The Years of Fire Read online

  He stood stock-still, blocking the doorway, a bag of groceries in his arms, too enchanted to speak.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Black Beauty asked in surprise.

  His face felt blistered and his air passages became completely blocked. He looked from side to side for an escape route. Then suddenly, as though someone had come up and pushed him from behind, he moved forward, haltingly, and looked straight into her magnificent eyes.

  “Because I think you’re really beautiful.”

  Had she noticed him before this? Had someone told her of his passion for her, a passion that made him burst into flame?

  “That’s sweet,” she said, laughing. “It’s always nice to hear that.… But you better run home and drink up your soup, little guy. You still got some growing to do. Maybe we’ll meet again in a couple of years …”

  Still laughing, but with a gentle, tender laugh that made her look more beautiful than ever, she patted him on the shoulder and continued into the grocery store. Charles took off at a run, both delighted and humiliated. He never spoke of this encounter to anyone. And the few times he saw Linda after that, he made a point of avoiding her. Charles excelled in all his subjects except mathematics, in which his performance was only mediocre. In November, at the suggestion of his French teacher, Jean-René Dupras, he began tutoring two of his fellow students, Steve Lachapelle and Olivier Giammatteo, both of whom delighted in torturing both spelling and syntax and were well on their way to the ambivalent land of illiteracy. It was known as the “help with homework” system, based on the observation that the transfer of knowledge often went more smoothly between members of the same peer group, who spoke more or less the same language, than when it came down from above, and it usually produced excellent results. The sessions took place during the lunch hour or after class and were entirely voluntary.

  Charles was proud of his new role. He put a lot of effort into it and showed himself to be a good teacher. His skill was highly appreciated by his fellow students as well as by the faculty. Beneath his flippant exterior there lurked a seriousness not often found in thirteen-year-olds, especially those who had gone through as many difficult experiences as Charles had.

  After several weeks the number of errors in Lachapelle’s and Giammatteo’s homework began to decrease to the point that they were actually fewer than the total number of words they had written. This was hailed as a vast improvement.

  However, it was because of this generous assistance that Charles was to undergo a painfully humiliating experience.

  At the tail end of one afternoon the trio was working away in a classroom. They’d been going at it for half an hour when Olivier Giammatteo, brought to the end of his tether by the rules of agreement of past participles, decided to break a different set of rules by lighting up a cigarette. He even succeeded in convincing his two colleagues to join him; Charles did so mostly to stay on his good side.

  That was the moment destiny decided to bring Robert-Aimé Doyon onto the scene. The principal’s infallible sense of smell immediately detected the forbidden odour. He opened the door of the classroom, surprised the culprits, and, his face brick-red, ejected them from the building. In a few harsh, clipped words he ordered them to appear in his office the first thing next day. The affair, it seemed, had assumed in his mind the proportions of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or the October Crisis.

  The next morning the three students were subjected to a long sermon on the cumulative effects of nicotine and insubordination and were ordered to spend the next three afternoons, from four o’clock until six, cleaning out the school basement, which was a junk heap of dusty, useless items that the caretaker had never found the time to chuck into the garbage bin.

  Robert-Aimé Doyon had always believed in combining the requirements of discipline with administrative efficiency.

  On the second day, Steve Lachapelle, between a sneeze and a fit of coughing, stumbled on an old cardboard box jammed between two eviscerated desks. It contained books.

  “Hey, Thibodeau! Look at this! I found something for you!”

  Charles looked in the box and took out the books. Along with stacks of old health manuals and moral guides for Catholic youth, he found an illustrated edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the complete plays of Corneille (in two volumes), a copy of The Other World, or The States and Empires of the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Comic Novel by Scarron. Except for the first, most of the titles meant little to him. After flipping through them, however, he set them aside to take home, assuming that they, like everything else in the basement, were meant to be thrown out.

  Fifteen minutes after the three students had left, Robert-Aimé Doyon went down into the basement to inspect their work. His eye fell on the cardboard box, which they had placed on a pile of old boards. Curious, he opened the box and was surprised to see that some of the books were still covered in dust but others had been wiped almost clean. His instinct told him that these last had been handled, and that others had no doubt been liberated. The identity of the thief was not hard to guess. It wasn’t so much the taking of the books that bothered him as that they had been taken without his permission. Everything in the school belonged to the school, and nothing must be allowed to leave the school without official authority and due consideration.

  The next morning, as Charles was entering his classroom, a student came up and told him that the principal wished to speak to him. Surprised and worried, he knocked on the office door.

  “Come in!” came the muffled, imperious voice.

  Monsieur Doyon was seated at his desk, his chin resting on his joined fingers. He was wearing a black suit and tie because later that morning he was going to the funeral of one of his aunts, but the effect was to accentuate the hollowness of his eyes, making them seem like a killer’s as they shot icy looks around him.

  Charles stood in the middle of the room and felt his mouth become dry.

  “How are you this morning, Thibodeau?” the principal asked with fake friendliness.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “Fine, sir,” Charles repeated submissively.

