“I do. It’s very interesting.”
“Good, I thought so, too. Perhaps for other reasons, though. After reading it, I told myself that dogs truly are … magnificent animals … superior to men in many ways. Don’t you think? They’re good, loyal, helpful… Ah! if only men were more like dogs! It would be so much better! We wouldn’t need lawyers, or notaries, or police, or generals, or soldiers. We wouldn’t even need doctors …”
Her voice broke on the last word. She sat down at the table and rested her head in her hands.
Charles watched her, filled with concern. He went behind her and massaged her shoulders. She gave a small smile and raised her head, looking straight ahead with dry eyes.
“You’re a good man. I was right to ask you to come see me.”
“STEAMY! STEAMY! VENISE-EN-QUÉBEC!” called the parrot, “PRETTY GODDAMNED NICE! BREAK THE ICE!”
“Shut up, you stupid bird!” Amélie shouted, suddenly furious. “One of these days I’m going to throw you out with the rest of the garbage!”
“Why are you keeping that ridiculous bird, anyway, Amélie? I wouldn’t be able to stand living with it for half an hour. Monsieur Victoire must have been sick and tired of it.”
His remark sparked a flurry of activity in Amélie. She instantly became calm, shrugged her shoulders, pursed her lips, and stood up to fetch the coffee pot. At the counter, with her back to him, she filled the cups.
“Monsieur Victoire gave me that ridiculous bird, as you choose to call it,” she said coldly, “because it was too old and too expensive to keep. Veterinarians don’t give their pills away for nothing, do they? Edouard is old, like me. I took him in, I saved him, I give him all the love and attention that has been denied me, and he is much the better for it. Shall I show you?”
She went up to the bird’s cage, opened the door, and held out her arm.
“Come on, boy, come to Mama who loves you,” she cooed. “Come to Mama who loves you very, very much, yes she does. Show our friend that you can be a nice little birdie, come on, birdie!”
The parrot gave a little hop to the door and, after rolling its terrifying eyes, perched on Amélie’s arm with a kind of strangulated miaowing sound.
The next instant it was flying swiftly around the kitchen. It landed on the top of the refrigerator and looked down at the back of Charles’s neck, its wings half-stretched and quivering.
“He’s my only friend these days,” Amélie sighed, taking a sip of her coffee. “Everyone else has abandoned me. And why shouldn’t they? I’m not good for anything.”
“Amélie, you’re talking nonsense. And I haven’t abandoned you. I still remember your Christmas Room and all the wonderful things you used to give me to eat. We’ve known each other a long time!”
“True. But you’ve abandoned me just the same, just like all the rest of them. Maybe some day I’ll succeed in getting you back, but that remains to be seen. I can’t take anything for granted, can I?”
Charles didn’t know what to say. He was deeply troubled. Compassion and annoyance struggled within him. Should he do what he could for this poor creature? Yes, of course he should; in her own way she had been very good to him. But what could he do? Not much. What would she allow him to do? Even less.
He looked down the hallway leading to the door, and judged that leaving so soon would be the wrong thing to do. He slid his hand towards the old woman’s, but she drew hers away.
“Amélie, please, I beg you to stop seeing everything so negatively… I’ve been very busy for some time now, I’m trying to find my niche, as they say. And I’ve changed jobs a few times, I’ve had some problems in my love life, things haven’t gone so well… All of that has taken up so much time, I can’t tell you. I know I’ve neglected you, but I haven’t abandoned you. I’ll come back, I promise.”
“We’ll see. But let’s change the subject, shall we? I didn’t ask you to come here so I could sing the blues. I wanted to hear all about you.”
“Me?”
“ME!” shouted the parrot, and resumed its flapping about the kitchen.
“Yes, you. I won’t pretend to you that I’m very happy with the way you’ve been going.”
“Why is that?” Charles answered, suppressing a sigh.
She rose, left the room, and came back in with a large stack of newspapers: he saw that they were all issues of Artist’s Life. She dropped the bundle on the table and remained standing until she caught her breath.
