“Sorry I’m late,” he muttered harshly.
He went up to the woman and motioned her to sit down.
From a nearby building, someone with a telescope was watching the couple with an anxious eye.
He had puzzled over these paragraphs for two days, becoming more and more perplexed, dissatisfied, and anxious; each version seemed banal, lifeless, insipid, spineless. He knew he had to strike the magic note, find the words that would catch the reader as if in a net and hold him prisoner until the final page, and set his work firmly in the tracks of great literature. He was in no doubt that the entire novel rested on its opening lines.
And yet he was in the grip of a strange form of stage fright, like a case of opening-night jitters. In version after version, two opposing certitudes took hold in his mind. The first was his conviction that there was only one perfect opening. And how on earth was he to find it? The second and seemingly contrary certainty was that there was an infinite number of perfectly good ways to begin a novel, and obviously a writer could choose only one of them. But which one?
After a number of failed attempts, he finally settled on the following version:
Robert Cormier could not recall ever having lived through such a depressing October night. A damp, somewhat cold wind was sweeping through Montreal, and the city seemed on the verge of death. The all but leafless trees in La Fontaine Park resembled skeletons. From the sixth floor, where he had ended up, Cormier looked down at a forest of branches raised entreatingly into the air for as far as he could see. Suddenly, an exclamation escaped his lips. The long-awaited moment was about to arrive. He grabbed his telescope and focused it on the park below.
He was going to mail one copy of his manuscript to Les Éditions Courtelongues. By the middle of the afternoon, Céline and Blonblon would have received their copies with the request that they read them as soon as possible, pencil in hand, so that they could write their comments — positive or negative — in the margins. Steve, for whom literary culture consisted of perhaps a dozen sentences, most of which he only partly understood, would have to wait until one of the others had finished with his or her copy and could pass it on to him. The delay wouldn’t bother him in the slightest.
Charles had made four copies of his novel, and the fourth copy was intended for an exceptional person. That night, accompanied by Blonblon, he rang the bell of an apartment on the ninth floor of the Frontenac Towers. The door was opened by Mademoiselle Laramée, his former teacher. He had called ahead to prepare her for his visit, but without mentioning the reason for it.
“Good God in Heaven!” she cried, in a curiously muffled voice. “My little Charles … you’ve turned into a grown man! But what am I saying? Of course you have, what else could you do? And I see you’re a friend of my mender of porcelain. He’s a good boy, I know him well. Come in, come in, come into the living room and we’ll have a real chat. Watch out for that rug, it’s been known to slip. You have no idea how much pleasure your visit gives me, Charles. I’ve never forgotten you, you know. I must confess, I think about you often.”
Charles followed the old woman with a slightly sad smile. He had hardly recognized her, so much had age dried, wrinkled, and shrunk her features. But his confusion had lasted only an instant. The clarity of her articulation, the quickness of her eye, the way she instinctively took charge of the most ordinary circumstances could only have belonged to Ginette Laramée the schoolteacher. He soon felt that he was back in the company of the woman she had always been, having overcome his shock at the ravages of time, just as she herself had overcome almost everything.
She had prepared for their visit, and now brought out a tray of coffee and cookies. She made Charles give a detailed account of his life since their last meeting. Having lived outside the district for a number of years, she had almost no knowledge of what had transpired within it; she had heard, however, that Charles had worked for a time as a delivery boy at the Lalancette Pharmacy. Charles hesitated a second, then told her yes, it was true.
“It didn’t interfere with your studies, I hope?”
“No, no, not a bit, Mademoiselle. I still managed to get good grades.”
He saw Blonblon’s ironic smile and quickly changed the subject. Ten months ago, he told her proudly, he had left his adoptive parents’; house and was now living in his own apartment. And he was going out with their daughter, Céline Fafard, whom she surely must remember.
“Oh yes, of course I do. Céline. She was a pretty young thing, very serious in her studies, a very direct personality. You must bring her with you the next time you come; I would love to see her again.”
She bombarded Charles with questions, oblivious to Blonblon’s presence almost to the point of being impolite, although, fortunately, he didn’t seem to mind.
“What is that you have there?” she asked suddenly, pointing to the package at Charles’s feet.
Charles blushed. “It’s something I brought for you, Mademoiselle. No, no, not a present, really. I’ll bring you a real present next time. This …”
“I don’t want a present, my boy,” she interrupted, almost offended. “Your being here is present enough. Imagine! As a matter of fact, I detest getting presents!”
“I’ll bring you one anyway,” said Charles, grinning maliciously.
Blonblon smiled to himself, his nose in his coffee cup.
“Well, if it would make you happy,” she muttered, trying to hide her emotion. “But I absolutely forbid you to spend a lot of money on such foolishness! I won’t have it, do you hear? So, then,” she went on, indicating the parcel once again, “what is it? You’ve piqued my curiosity.”
“I’ve just finished writing a novel, Mademoiselle Laramée,” Charles announced, with a mixture of solemnity and pride, “and I was wondering if you would read it over, give me your opinion of it.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed. “A novel? Did I hear you correctly? You’ve written a novel?”
