the top to the bottom, from every angle, in all its shapes and sizes, the good and the bad, everything, every last bit of it… I need this … If I don’t do it now, I might never go back to writing. Don’t you understand?”

“Are you sure it’s so necessary to live through all those experiences, Charles, that you have to put yourself in the hands of a manipulative cultist who, in all likelihood, is also a pervert?”

Charles, taken up short, said nothing.

“Listen to me, my friend,” the notary pursued in a hard, urgent voice. “I asked you to come here this morning because I take things very seriously. We’ve known each other a long time, Charles. I remember like it was yesterday the morning you came to my door because you wanted to divorce your father. Whether we knew it or not at the time, that was the day you became a kind of son to me, the son I never had and I would never have, and from that day on I began, bit by bit, to feel attached to you and to try to help you in any way that I could. Charles, I beg you, take the advice of an old notary who’s going bald and growing a beer belly but who’s been through the mill a few times and seen his share of nastiness in the course of his career: get away from this snake-oil salesman, this seller of signs of the cross, and look for some other way to get what you want…. Nothing, I give you my word, nothing would make us happier — me, Fernand, Lucie, and, above all, Céline.”

And to hide the tears that had begun to gather in the corners of his eyes, he bent back his head and took a large mouthful of port.

“I’ll think about it,” Charles said after a moment. “I’m not promising anything.”

The notary gave a small, nervous laugh. “Fair enough. I’ve said my piece. There’s nothing more I can do. If you were still a minor, I’d grab you by the scruff of your neck and lock you in your room until you’d had time to think things over. But, as you’ve just pointed out, you’re almost twenty-one, more’s the pity…. A little port?”

He refilled their glasses, settled himself back on the sofa, and spent a moment watching the amber liquid shimmer in the sunlight. Charles, moved by their talk but slightly irritated, had for the past few minutes been worried by Michaud’s warning. Now he was aware that Céline was waiting for him in his apartment. He’d left a note on the kitchen table telling her where he was.

“I also asked you to come here for another reason, Charles,” Parfait suddenly said, putting down his glass.

He smiled sadly.

“Amélie and I are going to separate. I wanted to tell you personally.”

Charles, taken completely by surprise, searched his mind for something to say and came up with nothing.

“I was wondering where she was,” he finally murmured. “Is she out shopping?”

“No, my friend. She’s undergoing hydrotherapy treatments in Baie-Saint-Paul. Five days of it. Eight hundred dollars. Hydrotherapy … ironic, isn’t it, when you think that our marriage is going down for the third time … I’d pay ten times that amount, twenty times, fifty, if there were some treatment that would make her happy. No such treatment exists, I’m afraid. So, rather than totally destroy one another, we’re going to try living apart. It’s all the rage these days, I hear. I hope you’re luckier in love than I have been, my dear Charles, or at least better at it.”

“Can I take a last look in the Christmas Room?” the young man asked in a miserable voice.

“Of course. Stay there as long as you like. It’s probably the last time you’ll be able to see it.”

Charles turned on the Christmas tree lights and, seated in the rocking chair, tried to lose himself in the twinkling multicoloured lights, the carols, and the joyful chimes. Was it because it was a beautiful day towards the end of summer? Whatever it was, the magic didn’t seem to be working, as though it were old, dusty, decrepit. However, every once in a while he managed a tiny whiff of childhood, awakened from a deep sleep, that brought a sigh of peace to his lips.

“Poor Amélie,” he murmured. “This will kill her.”

He wanted to leave her a message of friendship, or encouragement, but what to say? She would sense his pity and be offended by it. He quickly left the notary’s house, promising once again to give their discussion deep thought.

Arriving home, he found a note from Céline scribbled on the back of his own.
Tired of waiting. Gone shopping with a friend. Will call at suppertime
. Ever since he had told her about his forthcoming trip with Father Raphaël, their relationship had become decidedly cooler…

Boff, who had been asleep in the living room, woke up and walked into the kitchen, his head low, his eyes heavy. It suddenly occurred to Charles that his dog had become very old.

In order to acknowledge Charles’s departure, and to try to put a good face on a bad situation, Céline decided to throw a small surprise party for him in
his apartment. He was leaving Montreal in two days and would not be back for several weeks.

She had shed a lot of tears since he’d told her of his decision. She’d begged him to refuse to work for this peripatetic preacher who was surely nothing more than a profiteer, if not a madman. He might even be both. With the tragic air of Cassandra before the Trojan Horse, she predicted that Charles’s long absences would be the end of their love. She had even threatened to leave him.

Nothing worked. Charles clung tenaciously to his decision. After all, he was asking for just one year, perhaps even less than that, enough time to benefit from an experience that, he assured her, would make him a complete man, capable of understanding the whole of life, and, it followed naturally, of being a better lover.

She secretly regretted not being pregnant. There was nothing like a swollen belly to keep certain men from straying. Fatherhood had taken care of more than one adventurer, and the entire world was the better for it. But she rejected that idea as being ugly and stupid.

The next morning she relaxed a little. Her love for Charles, unpredictable though he was, was genuine, and impossible to fight. After all, she told herself, a year was not a lifetime. And anyway, she was convinced that he wouldn’t last out the year. Something would happen that would blow the whole thing up in his face. In order to work with numbskulls (and who else would he find in such a ridiculous sect?), he’d have to be a numbskull himself—or at least become one. Charles wasn’t without his faults, Heaven knew, but he had a good head on his shoulders and would almost certainly tire of this atmosphere of religious fervour in which he would be immersed from morning to night.

And so she had had the idea of throwing a party for him, to show him how devoted she was to him, and how adaptable she was by nature, hoping that he would be pleased. It was a small party: she’d invited only Blonblon, Isabel, Steve (this would be one of his first outings since his accident), and her brother Henri, who was taking night classes at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and couldn’t get away. After giving the matter a great deal of thought, she decided against inviting her parents or the notary, Parfait Michaud. She thought their presence would be a drag on the atmosphere. She bought beer and wine, borrowed her mother’s recipe for fettuccine Alfredo, one of Charles’s favourite meals, and carefully prepared it in advance to serve for dinner. The road to a man’s heart was through his stomach, she had read
somewhere, and she wanted to make sure the road between them was solid and memorable. She didn’t want to overlook anything.

Since Charles had been getting off work early these past few days (upon learning of his departure, Coïmbro had begun to sulk and pretend he hadn’t needed an assistant in the first place), Blonblon was given the task of keeping him away from home until after seven o’clock, so that Céline and Isabel would have time to finish the preparations. They tidied up the apartment (which was chronically untidy), vacuumed it, washed the dishes that had been festering in the sink, and hung paper streamers in the kitchen and the living room. Céline also borrowed a magnificent tablecloth, embroidered with flowers, from her mother, with which she covered the kitchen table. Boff trotted tirelessly from room to room, supervising the operations, wagging his tail, sniffing at each unfamiliar object, and giving off the occasional whine, the significance of which remained his own secret.

“This was a great idea you had there, Céline,” Isabel said, caressing her cheek.

“What idea?”

“To have this party for Charles. He’ll love it. When a man gets it into his head to do something, you’re wasting your time trying to get him to change his mind. You run the risk of losing him altogether.”

“Ha!” Céline replied, laughing. “I see you’ve had your obedience training. You’ll have a happy life …”