“I’ve read everything you’ve written since you started writing for this paper, my dear. I haven’t missed a week.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. I’m not flattering you. Quite the contrary.”
“FLAT AS MY ASS!” the parrot squawked, then landed so noisily on the pile of papers that Charles jumped back in alarm.
“Edouard, please! No swearing! And now look at him doing his business on my papers! Shoo! Off with you, now!”
The bird gave another squawk and flew out of the room, to Charles’s great relief.
“I’m not flattering you, Charles; I consider you to be wasting your talent writing for this paper, which talks of nothing but who’s got the most money, the grandest cottage, and the biggest tits, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Twice in one day, Charles was thinking. How strange!
“But aren’t you exaggerating a bit, Amélie? It seems to me we also write about music, and concerts, and films, and TV shows, and even about the theatre once in a while. Why, just this afternoon I was at Brigitte Loiseau’s …”
“It is only interested in such things insofar as they provide opportunities to mention money, cottages, and tits … and most of the time they do so in an incredibly vulgar way. You’re a bit better than most of them, I’ll admit, and sometimes I think you even write well, almost as well as you wrote in your novel…”
Charles smiled. “You’ve read it?”
“You never gave me a copy, but I did read it. However, I must say, my dear boy, that just because you write well doesn’t mean everything is just going to fall into place for you; on the contrary, it could all come tumbling down around your head. You are squandering your talent writing that muck, Charles. It doesn’t matter that your colleagues are doing it too: they’re just using dirt to make muck. But you! You! Every time I see one of your articles in this rag, if you’ll pardon the expression, I become so sad, so sad that I stand at the window for hours not able to do a thing…”
Charles was moved to take her hand, and this time she didn’t draw it away. He gave her the same response he had given Brigitte Loiseau, only going a bit farther; he hadn’t given up his literary ambitions (which was almost a lie), he was only working at Artist’s Life to gain some experience; he really hoped to work at a much more ambitious magazine and was even thinking of going back to school in the meantime.
“Really? What would you study?”
“Well, first I need to get my college diploma, then enrol at a university in literature or poli-sci, I haven’t decided which yet.”
“Do it soon, Charles. Time waits for no man. How old are you? Twenty-five, I think? You’ll get old sooner than you think, take it from me.”
The reference to time’s flight made him glance at his wristwatch. He had to leave right away in order to write his piece on Brigitte Loiseau before the deadline.
“Good heavens!” Amélie cried. “You haven’t touched your cookies! And they’re your favourites!”
She wouldn’t let him get up from the table until he had eaten six of them. A few years earlier he would easily have put away a whole box of them by himself. They were oblong cookies with rounded edges, covered with a thick layer of dark chocolate streaked with zebra-like stripes of vanilla that had earned them the nickname “stinky beasts” in the neighbourhood. He still found them incredibly sweet, but also incredibly delicious. As he was finishing his sixth, Edouard flew into the kitchen, landed on Charles’s shoulder, and gripped him painfully with its talons.
<
br /> Amélie wriggled with pleasure.
“You see? You see? He’s getting used to you! Soon he may even get to like you!”
Charles thought it a good time to leave. But first he had to accept two gifts. Amélie gave him a small, green-jacketed book entitled The Joy of Transeologic Thinking, by a certain Dr. Uri Numène.
“This book has helped me a lot, Charles. I might even say it saved my life!”
“I’ll read it, I promise,” Charles said in his most convincing tone.
Then, with a mysterious smile, Amélie handed him a cardboard box.
“Don’t open it until you get home, when you’re alone. I think you’ll really like this one.”
Poor woman, Charles sighed on his way back to the magazine offices. She always was a bit odd, but now I think she’s really gone around the bend. I must go back to see her. If only her bloody parrot would kick the bucket! I’d cheerfully buy her a rosewood coffin for it.
