The Years of Fire Read online

  “Blonblon,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t go to Monsieur Michaud’s last night.”

  Blonblon gave him a surprised smile.

  “I mean, I went there, but he wasn’t home. But I did see him a short time later, in the street.”

  He gave Blonblon the details of his encounter.

  “So what do you think, Blonblon? It makes me sick to think about it,” he went on without waiting for an answer. “Cheating on his wife when she’s home in bed with a migraine. That sucks, doesn’t it? I never thought he was like that. He’s done a lot for me, Blonblon – without him, who knows where I’d be right now? – and he has a lot of fine qualities, I know that as well as anyone. But to see him with his arms around that little … tart, I mean, jeez, what I mean is … I …”

  He stopped talking, tears welling up in his eyes.

  Blonblon chewed his lip thoughtfully, then he, too, scraped the bottom of his bowl with his spoon.

  A man sitting in a booth across from them was listening in on their conversation. He was bald and thick-lipped and had a scar on his left cheek that would have suited a pirate in a B movie; he listened with a strange smile, and every so often he rubbed the tip of his nose.

  “Well, Thibodeau,” Blonblon said with a seriousness Charles hadn’t seen in him before, “here’s what I think …”

  He pushed his bowl away and took a drink of his root beer, in which the bubbles had started to slow in their ascent to the surface.

  “… I think that love is the strongest force in the universe. No, listen to me! I know what I’m talking about. That girl might have seemed like a tart to you, but Monsieur Michaud is Monsieur Michaud and you are you. When love hits you between the eyes, my friend, watch out, there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t think. Common sense just flies out the window, believe me. I wouldn’t have been saying this a month ago, but now I can. Did you know that I have a girlfriend, Charles?”

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Henri saw us together, is that it? I thought so.”

  “Your mother told me, too.”

  “Oh yeah? It doesn’t matter, I’m not trying to hide anything. Her name is Caroline. Caroline Maltais. I’ll introduce you one day soon.”

  And with a quiver in his voice, as though his life depended on each word he was saying, he launched into the story of his love life.

  The affair had got off to a bad start. Caroline Maltais lived on the same floor as he did, but at the opposite end. He didn’t run into her very often, and truth be told he hadn’t paid much attention to her. Then one day, about a month and a half ago, he’d been waiting for the elevator on the ground floor when she came into the lobby with three of her friends; the small group huddled in a corner whispering and he had the strong impression that they were talking about him. Two or three times a phrase made it to his ears, along with a few stifled giggles: “Goldilocks.” They could have been referring to his hair, which was blond and fairly curly, but Goldilocks was also the name of a girl in a fairy tale his parents used to read to him when he was young, and that really cut him to the quick: could they possibly think he was effeminate? Then the elevator door opened and he entered it without even bothering to turn around, determined to snub these little idiots the next time he saw them.

  That same evening, as he was on his way out to get something for his father, he ran into Caroline in the hallway. She looked oddly at him and, as she passed by, turned her head away. He hadn’t had the presence of mind to come up with a cutting remark. Two days later, however, he saw her again, this time on the sidewalk with her three friends. They were all giggling and punching each other on the shoulder, and again he heard the word “Goldilocks.” But this time he was ready for them, and when he came abreast of them he turned to Caroline and said, “Hi, there, Stringbean!” He wanted to draw attention to her height, and to the skinniness of her legs, and to her long neck, which made her look like a giraffe reaching into a tree for a mouthful of leaves. Her eyes widened, as did those of her companions, and he went on his way feeling triumphant and revenged.

  He didn’t see her for a while after that and had almost forgotten the whole thing when he ran into her one night on his way into a convenience store. She was alone. She pretended not to notice him and passed by with her nose in the air. That week he saw her a few more times, and each time she acted as though he were transparent, or had shrunk to the size of a flea. The whole thing was getting on his nerves, although, given the circumstances, he could hardly have expected anything else.

