A Very Bold Leap (39 page)

It wasn’t until he was in his car and driving back to the hardware store that Fernand realized that, all things considered, his mission had been a complete success. He suddenly found himself singing “
Gens du pays
” at the top of his voice, something he’d never done before in his life. His feeling of satisfaction was so intense that he almost rammed into the rear end of a car that was stopped at a red light. “I must remember to ask Lucie what kind of cake he likes,” he told himself, making a sign of apology to the furious driver of the car ahead of him.

Charles’s political escapade had so upset Victor Vanier that the next morning when he arrived at the office and his secretary remarked that he looked a bit out of sorts, he nearly threw his coat at her. Later, when he tried to go over his accounts, a burning sensation between his toes kept him from concentrating. At eleven o’clock he nearly chucked out a client who had come in to complain about an error in his invoice. But gradually he calmed down, and his common sense returned.

Never since the beginning of the
Siren
had he had anyone as good as Charles working for him. The boy had picked up journalism like a cold at a daycare centre. Victor Vanier could take whole days off without the smooth functioning of the paper being disturbed one iota. Thanks to Charles, he might even be able to play golf next summer
in the middle of the week
. It would be incredibly unwise to punish him at this point, and even crazier to fire him. He decided he would not force Charles to write the retraction. He would write it himself, and couch it in the most diplomatic of terms, to make sure that no one got their nose out of joint, including Charles.

As soon as he made the decision, his toes stopped burning, as if by magic! “It’s all in the head,” he told himself, once again amazed by that simple observation. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a woman could make herself pregnant just by thinking about it. Hmm … Maybe that’s what Immaculate Conception is, after all…”

He sat down at his computer and, in fifty-three minutes, had banged out an editorial that began,

When Charles came to work on Tuesday, Vanier found him in a sullen mood. He spent the whole morning showing Charles in a thousand small
ways that his fit of pique from the previous week had burned itself out, but the young man remained plunged in silence, going through the motions of his duties with the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner forced to wash dishes fifteen minutes before his execution. Finally Vanier asked him to step into his office. He carefully closed the door and solemnly announced to Charles that he would not ask for a written retraction, because he had taken care of it himself. Would Charles be kind enough to read it over? He would very much like to hear what he thought of it.

Charles read the text and, for the first time that day, a smile appeared on his lips.

“It’s very good,” he said. “I wouldn’t change a word.”

“Good. I’m glad we see eye to eye on this. I think, in effect, I’ve put my finger on the problem but managed to stay within acceptable limits.”

And he shook Charles’s hand in the belief that they had reached an honourable agreement.

But the next day, Charles was still behaving oddly. A worm of doubt began to wriggle softly in Vanier’s mind; his employee had decided to quit: he was looking for a new job, and would no doubt be offered one in the near future, at which point Charles would take vicious pleasure in announcing his departure at the last moment and throw the whole office into a turmoil. How could Vanier stop that from happening? The only solution that came to mind seemed to him an extraordinarily painful one: he had to offer Charles a raise in salary. Should he raise him from forty to forty-five dollars a day? Or even fifty? It was like trying to decide whether to cut off his own arm at the elbow or the shoulder! A ridiculous choice! A monstrous decision to have to make!

Suddenly his toes started burning again, this time accompanied by cramps in his lower legs. The walls of his office appeared to be expanding and contracting around him in slow motion, sucking all the air from it. Was he coming down with something serious?

“Francine!” he called in a deathly voice.

The secretary appeared at his door.

“My God, Monsieur Vanier, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“Get… me a… glass of… water… please.”

He drank two glasses of water and felt better. His head cleared. He knew what he had to do. It was a pity but it had to be done, and he would do it.

“Now send Charles in here.”

Charles came in with an impatient air, as he had been going out to conduct an interview. But when he left a few minutes later, he was smiling broadly. He took the unexpected increase in pay often dollars a day as a mark of the esteem in which he was held. It may have been prompted by something really stupid, but it gave him the wonderful illusion that he had become irreplaceable.

O
ne night, after making sure that Céline would not be there, Charles finally fulfilled his promise and paid a visit to his adoptive parents. He was given a welcome not unlike that of General de Gaulle entering liberated Paris, or like the inventor of insulin being greeted by a group of diabetics. After hugging and kissing him, Lucie commented on how well he looked, wiped her eyes while apologizing for behaving “as silly as a convent girl,” and placed on the table the cake she had baked and frozen days earlier in preparation for his visit and which she had thawed out two hours beforehand on the kitchen counter. His status as a male meant that Fernand had to be more restrained; he confined himself to a hearty “Hi, there, my boy,” shook his hand vigorously, then noisily blew his nose, which frightened the parakeet, which had been observing the scene from its perch in a wire cage, nearly half to death.

