Unfortunately, only a tiny proportion of this juicy material was publishable; despite all the rhetoric, freedom of speech was still a limited concept in this country. You could write anything you wanted to, as long as you didn’t say anything. Ah, so many checks and balances are strewn in the path of a journalist. Délicieux himself had been in a cold sweat for weeks, ever since Artist’s Life, the magazine he’d been working for for seventeen years, had just been bought by Québécor, and you know what they say about a new broom: Pierre Péladeau, the new chief, had declared that “you can’t make good paper out of dead wood.” Half the editorial staff had been let go, but Délicieux and two or three others had officially been recognized as pillars of the establishment. All the same, he’d only temporarily dodged the bullet, because no matter what they say, talent has never outshone stupidity, especially bureaucratic stupidity.
The journalist ordered two more cappuccinos and finally got around to asking after his companion. Charles, knowing his tale would find a good ear, launched into a long and detailed account of his recent religious adventures, which amused the journalist so much that he asked Charles if he might write an article about them.
“After all,” he said keenly, “those sermons were a kind of public performance.”
He took out his notebook and asked Charles a few pointed questions, promising that if his story ever did get published, he would take all the necessary precautions.
Then Charles was struck by an inspiration. After reducing his friend to tears of laughter by exploiting all the resources of his mind and his imagination, he blushed and asked him if, by any chance, there would be a job for him at the magazine. He’d do anything, he said: empty chamber pots, interview deaf-mutes, type up other people’s stories on the balcony in winter. He’d wanted all his life to make his living with his pen!
Suddenly quiet, his face screwed up in perplexity, Délicieux scratched the end of his nose. “Hmm,” he said, “it’s not that I doubt your ability, Charles… It’s just that this isn’t the best time to try to get a friend on the payroll. Believe me, the new boss is still trying to prove that he really is the boss; he sticks his nose into everything — how many pencils we go through, how many paper clips we use! We practically have to fill out a request form to go to the bathroom. In any case, leave it with me for a couple of weeks. I’ll see what I can do … Holy smokes! Eleven o’clock! I’ve got to run, my boy.”
He got up and Charles caught a whiff of his eau de cologne through the spaces between his pink shirt buttons.
Okay, run off, you perfumed prig, Charles said to himself, holding back a bitter smile. If you ever want to clear a room, all you have to do is ask for a favour. Suddenly, pfffft! You’ll be alone in a second!
But Délicieux held out his hand and gave Charles a smile that would melt glaciers at the South Pole.
“You know what, Charles?” he said. “I’d be as pleased as punch to have you as a colleague. Imagine the fun we’d have, days and nights together, eh?”
Charles continued on to the Canada Manpower Centre, where they made him fill out a questionnaire that went almost all the way back to when he got his first baby teeth. Then he was interviewed by a clerk who asked him all the questions he’d just answered on the questionnaire, as well as a few others. After that, the woman filled out several other forms, each a different colour, and put them into a file folder and wrote Charles’s name on the tab. Then she gave Charles a warm, maternal look and kindly advised him to go back to school. Without a degree, she said, he was condemning himself to the life of an alley cat.
It was nearly one o’clock by the time Charles left the centre. Although he loved restaurants, circumstances were forcing him to make economies, and so he decided to go home to eat lunch in his apartment, despite the fact that he was famished. He didn’t even allow himself to buy a chocolate bar. “When I’m a journalist,” he told himself, “I’ll eat lunch in restaurants every day, and dinner, too, if I want! Everything will be part of my life when I’m working.”
He was still adding a few touches to his future life when he arrived at his apartment. Whistling, his head filled with golden images, he pushed open the door to the foyer, then stopped in mid-whistle and let out a long snort of air through his nose, his usual reaction to an unpleasant surprise.
Steve was sitting on the steps leading up to his apartment, hands crossed on his knees, waiting.
