A Very Bold Leap (35 page)

Slowly he pushed his plate away and sighed.

“I’d like to forget about it, too, Steve, but I can’t. You’d react the same way if you were in my shoes, I know you would. When your friend turns out to be Judas Iscariot, it doesn’t matter how hard he cries on your shoulder … No, sorry, but there’s nothing I can do …”

Steve had jumped to his feet.

“Judas? Is that what you just called me? A Judas?”

He seemed to have taken the phrase, even though he wasn’t quite sure what Charles had meant by it, as a deep insult. He rose up, white with fury, and leaned towards his companion, his hands gripping the edge of the table.

“I won’t be insulted by a spoiled little brat like yourself, you goddamned hypocrite. You hand out your sermons to everyone around you, but you’re no better than any other bozo strutting up and down the street in a baggy clown-suit. Can you even hear me with that swollen head of yours? Goodbye, asshole, I’ve had all I’m going to take from you.”

A few days later, Charles received a letter from Céline:

Céline
                         

Charles crumpled the letter in a rage and threw it on the floor. Then he picked it up, smoothed it out, and read it again, looking up vaguely from time to time and biting his lips. He read it two or three more times, then left his apartment and walked the streets until nightfall.

A
dozen months passed. The year 1989 began. During this time, Charles found a job in a sports store on Sainte-Catherine, across from the Papineau metro station. His life was dull and boring, as though, for him, time had stopped. Every now and then he sat down at his typewriter (he was saving up for a Macintosh SE/30 computer, the marvel of the age) and tried to start a new novel based on his experiences with the Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Christ, but his efforts produced nothing of any merit, and he began to wonder if the novelist in him had died. He had a brief affair with one of the clerks at the store, a tall woman with large feet, and with hair growing from her nose and armpits, whose favourite pastime was watching American soap operas. She could hardly talk of anything else — except sex, of course, her attraction to which was mingled with fear, since at the age of thirteen she had come under the influence of an “uncle” who had roving hands and who had left her with some deep-seated nightmares.

Then, one day, the owner of the store fired her to make room for one of his own daughters; she went back to live with her family in Chicoutimi, and Charles hadn’t seen or heard from her since.

He still thought of Céline. Whenever he did, something sweet and extremely painful stirred in him. He had the feeling that never again would he experience a love as pure and trusting as hers, or so full of profound peace. And he’d blown it stupidly for a few rolls in the hay with a woman who was kind and great in bed but who inspired in him about as much passion as reading a telephone book. Sometimes it was all he could do to keep from calling Céline to tell her he wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, but each time he resisted the urge it grew weaker, and after a while it went
away altogether, tired of beating its head against an object so incredibly hard and indestructible. All Charles could do was watch it fade, a powerless and desolate witness to its demise.

He saw Blonblon once or twice a week, and played pool with a few acquaintances he’d made in the neighbourhood, and read the newspapers with great interest, partly because he seemed to have inherited a passion for politics from Fernand and Parfait Michaud, but also because he was convinced that reading newspapers every day would prepare him for his future career as a journalist. He hadn’t given up hope, despite the fact that Bernard Délicieux’s efforts to get him a job at
Artist’s Life
— or anywhere else, for that matter — had so far been in vain.

“Don’t worry, my friend,” the gossip-monger assured him. “I’m doing everything I can, short of going down on my knees for the magazine’s owner! But where there’s life, there’s hope, eh? It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

Parfait and Amélie had been separated for almost a year and a half. She had had to spend a few weeks in a clinic, after which she took a small apartment on rue de l’Épée, in Outremont, where she lived a very quiet life. She did, however, have a companion: Monsieur Victoire’s parrot. The cab driver had decided to get rid of the bird because its language had become much fouler in its old age, and it required more and more care, which its new owner was only too happy to provide. Whenever her attentions failed to please it, she was treated to an alternating barrage of verbal abuse — “Stupid fathead!” or “Fat Bertha!” — which never failed to delight her.

The notary, who was a little bored with his new life, invited Charles to the theatre or a concert or a restaurant from time to time, but more often than not it was Charles who called on him, taking a circuitous route to the house to avoid having to go near rue Dufresne and run the risk of coming face to face with a member of the Fafard family. One day he saw the hardware-store owner at a distance; he looked a bit thinner, his hair greyer, but he was walking with his habitual energy and determination. Charles watched him for a few minutes with a sad smile and almost went in to see him, but the thought of the scolding he might get and the decibels with which it would be delivered, which he knew Fernand could be counted on to bestow at the least opportunity, made him decide to put off the encounter until more dust had had time to settle.

Parfait Michaud’s remonstrances were a lot easier to take than those of Fernand Fafard.

“What a mess your love life is in, my poor Charles,” the notary said one evening while they were talking in his living room. “I know I’m the last person on earth with the right to reproach you on that score, with my own life in such disarray, but it seems to me that in your place I wouldn’t have reacted the way you did. For one thing, and I don’t wish to make you feel any worse than you do, I find it distasteful to find fault with others for doing the same thing one is doing oneself. You were sleeping with your pharmacist friend. Fine. Céline found out about it and took her revenge by sleeping with one of your friends. All you had to do was give her a good tongue-lashing, in your own inimitable style, and let things get back to normal. After all, you loved each other, isn’t that true? Isn’t that what counts, after all? This new generation, I don’t know, it astonishes me how — what’s the word? —
macho
you can be. Times have changed, my dear boy. Women don’t see themselves as eternal victims anymore when it comes to affairs of the heart. Look at Amélie! Women now demand equality, in bed as well as other places. And men have to adapt to that new reality. What do you want Céline to be, like the ‘habitant wife’ in the old song, faithful and submissive to her man no matter what he does to her? Poor Charles! You’re behind the times, my friend! Complete fidelity, as you yourself must know from your own experience, may be more or less the
ideal
we try to attain, but there are a great bloody lot of us, and you and I are two perfect examples, who don’t have a hope in hell of reaching it. Worse yet, we turn up our noses at it like it was something the cat did on the rug!”

