A Very Bold Leap

by Yves Beauchemin

  “Parfait,” he said quietly, with unaccustomed tenderness, “believe me, you’re getting worked up over nothing. I want to travel with this guy because it’ll be interesting, I know it will, but it will also be educational. I’ll learn a lot. That’s important to me, Parfait. Can’t you imagine what it’ll be like? Travelling all over Quebec for six months or a year! I want to learn about life from the top to the bottom, from every angle, in all its shapes and sizes, the good and the bad, everything, every last bit of it… I need this … If I don’t do it now, I might never go back to writing. Don’t you understand?”

  “Are you sure it’s so necessary to live through all those experiences, Charles, that you have to put yourself in the hands of a manipulative cultist who, in all likelihood, is also a pervert?”

  Charles, taken up short, said nothing.

  “Listen to me, my friend,” the notary pursued in a hard, urgent voice. “I asked you to come here this morning because I take things very seriously. We’ve known each other a long time, Charles. I remember like it was yesterday the morning you came to my door because you wanted to divorce your father. Whether we knew it or not at the time, that was the day you became a kind of son to me, the son I never had and I would never have, and from that day on I began, bit by bit, to feel attached to you and to try to help you in any way that I could. Charles, I beg you, take the advice of an old notary who’s going bald and growing a beer belly but who’s been through the mill a few times and seen his share of nastiness in the course of his career: get away from this snake-oil salesman, this seller of signs of the cross, and look for some other way to get what you want…. Nothing, I give you my word, nothing would make us happier — me, Fernand, Lucie, and, above all, Céline.”

  And to hide the tears that had begun to gather in the corners of his eyes, he bent back his head and took a large mouthful of port.

  “I’ll think about it,” Charles said after a moment. “I’m not promising anything.”

  The notary gave a small, nervous laugh. “Fair enough. I’ve said my piece. There’s nothing more I can do. If you were still a minor, I’d grab you by the scruff of your neck and lock you in your room until you’d had time to think things over. But, as you’ve just pointed out, you’re almost twenty-one, more’s the pity…. A little port?”

  He refilled their glasses, settled himself back on the sofa, and spent a moment watching the amber liquid shimmer in the sunlight. Charles, moved by their talk but slightly irritated, had for the past few minutes been worried by Michaud’s warning. Now he was aware that Céline was waiting for him in his apartment. He’d left a note on the kitchen table telling her where he was.

  “I also asked you to come here for another reason, Charles,” Parfait suddenly said, putting down his glass.

  He smiled sadly.

  “Amélie and I are going to separate. I wanted to tell you personally.”

  Charles, taken completely by surprise, searched his mind for something to say and came up with nothing.

  “I was wondering where she was,” he finally murmured. “Is she out shopping?”

  “No, my friend. She’s undergoing hydrotherapy treatments in Baie-Saint-Paul. Five days of it. Eight hundred dollars. Hydrotherapy … ironic, isn’t it, when you think that our marriage is going down for the third time … I’d pay ten times that amount, twenty times, fifty, if there were some treatment that would make her happy. No such treatment exists, I’m afraid. So, rather than totally destroy one another, we’re going to try living apart. It’s all the rage these days, I hear. I hope you’re luckier in love than I have been, my dear Charles, or at least better at it.”

  “Can I take a last look in the Christmas Room?” the young man asked in a miserable voice.

  “Of course. Stay there as long as you like. It’s probably the last time you’ll be able to see it.”

  Charles turned on the Christmas tree lights and, seated in the rocking chair, tried to lose himself in the twinkling multicoloured lights, the carols, and the joyful chimes. Was it because it was a beautiful day towards the end of summer? Whatever it was, the magic didn’t seem to be working, as though it were old, dusty, decrepit. However, every once in a while he managed a tiny whiff of childhood, awakened from a deep sleep, that brought a sigh of peace to his lips.

  “Poor Amélie,” he murmured. “This will kill her.”

