“Don’t listen to her,” Charles cut in, furrowing his brows. “I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”
“That’s the way I see it, too,” said the director, rising from his chair. “Drop by the office on Monday around ten. I’ll have your paycheque ready for you.”
He was about to leave when Charles stopped him with a gesture. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? I don’t understand how… Why was it that you came looking for me?”
Roger Laprotte slapped his forehead. “Son of a gun,” he said. “I completely forgot! You received a phone call at the office at about two thirty, someone named Céline Fafard or something like that. A friend of yours was in an accident earlier this afternoon. Fairly serious, apparently; he maybe dead already. You’d better call her back right away.”
And giving the two lovers an amiable wave, he hurried back to his office.
At around one-thirty that afternoon, Steve Lachapelle had been crossing rue Ontario on his way to the Vieux-Montréal Cegep when he’d been hit by a delivery truck. Because he was unconscious, he hadn’t heard the horrified shouts of the driver, who stood in front of Steve running his fingers frantically through his salt-and-pepper hair, feeling stupid and powerless. Neither did he see the crowd of bystanders gathering around him, exclaiming and calling out an incredible amount of contradictory advice. Nor had he felt anything when the ambulance crew picked him up and laid him carefully on a stretcher, which in fact was a very lucky thing for him, the only good thing about the whole situation.
By the time Charles, Céline, and Blonblon arrived at Notre-Dame Hospital, he was in the operating room, being treated for multiple traumas and a fractured skull that required a delicate and hazardous operation. Isabel joined them later in the evening. After exchanging a few words with her friends, she sat next to Blonblon, hung her head and seemed to retreat into herself. Charles understood that she was praying.
From a nearby examination room came the sounds of a stormy discussion between a young man and a female doctor; the poor bugger had tried to relieve a migraine headache with a mixture of cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, and Tylenol, and the combination hadn’t helped much. The doctor was trying to persuade him to swallow a half-litre of a kind of coal-tar-based liquid, but the prospect of doing so seemed to repulse the sick man; furious, breathing hard, he declared that he wanted to go home.
“Come on, stop arguing and swallow this for me, like a big boy,” the doctor said, her voice firm but a bit tired. “You are experiencing full-blown respiratory arrest. Do you know what that means? It means you could croak if we don’t act quickly. Do you want to croak?”
Finally the man resigned himself to his fate and drank the concoction, retching. Both Céline and Charles sighed with relief.
Among the crowd of sick or injured patients sitting on the chairs or lying on stretchers, Charles noticed a woman in her early forties wearing a black woollen coat that had seen better days, sitting on the floor in a corner with a young girl sleeping on her lap, heedless, it seemed to Charles, of the hustle and bustle taking place in the waiting room around them. Suddenly, Charles realized that the woman was Steve’s mother. He’d seen her only once before, since his friend rarely invited anyone to his house. Charles went over to her to find out what she knew about the accident, and to try to comfort her. She looked up at him with large, tearful eyes, murmured a few vague words, and sank back into her stupor.
At around ten, a large, unshaven man wearing overalls splattered with paint entered the room, spotted Steve’s mother, and walked quickly over to her, nearly colliding with a bed being rolled down a corridor. When she saw him she stood up quickly, the little girl in her arms, and all the pain she had been bottling up inside her burst forth. The man held her awkwardly, hindered by the child, who had also burst into tears, and tried to console the woman as best he could as she heaved long, loud sobs that sounded as though they were coming from a pipe organ. From what he was saying, Charles gathered that this was Steve’s uncle, whom he knew to be very attached to his nephew.
At midnight the surgeons were still operating on Steve, impressed by his fortitude but not holding out much hope. The prognostication forming in their minds was hardly reassuring.
At around two o’clock in the morning, Isabel came back from the cafeteria with sandwiches and coffee and was distributing this nocturnal snack among her friends when an authoritative-looking man appeared in the room; he was wearing a grey suit that shimmered like silk, but no tie and with his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and looking exhausted and vaguely gloomy. He exchanged a few words with a nurse and then walked towards Madame Lachapelle. She stood up to meet him, her face flushed and her mouth trembling. A swatch of hair fell over her eye but she didn’t bother to remove it. She looked as though the angel of death had just appeared before her eyes. Charles, Céline, and Blonblon moved discreetly closer, despite Isabel’s disapproving gestures.