“Well,” Charles murmured after a few seconds, “it looks like this is my day for confrontations … What, have you all formed a group or what?”
Steve stood up awkwardly, his nose twitching comically, and would have held out his hand to his former friend but thought better of it.
“Hello, Charles. How are you doing?”
“So, let me get this straight,” Charles said, ignoring the question. “Céline got nowhere this morning, and so she sent you to see if you could do any better, is that it?”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I haven’t seen Céline for weeks.”
The seriousness of his voice quashed Charles’s anger, and he almost regretted his harsh welcome.
“She didn’t want to see me again,” Steve added. “Which wasn’t that hard: it’s easy to end something that never got started in the first place.”
“Listen,” Charles said, his impatience returned full force, “I’m starving to death, and anyway I don’t want to talk standing here in the foyer.”
“Let me buy you lunch,” Steve said quickly. “Anywhere you like.”
“You will not buy me lunch. You will never buy me anything ever again.”
They exchanged a few more words, and then Charles decided to go to the cafeteria in the Saint-Luc hospital, where he could eat for next to nothing. He told Steve he could come along if he felt like it.
Soon they were ensconced in the corner of a large, noisy room, where they could have both had nervous breakdowns without attracting much attention. While Steve watched silently, looking quite pitiful, Charles gobbled down a plate of veal cutlets, apple sauce (reconstituted), and overcooked carrots, wiped up his plate with a slice of bread, took a sip of very bad coffee, and then leaned back in his chair.
“Okay, so what do you want to tell me? Choose your words carefully, I’m not having a good day.”
“I… What the hell, I don’t know where to start… While I was waiting for you in your building, I had all these smart things to say running through my head, but now that you’re right here in front of me, everything’s all mixed up.”
“Don’t count on any help from me,” Charles said sourly.
“Look, first I have to tell you what happened. I —”
“Céline already took care of that.”
“Do you mind if I speak? If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, we might as well call it quits right now and go our separate ways, and forget the whole damn thing.”
“Good idea,” Charles said, standing up.
Steve grabbed his arm. “No, please, hear me out. I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest for weeks now. There’ve been nights when I couldn’t sleep. You know me, Charles, I’m not a monster, am I? We’ve known each other since grade school, you’re my best friend …”
“I was your best friend,” Charles corrected, his voice tight. “When you want to keep someone as a friend, you don’t sleep with his girlfriend.”
“I know, I know, I’m getting to that. That night I called Fernand’s house to see if they’d heard from you, and Céline answered the phone. She seemed completely shattered, Charles, completely, you should have heard her! She sounded so wretched I couldn’t not ask her what was wrong. She burst into tears and told me everything, and if you don’t mind my saying so, Charles, I’ve got to say I was pretty much thrown on my ass.”
“It’s not your ass that concerns me,” Charles said, laughing harshly.
“I felt so… so sorry for her, poor thing,” St
eve said, ignoring the joke, “that I offered to go with her. She was going to your apartment to get her things.”
“I know, I know, like I said, she already told me all this.”
“She couldn’t have told you how I felt, goddamn it!” Steve practically yelled. “Sorry, I’m a bit on edge myself, I hardly know what I’m saying …”
He heaved a deep sigh and looked around the room to see if anyone had overheard his outburst. Then he sighed again and went back to his story.
“So, I was helping her pack up her stuff in the bedroom when, just like that, I was holding her in my arms: she could hardly stand up, and her eyes were running like a couple of faucets. Then she stopped and looked up at me with this weird expression on her face, like she was thinking about something else, you know? Then she said, ‘It’s not fair, Steve. For three days now, maybe longer than that, he’s been screwing some bimbo in La Tuque while I’ve been moping around here waiting for him. I want to get even, Steve.’ Stupid me, I said, ‘How?’ And she said, ‘I want to sleep with you. In his bed. I want you to do this for me, Steve. It can’t be that hard, can it?’ And she started undoing my belt.”
