A Very Bold Leap Read online

  “Why? What did you say?”

  Fernand frowned and waved his large hand in the air.

  “Not now, not now, if you don’t mind. What I need first is a hot bath.”

  Charles was on the subway heading to the north end of the city, where Fernand had sent him to see a supplier. He had just closed his copy of The Red and the Black with a yawn, unable to concentrate on reading because his mind was racing from lack of sleep, when his eye fell on a page of La Presse, which a passenger across from him was reading. The centre of the page was taken up by a large photograph of Brigitte Loiseau, smiling and prettier than ever, and above the photo was the headline:

  FILM SERVES UP A TRULY GREAT ACTRESS

  He quickly got off at the next station, bought a copy of the newspaper, and read the article twice while standing in front of the kiosk with his temples throbbing, his mouth filled with an acid taste, and seized by a strange desire to burst into tears. So she had defeated her black demons and shown her true potential! For once the hideous law of gravity that dragged so many people to the bottom as they grew older had been suspended! Rather than sink into the poisonous abyss, the Blond Angel had risen, cleansed of the mud that had threatened to drown her, and soared above everyone’s heads, her beauty displayed for all to see. Charles felt such a rush of joy and pride that it brought tears to his eyes. He knew he had played a decisive role in her victory. It was, to some extent, as much a victory for him as for her!

  That night he and Céline went to Le Parisien to see Julie Martin, Cashier. During dinner, a television movie critic had praised the film, calling it a sentimental comedy with great production values and plenty of verve, and he had especially praised Brigitte Loiseau in the title role, using phrases like “a breath of fresh air,” “great vivacity,” “subtle humour,” and “just the right tone.” Charles found the actress amazing, and Céline, too, shared his enthusiasm, although she said she found her acting a bit vulgar.

  “But that’s what the part called for,” Charles replied.

  “The part? But surely you can portray ordinary people without looking like you want to hop into bed with the first turkey who comes along!”

  “But she didn’t want to hop into bed with the first turkey who came along. If she’d wanted to, she would have.”

  He dropped the conversation, which was on the verge of turning bitter. Céline’s spitefulness surprised him: another minute and she’d be saying that the film was a waste of time, and all because of Brigitte Loiseau’s bad acting.

  The next day he went back to see Julie Martin, Cashier again, this time with Blonblon and Isabel, who laughed loudly and came out feeling invigorated.

  “A week from now everyone will be talking about your Brigitte,” Blonblon predicted. “Before long you won’t be able to turn on the TV without seeing her. She’s on her way, man!”

  “On her way? She’s already zooming!” corrected Isabel, who liked using unusual phrases. “And all thanks to you, Chuckie my boy! She owes you a ton. In fact, she owes you everything.”

  Charles smiled, filled with a sense of calm pride. He toyed with the idea of seeking out the actress and telling her of the important role he’d played on a certain day in her life.

  Blonblon didn’t need to be a great Nostradamus to come up with the predictions he’d made. Three days after the film came out, it had broken all the box-office records, and Brigitte Loiseau was the darling of the dailies; shortly after that she signed a contract with TVA-TV to play an important role in a drama series written by the prestigious Guy Fournier. All she had to do was work hard and stay healthy, and her talent would take care of the rest, at least for the next few years.

  Meanwhile, Charles was learning to tell at a glance the size of a screw or a nail; he knew the respective virtues of silicon caulking compared to those of thermoplastic, and of oil-based versus latex paint; he could expound on the advantages of battery-powered screwdrivers, and of the durability of a top-of-the-line electric drill over that of one of its run-of-the-mill siblings. By paying close attention to Fernand, he, too, became adept at advising a home handyman on the correct way to install linoleum, or calming a housewife who’d been showered by sparks from a short circuit, or helping an old man who was confused at not being able to find replacement parts for a lamp he’d bought fifty years before. He found that his earlier days in Blonblon’s workshop now came in very handy. He listened carefully to comments made by the professional workmen and the neighbourhood plumbers and electricians who came into the store for supplies until he gradually became an invaluable encyclopedia of information. He even developed the kind of sixth sense that told him when offering a small discount would clinch a sale, or when being slightly over-attentive would lose one, and he assumed the patience of Buddha when beset by idiotic questions, unhelpful descriptions, hackneyed remarks, and scandalized comments on the price of the store’s merchandise.

