The Years of Fire (40 page)

“No one could ever accuse you of being a blabbermouth,” Fernand said, as he saw him to the door.

“I probably talk too much for a notary, but I have a pretty shrewd notion of professional privilege.”

“Well, God bless you anyway.”

And he shook Michaud’s hand so vigorously that the notary’s eyes bulged and he all but let out a cry of pain.

Charles was shovelling cheese relentlessly, making love to Céline like a man possessed, ploughing through Balzac and, two or three times a week, playing pool with Steve and Blonblon – who had reluctantly allowed himself to be converted to the game and was showing such a remarkable aptitude for it that Steve sometimes seemed positively jealous. Fernand had officially forbidden Céline to join them because of her age – otherwise she would have been there.

In order not to run into De Bané, Charles no longer patronized the Orleans and the beautiful Nadine; they now went to a place on rue de Lorimier, La Belle Partie, run by a fellow named Albert Gouache, a small, chubby-cheeked man with long white hair and a huge, drooping, Asterix-like moustache. Gouache was born in Paris but had been living in Montreal for the past thirty years, and, like all good Montrealers, complained about the city with an unremitting fluency. Charles enjoyed teasing him, making a fuss over his hair – “just like Victor Hugo’s,” or “Santa Claus’s” (depending on the season) – commiserating with him on how difficult it must be to master a Quebec accent, and constantly asking him about his plans for expanding the business, which Gouache had been talking about for fifteen years, and which by now had become part of the local folklore.

Despite his precautions, however, Charles did run into his former drug dealer two or three times on the street; each time, after a hard stare, De Bané gave him a wide berth and vanished into thin air. Then one day he was gone. Had he taken his business elsewhere, or was he mulling over the error of his ways behind bars? No one knew.

In short, the summer passed agreeably, despite the forced labour at the cheese factory, which resulted mainly in aching muscles and a fierce desire to be done with it. But no one seemed to be willing to hand him money for nothing, and so Charles allowed himself to give in to the harsher realities of life.

One night, after a long conversation with Parfait Michaud over two cups of delicious cappuccino (at which the notary still excelled), Charles walked home in an almost uncontainable state of excitement. He was
overwhelmed by inspiration. He went into Céline’s room and made passionate love to her, then went into his own room and began writing a short story. By four o’clock in the morning he had written twenty pages, and he fell asleep convinced that he had accomplished something worthwhile.

“Loving books doesn’t necessarily mean you can write them,” the notary had once warned him. “I’m living proof of that myself. When I was a young man I wrote a novel, two plays, and a collection of poems, all of which were published by Trashcan Editions!”

“No,” Charles told himself as he tossed and turned in his bed. “Not me. I’m good! I know it! And I’m going to work and work at it until I’m better. The next thing I buy is going to be an IBM typewriter. Then we’ll see what we shall see!”

Each morning, because of his job at the cheese factory, he was the first one up. Céline often had breakfast with him and then went back to bed. That morning he read her the first few pages of his short story, which he called “Skidding in Fourth Gear.” She thought it was fantastic.

“Well, not yet,” he objected modestly. “It’s only a first draft. There are two or three good things in it, but I’ve got to rework the whole thing.”

At work a few hours later, Steve remarked on the dark circles under Charles’s eyes and his sluggish behaviour, and Charles had to confess to him that he’d been up half the night writing.

“Writing what?”

“A short story.”

“It couldn’t be too short if it took you half the night.”

Charles explained to him what a short story was. His friend gave him a long, dumbfounded, not to say worried, look, and after thinking about it for a moment, said:

“If anything’s going to keep me up half the night, I’d rather it was sex.”

And he went back to shovelling cheese.

It took him a few weeks, but Steve finally convinced Blonblon and Isabel to smoke a joint, arguing persuasively that if they didn’t try it at least once the entire twentieth century might end up passing them by untouched. Charles and Céline had also lent their support to the argument.

It happened one Saturday night in August, in a quiet corner of Park La Fontaine after an evening at the movies. There were at first a few shudders, a few dry coughs, a few wry grimaces, but after a few minutes the effects of the fabled fumes began to make themselves felt, and Blonblon settled into a quietly contemplative state while Isabel laughed herself hoarse. Their friends, a little more hip to the scene (if twenty joints in three years qualified them for that distinction), let themselves float off into their own foggy reveries. Steve, hunched desperately over to hide a preening erection, was scraping away at the gravelled path with a broken tree branch, making drawings that meant nothing to anyone but him. Charles was blown away by the growth patterns in the trees around him; the profound and inexplicable connections between them and him filled him with serene joy. His eye fell on Céline, who was leaning against the bench beside him, smiling at something invisible. A thin, pink halo flowed along the contours of her body; he found her furiously, gloriously beautiful. She took his hand. With the slightest encouragement from her he would have made love to her right there, on the bench. On second thought, it would be better to wait. Somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain he remembered that it was best to keep his cool, and to keep in mind that only assholes violated the established order of things.

An hour later they were sitting in a small snack bar on Sainte-Catherine, looking at a platter of poutine. The happy, lively conversation flew off in all directions at once. They talked in a jumble about a new kind of condom on the market, the civil war in Ireland, Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, and Robert Bourassa’s latest subterfuges. Isabel laughed until her eyes filled with tears at Charles’s and Steve’s description of their supervisor’s head-first fall into a vat of cheddar cheese, while Blonblon and Céline compared notes on the potential marvels of computers. Charles ordered his
third coffee. He wanted to tell his friends about Balzac. His friends stopped him, saying it was far too late. For a few minutes he sat there looking morose. Céline caressed the back of his hand, and his good humour returned as though a switch had been thrown on.

“We should go for a walk on Mount Royal,” he said, jumping to his feet. “On the night the Parti Québécois was elected in 1976, Fernand and Monsieur Victoire stayed up there the whole night, singing and talking. They were up until sunrise. Not bad for a couple of old farts, eh?”

In order to save time, since it was getting late, they decided to take the metro, then a bus. The metro station at Berri-de-Montigny was only a short distance away.

As Charles passed through the turnstile, surrounded by the happy sounds of Saturday-night travellers, his eye fell on the huge slab of black granite set at the centre of the station to commemorate the Montreal Metro’s inauguration in October 1966. It served as a bench in this kind of waiting room for lost souls.

Suddenly he was struck by a revelation. Followed by the surprised gaze of his companions, he moved towards the slab and stared at it, his jaw tightly clenched, as though he were going to try to lift it. Two young girls in sundresses, sitting directly in front of him, were drinking a glass of orangeade. They looked up at him and exchanged amused glances. He didn’t see them. He had become Eugène de Rastignac in
Old Goriot
, the ambitious hero who, at the end of the novel, defies Paris before setting out to conquer it.

Céline came up to him. “What are you doing, Charles?”

“What’s up, Thibodeau?” echoed Steve, coming up to grab his arm. “Are you having a religious experience?”

He didn’t hear either of them.

The slab, the symbolic convergence point for all the metro lines that threaded through the city, had suddenly become for Charles the soul of Montreal, its brain and its will, the seat of all its urges, good and evil.

He stepped around the two young girls and jumped up onto the slab, transported by a feeling of power that all but obsessed his mind. People
were looking at him with joy and alarm in their eyes. Enormous waves of energy were flowing into him from throughout the city, swelling, crackling with electricity. He felt the heart of Montreal beating in his breast. He tasted its acrid, raging, intoxicating blood.

“Montreal!” he shouted, arms outstretched. A ticket-collector began moving towards him, curious, his brows furrowed.

“Montreal! You’re going to be hearing from me! I’m going to make your ears ring!”

END OF VOLUME TWO