A Very Bold Leap Page 9

  He suggested they meet the next day at four o’clock at La Brioche Lyonnaise, on rue Saint-Denis, and he would bring his manuscript. Then, slightly woozy from the cognac and knowing he had to be at the hardware store early in the morning, he got up and left the restaurant. The encounter with the journalist seemed to have reinvigorated him, and despite his fatigue and the vague feeling of unreality that had come over him, he sat down at his work table and managed to write three pages before taking himself off to bed.

  Bernard Délicieux loved The Dark Night. A few days later, Charles went to his apartment on avenue Pare La Fontaine. The journalist opened the door in a dressing gown and slippers, with a two-day growth on his chin and in such a state of excitement it raised his voice to falsetto pitch; he began prattling to Charles with grand, theatrical gestures, stopping at odd moments to peer into the young man’s eyes and pat him on the shoulder. His thin, hairless legs contrasted comically with his protruding belly, making him look vaguely like an ostrich, but Charles was too absorbed in the praise being heaped on him to notice anything unusual about his host’s appearance. His months and months of work had finally begun to pay off. Through the voice of this overexcited individual, who was delivering his praise while pacing about the room, Charles could hear the approval of his public.

  “Your book had me in its grip from the moment I opened it, Charles. I put everything aside and read it in one go. Then I read it again, something I haven’t done for thirty years. You can pride yourself on having given me the most intense experience! I didn’t even put it down to get dressed. I haven’t shaved or eaten anything but a few cinnamon buns and coffee! This novel absolutely must be published. You are a born writer, one of the future greats of our literature, and any publisher who doesn’t see that is an imbecile who should be demoted to selling bicycles or woollen goods or something, or better still, retired so their place can be taken by someone intelligent.”

  “Maybe, but they all say the same thing,” Charles said sadly. “My book will never be published.”

  “It will, it will, mark my words. Give me some time to think about it. I’ll figure something out. Obviously, it isn’t entirely perfect, it’ll need a few improvements here and there. I’ll make a few notes — you can read them when your head has cleared; make of them what you will — you’re the master, after all. Me, I’m nothing, a poor, old journalist, worn out by work.”

  And he launched into a fresh string of praises. Suddenly, Charles found his enthusiasm suspect, his mannerisms and appearance unpleasant, even slimy. Délicieux offered him a coffee, but he turned it down, saying he had to meet someone, and after thanking the journalist as warmly as he could manage, he left, his manuscript under his arm, confused and perplexed without quite knowing why. Once again, he felt himself to be back at square one.

  Three days went by. Fernand and Lucie watched Charles with concern. Normally friendly and industrious, he had become quiet and preoccupied. He would stop in the middle of doing something and stare off into space, fingering his lips, and when asked a question would seem to be hearing it from a great distance; twice he had almost lost customers who had come up to him with a polite request. It was the goddamn publishers, muttered Fernand; they take more pleasure in torturing writers than in publishing their books, as they ought to do, unless they were just stupid and lazy. After all, what were the risks? The government gave them grants, didn’t it? But instead of using the money to publish books, they no doubt bought themselves Mercedes-Benzes and drank champagne with bimbos smothered in jewels. He had half a mind to go to them and give them a piece of his mind, but what good would that do? He knew nothing about that kind of business, and they’d simply laugh in his face.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Charles showed up at the hardware store looking so distraught and out of sorts that, after consulting with his wife, Fernand decided to take him aside and ask him how things were going, and whether or not he could be of any help.

  “Give him a couple of days off,” Lucie suggested. “A little rest might do him some good. Maybe he’s gotten into the habit of writing all night. Artists usually keep late hours. But they need their sleep like everyone else, don’t they?”

  A few minutes before ten, just when Fernand had gathered enough courage to approach him, Charles received a telephone call and spent several minutes on the line. When he hung up, he was a changed man. For the rest of the morning he was the most charming and efficient hardware-store clerk in the city, and when he left the store at noon he was whistling “When Men Live for Love.” Fernand and Lucie stood at the door watching him sashay down the street, still perplexed but much relieved.

  Several minutes later he left the Berri-de Montigny subway station and walked quickly up Saint-Denis to the Commensal, a restaurant where Bernard Délicieux was waiting for him with a small man sporting a black beard and thinning hair, in his late thirties, with a pair of tinted glasses pushed high onto the top of his head.

  “Charles,” said the journalist, standing up, “allow me to introduce Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux, editor, journalist, public relations expert, reporter, and a great many other things besides, as he will tell you himself. But first,” he said, assuming a comically formal tone, “let us make our choices from this groaning board of succulent vegetarian meals prepared for the delectation of our palates and the benefit of our health. On me, of course.”

  He led the way to the serving counters, where huge, gleaming metal trays were heaped with a colourful array of hot and cold meals, their steam filling the room with strange and mouthwatering aromas.

  “Have you been here before?” asked Pigeon-Lecuchaux, stepping politely aside so that Charles could take a plate for himself.

  “Yes, once or twice,” Charles replied, looking, despite himself, at the man’s tinted glasses perched so bizarrely on his head. “A long time ago.”