  Fernand and Lucie were astonished by his resourcefulness and his keenness, and heaped compliments on him daily. Henri, busy with his studies, worked at the store on Saturdays, and even then only when he was needed. He’d never given much thought to taking over the store from his father, but with Charles incurring more and more favour, Henri began to feel jealous — the rightful heir sensing a possibly successful rival claim. To his father’s great satisfaction, he began showing up more often at the store. But the source of his new-found zeal soon became all too apparent, and the effects more and more disagreeable. Henri criticized Charles’s smallest mistakes, took over his customers, and contradicted him in public (even when Charles was right). Eventually, Lucie had to find subtle ways to ensure that the two boys worked together as infrequently as possible.

  Charles paid little attention to his friend’s behaviour; his mind was on his books, not on the hardware store. Henri might have viewed Charles as a threat, but the indignities he inflicted were entirely useless, since in this particular battle there was only one combatant.

  Charles worked his half days conscientiously, even with pleasure, but no sooner had he walked out the door at one o’clock than all thoughts of screws, nails, trowels, and drills were sent packing, and he returned to his apartment a writer. He fixed himself a quick sandwich or a Kraft Dinner, then sat down at his typewriter, a cup of coffee on the small electric heating pad that Céline had given him, and went to work on the novel.

  Several hours would pass in this pleasurable way, and each day the stack of manuscript pages grew by four or five sheets, written at full speed with no thought given to style or syntax or even spelling; he wanted to get it all down in the heat of his inspiration, as had been Stendhal’s method. It was said of Stendhal that he wrote divinely but not too well, a criticism of his own writing Charles would have welcomed. At five o’clock, his stomach would begin to rumble, and he would feel the need to shake off the leaden weight that settles on the shoulders after a long bout of solitary writing, to emerge from his cocoon, shake the cobwebs out of his brain, and return to the real world; he needed noise, company, movement — or, better still, Céline, naked in his bed. Before getting up from his table, however, he would fondly read through the pages he had written that day. Imagine, all these words flowing from his brain and his alone! All these characters scurrying about, each more insistently than the other, all searching for happiness; none of them would have emerged from the glacial void of nothingness had he not chosen to make them spring from the keys of his typewriter! A wave of pleasure would well up within him. And then his eye would fall on a mistake, a clumsy phrase, a worn-out expression; he’d scribble one or two corrections on the pages, then toss them back on the pile. Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow! For now he had to eat, enjoy, live!

  He would make himself an omelette, or a plate of spaghetti, and top off his meal with a few Vachon cakes washed down with a glass of milk. Then he’d leave the apartment and go to the phone booth at the corner of the street. Although Céline loved him to distraction, she was still a diligent student and couldn’t join him
every night. Her parents wouldn’t allow it anyway. So he would call Steve or Blonblon, suggest they go to a movie, or a tavern, or a pool hall. He’d return home around eleven, and go back to working on the novel into the wee hours. The first warm glow of morning would sometimes be visible through his window, but the even warmer glow he felt from his work would make his fatigue evaporate.

  First the autumn and then the winter passed. He had achieved a kind of equilibrium. His manuscript grew a bit each day, his love flared with a passion that seemed inexhaustible, and he was earning some money — not much, but the simple life he was therefore forced to live contented him. The independence it gave him was well worth the sacrifices, he would say. What did it matter that he ate thin porridge for breakfast; that the images on his black-and-white television jumped and the dialogue was incomprehensible; that he had to go out into the freezing night, a gasoline can in each hand, to buy kerosene for the space heater that was always on the point of running out; that he could afford only cut-rate fruit and vegetables from the corner store; that the springs in his old sofa bed dug cruelly into his backside? What did any of that matter when he could do as he pleased? Freedom blew its liberating breath through his brain, made it crackle like a campfire, fanned it with a taste for revolution, and made idiotic Darkness retreat, abashed, before the advancing, joyful flames.