He stopped to take a deep breath, trying to get control of his emotions.
“Charles, it’d been months since I’d been with anyone … Yeah, I’d jerked off a few times, but you and I both know that doesn’t help much … I just cracked. Yes, I cracked… Don’t look at me like that, come on… Me and my dick don’t always see eye to eye, you know what I mean? Well, my dick made the decision without consulting me, I swear to God… We’d barely finished when you walked in the door, and I’ve got to say, I’ve had better sex in my life. Her too, I suppose. There. That’s the whole story… Except for one last thing: if there were any way I could go back and do the whole thing over again, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t, Charles. But of course there’s no way…”
He hung his head in consternation.
Charles looked at him, and the same feeling that, a few hours earlier, had almost moved him to forgiveness stirred within him again. But, just like before, his arms wouldn’t budge. A treacherous voice whispered in his ear that only a cuckold would pardon such an offence as they had committed; his honour demanded the total destruction of all bonds that had united him with Céline as well as with Steve. Once faith has been severed, the voice told him, it can never be resurrected. If you have a wound in your hand, you have to cauterize it without mercy, or you risk losing the whole arm.
Slowly he pushed his plate away and sighed.
“I’d like to forget about it, too, Steve, but I can’t. You’d react the same way if you were in my shoes, I know you would. When your friend turns out to be Judas Iscariot, it doesn’t matter how hard he cries on your shoulder … No, sorry, but there’s nothing I can do …”
Steve had jumped to his feet.
“Judas? Is that what you just called me? A Judas?”
He seemed to have taken the phrase, even though he wasn’t quite sure what Charles had meant by it, as a deep insult. He rose up, white with fury, and leaned towards his companion, his hands gripping the edge of the table.
“I won’t be insulted by a spoiled little brat like yourself, you goddamned hypocrite. You hand out your sermons to everyone around you, but you’re no better than any other bozo strutting up and down the street in a baggy clown-suit. Can you even hear me with that swollen head of yours? Goodbye, asshole, I’ve had all I’m going to take from you.”
A few days later, Charles received a letter from Céline:
Rest assured, Charles, I’m not going to try to get you to change your mind. On the contrary, I want to thank you. Your attitude during our last encounter opened my eyes; it even killed the love I’d felt for you. All those years we spent together, and I never realized what a pathetic little sexist pig you were, believing that infidelity is a masculine privilege, and that women are like condemned victims who should just meekly lower their heads to the chopping block, whatever happens. Now I see you for who you really are, so thank you. You should get yourself a Koran and move to Arabia, your spiritual home, where you can rule over your harem to your heart’s content. On the other hand, if you stay here you can always find bimbos and hookers who’ll be only too happy to put up with you. Good luck.
Céline
Charles crumpled the letter in a rage and threw it on the floor. Then he picked it up, smoothed it out, and read it again, looking up vaguely from time to time and biting his lips. He read it two or three more times, then left his apartment and walked the streets until nightfall.
A dozen months passed. The year 1989 began. During this time, Charles found a job in a sports store on Sainte-Catherine, across from the Papineau metro station. His life was dull and boring, as though, for him, time had stopped. Every now and then he sat down at his typewriter (he was saving up for a Macintosh SE/30 computer, the marvel of the age) and tried to start a new novel based on his experiences with the Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Christ, but his efforts produced nothing of any merit, and he began to wonder if the novelist in him had died. He had a brief affair with one of the clerks at the store, a tall woman with large feet, and with hair growing from her nose and armpits, whose favourite pastime was watching American soap operas. She could hardly talk of anything else — except sex, of course, her attraction to which was mingled with fear, since at the age of thirteen she had come under the influence of an “uncle” who had roving hands and who had left her with some deep-seated nightmares.
Then, one day, the owner of the store fired her to make room for one of his own daughters; she went back to live with her family in Chicoutimi, and Charles hadn’t seen or heard from her since.