  Then one night, about eight o’clock, as he was coming out of Frontenac Towers on his way to the Fafards, he saw her coming towards him balancing a small parcel on the tip of her finger. She was wearing a blue dress and black shoes and she had a large, blue headband holding back her hair, which was chestnut brown. The sun was just on the point of passing behind a building, but first it showered her with a spray of copper rays that transformed her into an incandescent vision of exquisite grace and lightness. He stopped, dumbstruck, and had to force himself to resume walking. She continued straight towards him, falling back into shadow but, strangely, remaining as lovely as she had been in the light. As he passed her he nodded and smiled – and she smiled back!

  From that moment on she was never out of his thoughts; watching TV, having a conversation, riding his bike, taking a shower, getting up or going to bed, during meals, her image floated through his head. He would wonder where she was at any given moment, what she was doing, whether she was thinking of him, and he felt tortured, but in a tender way, a way he had never felt before. It was a strange kind of melancholy. He couldn’t shake the feeling off, and in any case he didn’t want to. It was pain and pleasure mixed together. He’d never been so happy to be feeling so sad, joyfully embracing this huge sorrow that had come from God-knew-where to tear up his insides. He’d be gripped in feverish agitation for hours on end, then suddenly fall into a morbid torpor and lie stretched out on his bed or on the sofa, barely able to breathe. He knew it couldn’t go on. He had to speak to her.

  A few days later he was at the Quintal Arena on de Maisonneuve Boulevard, where he’d gone to have a swim with Steve Lachapelle. Caroline was there with a girl with a large chin, someone he hadn’t seen before, who turned out to be a cousin or something. Anyway, when she saw him she gave a shy wave; he waved back and made a spectacular dive into the pool, which astonished Steve because usually it took a great deal of vigorous (and unsolicited) coaxing to get him into the water. Surfacing from his dive, he swam across the pool to where she was talking to her cousin and took part in their conversation. After a minute she joined him in the water and they began to swim lengths together. The cousin sat on the edge of the pool with her mouth open, paddling her feet in the water, and Steve Lachapelle worked on his breast stroke by himself, every now and then casting curious looks at Blonblon, obviously feeling like a fifth wheel. Things improved slightly when Blonblon brought Caroline over and introduced her and her wide-eyed cousin, Lina, to Steve.

  An hour later they all left the pool together and went to a pizzeria. Showing more animation than Steve had seen in him before, Blonblon made Caroline laugh so hard she sometimes had to rest her head on his shoulder. Even Lina began to show signs of a fleeting intelligence. It was while Steve was trying to pull Lina from her lethargy that Blonblon summoned all his courage and, thin-lipped with worry, slid his hand under the table and placed it on top of Caroline’s. She responded by taking his hand and squeezing it.

  “From that moment on I was a goner,” he said. “The next afternoon I kissed her in the elevator. Then we went for a short walk in Médéric-Martin Park, and after that …”

  His voice trailed off. He was unable to describe the undescribable. He was an initiate rendered speechless by his initiation. He could only smile, his eyes drifting off, as he relived the first entrancing kisses and caresses, swept away again by an emotion that made his penis pulse almost painfully against the front of his jea
ns.

  “Her tongue, man, her tongue … if you could just … and the way she runs her hands up and down my back … oh, man!”

  Charles smiled, flattered at being taken into Blonblon’s confidence, but was struck at the same time by the sharp blade of envy. His face fell. He had just realized that the friendship that had bound the two of them together would never be the same again. Blonblon moved off, waving his hand wildly and telling Charles he should find a girl of his own with whom to embark on this amorous voyage into the unknown.

  Sure, thought Charles, find a girl. But who would this girl be? He hadn’t the slightest idea.

  An image of Céline flashed through his mind, but it was gone almost before he noticed it.

  5

  Unbelievable that two schools so close to one another and filled with pretty much the same students could nonetheless be so different. That, at least, was what Charles was thinking as he walked home from Pierre-Dupuy High School on a rainy afternoon in September 1981.