  He wanted to leave her a message of friendship, or encouragement, but what to say? She would sense his pity and be offended by it. He quickly left the notary’s house, promising once again to give their discussion deep thought.

  Arriving home, he found a note from Céline scribbled on the back of his own. Tired of waiting. Gone shopping with a friend. Will call at suppertime. Ever since he had told her about his forthcoming trip with Father Raphaël, their relationship had become decidedly cooler…

  Boff, who had been asleep in the living room, woke up and walked into the kitchen, his head low, his eyes heavy. It suddenly occurred to Charles that his dog had become very old.

  In order to acknowledge Charles’s departure, and to try to put a good face on a bad situation, Céline decided to throw a small surprise party for him in his apartment. He was leaving Montreal in two days and would not be back for several weeks.

  She had shed a lot of tears since he’d told her of his decision. She’d begged him to refuse to work for this peripatetic preacher who was surely nothing more than a profiteer, if not a madman. He might even be both. With the tragic air of Cassandra before the Trojan Horse, she predicted that Charles’s long absences would be the end of their love. She had even threatened to leave him.

  Nothing worked. Charles clung tenaciously to his decision. After all, he was asking for just one year, perhaps even less than that, enough time to benefit from an experience that, he assured her, would make him a complete man, capable of understanding the whole of life, and, it followed naturally, of being a better lover.

  She secretly regretted not being pregnant. There was nothing like a swollen belly to keep certain men from straying. Fatherhood had taken care of more than one adventurer, and the entire world was the better for it. But she rejected that idea as being ugly and stupid.

  The next morning she relaxed a little. Her love for Charles, unpredictable though he was, was genuine, and impossible to fight. After all, she told herself, a year was not a lifetime. And anyway, she was convinced that he wouldn’t last out the year. Something would happen that would blow the whole thing up in his face. In order to work with numbskulls (and who else would he find in such a ridiculous sect?), he’d have to be a numbskull himself—or at least become one. Charles wasn’t without his faults, Heaven knew, but he had a good head on his shoulders and would almost certainly tire of this atmosphere of religious fervour in which he would be immersed from morning to night.

  And so she had had the idea of throwing a party for him, to show him how devoted she was to him, and how adaptable she was by nature, hoping that he would be pleased. It was a small party: she’d invited only Blonblon, Isabel, Steve (this would be one of his first outings since his accident), and her brother Henri, who was taking night classes at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and couldn’t get away. After giving the matter a great deal of thought, she decided against inviting her parents or the notary, Parfait Michaud. She thought their presence would be a drag on the atmosphere. She bought beer and wine, borrowed her mother’s recipe for fettuccine Alfredo, one of Charles’s favourite meals, and carefully prepared it in advance to serve for dinner. The road to a man’s heart was through his stomach, she had read somewhere, and she wanted to make sure the road between them was solid and memorable. She didn’t want to overlook anything.

  Since Charles had been getting off work early these past few days (upon learning of his departure, Coïmbro had begun to sulk and pretend he hadn’t needed an assistant in the first place), Blonblon was given the task of keeping him away from home until after seven o’clock, so that Céline and Isabel would have time to fi
nish the preparations. They tidied up the apartment (which was chronically untidy), vacuumed it, washed the dishes that had been festering in the sink, and hung paper streamers in the kitchen and the living room. Céline also borrowed a magnificent tablecloth, embroidered with flowers, from her mother, with which she covered the kitchen table. Boff trotted tirelessly from room to room, supervising the operations, wagging his tail, sniffing at each unfamiliar object, and giving off the occasional whine, the significance of which remained his own secret.

  “This was a great idea you had there, Céline,” Isabel said, caressing her cheek.

  “What idea?”

  “To have this party for Charles. He’ll love it. When a man gets it into his head to do something, you’re wasting your time trying to get him to change his mind. You run the risk of losing him altogether.”