He still thought of Céline. Whenever he did, something sweet and extremely painful stirred in him. He had the feeling that never again would he experience a love as pure and trusting as hers, or so full of profound peace. And he’d blown it stupidly for a few rolls in the hay with a woman who was kind and great in bed but who inspired in him about as much passion as reading a telephone book. Sometimes it was all he could do to keep from calling Céline to tell her he wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, but each time he resisted the urge it grew weaker, and after a while it went away altogether, tired of beating its head against an object so incredibly hard and indestructible. All Charles could do was watch it fade, a powerless and desolate witness to its demise.
He saw Blonblon once or twice a week, and played pool with a few acquaintances he’d made in the neighbourhood, and read the newspapers with great interest, partly because he seemed to have inherited a passion for politics from Fernand and Parfait Michaud, but also because he was convinced that reading newspapers every day would prepare him for his future career as a journalist. He hadn’t given up hope, despite the fact that Bernard Délicieux’s efforts to get him a job at Artist’s Life — or anywhere else, for that matter — had so far been in vain.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” the gossip-monger assured him. “I’m doing everything I can, short of going down on my knees for the magazine’s owner! But where there’s life, there’s hope, eh? It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”
Parfait and Amélie had been separated for almost a year and a half. She had had to spend a few weeks in a clinic, after which she took a small apartment on rue de l’Épée, in Outremont, where she lived a very quiet life. She did, however, have a companion: Monsieur Victoire’s parrot. The cab driver had decided to get rid of the bird because its language had become much fouler in its old age, and it required more and more care, which its new owner was only too happy to provide. Whenever her attentions failed to please it, she was treated to an alternating barrage of verbal abuse — “Stupid fathead!” or “Fat Bertha!” — which never failed to delight her.
The notary, who was a little bored with his new life, invited Charles to the theatre or a concert or a restaurant from time to time, but more often than not it was Charles who called on him
, taking a circuitous route to the house to avoid having to go near rue Dufresne and run the risk of coming face to face with a member of the Fafard family. One day he saw the hardware-store owner at a distance; he looked a bit thinner, his hair greyer, but he was walking with his habitual energy and determination. Charles watched him for a few minutes with a sad smile and almost went in to see him, but the thought of the scolding he might get and the decibels with which it would be delivered, which he knew Fernand could be counted on to bestow at the least opportunity, made him decide to put off the encounter until more dust had had time to settle.
Parfait Michaud’s remonstrances were a lot easier to take than those of Fernand Fafard.
“What a mess your love life is in, my poor Charles,” the notary said one evening while they were talking in his living room. “I know I’m the last person on earth with the right to reproach you on that score, with my own life in such disarray, but it seems to me that in your place I wouldn’t have reacted the way you did. For one thing, and I don’t wish to make you feel any worse than you do, I find it distasteful to find fault with others for doing the same thing one is doing oneself. You were sleeping with your pharmacist friend. Fine. Céline found out about it and took her revenge by sleeping with one of your friends. All you had to do was give her a good tongue-lashing, in your own inimitable style, and let things get back to normal. After all, you loved each other, isn’t that true? Isn’t that what counts, after all? This new generation, I don’t know, it astonishes me how — what’s the word? — macho you can be. Times have changed, my dear boy. Women don’t see themselves as eternal victims anymore when it comes to affairs of the heart. Look at Amélie! Women now demand equality, in bed as well as other places. And men have to adapt to that new reality. What do you want Céline to be, like the ‘habitant wife’ in the old song, faithful and submissive to her man no matter what he does to her? Poor Charles! You’re behind the times, my friend! Complete fidelity, as you yourself must know from your own experience, may be more or less the ideal we try to attain, but there are a great bloody lot of us, and you and I are two perfect examples, who don’t have a hope in hell of reaching it. Worse yet, we turn up our noses at it like it was something the cat did on the rug!”
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