  Steve Lachapelle had moved out of Pointe-Saint-Charles and was once again living in the neighbourhood, where he was a student the Vieux-Montréal Cegep with Blonblon. For him, the move was a practical one: his mother, he said, seemed to have wheels for feet — in one year she had changed apartments three times! Charles therefore saw him as frequently as he had in the old days. His return to the quarter pleased Charles, but at the same time it made him aware of something that bothered him more and more as time went on.

  It was the interruption.

  Charles was no longer living the life of a student. By leaving school, he had chosen to become a worker before any of his friends, to adopt a rhythm that was different from theirs, to live, in some ways, in a different world. At first he paid scant attention to the situation, but little by little it began to weigh on him.

  Despite his best efforts, the gap between him and them continued to widen. He didn’t know any of their professors, still fewer of their friends; he no longer shared their pleasures or their concerns; most of their allusions escaped him; at times they even seemed like strangers to him. If it weren’t for his writing, he might even have begun to feel he no longer belonged in their social class.

  But happily there was his writing. Being a writer gave him a certain status, even though apart from Céline no one had had a glimpse of his manuscript. Out of vanity he refused to let them see his rough drafts. Steve sometimes referred to him, jokingly, as the Scribbler, but beneath the banter and the mocking tone was an unmistakable hint of respect. One day he confessed to Charles that the very idea of having to type more than three pages of original text gave him such a pain in his guts he could hardly breathe.

  For his part, Blonblon was very interested in Charles’s project, and every time they got together asked him how “the great work” was going. In the past few years he had become an avid reader, under Charles’s tutelage, although without the latter’s all-consuming passion. Isabel thought writers were cool, noting that in Chile it took great courage to take up the profession. As a young girl, she said, she had seen a writer get the shit kicked out of him by a gang of policemen disguised as thugs. In her eyes, there was something heroic in what Charles was doing. To Céline, of course, Charles was neither more nor less than a genius. Charles himself modestly refused to accept the compliment, but it pleased him nonetheless.

  On Sundays, Charles was in the habit of having dinner at the Fafards’; house, after which he and Céline would go for dessert to the Michauds’;, where Amélie, contrary to all the rules of a healthy diet, smothered them in pastries. It was during one of these visits that Charles, having screwed up his courage, showed the notary the first chapter of his novel.

  Parfait took the manuscript into his study to read it, then after half an hour reappeared with a slightly embarrassed smile on his lips.

  “I can’t say much at this stage,” he said. “It’s still a bit early to tell. Fifteen pages aren’t enough to allow me to form a strong opinion. But if it turns out you have talent, Charles, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  The young man had to be content with this somewhat ambiguous response, full of exit clauses as it was, and forced himself to find encouragement in it. But never again would he show a single line of his work to the notary.

  He completed the first draft of The Dark Night (his working title) on July 14th, 1985, and immediately set about revising the manuscript. This took him another four months. He found the work exhausting. Every time he corrected one faulty or infelicitous phrase, or eliminated a repetition or a cliché, he found three, five, ten others that were just as bad. His dictionary took on the colour of an old dishrag from having been manhandled so often, and its edges were marked by a huge, greasy stain. Certain passages in the novel that had filled him with pride at first reading now seemed weak and, in some cases, ridiculous. There were days when he was too discouraged to work on it at all; he would throw the text across the room and go for a long walk in the city, wondering what attack of foolishness had ever made him take on such a cruel occupation.