Charles nodded, then lowered his eyes.
“He’s been working away at it for over a year,” Blonblon cut in. “It nearly knocked him out, didn’t it, Charlie boy?”
“And … how long is it, this novel of yours?”
“Two hundred and seventeen pages, typed and double-spaced.”
“Typed and retyped,” said Blonblon. “Three times!”
Charles passed her the manuscript with a bashful smile. Ginette Laramée, her glasses at the end of her nose, began glancing through the pages. A slight smile touched her lips and her expression was one of frightened surprise, as though someone had just plopped a three-headed rabbit or a multicoloured frog in her lap. She returned to the beginning and read the first few lines, her lips moving, and nodded her head with an air of satisfaction.
“It seems good, very good, in fact. You always were good with language, Charles. I’ll begin reading it tomorrow morning, with great pleasure. But tell me …”
She set the manuscript on her lap, hesitated for a second, looking for the right words as though she were broaching a delicate subject.
“… why did you write this novel, Charles?”
“Because I want to become a writer.”
“That’s all he ever thinks about,” Blonblon confirmed. “Can’t get it out of his noggin. He’s a complete bore on the subject.”
Ginette Laramée raised her head sharply, like an ostrich that had just seen an onrushing bus. She furrowed her brows, tightened her lips, and said, somewhat harshly, “A writer? Come, come, Charles, writing isn’t a profession, it’s a hobby. You’ll starve to death, poor child.”
“That’s what we all tell him,” Blonblon chimed in. “But he won’t listen.”
“Michel Tremblay makes a good living,” Charles said.
“Yes, that’s true, or so we are given to understand. But he is practically the only one. And, of course, he writes mainly for the stage. They say there’s more money in theatre. Not to mention that he doesn’t have a family to support. Don’t you want to have chil
dren some day?”
“I don’t know.”
“I would dearly have loved to have had children of my own,” she sighed, “but life denied me that pleasure. At any rate, you have plenty of time to think about that. And about a great many other things besides,” she added, seeing the annoyed expression on Charles’s face. “I don’t mean to sound discouraging, because there is nothing nicer than writing books; I’ve always said so and I’ll say it again. I promise I will read your novel right to the end and give you my opinion. But you know me, Charles: I won’t mollycoddle you.”
“I don’t want you to,” Charles replied, standing up. Blonblon followed suit. Charles offered his hand to Mademoiselle Laramée, judging that it was time to take his leave and almost happy to be on his way.
It was the same mixture of admiration and concern that came over Fernand Fafard when he learned, by accident, of the existence of Charles’s manuscript a few days later. Céline had inadvertently left her copy on her desk among her schoolbooks. Fernand was a great reader of newspapers and magazines, but he had read only two novels in his entire life, both of them during a two-week vacation on the seacoast at Ogunquit ten years before. Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan, and The Damned, by Guy des Cars. His recollection of the experience was irrevocably associated in his mind with the intense heat that beat down on the beach and the maniacal pounding of jackhammers as workmen demolished a sidewalk outside their hotel. His venture into the world of literature was halted and never repeated.
“Hmm, yeah, well,” he murmured after reading a few pages. “He knows how to make words do what he wants them to do, no doubt about that. You can tell right off that he has a knack for it. When he writes, everything he’s read comes back into his head, all the expressions, the fancy phrases, the right words …”
But he didn’t dare read on for fear of being caught. Lucie proved to be both more curious and more forthright; she asked Charles to lend her a copy of The Dark Night, and she read it from start to finish.
“He has talent,” she assured her husband. “More talent than both of us put together multiplied by a hundred. He has a good plot, you never lose the thread, and he keeps up the suspense right to the end, or nearly. On the other hand, the character of the little dancing girl sets my teeth on edge. But that’s probably just me: I’ve never liked crybabies.”
“Do you think he’s really a… a writer?” asked the hardware-store owner, disconcerted.
“Who can tell? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
From then on, Charles was allowed to leave the hardware store at noon instead of one o’clock, without his salary being affected. Céline and Blonblon were encouraging; they found his novel “action-packed” and “realistic.” They told him how fascinating it was to see characters moving around “in the part of the city we know,” and that Robert Cormier, the main character, was “a nice guy” and also “cool.” Steve Lachapelle found him “a bit of a drip,” however, adding that he had managed to read The Dark Night right to the end, which to him was high praise and a mark of true friendship.
From the redoubtable heights of the teaching profession came the verdict of Mademoiselle Laramée, which was also favourable. Charles received it in her apartment, along with a piece of chocolate cake made especially for the occasion. The former teacher had flushed out a hundred mistakes in spelling and punctuation, which weren’t many for a text of such length; in a few places the narrative dragged on far too long; and some of the scenes she found much too violent. “But,” she added, “you mustn’t pay any attention to the likes and dislikes of an old fuddy-duddy like me.”