  “Well!” declared Délicieux. “I’ve been coming here every day for a month now. I’ve decided to pay more attention to my health. No more meat for me! With what they feed cattle and pigs and chickens these days, we’re better off staying away from meat altogether, believe me. Try a slice of this millet tourtière, Charles, and tell me what you think of it. And here’s a seaweed salad — you won’t find any worms in that! — and some grilled tofu… yum-yum! What an embarrassment of riches — dig in and live to be a hundred!”

  “So,” said Pigeon-Lecuchaux, taking his place at the table with a plate piled high with food, “Bernand tells me you have laid a golden egg?”

  And he attacked his meal with remarkable voraciousness.

  “Laid a golden egg!” exclaimed Bernand Délicieux, beaming. “Honestly, the expressions you come up with!”

  “I tried to write a novel,” Charles replied modestly.

  “And I understand the publishers have been hard on it.”

  “Well, let’s say they haven’t been stopping me in the street asking me to sign a contract.”

  Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux gave a small, silent laugh and blinked two or three times, then, after vigorously chewing on a piece of curried eggplant, murmured in a silky voice, “With your permission, I would like to form my own opinion of your manuscript. I have the utmost respect for Bernard’s judgment. If I think the novel has merit, I might be able to do one or two things for you.”

  “He can do it all, Charles!” enthused Délicieux, brandishing his fork.

  Which, in a way, was perfectly true.

  Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux had been living in Montreal for a year. He had let out that he was originally from Paris, the son of a well-known surgeon, now deceased. In fact, he had been born in Bergerac, in Dordogne, where his father had been the concierge of a tobacco museum. Charles thought he had seen his name somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. Délicieux filled him in: three weeks after his arrival in Montreal, feeling an urgent need to put money in his purse, the adventurous master of all trades had struck gold. In ten days he had written a biography of Ginette Reno that had become a small scandal a
nd the subject of a lawsuit for defamation of character. The speed with which he had written the book, and the quiet effrontery of its contents, had blown Délicieux away, and he had made Pigeon-Lecuchaux into a kind of cult figure.

  “He is Otis Editions, Charles.”

  “Otis, like the elevator company,” explained the publisher with a thin smile, “except that we only go up! I already have half a dozen titles that are selling quite nicely, and we’re putting together a small book about the Gay Village that will sell like hotcakes, believe me. It is clear to me that homosexuals are on the rise.”

  Charles listened to him with interest and surprise. With a little more knowledge about the career of his new acquaintance, he might have cut short his lunch and gone to watch the sparrows in La Fontaine Park, or to count the cracks in the sidewalk on Sainte-Catherine. But very few people in Montreal knew who Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux really was.

  A shameless adventurer, an inexhaustible talker, a man of infinite schemes, Pigeon-Lecuchaux had dabbled in everything, stirred up everything, stuck his nose everywhere, and done anything. His innumerable talents had been employed in the sale of rosewood pianos (“the singing wood”) and of whirlpool baths, and in publicity. He had been involved in the organization of cultural events both philanthropic and commercial; the setting up of a practice in “reconstructive psychology;” the production of high-class pornography; a dealership in holistic medicines; illegal immigration; writing, journalism, and, most recently, his venture in publishing.

  The previous year, in Paris, he had published, with the connivance of a dubious translator and under the pseudonym Sacha Savaroff, three erotic mystery novels — Tête-à-Tête on a Train Track; Everyone Looks Like Someone; and A Hippopotamus in My Bed — the work of an obscure writer in Moscow. Sacha Savaroff had remained as obscure in Paris as his victim had been in Russia.

  Then, after having produced several books that had been adroitly mixed, mashed, and reassembled from other books, he had published The Seven Pillars of Inner Peace, a philosophical work under the name Abouyafi Afnam Aknach, purportedly an eighteenth-century dervish. The famous intellectual Jacques Languirand himself had provided the preface, although without knowing it. The book sold very well, since mystical contortionism had been all the rage for some time.

  But legal entanglements had inspired the author to preserve his own inner peace by turning himself into a puff of air and rematerializing in Quebec, where he came to earth with ferocious energy and daunting enthusiasm, convinced as he was that he had landed in the country of his dreams, which so far had proven to be the case.

  Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux took a mouthful of triple-chocolate cake, accompanied it with a long sip of coffee, waited several seconds for an inopportune bubble of gas to dissipate, and then, turning towards Charles, handed him a card.

  “Bring your manuscript to my offices tomorrow. You will hear from me pronto, I assure you. And what I like, the world likes. You have my word on that.”

  The next afternoon, shortly before one o’clock, Charles discovered that “my offices” consisted of a tiny room somewhere in the bowels of an immense four-storey dilapidated edifice on rue Ontario, near Saint-André, a former warehouse that had, over the intervening years, been put to ever more diverse and ludicrous use. Otis Editions was reached by threading through an incredible maze of creaking corridors and dusty stairwells filled with a variety of rumblings, scurryings, and unidentifiable noises; the walls and ceilings were covered by a lavish display of tile work, and the electrical fixtures were encrusted with paint. Charles wandered about for a good twenty minutes looking for someone who could point him in the right direction, and then suddenly recognized Pigeon-Lecuchaux’s voice speaking into a telephone. He knocked on a door. Someone bade him enter. The publisher welcomed him with a friendly “Ha!” then stood up, shook his hand, and shoved a chair towards him that looked as though it had supported thousands of backsides and was beginning to smell like it.