“Tell me, doctor… how is he?” the woman stammered.
“He’s doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances, madame. We’ve just transferred him to Intensive Care. I won’t pretend that your son hasn’t suffered a very serious injury. We’ve done everything we could, I assure you. Now all we can do is hope for the best…”
The woman seized the doctor’s arm and, in a gasping voice, obviously gripped by indescribable terror, asked, “Is he going to pull through, doctor? That’s all I need to know. Is he going to pull through?”
The doctor looked at her, gently trying to disengage his arm from her convulsive grasp while her brother stroked her hair to try to calm her down.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” the doctor said. “In a few days we’ll have an idea of how his condition is evolving. It’s a good sign that he survived the operation. We’ll probably have to operate again.”
Leaving his sister, who had collapsed in tears on one of the chairs, the man in overalls stepped in front of the doctor and spoke in an aggressive, almost threatening voice.
“Look here, doc,” he said, “I want to know what that goddamned son of a bitch of a truck driver whose ass I’m gonna kick from here to the middle of next week did to Stevie. And I want to know all the details!”
The doctor sighed with exhaustion; his eyes began to flutter and his tired expression spread across his entire face.
“Your son, sir …”
“He’s not my son, he’s my nephew.”
“Your nephew, then, has suffered a double fracture to his pelvis, clean breaks to the left leg and the left arm, multiple fractured ribs with a possible lesion to his liver; the tests will tell us more accurately when they come back tomorrow. But mostly he’s had a serious cranial concussion that has caused an effusion of blood to the brain. The good news is that his spinal column has not been compromised.”
“Can we go in and see him?” asked the man in the same aggressive tone.
“Tomorrow. Right now, the best thing you can do, my dear sir, is to go home and get some sleep. In any case, your nephew is still in a coma.”
At the word “coma,” which to him was practically synonymous with “dead,” the man began to swear with such fury that the doctor backed away, raising his arms helplessly, and left the room.
Before getting out of the taxi that had just pulled up in front of his apartment building, Charles gave Céline a hug.
“I forgot to tell you, the Taxation Service gave me my walking papers today … or I guess yesterday. I’ll tell you all about it, it’s nothing serious…”
He opened the taxi door, his mouth stifling a yawn, then turned back to Céline.
“Do you think Fernand would hire me back at the hardware store, until I have time to find another job?”
She made a vague gesture and sank back against the head rest, closed her eyes, and let her head fall on Isabel’s shoulder.
Charles had been working at the hardware store for three months. Despite another slump in sales, Fernand had taken him on without hesitation, as though keepin
g Charles afloat was a sacred duty. The former barker had made up a story about office politics to explain why he’d been fired, and Céline had believed it without question. He was humiliated by his lie; it made him feel weak, and he had always forced himself to be as truthful as possible. Infidelity seemed a thousand times more acceptable to him than lying. After all, having an affair was a kind of adventure that required dexterity, sometimes audacity, and implied that the person having the affair was charming and seductive. In any case, he was certain of two things: he did not love Aglaé Mayrand, and he adored Céline. Wasn’t that all that mattered?
He hadn’t seen the pharmacist since losing his job in Verdun. His new job kept him busy, and she had gone directly from Saint-Georges-de-Beauce to Fermont, which was a snowball’s throw from the North Pole. But he dreamed of her sometimes, while he was tinting a gallon of paint, or weighing a bag of nails. Aglaé displayed a passion for him that older women often feel towards younger men, perhaps seeing it as a final glimmer of their own youth. She telephoned him two or three times a week, which sometimes put her lover in an awkward position, since she always called him at home, and sometimes when Céline was there. Each time the phone rang he leapt to his feet, but once or twice Céline beat him to it.
“Who is that woman?” she asked one night, out of curiosity.