  “Your marks are satisfactory, or so I hear, despite the fact that you can be … disruptive, at times.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re doing well enough in French to be tutoring some of your fellow students. You have my congratulations.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure. I’m curious to know how it is that you do so well in French.”

  “Because I work at it, sir.”

  “Yes, of course. Nothing can be accomplished without work. It’s one of the laws of nature. Is there not another reason, though, Thibodeau?”

  “Maybe because I also like to read,” Charles said, after thinking about it for a moment.

  “Yes, yes, that doesn’t surprise me … I would have bet both my ears and the tip of my nose that you were a book-lover. To the extent, I would also wager, that when you see a book your head begins to spin so much that you no longer know quite what you’re doing. Am I correct?”

  Charles’s face began turning a telltale red.

  “Am I not correct, Thibodeau?” the principal repeated, smiling a pitiless smile. “Answer me! Am I not correct?”

  “I thought they were going to be thrown in the garbage, sir.”

  “You thought what were going to be thrown in the garbage?” asked the principal, feigning surprise.

  “The books I found in the basement yesterday afternoon, sir. Isn’t that what you called me in to talk about?”

  “Oh? You found some books in the basement, did you? And what did you do with them?”

  Charles stared at a small crack in the base of a plinth at the far end of the principal’s office. He would have liked to have been able to shrink, like Alice, and escape through the crack forever, and never again have to see this terrifying man who was taking so much pleasure in his h
umiliation.

  “I took them home,” he said, barely able to speak. Then added, when there was no response from Doyon, “Sir.”

  “You took them home?” said the principal, holding his chin in his two open hands, a gesture Charles hadn’t seen him use before and which made him look both clownish and menacing. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I just told you, sir. I thought the books were going to be thrown out, so I thought I might as well –”

  “Let me see if I’m getting this right,” the principal interrupted. “It seems to me there’s still something I don’t understand. Hmm. I wonder what it could be. Is it, by any chance, that your father has bought the school and no one bothered to tell me about it?”

  Charles said nothing. A drop of sweat slid slowly down his left cheek. He felt as though his feet had caught fire and were swelling up and splitting his shoes. His stomach churned.

  “Answer me, Thibodeau. I’m awaiting your response.”

  “He has not bought the school, sir.”

  “No, I hadn’t thought so. So then nothing in this school belongs to you, or to him, except of course your own personal effects. Is that right, Thibodeau?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s right.”

  “In other words, you stole those books.”

  Charles stared at the floor, his fists clenched. His teeth grated against one another, emitting loud cracking sounds that echoed in his head.

  “Answer me, Thibodeau.”

  “Yes, sir, I stole them.”

  “Good. Now we know exactly where we stand, do we not? Where do you live?”

  “Nineteen-sixty-seven rue Dufresne, sir.”

  “Go home and get them. You’ve got ten minutes. I suggest you hurry.”

  Seven minutes later, Charles was back in Doyon’s office, completely winded. He set a paper bag on the principal’s desk. To his great relief the house had been empty, saving him from having to give embarrassing explanations.

  The principal examined the bag’s contents. Slowly his expression softened. As he had little interest in reading, none of the books was familiar to him, but their old, worn condition and the names of some of the authors, which conjured in his mind vague scholarly memories, suggested to him that they belonged in the category of “serious literature,” even though all that meant to him was that they were stuffy and boring. It was also clear to him that they might as well have been thrown in the fire, since they were of no conceivable use to the school. Doyon raised his head and an incredulous smile spread across his thin lips.

  “And you say you were going to read these things?”

  Charles nodded, looking thoroughly fed up.

  The principal continued examining the books and following his own reflections. But the dust made him sneeze, and with a brusque gesture he shoved them to the edge of his desk. Then he spent a long time clearing his throat. Suddenly his eyes lit up and began rolling wildly, a sign that he had hit upon a pedagogical opportunity.

  “In principle, Thibodeau,” he said, stretching out his hands and leaning forward in his chair, “I have no objection to your reading these books. But remember one thing, my friend: trying to educate yourself through theft, as you have just done, is like trying to nurture a plant by pouring boiling water on it. It won’t work. Are you with me?”

  Charles nodded in agreement.

  “Good. Here’s what we’re going to do,” he went on, picking up one of the volumes of Corneille and flipping through it. “You are going to study, hmm, let’s see, Le Cid, a very good play, in verse, and tomorrow afternoon, at four o’clock, instead of going down to work in the basement with your two friends, you’re going to come up here to my office and recite to me, from memory, the first one hundred lines.”

  Charles’s head and shoulders slumped.

  “The first hundred lines?” he murmured, horrified.

  “The first hundred lines. By tomorrow at four o’clock. Now you may return to your class.”

  Charles, however, did not move. He seemed not to have heard the principal. The hundred lines flooded through his brain like an ocean too vast to drink.