  There were other days, however, when the wind blew more favourably. He would read a few pages and suddenly feel he had never in his life read anything so beautiful. He fancied he could already hear the accolades of his innumerable future readers. Thibodeau: rhymes with Hugo. He saw his photograph on the front page of Le Devoir and La Presse and Le Journal de Montréal, and even in Montreal’s English-language newspaper, the Gazette. Just walking down the street would be exhausting because of the many admiring glances turned his way; people would ask for his autograph, pay him huge compliments, and he would receive them all with a modest smile. Unfortunately, such days were few and far between. Usually he felt more like a simple labourer struggling to do good, honest work — a wall, for example, built slowly, brick by brick, subject to the inexorable constraint of the plumb line and with the back of his neck being baked by the pitiless sun.

  If only he could lay his hands on one of those Macintosh 512K computers he’d seen advertised in one of the papers! During a televised interview, a famous Montreal writer had declared that the computer had changed his life; it had reduced his workload by half, given more fluidity, more lustre, to his writing style, and allowed a greater conscientiousness in his texts. The Mac 512K, however, along with a daisy-wheel printer, cost more than three thousand dollars! He might as well dream of being invited to a party on the Côte d’Azur!

  On the afternoon of the 20th of November, during the early stages of a snowstorm that was casting a grey pall over the city’s streets, swallowing up whatever faint light that came to them from the dismal sun, Charles entered a print shop on rue Masson and walked out an hour later with a self-conscious expression on his face and, under his arm, four photocopies The Dark Night carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. Three copies were for his friends, whose opinions he valued (and hoped would be laudatory), and the fourth was to be sent to Les Éditions Courtelongues, the publishing house he dreamed of being taken on by, alongside Michel Lemay and Antoinette Mailhot. The transaction had cost him forty-three dollars and forty cents, which meant he would have to cut out movies and beer for the next few weeks or else rely on televised films and the generosity of his companions.

  The manuscript came to two hundred and seventeen pages of double-spaced type. It represented by far the hardest, most exacting work he had ever done in his life. He had put the best of himself into it, and his hopes for it were just as high. Placed end to end, the manuscript pages would make a path sixty metres long, the length of six hundred and sixty-six cigarettes. Each line had cost him dearly; certain passages had brought him to the edge of despair. He’d had to rewrite
Chapter Eight five times; it contained a love scene that he had found almost impossible to describe.

  As a reader, he had come to appreciate the importance of a strong opening; any vessel that didn’t grab his attention from the start ran the risk of an early shipwreck. Such knowledge had made shivers run up and down his spine. He had reworked his opening paragraphs seven times! Here are three versions of it:

  Night fell on Montreal. Stretched out across its island, the metropolis flung its yellowish light to the heavens as though returning that of the stars. Drowsiness spread from one neighbourhood to the next, and through them all blew a chill, damp October wind. Only in the city’s centre was there any movement. On rue Papineau, just north of Sherbrooke, on the sixth floor of a twelve-storey building, a man leaned out his window and, with the aid of a powerful telescope, observed a scene taking place far below, in La Fontaine Park.

  “Shhh! Leave me alone, can’t you? Turn off the light!”

  Leaning toward the window, Robert Cormier, armed with a telescope, was looking at something at the base of his building.

  “Is it them?” inquired the woman, her voice charged with emotion.

  “I think so. Damn, if only it weren’t so dark. There they are, they’re heading towards a street light. I … I think …”

  The telephone rang.

  “Don’t you dare answer it!” Cormier ordered, half turning from the window.

  The apparatus continued to ring in the darkened apartment, the air of which hung heavy with the odour of cigarettes and whisky.

  This late at night, La Fontaine Park was deserted. The first cold weather of October had stripped the trees of their leaves. Somewhere off in the distance the weak light of a streetlamp fought off the night’s shadows. The young woman shivered and looked about her as she walked, then stopped beside a bench. A low murmur rose from the half-sleeping city. She looked at her watch and for an instant a flash of impatience distorted the harmony of her beautiful face. Another shiver ran through her. Then, hearing the scrape of a footstep on the path, she turned around. A man wearing a thick, brown cardigan was approaching her, his hands thrust into its pockets.