“What about you, Parfait?” Charles replied with a sly smile. “Are you seeing anyone these days?”
“Me? Not a hope,” sighed the notary. “I’ve hit an arid patch that doesn’t seem to have an oasis in sight, alas and alack! Well, it’s the old story. I grow old, I grow old, and the kind of women who please me are no longer pleased by the kind of man I have become.”
“You like them young, as I recall.”
“Quite young, yes. The younger the better. Careful, now, I’m not saying I go after jailbait. But I must say I cannot resist the charms of youth.”
“Maybe you can introduce me to your next conquest, just so I have an idea of your tastes.”
“And so you can steal her away from me, no doubt.”
“I don’t play those kinds of games,” Charles said firmly. “Just out of curiosity. I’ve never laid eyes on a single one of your girlfriends, you know, except once.”
And he told Parfait the story of the astonishing discovery he’d made one night while he was looking for Boff in Médéric-Martin Park, when he’d seen Parfait come out onto the sidewalk with a woman who was obviously not one of his clients. He’d been horrified to learn that the notary was leading a double life. For a long time afterwards, he’d felt a kind of resentment towards him.
Parfait Michaud remained thoughtful.
“How old were you then?” he asked.
“About fourteen, I think.”
“Did I scandalize you?” Michaud asked, worriedly.
Charles laughed. “As if! We did have radio and television in those days, don’t forget.”
The notary sighed again. The turn their conversation had taken was not a pleasant one for him. There was a degree of familiarity in it that threatened his dignity and the health of their relationship. He still thought of himself in some respects as Charles’s father, and it was important to him to maintain that status. In Quebec, a father did not take his son to a house of ill repute, nor did he introduce him to his mistresses. It wasn’t done. It was degrading. The various compartments of one’s life were kept separate, otherwise chaos and confusion ensued.
He stood up, left the room, and came back with a bottle of port and a look on his face that was both worried and a bit haughty. He filled two glasses and handed one to Charles. The latter, intrigued by his friend’s change in demeanour, looked on in silence.
“Charles,” the notary said after a moment, “excuse me for harping on this, but I feel I must return to what we were talking about earlier: I am definitely worried about you.”
“Please, Parfait, spare me just for tonight.”
“No, no, and no! True friendship doesn’t ignore these things. It is a matter of courage and frankness.”
The young man sighed deeply and began rotating the glass between his fingers.
“When are you going to stop spinning your wheels, my boy? You’re twenty-two years old. That’s still young, of course, but you’re coming to the end of your youth. There you are, a young man brimming with talent, wasting your time in a sporting goods store. You could be doing so much better! Have you thought about going back to school?”
“No. I’m thinking of becoming a journalist.”
“Well, do you think you’ll become a journalist by selling tennis racquets and running shoes?”
A bit annoyed, Charles told him that a journalist of his acquaintance was trying to get him a job at a magazine, but it wasn’t easy: for every job that came up, there were fifty people applying for it.
“So how long have you been waiting?”
“About ten months.”
“That’s a long time.”
The notary set his glass down on a pedestal table and looked at his knuckles for a few moments.
“If it were me, I’d try a more … direct approach.”
“How so?”
“Oh, my good friend, how should I know?” said Michaud, raising his shoulders in a shrug of despair. “Try anything! You used to be more resourceful. I’d write myself a fabulous curriculum vitae and send it to all the magazines in town. I’d put in my application everywhere, even with those little neighbourhood weeklies that seem to have cropped up everywhere lately. Yes, even with those! You have to start somewhere, after all… Huge successes sometimes have humble beginnings; you don’t climb up a ladder by starting at the top rung! What do you want me to say? Move, act, stop moping about like a slice of wet bread. Excuse my meddling,” he added quickly, seeing the young man wriggling in discomfort in his chair, his face clouding over. “I know it’s none of my business. You’re twenty-two. You have your own life to live. And I haven’t exactly been that successful in my own …”
They sipped their port in silence, both embarrassed and neither knowing how to pick up the conversation. And now I’ve just quarrelled with him, thought the notary in consternation. What the devil is wrong with me? I should stick to what I’m good at: scribbling contracts in the solitude of my office.
“You know what, Parfait? You’re absolutely right,” Charles suddenly declared. “And it’s high time I owned up to it. I’ll get to work first thing tomorrow. To hell with being depressed. I’ve wasted enough time on it. You should have said all this to me a long time ago. I think I need to be given a good dose of reality from time to time.”
And he flashed the notary a smile that Parfait Michaud had long ago classified as one of the seven wonders of the world.
The language battle had been raging in Quebec pretty much non-stop since the adoption, in 1977, of Bill 101, one of the more ambitious of the reforms introduced by the Lévesque government. The bill made French the only official language in Quebec. It was an attempt to stave off the slow but invidious process of assimilation that had been threatening to do to the citizens of Quebec what had happened to other minority French-speaking groups in North America, nearly all of which were heading to extinction or had already disappeared altogether.