  A surge of anger suddenly welled up from somewhere deep within him, fury against this imbecilic dictator who amused himself by torturing his students, as his own father had tortured him for years; the anger rose and swelled with such relentless force that it swept away his fear like so much dust. Charles turned scarlet, and he shot at the principal a look that the latter had never, in his eighteen-year career, seen aimed at him before by a student. It was not a look of fear or resentment, it was an unleashing of the most scathing contempt. He opened his mouth to put this young imp of a student back in his place, but before he could speak Charles stepped forward, placed his hands on the desk, and spoke in a stifled, trembling voice.

  “This is stupid, sir. I have an exam tomorrow afternoon. I won’t have time to study for it, and I’ll fail.”

  For a few seconds, Doyon felt as though his head were full of bubbles. The bubbles bounced crazily around, tumbled into each other, and burst, leaving nothing but emptiness. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  But his calm quickly returned. His lower lip protruded until it almost touched his moustache, and a fierce expression appeared on his face.

  “What’s that you say, Thibodeau? I didn’t understand you.”

  “I said that it’s a stupid idea,” Charles repeated, in a somewhat less confident voice.

  “Stupid, is it? Hmm. That’s the first time anyone has spoken to me in such a manner. But I suppose you have your reasons. I might even concede the point. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I believe you to be right, at least in this case. Of course your studies must come first. As you say, it was stupid of me to deprive you of the time to prepare for your exam. I will therefore change your punishment. You will have three days to memorize your lines. But you will memorize three hundred lines, not a hundred, and instead of reciting them here in my office, you will give a little performance of them to the entire school, in the auditorium. On stage, naturally. That will be much more … amusing, don’t you think? I’ll make the arrangements. Now get out of here.”

  And he handed Charles the Corneille.

  It was a deflated Charles who returned to his class. He was so caught up in his anguish that he didn’t hear a word spoken by his math teacher, Monsieur Tousignant, who had to call his name three times to get his attention, to the great amusement of the other students. So great was his need to unburden his heart that after class he went up to Monsieur Tousignant, a large, boring man with the eyes of a dead fish and a completely monotonous voice, and told him what had happened. Monsieur Tousignant listened to his story carefully without making a single comment, but by his expression it was clear that he found Charles’s punishment cruel and out of proportion.

  “I’ll speak to the principal later,” he promised the boy. “But next time, keep a rein on that tongue of yours.”

  Doyon had a great deal of respect for the math teacher, whom he deemed to be “serious and businesslike.” But he bridled with anger nonetheless when the teacher began speaking on Charles’s behalf, threatening to add another hundred lines if he heard any more interference from the staff.

  The next day Charles blew his geography exam like a complete dunce, because he’d spent the entire night studying Le Cid. The fear of humiliating himself in front of the entire school gave him cramps from his stomach down to his calves. He knew that that was the real goal of the principal’s punishment: public humiliation. He saw himself standing on the stage, trying to give his lines despite the howls of laughter coming from the assembled students, and he was overcome by a kind of vertigo that robbed him of all his strength. But he lowered his head, forced himself to be calm, and applied himself to memorizing the play.

  CHIMÈNE

  Elvire, is what you’ve told me now th’entire truth?

  Have you kept back nothing of what my father said?

  ELVIRE

&nbs
p; Indeed are all my own senses yet amazed;

  He esteems Rodrigues as much as you do love him;

  And unless I’m much deceiv’d in how I read his soul,

  He will command you to respond in kind to his love.

  At first it all seemed like so much gibberish, and he despaired of ever being able to memorize something he couldn’t understand. Gradually, however, he began to make inroads into the text. He guessed that “flame” was another way of saying “love,” and that “lovers” were simply people in love with each other. He was amazed to learn that at that time in Spain the father chose a husband for his daughter, and that an Infante (the daughter of a king) could cause a lot of trouble by falling in love with a simple knight, even though he was the most handsome, intelligent, and courageous knight in the world.

  Finally the quarrel between Count Gormas and Don Diego impressed itself on his mind like a scene from a cloak-and-dagger movie. He began to hate the jealous count who was wicked enough to challenge a poor, old man who’d been given a position he wanted for himself. Certain of Corneille’s lines, despite their somewhat bizarre turns of expression, began to resonate in his head like bronze gongs being banged together.

  The greatest kings, alas, are made the same as we:

  They can be in the wrong as all humanity.

  Oh God! My strength, worn out by all this care, departs!

  – Rodrigue, have you the heart?

  – So much so that my father

  Will discover when the time is come …

  – Then I’ll say no more. Revenge me, revenge thyself;

  Show thee a worthy son of such a man as I.

  Hounded by troubles wherever destiny sends me,

  I’ll rout them all. Go, run, fly, and revenge us both.

  In his effort to memorize the lines, he didn’t realize that the heroes of the play were in fact Rodrigue and Chimène (what an odd name!), and that the play was a love story. Often the impassioned spirit that ran through Le Cid took hold of him. But so many words to learn! So many plot twists to untangle! Such a torrent of curses falling on the head of Doyon, who was resting in his comfortable bungalow a few dozen blocks away in Cité-Jardin.