“Who? I don’t know. Just a wrong number.”
“But she asked for you.”
“No, she wanted someone named Charles Bilodeau. Not me.”
“Charles Bilodeau? Charles Bilodeau?” Céline repeated thoughtfully, giving him a long, skeptical look.
“Come on, Céline, you don’t think for one minute that —”
“You’re a liar!” she cried in sudden rage. “If you think I’m going to play silly cops-and-robbers games with you, you’re wrong! I won’t sink that low! I won’t humiliate myself like that! You want to cheat on me? Go ahead! Just don’t pussyfoot around about it — jump right in, head first, ass in the air. Sleep with everyone on the block, everyone in the city, if you want, I couldn’t care less! I don’t give a dog’s first fart what you do! You can lie to me like Pierre Trudeau lies to everyone in Quebec for all I care! You can …”
Her deep sobs prevented her from going any farther.
“But Céline, what’s come over you all of a sudden? I’ve never seen you like this before! And all because of a simple telephone call?”
And then, to his astonishment, his own eyes filled with tears. He held Céline in his arms to console her, filled with self-loathing and seeing clearly the ugliness of his betrayal.
Céline calmed down quickly and was soon smiling through her tears; and an hour later she even seemed to have forgotten her outburst. Charles was relieved but still anxious. Would she trust him again? Or would she suppress her suspicions and close her eyes for fear of losing him?
The next afternoon Charles hurried out of the hardware store during his coffee break and, from a telephone booth, dialled the pharmacist’s number and absolutely forbade her to call him at home. He came within a hair’s breadth of breaking it off with her altogether, but at the last minute a sudden weakness came over him; some soft and infinitely disappointing part of himself intervened and prevented him from saying the necessary words.
The day after the accident, Charles, Blonblon, Isabel, and Céline went to the hospital to see Steve during the evening visiting hours. They were given only five minutes, but even that seemed a long time. Steve was still unconscious, almost unrecognizable with his swollen face, a thick, transparent plastic tube protruding from one nostril, his hair wildly askew and scalp partly shaven, and a huge swath of bandages covering most of his head. A horrible, gasping sound came from his gaping mouth through deeply cracked lips, and the metal framework that had been constructed around his body to keep him from moving made him look frightening. Could this mutilated thing before them really be the carefree, irresponsible guy they knew, always ready to entertain them, to make everyone within earshot laugh at his antics? What had they done with the real Steve? Would they ever get him back again?
“Yes, we will,” Isabel said with conviction. “If we ask God with all our strength.”
Blonblon turned scarlet and nodded in agreement.
Two days later Charles returned to the hospital without Céline, who had to stay after school to rehearse a play. Steve’s condition seemed to have worsened. His colour was more chalklike, his face more deformed than ever. It was several days before Charles could bring himself to go again, and after that he found it difficult to visit his friend more than two or three times a week. He went out of a sense of obligation, but without much hope, finding it painful and useless to keep someone company who was so obviously inhabiting a different world, a pitiful mechanism that no longer produced anything but a suite of sinister sounds and a vaguely acidic odour.
Blonblon and Isabel, on the other hand, made it their duty to visit almost daily. They sat beside Steve’s bed for hours, hand in hand, including him in their conversations, uttering words of encouragement. They even exchanged furtive kisses that were at times interrupted by the rather noisy arrival of Madame Lachapelle or one of the members of her family.
Weeks passed. The patient slowly started looking human again and began to experience brief moments of semi-consciousness; he would look around his room with eyes dulled by morphine, apparently unable to recognize any of his visitors.
“Someday he’s going to get his senses back again, isn’t he?” Madame Lachapelle would ask the nurses in alarm.
And they would tell her again that the neurological tests had revealed no cerebral damage, that the process of healing had begun but that it would take time.