Bill 101 quickly acquired a kind of sacred status, since for the first time in the history of the French presence in Canada, it expressed the determination of the majority of Quebeckers to live in their own language on their own territory. It also raised ferocious opposition from English Canada, especially from the minority English-speaking population of Quebec, who were shocked to find themselves so peremptorily stripped of one of the traditional trappings of their domination: the predominance of English in the province’s public life.
On the 15th of December 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada, citing a number of unfavourable judgments against the provisions in the problematic bill, declared French unilingualism illegal on commercial signs and in corporate names in the province, unleashing a storm of protest throughout Quebec.
Four days later, the next scene in the drama unfolded: under pressure from the voting public, the premier, Robert Bourassa, invoked a special exemption measure (known as the “notwithstanding clause”) to countermand the federal court, by introducing Bill 178, which reconfirmed French as the only official language in Quebec on exterior shop signs… while permitting bilingualism inside the stores themselves. Ever the master of half-measures, Bourassa opted for a compromise that weakened the French language charter in Quebec, but stopped short of giving in completely to the federal government’s crusade to end what it termed “racism” in Quebec. In one stroke he had alienated both English Canada and the French majority within his own province. The next day, three of his four English cabinet ministers resigned; meanwhile, a popular campaign was launched by supporters of French unilingualism to force the government to reaffirm Bill 101 in its entirety.
On the 12th of March 1989, summoned by the Mouvement Québec Français, sixty thousand people demonstrated in the streets of Montreal. The point of assembly was Park La Fontaine, and the time of departure for the protest march was fixed at one o’clock in the afternoon.
Charles, Isabel, and Blonblon arrived at the park at about twelve-thirty. A huge crowd had already assembled: placards, handbills, and flags depicting the Quebec fleur-de-lys
were being joyously handed out and were flapping in the warm, spring breeze under the bright sun, as though the very weather had come out to support the cause of freedom. The marchers set out along rue Sherbrooke heading west. Charles felt himself transported by a kind of drunkenness, brought on by the immense feeling of goodwill that had spread over everything he could see around him. Without really knowing why, he put his arms around Isabel’s and Blonblon’s waists and hugged them close to him. Everyone was singing and shouting slogans; people were smiling; total strangers were behaving like bosom buddies; children riding on the shoulders of their parents looked about with eyes filled with the seriousness of the moment; marchers burst into laughter after reading the words on some of the placards; old friends greeted one another with shouts of joyous surprise; the tramping of so many feet on the pavement produced a heavy, powerful drumroll, as though an irresistible force were underway. To look at it, one would never guess that this assemblage of happy citizens had been born out of years of oppression, and was in fact a cry of revolt against a string of ancient grievances.
The crowd had just begun to cut down rue Saint-Denis towards Place Jacques-Cartier in Old Montreal, where the speeches were to be given, when an old man on a bicycle, wearing a huge black overcoat and with his head topped by a red tuque, suddenly appeared on the sidewalk casting murderous looks at the protesters. He began shouting insults at them in English, accompanied by obscene gestures. Marchers laughed at him tolerantly, as though he represented Canada itself, shouting bitterly its utter defeat.
“Go get yourself a warm meal!” Charles called to him. “You’re going to catch your death!”
The crowd laughed. A hand fell on Charles’s shoulder and he turned to see a tall, young man with long, brown hair and a pencil-thin moustache leaning towards him, the noise surrounding them making conversation difficult.
“Would you be Charles Thibodeau, by any chance?”
Charles nodded.
“I recognized your smile. There’s only one guy on the planet with a smile like that, and it’s you. You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“No.”
“I can still see you up on that stage, reciting lines from Le Cid in front of the whole school. Man, I nearly busted a gut that day, let me tell you!”
“Marcel Lamouche!” cried Charles.
Little Lamouche. Charles hadn’t seen him since his first year of high school, at Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur. He’d undergone such a biological transformation in the meantime that it was as though his soul had switched bodies. In 1980 his family had moved to Sherbrooke, and Marcel had gone to school there; he’d come back to the city at the end of the summer to go into first-year law at the University of Montreal. He introduced Charles to his sister, who was marching alongside him, listening to them with a quiet smile on her lips. Charles introduced them to his two friends.
“Michel Leblond?” Lamouche exclaimed. “The Saviour of the Universe? I don’t believe it! Do they still call you Blonblon?”
“Sometimes,” Blonblon said with a smile of resignation.
Marcel Lamouche’s sister was twenty-one and pretty, almost Asiatically thin. Her demeanour was somewhat self-effacing; she spoke little, listened a lot, and looked all around her with careful attention, as though she wanted to keep the fruit of her reflections all to herself.
Shaking her hand, Charles got the impression that she was pleased to meet him. In fact, without his knowing it, he had already been pleasing her for several minutes as she listened while the two old friends caught up with each other’s news. Isabel, not one to hold back, engaged her in conversation and learned that Stéphanie was sharing an apartment with her brother and was taking psychology; although she’d found Montreal a bit daunting at first, she now loved the city and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. All the while she talked to Isabel, she tried to keep herself close to Charles, and despite her shyness managed to include him in her conversation as much as possible. Which was easy enough, given that Charles himself had decided to favour her with his vast array of charms.