On a scale of one to ten, she would give The Dark Night a seven and a half. Considering it was a first novel, Charles had accomplished something truly remarkable; she shook his hand warmly and told him he must continue with his writing. Charles, however, wondered if her affection for him hadn’t clouded her judgment.
The ultimate authority on the subject, however — Les Éditions Courtelongues — maintained a total silence that, after weeks, and then months, had passed, became all but unbearable. Taking the prolific Balzac as his model, however, Charles launched into the writing of a second adventure novel, this time one that took place in the forests of northern Quebec, near Abitibi. Since he had never set foot in that part of the country, he drew strongly on his reading of a number of works by Jack London. The work went slowly, however, as though the fate of this second novel hinged on that of the first.
Three times he called the publishing company to find out where his manuscript was in the assessment process, and each time he was told that the selection committee was swamped and would come to a decision in due course. The fourth time, he learned that the literary editor, a Mr. L’Archevêque, was in Europe; he would be back in two weeks, at which time he would, without fail, communicate with Charles either by post or by some other means. On the fifth call, Mr. L’Archevêque was in a meeting, and for the next several calls it seemed to Charles that all the editor ever did was go to meetings.
On March 22nd, 1986, at ten after three in the afternoon, still without news, Charles put on his boots and coat and went down to the corner restaurant to call the overworked editor again. The response was the same. With the determination of one who knows he has nothing more to lose, he jumped into a taxi — a luxury justified by his rage — and twelve minutes later presented himself at the office of Les Éditions Courtelongues, on Laurier Street in Outremont. When he arrived at the reception desk, however, he found the dark wood panelling, the high ceiling, and the thick, wine-coloured carpeting intimidating, making him conscious of the audacity of his actions. At the far end of the room, seated behind a large desk, was a young woman apparently engrossed in a fashion magazine.
He stopped, unsure of his next move.
“May I help you?” she said, giving him a polite smile.
Too late. How could he turn and run from such a good-looking woman who was eyeing him with the cool precision of a laboratory instrument?
He walked towards her. “I would like to speak with Mr. L’Archevêque,” he said.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. L’Archevêque is in a meeting.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
She looked at him in surprise. “He can’t see you, I’m afraid. He’s very busy.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
He sat facing her in a large leather armchair.
“Mr. L’Archevêque cannot see you this afternoon,” the receptionist replied, fixing him with an acid gaze. “He has meetings right through to six o’clock.”
“Then I’ll see him after six. I have nothing pressing.”
Disconcerted, she stared for a moment at the pile of papers on her desk, then made a tentative gesture towards her telephone. Charles felt his heart leap. The brick wall he’d been beating his head against for months was about to crumble and fall. A few more whacks and he’d be through.
“Your name, sir?” she asked finally, in a clipped, glacial tone.
He gave his name and told her what his visit was about. The woman got up and walked down a corridor behind her and knocked on a door. There followed a brief exchange, punctuated by a stifled exclamation. Two bright spots began to flash in front of Charles’s eyes; his nerves were sapping his courage. He took a deep breath and the spots disappeared. The receptionist was standing before him.
“Mr. L’Archevêque cannot possibly see you this afternoon,” she said. “He asks that you phone him next week.”
“The hell I will!” Charles replied, jumping to his feet. “I’ve wasted enough time on phone calls!”
And before the woman could react, he marched around her and down the corridor, knocked once on the literary editor’s door, opened it, and entered the office. The man looked up at him, mouth gaping open, pen in hand suspended above a sheet of paper. He had thick, blond hair and features that were slightly faded, like those of a former playboy. He looked delicate in his wire-framed glasses and silk tie, and the expression on
his face showed languid surprise and a hint of amusement.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded, throwing himself back in his chair.
Oh, just my luck, Charles thought, a goddamn Frenchman from France!
“Sir,” he replied, blushing to the roots of his hair and shaking like a leaf, but charged with an indignation that brought him to the balls of his feet and made his eyes stare like those of a hypnotist, “I’m very sorry to bother you, but four months ago I sent you the manuscript of a novel that took me more than a year to write, sir, and to this day no one has told me a thing about it despite the fact that I’ve called at least thirty times to speak to you, but no, you, sir, are impossible to reach, and so I — if you’ll pardon my language, it just comes out this way — I’ve had it up to here! I wouldn’t treat my dog the way you’ve been treating me, sir! This whole thing has got me climbing the walls! If you don’t like the novel, fine, then send it back so I can try somewhere else. You’re wasting my time, sir, and thanks to you my nerves are completely shot!”
He stopped, still angry, but out of breath and out of ideas. He was seized by a violent desire to turn and run from the office, but the literary editor, who appeared to have taken a certain pleasure from the diatribe, motioned for him to sit down with a friendly gesture.
“What is the title of your manuscript, Mr. Thibodeau?”
He had a sort of singsong, drawling way of speaking that was not that of a man given to outbursts of anger. It was the voice of a charming, worldly man, sly, perhaps even underhanded, certainly vain and sensitive, the kind of voice belonging to someone who was used to listening to others and keeping his own deeper feelings to himself.
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