  The difference had hit him the minute he’d stepped inside the school. First there were the hordes of students swarming everywhere, moving in waves, filling the stairwells with a dull roar. He’d never seen anything like it! “There must be fifteen hundred of us,” he told himself. Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur hadn’t had half that many. And he’d been one of the older kids in his former school, whereas here he felt about as small as a germ. And all those girls, laughing, chattering, swinging their hips, allowing themselves to be hugged or pushing someone away with an elbow or a knee, their eyes flashing angrily and their mouths twisting.… It was all heady stuff for a guy who had gone to a boys-only school for the past eight years! And the whiff of cigarette smoke floating through the air. Just inside the main entrance was a kind of café covered by a green canopy and separated from the corridor by a white picket fence. Students smoked freely, sitting at the tables, perched on chairs, even in the stairwells and the corridors. Teachers even had the right to smoke in class! At Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur, if anyone had lit a cigarette within the school walls there would have been an earthquake; the guilty student would have got five hours of detention.

  But all that was nothing compared to what took place in class.

  That morning, he’d heard Pierre Blanchard say to Réal Dionne, their math teacher: “Jesus H. Christ, you filthy son of a bitch!”

  Exasperated by Blanchard’s behaviour, Dionne had then made a remark that sent a ripple of laughter through the class. The teacher didn’t take the insult too seriously, because he could see that Blanchard was not in great shape. The word in the school was that his father was a hard case who had his own way of getting his children out of bed in the mornings. At any rate, Blanchard went up to Dionne after class and the two of them talked in low voices for a long time before parting on friendly terms.

  Charles would never have admitted the fact publicly, but he had a lot of respect for his teachers. They had to have nerves of steel to teach at Pierre-Dupuy! Half of each class was taken up trying to impose some kind of order. Rarely was there quiet for more than twenty seconds at a time. The students talked freely among themselves, dropped things on the floor, shuffled their feet, rearranged their chairs and desks, got up and walked around and even left the classroom without permission, asked the same questions over and over (because they rarely listened to the answers), threw wads of paper at each other, read books, or napped with their heads on their desks. They didn’t behave that way out of spite; they simply couldn’t help themselves. They were like young animals incapable of harnessing their energy.

  The previous day Jocelyne Ouellette had, as usual, paraded in front of everyone just before class, showing off her breasts that filled her black cotton sweater, until the teacher had told her to sit down at her desk. As she’d passed Charles she’d brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. He got the message. It was an invitation (the second in three days) to “get it on,” like the others. He’d been too standoffish. The girls had figured out that he was still a virgin. They seemed to have a nose for that sort of thing, despite his best efforts to make them think otherwise. Their sometimes ironic attitude and certain innuendos indicated that they saw through his pretence. If he didn’t do something about the problem in the next few weeks, they would write him off as a hopeless twerp.

  If only his Black Goddess were still there, the one he’d spent the summer dreaming of. He would have drummed up the courage to have a go at her, despite the difference in their ages! He might not even have had to work too hard at it; she might have simply gone to bed with him out of kindness, to make a man out of him. But she’d been out of school for some time. What was she doing now? he wondered. Working as a packer at Rose & Laflamme? A spinner at Grover’s? A go-go dancer in a downtown disco?

  Steve Lachapelle swore he’d seen her coming out of the Macdonald’s Tobacco factory with a man much older than she was – may he rot in hell, the old pervert!

  Since Blonblon had little time for anything but his affair with Caroline, Charles had begun hanging out with Steve Lachapelle, who was as scatterbrained as ever but still fun to be around. He convinced Charles to take up pool, which he said was “a real trip, man,” as much for the game itself as for the kinds of places where it was played. Since school began, Charles had been working at the Lalancette Pharmacy only on Saturdays, and so he and Steve took to going to the Orleans Billiards Hall on rue Ontario. To get there they had to go through a tunnel under a railroad overpass, a dark, filthy place that stank of urine; its vaulted ceiling and massive concrete pillars looked vaguely Egyptian and gave the place an aura of defeat; it gave Charles the creeps, but since he didn’t want Steve to think he was chicken he pretended it was the coolest place in the world. Every time they went through it they clowned around and sang dirty songs at the top of their voices while cars and trucks whizzed past their noses.