  “Ha!” Céline replied, laughing. “I see you’ve had your obedience training. You’ll have a happy life …”

  lust then the doorbell rang. It was Steve, who’d been dropped off by a friend. He was still using a crutch to get around.

  “He’s not here already, I hope?” he said. “Good. I’ve got a present for him.” And he held up a small box wrapped in ribbon.

  “What is it?” asked Isabel.

  “Hey! Hands off, babe. You can see it later. You’ve got to know how to wait for the good things in life.”

  “Don’t call me ‘babe.’ It’s vulgar.”

  Steve took her hand and kissed it with comical effusion. “Well, pardon my manners, honey-chile … I’m a tad thick in the hade!”

  Apart from his limp, his thinness, and a slight lack of balance, which was caused by his skull fracture, Steve had regained his former gallantry, his boyish gaiety, and the tendency he had always shown for tomfoolery.

  The door opened again and Charles appeared in it, accompanied by Blonblon.

  “What’s all this?” Charles said, astonished.

  “We are all so glad to be finally seeing the last of you,” Steve replied, “that we thought we’d get together and celebrate!”

  Standing a bit off to one side, Céline gave Charles a timid smile. He strode towards her and impetuously put his arms around her; the next minute, the two lovers were whispering together in a corner. So intimate were their effusions that even Steve turned his head.

  The party was a success. They drank two bottles of red wine and several beers and declared the fettuccine a masterpiece of the culinary art, and no mention was made of the tensions caused by Charles’s decision, at least not until dessert, when Steve, who was slightly drunk, decided it was time to give Charles a friendly warning.

  “You know what they say, old chum. The dog who goes off hunting loses his spot.”

  Charles furrowed his brows and was about to make a sharp response then thought better of it. The rest of the group maintained an embarrassed silence.

  But that lasted less than a second.

  Steve thought the moment a propitious one for giving Charles his present. It was a compass, encased in a varnished wooden box that was slightly scratched. It had belonged to his father.

  “It’s so you can find your way back,” Steve explained, who never shied away from stating the obvious. “Poets like you are always getting lost. I thought of throwing in a can of Cordon Bleu beef stew, too, in case you got lost in the woods, but then I’d have to include a can opener, and the whole thing became too expensive.”

  The second awkward point in the evening came when everyone was ready to leave, and again it was poor Steve who put his foot in it. This time, however, no one could blame him.

  It was a beautiful August night, warm and slightly breezy; surrounded by his friends, Steve was waiting on the sidewalk for his friend to come and pick him up when suddenly he gave himself a tap on the forehead and turned to Charles.

  “Damn! I almost forgot! Guess what.”

  He waited for his friend to reply, and when no reply came he went on.

  “My mother got a funny phone call yesterday. It was about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t mention it earlier because I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

  He stopped and looked up and down the street, for dramatic effect.

  “Come on, spit it out,” said Charles impatiently. “What was it about?”

  “It was from your father.”

  His words were met by a stupefied silence.

  “My father?” Charles repeated, incredulous. “Why would my father call your mother, I wonder?”

  “In point of fact, it was me he wanted to talk to, but I wasn’t there. He’s just got back to Montreal, said he wanted to know how you were doing. Man,” Steve added, with a nervous laugh, “he’s got some kind of hard-on to find out what you’re up to …”

  Charles would probably have laughed had anyone told him that one day he would end up loving his job. However, after two months of crisscrossing Quebec on Father Raphaël’s coattails, and despite the exhaustion and the thousand and one inconveniences that being constantly on the road entailed, Charles adored his new life as a traveller. Contrary to his fears, the preacher proved to be an agreeable man to work for; he rarely interfered with his assistants’; work, always showed concern for their well-being, made only reasonable demands on their time, and was never slow to congratulate them warmly whenever they did something right.