“What about you, Parfait?” Charles replied with a sly smile. “Are you seeing anyone these days?”

“Me? Not a hope,” sighed the notary. “I’ve hit an arid patch that doesn’t seem to have an oasis in sight, alas and alack! Well, it’s the old story. I grow old, I grow old, and the kind of women who please me are no longer pleased by the kind of man I have become.”

“You like them young, as I recall.”

“Quite young, yes. The younger the better. Careful, now, I’m not saying I go after jailbait. But I must say I cannot resist the charms of youth.”

“Maybe you can introduce me to your next conquest, just so I have an idea of your tastes.”

“And so you can steal her away from me, no doubt.”

“I don’t play those kinds of games,” Charles said firmly. “Just out of curiosity. I’ve never laid eyes on a single one of your girlfriends, you know, except once.”

And he told Parfait the story of the astonishing discovery he’d made one night while he was looking for Boff in Médéric-Martin Park, when he’d seen Parfait come out onto the sidewalk with a woman who was obviously not one of his clients. He’d been horrified to learn that the notary was leading a double life. For a long time afterwards, he’d felt a kind of resentment towards him.

Parfait Michaud remained thoughtful.

“How old were you then?” he asked.

“About fourteen, I think.”

“Did I scandalize you?” Michaud asked, worriedly.

Charles laughed. “As if! We did have radio and television in those days, don’t forget.”

The notary sighed again. The turn their conversation had taken was not a pleasant one for him. There was a degree of familiarity in it that threatened his dignity and the health of their relationship. He still thought of himself in some respects as Charles’s father, and it was important to him to maintain that status. In Quebec, a father did not take his son to a house of ill repute, nor did he introduce him to his mistresses. It wasn’t done. It was degrading. The various compartments of one’s life were kept separate, otherwise chaos and confusion ensued.

He stood up, left the room, and came back with a bottle of port and a look on his face that was both worried and a bit haughty. He filled two glasses and handed one to Charles. The latter, intrigued by his friend’s change in demeanour, looked on in silence.

“Charles,” the notary said after a moment, “excuse me for harping on this, but I feel I must return to what we were talking about earlier: I am definitely worried about you.”

“Please, Parfait, spare me just for tonight.”

“No, no, and no! True friendship doesn’t ignore these things. It is a matter of courage and frankness.”

The young man sighed deeply and began rotating the glass between his fingers.

“When are you going to stop spinning your wheels, my boy? You’re twenty-two years old. That’s still young, of course, but you’re coming to the end of your youth. There you are, a young man brimming with talent, wasting your time in a sporting goods store. You could be doing so much better! Have you thought about going back to school?”

“No. I’m thinking of becoming a journalist.”

“Well, do you think you’ll become a journalist by selling tennis racquets and running shoes?”

A bit annoyed, Charles told him that a journalist of his acquaintance was trying to get him a job at a magazine, but it wasn’t easy: for every job that came up, there were fifty people applying for it.

“So how long have you been waiting?”

“About ten months.”

“That’s a long time.”

The notary set his glass down on a pedestal table and looked at his knuckles for a few moments.

“If it were me, I’d try a more … direct approach.”

“How so?”

“Oh, my good friend, how should I know?” said Michaud, raising his shoulders in a shrug of despair. “Try anything! You used to be more resourceful. I’d write myself a fabulous curriculum vitae and send it to all the magazines in town. I’d put in my application everywhere, even with those little neighbourhood weeklies that seem to have cropped up everywhere lately. Yes, even with those! You have to start somewhere, after all… Huge successes sometimes have humble beginnings; you don’t climb up a ladder by starting at the top rung! What do you want me to say? Move, act, stop moping about like a slice of wet bread. Excuse my meddling,” he added quickly, seeing the young man wriggling in discomfort in his chair, his face clouding over. “I know it’s none of my business. You’re twenty-two. You have your own life to live. And I haven’t exactly been that successful in my own …”

They sipped their port in silence, both embarrassed and neither knowing how to pick up the conversation.
And now I’ve just quarrelled with him
, thought the notary in consternation.
What the devil is wrong with me? I should stick to what I’m good at: scribbling contracts in the solitude of my office
.

“You know what, Parfait? You’re absolutely right,” Charles suddenly declared. “And it’s high time I owned up to it. I’ll get to work first thing
tomorrow. To hell with being depressed. I’ve wasted enough time on it. You should have said all this to me a long time ago. I think I need to be given a good dose of reality from time to time.”

And he flashed the notary a smile that Parfait Michaud had long ago classified as one of the seven wonders of the world.

The language battle had been raging in Quebec pretty much non-stop since the adoption, in 1977, of Bill 101, one of the more ambitious of the reforms introduced by the Lévesque government. The bill made French the only official language in Quebec. It was an attempt to stave off the slow but invidious process of assimilation that had been threatening to do to the citizens of Quebec what had happened to other minority French-speaking groups in North America, nearly all of which were heading to extinction or had already disappeared altogether.

Bill 101 quickly acquired a kind of sacred status, since for the first time in the history of the French presence in Canada, it expressed the determination of the majority of Quebeckers to live in their own language on their own territory. It also raised ferocious opposition from English Canada, especially from the minority English-speaking population of Quebec, who were shocked to find themselves so peremptorily stripped of one of the traditional trappings of their domination: the predominance of English in the province’s public life.