Charles’s visits, which had become even less frequent, always plunged him into a state of unbearable depression that took all his strength of will to pull out of. It was clear to him that, despite all the encouraging prognostications from the doctors, Steve was not going to leave the hospital alive. One night, as he watched his friend sleeping, mouth hanging open, breath coming in quick, hot gasps, saw the yellowing, transparent skin on his face, his left arm mummified in an enormous cast and lying at his side like a lifeless object, a sudden, suffocating anguish came over him. He was gazing upon Death, and it was a long time since he had seen it looking so young. He recalled the body of his tiny sister, Madeleine. He’d been four years old, standing on tiptoes, his chin pressed between the bars of her crib. It had shocked him to see the baby lying so still, so quiet, her clenched teeth giving her such an expression of mischief. His mother blew her nose and sobbed behind him. He wanted to touch the baby’s moist, unnaturally red face. “No, Charles, let Madeleine go beddy-byes,” Alice had whispered in a choked voice. “She needs to rest now.” Wilfrid had grabbed him by the arm and led him out of the room, despite his tears of protest.
He left Steve’s room, went down to the cafeteria, and ordered a hot chocolate. Then he decided to go home. For the rest of the night he could do nothing but slouch in front of the television. Blonblon and Isabel rang his doorbell and tried, without success, to convince him to go out to a café. The next day he was so distracted at work that Lucie asked him what was eating him. Taking her concern as criticism, he told her to mind her own business and retreated to the stockroom, leaving her alone in the store to deal with customers.
Céline was surprised by his dark mood.
“Come on, Charles! After all, the doctor says he’s going to get better…. Get a grip on yourself, you’re going to be worse off than he is!”
Fernand also tried to reason with him. He told Charles about a spectacular accident he’d witnessed when he’d been seventeen.
The family had lived not far from a garage that specialized in the maintenance and repair of heavy equipment. One Saturday morning, he’d been watching a mechanic inflating the enormous tire on a ten-ton truck when the tire exploded.
“Lucky for me I wasn’t standing any closer, otherwise it would have rearranged my face for me! As it was, a lug nu
t hit me in the forehead and gave me a lump the size of my thumb, and my ears rang for three days. But you should have seen what happened to the mechanic! He was lying there stretched out on the ground, his face as black as one of the pieces of tire, and swollen up like a watermelon! Like a watermelon! You couldn’t see his nose, or his eyes, you couldn’t even see his ears! He looked like a monster, I’m not kidding! Even the ambulance drivers turned their heads! ‘Poor old Edouard,’ my father said sadly. ‘He was a good-looking lad, he was, but if he ever pulls out of this, his womanizing days’ll be over…’ But three months later his face was back to normal and he was picking up chicks like you wouldn’t believe!”
Even Henri added his encouragements, despite the fact that he had never felt anything more for Steve than a kind of amused contempt. One night he even rallied enough compassion to visit Steve in the hospital.
“Don’t freak yourself out over this, man,” he said to Charles after his visit. “That guy’s head’s so thick he’ll go through this like a bullet through butter. Just you wait and see.”
And he beat an affectionate tattoo on Charles’s shoulder.
Charles was taken aback by Henri’s gesture. When they’d been children, Henri had always been his protector, but now he felt as though they had become almost total strangers. Henri had his own circle of friends, whom Charles rarely ran into, and he was going out with a large, blond girl who worked at a travel agent’s, and whose appeal Charles had yet to figure out. A big outdoor sports fan, Henri was nonetheless closed to others; his sole ambition seemed to be to attend Business School and then go on to take over the family business from his father and inject it with a vitality that Fernand, despite all his efforts, had never succeeded in giving it.
Charles was also stalled on a different front. He may not have succeeded in conquering Montreal with his pen, as he sometimes reminded himself in a melancholic tone, but neither was he going to do it working in a hardware store. At least working as a barker, although he realized it was an odd, not to say ridiculous, employment, had had the benefit of getting him out and “enriching his experience,” and he had been relatively happy while doing it. Unfortunately, his sexual exploits had brought his budding career to a sudden halt. He had to find something else to do, and fast. For a long time now, he had found that selling nuts and bolts, coffee makers, and electric drills had nothing new to teach him. He was spinning his wheels, wasting his time, getting nowhere slowly. He still dreamed about the vagabond life led by Aglaé Mayrand.
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