They arrived at Place Jacques-Cartier. Two technicians were on a stage checking wires and amps; one of them tapped a microphone with his fingers, unleashing a loud booming sound from the loudspeakers.
The speeches were soon underway. As usual, those delivering them went up in order of mounting importance. Finally came the turn of Jacques Parizeau, who the previous year had become the leader of the Parti Québécois. Smiling, his face bright red, he had the look of a fat shopkeeper whose access to republican ideas set him apart from the common run of humanity.
He waited patiently for the crowd to quiet down, then, with his astonishing ability to turn the rowdiest public meeting into a scholarly lecture, he began to expound on his perception of the situation with the élan and lucidity of a great speaker. There was much applause, although it was kept brief so as not to drown out the thread of his oratory.
Charles was enthralled. Now there, he thought, was a brain! We now had nothing to fear from our adversaries, certainly not those in Ottawa, where certain members of our own Quebec family, their eyes firmly fixed on their careers, were galloping through the mud with a smile on their lips.
Every now and then Charles exchanged a brief remark with his friends. Towards the end, he leaned down to speak to Stéphanie, and asked her for her telephone number. She gave him a smile of astonished happiness, her cheeks turning beet red, and rummaged frantically in the pockets of her coat. Then she handed him a piece of paper folded in four.
After a final salvo of shouts and applause, the demonstrators began to disperse, discussing the issues of the day with great animation, energized by the illusion that the problems that had brought them together were already on the road to being solved. These were the people, the good, old, Québec people, forever prone to the naïve conviction that with patience, goodwill, and fluent speeches, there was almost nothing that couldn’t be rectified.
Marcel Lamouche suggested going somewhere for a coffee. They had to walk all the way up to Sainte-Catherine, since the shops in Old Montreal were completely full. They finally found themselves in the Picasso, the venerable bar-café on rue Saint-Denis where generations of students had sipped beer and wallowed in the pleasures and the pangs of mutual seduction.
“I’m so happy to have run into you again, Charles!” said Lamouche, clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s too bad we lost touch for so long. I still haven’t asked you what you’ve been up to; you’re studying, I presume?”
“No,” Charles replied, looking him straight in the eye. “I’m working in a sporting goods store.”
“A sporting goods store?” said Lamouche, astonished. “Well, hey, that’s cool,” he added politely, and said no more. But he was clearly disappointed to see such a gifted talent as his old friend content with such a lowly occupation.
“Well, it’s just for the time being,” Charles explained, deeply embarrassed to be addressing both a future lawyer and a future psychologist. “I’m waiting until a job comes up at a newspaper.”
“Oh yeah? That’s great! That’s right up your alley. At school you used to beat our asses in French class. What paper?”
Stéphanie looked down, while Blonblon and Isabel, who knew the true situation with Charles, tried not to smile.
“Oh, well, I’m not at liberty to say just now,” Charles lied, looking away.
It was the first time in his life that he’d felt outclassed, so to speak, and the feeling was intolerable. He began talking so quickly and with such verve that Blonblon, who knew him as well as he knew the back of his own hand, could feel the distress that had come over him. He began to hope with all his heart that Charles’s dreams of becoming a journalist would be realized. And soon.
Later that day, Charles was waiting for one of his pool-playing friends inside the Sherbrooke metro station; the friend was going to bring him to the house of someone he knew who was willing to part with a computer at an unbelievable price, or so the friend had said.
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It was nearing six o’clock. Leaning against a wall at the top of the stairs leading down to the platform, Charles was idly watching the crowd of commuters climbing the steps to the exit when he began to experience a strange sensation. He had the feeling that some unseen person was trying to transmit a message to him, a message of paramount importance.
The commuters climbing towards him could be divided into three groups: there were the young, who bounded up the steps as though wafted up on draughts of air and quickly disappeared, sucked out onto the street; there were those who, being older, took the stairs slowly, one at a time, their faces set, concentrating on the battle against time; and then there were the very old, fewer, but condemned to a painful upward journey, their hands grasping the handrail, making small, hissing sounds with each step, their faces twisted with the effort, turning every so often to the person behind them to apologize for their slowness.
In other words, Charles saw before him, arranged on the stairs, the three phases of life. For now he belonged to the first group, but soon — very soon, he told himself frankly — he would be joining the ranks of the second group, and then the third. There was nothing new in this observation, but it made his skin crawl nonetheless! Was he ill? No, not at all. Or perhaps he was: he was experiencing the traumatic shock of hyperlucidity, an overpowering phenomenon that no ordinary person could tolerate for more than a few seconds at a time. He had to move quickly, the unseen voice was telling him, since the game that had begun a few years before was about to achieve its apotheosis, and he had already wasted a great deal of time!
It was just at that moment that his friend arrived. Charles hurried towards him as though he were a saviour. The friend, taken aback, asked him if he was all right, then took him to see the computer — which Charles didn’t buy because the asking price was too high.
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