  The preacher was, however, a solitary individual who, except when engaged in his “apostolic” activities, didn’t seem to put much value on contact with other people, unless it was with fellow pastors and evangelists whom he met in the course of his travels. He often took his meals alone in his hotel room, although he sometimes invited Marcel-Édouard or Maxime (never Charles) to keep him company. He always chose a room (or better, a suite, if one were available) well away from those of his companions, preferably even on a different floor. Before each public meeting, he would be brooding and even nervous, often short-tempered, would refuse to eat, and would spend hours alone in his room, pacing the floor and heaving great sighs. Bringing down the Word of God from Heaven, for which he was the channel, hardly seemed to stimulate in him a sense of charity.

  Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, for their parts, seemed to be amiable enough as companions, despite their tendency to dump the less interesting tasks onto Charles. But Charles considered that to be quite normal, in the scheme of things, given his apprentice status in the organization. He would gladly have accepted much worse if it meant still being able to lead the hotel (or motel) life that had become his; he revelled in it, because it gave him the sensation of being on permanent vacation.

  For the first few weeks, Charles’s job consisted almost entirely of observing his two companions in order to get some idea of the various aspects of the job: the preparation of the meeting rooms, which were usually rented; the welcoming of the faithful; the distribution of brochures before each meeting; the sale of books on spirituality (Father Raphaël had written five, and it was those that they had to push the hardest), and so on. But for some time now the preacher, having seen that Charles could express himself well, was fairly literate, and was of a sociable nature, had asked him to take on the role of press attaché. The job involved making the initial contact with the media — the local radio stations and newspapers — announcing the arrival of the group as though it were a major event. Soon Father Raphaël was getting him to run a pencil through his own publicity texts, hundreds of which were distributed in the course of his lectures, and which also formed part of his press package.

  Although there were the inevitable repetitions in the never-ending stream of preachings, Charles continued to be impressed by his employer’s oratorical talents, or at least by his gift for playing the mystical tragedian. The breath of cool air that suddenly wafted through an overheated room still raised gooseflesh, for him as well as for Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, whose faces always became graver, their eyes so bright they seemed drunk.

  Almost all the meetings were marked by some spec
tacular event: faintings, trances, prophetic pronouncements, crying, moaning, and once in a while even apparent epileptic seizures. But Charles quickly learned that the most significant moment in the meeting was when they took up the collection. This was always done towards the end, when the religious fervour was at its peak, and the take was generally prodigious.

  Charles bothered his head barely at all about what happened to all that money. The important thing to him was that it allowed him to go on living his fascinating life, traipsing around to the four corners of the province with all expenses paid. Of course, the horn of plenty that emptied itself day after day into Father Raphaël’s saintly hands wasn’t an unmixed blessing; it sometimes had its disagreeable aspects. It wasn’t rare for Charles to be awakened in the middle of the night by one of the faithful in a mystical trance, or having a spiritual crisis, pounding on the door of his room demanding to speak to the preacher — who was, of course, never to be disturbed at that hour, since he guarded his sleep jealously. It often happened that Father Raphaël would be stopped in the street by a follower in search of spiritual orientation; the pastor would always reply with patience and goodwill, but in his absence, the follower would latch on to one of his assistants, sometimes with an unnerving tenacity.

  One afternoon, in Château-Richer, outside the Sault-à-la-Puce Inn, a woman threatened Charles with a pair of scissors if he didn’t bring her immediately to the preacher.

  “Anyone who prevents us from seeing him is working for the Devil,” she declared, waving her weapon wildly in the air.

  In two months the little apostolic team had covered the entire region around Quebec City, all of Charlevoix, and a good part of the North Shore. In Baie-Saint-Paul, home of the Cirque du Soleil, during a meeting held in an auction barn, a true miracle took place: a seventy-year-old man who had not walked for six months got up and walked! The incident made headlines in all the local and regional papers, and the preacher was asked to give five interviews on radio and television. In Chibougamau, the holy man broke the attendance record previously set by the famous stand-up comic Daniel Lemire, and his followers left the room in a far higher state of jubilation than could ever have been provoked by a simple jokester — and the money flowed from their wallets in pretty much the same proportion.