  “Unlike my more frivolous-minded confrères,” he seemed to find it necessary to explain, “I do not put my money into décors et spectacles, as the great Gaston Gallimard used to say, but into my books. Here everything goes into the book, nothing but the book. My vanity and my comfort are well down the list of priorities. Any publisher worthy of the name should be a slave to his books and to his authors, for they are his only reason for being. That’s how I see it, anyway. And very soon, my dear friend, I hope to become your slave. Ah, here it is, the famous manuscript! I cannot wait to read it. I’ll begin immediately.”

  “There are probably a few places where it still needs work,” Charles said modestly.

  “No matter. What’s important is that it show talent. Everything else is just mechanics and plumbing. That’s where we come in, we editors; we are the bridge between the writer and the multitudes. But the bridge’s foundation must be solid, and the roadway smooth and free of obstacles, so that the traffic of ideas between the one and the other can proceed unimpeded.”

  He opened the manuscript and straight away began reading. Three minutes passed. From the floor above their heads came the sound of “Yellow Submarine” playing on a consumptive radio. Charles watched in astonishment as a space in the greyish plank floor beneath his feet narrowed and widened as if through some mysterious pulsation, then realized that his own nervousness was making him hallucinate.

  Pigeon-Lecuchaux raised his head.

  “It starts well,” he said. “If the quality keeps up, I can get you favourable reviews, guaranteed.”

  “Guaranteed?” asked Charles, amazed.

  The publisher glanced at his watch, then stood up and offered his hand to Charles with a paternal smile.

  “Guaranteed. I have an infallible method in place. You will hear from me soon, my friend. All my thoughts are with you.”

  Céline and Blonblon listened to Charles in bewilderment as the carafe on the counter refilled with coffee. Charles had asked them over to tell them about his second encounter with the owner of Otis Editions. The meeting had taken place earlier that day in the restaurant Le Caveau, on rue Victoria. A huge meal, superbly complemented by fine wine, had accompanied a series of strange proposals — strange, at least, to a neophyte writer like Charles.

  Édouard Pigeon-Lecuchaux had loved The Dark Night. He bombarded Charles with praise that included such phrases as “major talent” and “a star of the first magnitude,” called him “a young Atlas holding up the world of Quebec literature,” and said his novel was “a quintessentially North American outpouring in which the interweaving of cruelty and love produces an extremely durable emotional fabric.” In short, a great career awaited the future author if…

  And here the publisher had paused.

  “If what?” Charles had asked, excited but also a bit skeptical.

  “If adequate care is taken,” continued Pigeon-Lecuchaux, “to ensure that this career has its beginning under the most favourable conditions.”

  “And what conditions would those be?”

  “We can talk about that later,” the publisher had replied with a dismissive gesture. “Someone will be joining us for dessert to discuss that. First I want to describe to you what I consider to be the publisher’s role in all of this.”

  According to Pigeon-Lecuchaux, most publishers treated their authors as so many galley slaves, repaying their Herculean efforts with a miserable pittance — the so-called “author’s royalties,” which rarely exceeded five per cent of sales (in other words, nothing) — and keeping the lion’s share for themselves.

  Pigeon-Lecuchaux saw things differently.

  He did not regard the writer as a common employee, but rather as an associate, almost a partner, who supplied the firm with the raw material — the book — and who therefore deserved adequate compensation. Wasn’t that simple justice? In fact, Pigeon-Lecuchaux saw himself as the common element, a simple gearbox, as it were, glistening with sweat and streaked with oil, whose only task was to direct the energy from the creative mac
hine, the writer, from which it drew its motive power. But in order to get this motive power rolling, a more fundamental condition came into play. If the author was to participate on an equal footing in the profits generated by his work, he first had to contribute to the generation of funds needed for its publication. The publisher, in this case Pigeon-Lecuchaux, simply drew a reasonable salary for his own role in the process.

  “Contribute to the generation of funds?” Charles had repeated, becoming more and more nervous. “Contribute how much?”

  “Oh, not much. A few thousand, more or less. But the success of the book, and I am certain that it will be successful, is in direct proportion to the amount of effort that goes into producing it. Your investment will be returned to you twenty-, fiftyfold! Oh yes! With proper early management, you’ll have an assured income for the rest of your life, from a single book. Can you imagine it? A life of freedom and ease! Something like that doesn’t just fall into your lap, you know!”

  Charles had given a disillusioned shrug. “That may be so,” he said, “but I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “That remains to be seen. People spend their whole lives dreaming of having a million dollars, but they can usually lay their hands on seven thousand without too much trouble.”

  “Seven thousand!” Charles had exclaimed, then added, suspiciously, “So why not put the money into it yourself, if you’re so certain of my success?”