Drinking cup after cup of coffee, Charles worked long into the night on his Brigitte Loiseau piece, then went home, arriving just before midnight. When he opened the cardboard box, he saw that it contained the electric crèche that he had admired so often in Amélie’s Christmas Room. He turned off the lights and plugged it in: it filled the room with a bluish pink glow as the Holy Virgin tenderly rocked the Baby Jesus on her knees, with Joseph and the donkey nodding their heads beside her in an alternating rhythm. It was a long time before he pulled himself away from this innocent contemplation.
Yes, he decided, I’ve got to get a move on. After all, in five years I’ll be thirty.
At four o’clock in the morning, unable to sleep, Charles decided to get up; he sat down at his kitchen table and began reading The Master and Margarita, a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov that Bernand Délicieux had lent him, saying that anyone who hadn’t read it, whether they knew it or not, had a hole in their head that would never fill up by itself.
He was hooked after the first few lines. How? How could someone write like this despite being sick, under the Stalinist regime, and without even knowing if it would be published?
Far from calming him down, the novel made him more and more excited. At five thirty he closed the book and decided to take a walk. Walking often relaxed him.
It was the beginning of June. The sun was just rising, and its rays were already beginning to pump freshness into the air. Rue Saint-Denis, still deserted at such an early hour, shone blue and red with a few shadows where night was making its final stand. He headed up towards Sainte-Catherine, gazing at the clock tower of the Université de Québec à Montréal, a part of the old Saint-James Church that UQAM had integrated into its new facade in order to salve its conscience, the way one would toss a coin to a beggar who was freezing in a windstorm.
“Right… university,” Charles thought with a disdainful frown. “There’s one place I’m not ready to park my butt in yet…”
An old, beige mutt with matted hair appeared at the corner and, as though recognizing Charles, headed straight towards him, limping. The young man searched his pockets and, by a happy chance, found a piece of biscuit.
The dog stopped in front of him and waited on its haunches, its gaze friendly and its tail sweeping the sidewalk behind it.
“Here, old boy. It’s all I have. Where did you come from, eh? You look lost.”
The dog swallowed the biscuit with a single gulp, then waited as though to say, “Is that all?”
A moment later, when it seemed apparent that Charles had nothing else to offer but pats on the head, the dog licked his hand politely and limped off, its nose sniffing the wind, still full of beans despite its wounded paw.
Charles continued his walk, once again eyeing the clock tower that shot like an arrow above the street, pointing towards a sky growing bluer by the minute. “Smartass!” it seemed to be saying. “Well on your way to conquering Montreal, are you? Ha! Some conquest! A scribbler for a muckraking magazine! Congratulations!”
Charles chewed his lip. Sarcasm from a tower seemed to him to demand a reply.
Rue Sainte-Catherine was beginning to fill up. Pedestrians had appeared; they ambled along, or else hurried, practically racing each other, no doubt late for work. Delivery trucks rumbled, stopping with much grinding of gears and clattering of doors. At a red light, two cars nearly collided. There was a great honking of horns.
Charles crossed the street and continued up Saint-Denis, still worked up with a feeling of vexation that, to his surprise, refused to leave him and in fact threatened to blossom into full-scale anger. How can a person get angry at a clock tower? It seemed ridiculous. Obviously insomnia didn’t agree with him! Then he bumped into a pedestrian; the stranger groaned.
“Sorry, sir, I didn’t see you.”
“I can see that,” the man replied, moving off without looking up.
Charles realized he was standing in front of the entrance to the old Saint-lames Church, still closed at this hour. He looked up again at the arrow surmounted by a weather vane flashing in the sunlight. How he would like to give these old towers a good shaking, get right up there and shake the living daylight out of them, or even give them a couple of swings with a wrecking ball. Why? He would have been hard put to explain his feelings.
“Hey, you,” called a hoarse voice, “what, is your girlfriend locked up in that tower or something?”