  The Orleans Billiards Hall was, by comparison, like heaven itself. It was on the second floor of a huge, faceless building, above a supermarket. They had to climb a wide staircase with three right turns, as clean and shiny as a bank counter; the experience awakened a host of lively emotions in Charles. The pool hall pleased him very much the minute he entered it: huge and dark, the room contained some twenty pool tables with long lights suspended above them, only some of which were burning. Around these the players moved slowly, almost athletically, totally absorbed in their games. On the left was a long bar behind which worked a very pretty girl wearing blue jeans and a tight-fitting blouse that stopped just above her navel. She made quite an impression on Charles. Behind the cash sat a heavy-set man in his fifties, with thick salt-and-pepper hair and the look of someone who had seen everything twice. He kept writing down numbers in a book and looking up occasionally to have a word with two customers perched on stools at the bar, sipping their beers. Three more were sitting at a table farther back, playing cards.

  The mysterious clicking of balls, the bright-green rectangles glowing in the darkened room, even the dimensions of the hall, in which all sounds and voices seemed to dissolve into a vast, shimmering emptiness, gave Charles the impression of intrigue and adventure, and the heady feeling that he had entered into the world of adults.

  He turned to Steve and smiled, and Steve gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  “Not bad, eh? But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Follow me.”

  He walked quickly and confidently up to the cash and asked for a table.

  “Number eight,” the man said after looking him over for a second. “Be careful of the cloth, okay?” he added suspiciously.

  Lachapelle frowned at him.

  “You’ve never had a problem with me. I’ve been coming here nearly three months now. He’s new,” he added, nodding towards Charles, “but I’ll show him the ropes, don’t worry.”

  “Just watch the cloth,” the man said again, going back to his notebook.

  “He’s always like that,” Steve grumbled as they walked over to their table. “Nadine’s a lot nicer. I wouldn’t mind getting
into her pants.”

  “Nadine?”

  “The beauty behind the bar.”

  He put his hand between his legs and thrust his hips forward with a grimace of pleasure.

  “Man, I’d give it to her in a minute, but the old guy’s poking her, can you believe it? I guess when you’re the boss …”

  They started playing pool. Charles thought the game went on too long. The one or two ropes that Steve bothered to show him were short ones.

  He taught himself how to follow through with his stroke, how to rebound, how to carom off another ball, how to put English on the cue ball, how to break. He also played with extreme caution, since a tear in the cloth would have cost them a lot of money and got them thrown out of the pool hall.

  Around nine o’clock Charles began to get a headache and suggested they go to the Villa Frontenac for a smoked-meat sandwich. Just then a tall, balding man in a checked shirt and jogging pants with baggy knees came up to them, hands in his pockets, swaggering a bit like Charlie Chaplin in old silent films. He stood at the end of their table and watched them play. After a while he went up to Charles and, excusing himself politely, showed him a better way to bridge his cue, then gave him a few tips on improving his play, always speaking as though to an equal, someone he had known for a long time. Every now and then he said something to Steve, whom he apparently considered a regular, and Steve would reply in kind, eager to be seen to be on an equal footing with a man who was twice his age.

  When the game was finished, the man invited the boys over to the bar and offered to buy them a beer.

  “They’re underage, these two, De Bané,” said the owner, pointing at Steve and Charles.

  “Aw, c’mon,” said the man, his eyes widening. “One beer never hurt anyone!”

  “Maybe not, but it would hurt my licence. Coke, 7-Up, coffee, or the street, your choice. You might like running after trouble, but I’d rather chase something else.”