“Your favourite cake: chocolate caramel! As you can see, we’ve been expecting you! If you’d come twenty minutes earlier, you could have had a good meal, too. Fernand, make some coffee. You still drink coffee, don’t you, Charles?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I only ask because with your new job, which must be so stressful, I thought maybe you might have given up coffee, you never know. But then why would you give up coffee? You’re young and strong, you can do anything you like. Of course you can!”

“Not me,” Charles laughed.

He listened to her prattle, very happy to have found her as vivacious and warm as she had been the last time he’d seen her, more than two years before. Her face was still youthful despite the fact that she was closing in on fifty. The only change he could see in her was that she was putting on a bit of weight.

“Oh, I’ve been on a diet for nearly a year, now,” she sighed. “But anything I lose one week I put on again the next week, with a bit more added, apparently.”

“Like I’ve always said, you’re too nervous,” said Fernand, in defence of one of his favourite theories. “Being nervous makes a person put on weight. You can only lose weight by exercise.”

“Anyway, you’d think I’d get enough exercise with all the things I do, what with the shopping, the housekeeping, working at the hardware store, and God knows what else!”

It was age, no doubt, plus those gigantic plates of Peruvian food that had begun to appear since her involvement with the Alvarado family. “Extraordinary people!” Fernand assured Charles. “I don’t understand a lot of what the father says — his wife speaks French a bit better than he does — but if you saw the kids! As beautiful as little angels that had been barbecued in Hell for a minute or two! Their skin is as golden-coloured as a tobacco leaf. And they speak French as well as you or me! Not a trace of an accent!”

“Which just means that they have the same accent as us,” put in Lucie. “The three oldest are doing very well in school. And Esperanza is like you, Charles: she always has her nose in a book.”

He had intended to stay for an hour, hoping that the conversation wouldn’t fizzle away to nothing, but it was midnight before he left. They spoke of the future of the hardware store; Fernand was going to hand over the management of it to Henri in two or three years. Henri was soon to be married. Then they played canasta, a passion for which had recently descended upon Fernand and Lucie. After that, Fernand had opened one of his “good bottles” (he’d begun making his own wine the previous year and had discovered in himself, as he said, “a nose for grapes”) and Charles made the kind of appreciative noises that were expected on such occasions.

They talked briefly about Céline. After trying and giving up on nursing, she had decided to go in for teaching, with a view to becoming a high school math teacher. She’d recently broken up with her boyfriend (to Fernand’s great relief) and was now going out with a different one, a student at the business school. For a while now she’d been talking about moving in with a girlfriend of hers somewhere in the area.

Charles listened to all this trying to seem neutral, but he felt a wave of regret and could see the same feeling in the eyes of Fernand and Lucie; Céline’s life, which at one time could have been his life, too, had been lost to him and would
remain lost forever; she was becoming more and more of a stranger, beyond his comprehension; some day, when they mentioned her in some off-hand remark, it would be as though they were talking about someone who had died, or someone he hadn’t met. This feeling of immense loss overwhelmed him; his feelings for Stéphanie, oddly, came nowhere near filling that void.

“Ten after twelve!” he suddenly cried. He stood. “I’ve got to go, I’m afraid, or tomorrow I’ll be dragging myself around like a sack of potatoes. You, too, I imagine.”

Lucie took him in her arms.

“Promise me you’ll come back soon,” she murmured to him tenderly. “I’ve missed you so, so much! And not only me, you know. Look at Fernand: I haven’t seen him in such a good mood for months, maybe even years!”

He’d had such a good time that he soon began making a habit of dropping in on the Fafards from time to time, usually on a Thursday, when he didn’t go to work. He always warned them he was coming the night before.

One night, feeling brave and wanting to show off her good looks, he asked Stéphanie to go with him. She was reluctant, but he persisted, and in the end she agreed. She found Lucie charming, if a bit simple-minded, but Fernand’s direct way of speaking, his common touch, his thunderous voice, and the way he had of looking at her as though he were judging a piece of merchandise put her off. Fernand sensed it, and his boisterous gaiety became forced; they left early, having little left to talk about.

“I hope you’ll come back and visit us again,” Fernand said to the young woman, with the feeling that he had committed a faux pas without quite knowing what it was.