A panhandler emerged from the shadows. He came up to Charles with an unhealthy grin that showed two missing canines. He was wearing broken-down shoes and a long, bottle-green woollen coat that was so clean and so well cut that it emphasized the ravages that forty years of alcohol had visited on his face.
Taken by surprise, Charles studied him with some distaste. The man’s long, dirty hair escaped from under a white tuque splattered with stains.
“Won’t answer me, huh?” the man went on, planting himself in front of Charles, looking at him with a watery, mocking eye.
“My girlfriend is sleeping with the verger this morning,” Charles said jokingly. “I’m pretty sure they’re not doing that in the tower. I wouldn’t mind going up there myself, though.”
“What for?”
“Just to have a look around.”
“I can fix you up, cap’n. Ten bucks and I’ll let you into the tower.”
Charles looked at him dubiously.
“You don’t believe me? Ten bucks and in five minutes you’ll be at the top. You can get a goldarned good view of everything from up there.”
By way of confirmation, the man took a ring of keys from his coat pocket.
“This one’s for opening the gate, which is right over there, on the right. And this one’s for door number J-1825. Behind it there’s a set of stairs that’ll take you straight up to the bells, even higher if you want.”
“What about the alarm system?”
“I’ll take care of that, cap’n, don’t worry.”
Charles shivered and his eyes lit up. He had just had an idea that was so foolish, so ludicrous, and yet so majestic, that he felt carried away by it.
The rubby shuffled over to the gate that barred entrance to the portal of the former church and, after carefully looking up and down the street, signalled to the young man to hurry over.
“Shake a leg, cap’n. No one’s supposed to see us, okay?”
There was a clank and then a small, creaking sound. The man quickly slid through the gate and, when Charles followed him, he closed and locked it again. The next instant they were both hidden away in a dark recess, away from prying eyes.
“How did you get those keys?” Charles asked, suspiciously.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out, cap’n. All the same, it’ll cost you ten smackers.”
He went up to the iron-bound door and slid the second key into the lock.
“And you’re sure the alarm system won’t go off?” Charles asked.
“What do you take me for, cap’n, some kind of fool? D’you think I’d open the door if I hadn’t shut off the alarm?”<
br />
“Stop calling me captain. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“What do you want me to call you then? Boss?”
“Call me Charles.”
“Hey! We have the same name.”
Charles blanched. Fate was still sending him signals. But what a dire warning this was! Same first name and perhaps, if he wasn’t careful, the same fate.
“My name’s Charles Dion,” the rubby said. “But everybody calls me Squeezy,” he added, sensing that something he had said had upset his new friend and might cost him ten dollars.
He pushed open the massive door and went in. Charles started to follow, but the man was blocking the entrance with his hand out.
“My ten bucks first, cap — I mean, Charles. Thank you.”
They proceeded up a feebly lit stone staircase and soon found themselves on a large landing.
“The wainscotting room,” said Squeezy in a respectful hush, pointing with his index finger to a door with a small, square window. “Goddamn nice in there! That’s where the bigwigs meet from time to time. I wouldn’t mind sleeping in there, I tell you, the rug’s as thick as a mattress! Too risky, though. I make do with the bell tower. It ain’t so bad, either.”
They continued their ascent, climbing the stairs, some of which were metal, some wood. Squeezy began to puff. Every so often he would lift a heavy trap door leading to the next level.
Suddenly he turned to Charles with a hideous smile.
“Okay, boss,” he murmured, panting. “You’re making me earn my ten bucks, that’s for sure … I ain’t never climbed this high before.”
They were standing in semi-darkness, surrounded by strange odours, as though something from a distant, long-gone era had remained imprisoned in these massive stone walls. Huge wooden beams, beaded with condensation, rose vertically above their heads and disappeared into the gloom.
Finally they came to the bottom of a long ladder that ascended through metal hoops affixed to the wall.
“Now you be careful, eh?” Squeezy warned, a hand on one of the ladder’s rungs. “One false step and you can crack your head open real good, Charles.”
A Very Bold Leap Page 38