“Of course,” she said politely.

Lucie kissed her on both cheeks and told her that Charles had always had good taste. The compliment came across as flattery.

“Charles could be good at so many things,” Stéphanie breathed, “if only he would try!”

Lucie gave her an astonished look. “But he hasn’t done too badly so far, has he?”

Stéphanie looked away with a tight smile of constraint on her lips.

“That girl doesn’t like me,” Fernand said after the couple had gone, “and I’m not crazy about her, either. It sticks out like a finger in your eye.”

“Well, my dear, it’s none of our concern. And don’t you dare say anything like that to Charles; he’d never set foot in this house again if you did!”

Stéphanie visited the Fernands only one more time, and then even Charles had to agree that it was an awkward situation.

It was an evening in early June, a night still redolent with the freshness of spring. Charles had decided to show up a bit earlier than usual, since they had plans to go to the cinema afterwards. It was Fernand who opened the door, and from his manner Charles understood that they had arrived at a bad time.

“Come in, come in,” said the hardware-store owner with a stiff formality.

They were ushered into the kitchen, where six people were sitting around the table. They had reached the dessert stage. Henri was sitting beside his somewhat pudgy future wife, a blond woman with soft eyes who looked a bit unfocused; Céline was talking quietly to a tall, young, military-looking man with a brush cut and a firm chin, a living portrait of the kind of man who might be sent on dangerous missions. She stood up and, without the slightest sign of being ill at ease, introduced him to Charles, who, in turn, introduced everyone to Stéphanie. A nearly empty bottle of wine perhaps explained his ex-girlfriend’s easy manner.

She had become more beautiful than ever. She had an easy self-confidence, knowing that she was attractive but not showing that she was aware of it. She asked both Charles and Stéphanie about their jobs, congratulated Charles on an article of his that Lucie had recently given her to read, and then left with her boyfriend, who had remained silent and smiling, like someone who was being careful not to put his foot in his mouth.

After leaving the Fafard house, Charles made no mention of their unexpected encounter with Céline, and Stéphanie, who sensed the tension in the air but couldn’t account for it, refrained from asking questions.

Céline had been unhappy since the day she and Charles had broken up, but she would have vigorously denied that to anyone who pointed it out to her. She led an active and varied life. She’d made new friends, taken up tennis, which she enjoyed immensely, read a lot more than she had during her
adolescence, and in a wider range of subjects; she went out with many boys, some of whom she’d been quite taken with, although usually for only a short time, and now believed she had found the love of her life.

Laurent Gadbois was a serious, steady fellow, easy to get along with, and extremely pleasant to sleep with, exhibiting a knowledge of female anatomy unusual in males, despite their boasting otherwise. And he was quite different from Charles, whom he would no doubt have classified as “troubled.” It was Laurent who had introduced Céline to tennis, a sport he excelled in; he, too, was interested in mathematics, and he shared Fernand Fafard’s political views, which was absolutely essential if he wanted to remain welcome in the Fafard household. Furthermore, he adored Lucie, especially her cooking, which suggested that his life would end in comfortable obesity. He wasn’t one to make a big show of his affections, but Céline told herself that, contrary to popular belief, that was something that could be developed over time in most men.

She had known him for six months. Despite his many entreaties, she was in no hurry to move in with him. Her love for him had already settled down, preparing her for life’s deceptions and disappointments, and no doubt for the children they would perhaps have one day. There was not a great deal in common with her first love, the years of grand passion and turbulence she had known with Charles, of which she retained memories that were both delightful and painful at the same time.

Charles’s surprise visit to her parents’; house had thrown her for a loop, and she was proud of herself for having been able, with the aid of the wine, to hide that fact. She had become more in control of herself over the years; she would never be one of those women whose major role in life was that of the victim.

She studied hard, went out often, made her own clothes, followed the events of the day with interest, and, once in a while on Saturdays, lent a hand to her aging parents in the hardware store, where she had to employ all her diplomatic skills to avoid confrontations with Henri, who already saw himself as the store’s owner.

Life seemed to her to be interesting, if not actually joyful. She had, in the past, known moments of intense pleasure, but she was not far from believing that such moments belonged to the young, and at least in her case slowly faded as one matured.

That was not the view of her mother, with whom she discussed the matter one day: Lucie thought that every stage of one’s life contained moments of joy for those who knew how to find it, and she was secretly worried about her daughter, whom she would have liked to see smile a bit more often.