by Eric Dupont
“Aren’t they a little young? Someone gets murdered,” Solange said skeptically.
“If they’re old enough to watch The Passion of Christ on TV on Good Friday, they’re old enough for Tosca.”
“How can you compare an opera to the suffering of Our Lord, Madeleine? The Passion of Christ teaches us something. It changes our hearts. It’s more than mere entertainment.”
“The same goes for Tosca, I think. They aren’t just in it to get dressed up and sing in front of everybody. We’re going. I’m sure it’ll be good.”
“And the fifth ticket?”
“What about the little Haitian girl who takes singing lessons from Madame Lenoir with Michel. What’s her name again? The one he invited to his birthday party.”
“Anamaria di Napoli?”
“Give her mom a call.”
The Book Thief
Königs Wusterhausen–Westend
April 28, 1999
Dear Michel,
You’ve been waiting for a while now for this reply to the letter you sent me at Easter. Phoned dear Suzuki last Sunday night to see if you were home, to speak to you. It was still afternoon in Montreal, so I was sure Mother Superior wouldn’t answer since she’s always at her office then. She was surprised to hear my voice. She told me the big news about you and Anamaria. Am so proud of you both. So you’re in Rome? On a big movie shoot, Suzuki tells me. Tosca. Funny, it’s the first opera we went to see, right after Mr. Zucker’s funeral. Do you remember him and the barley sugar lollipops in the shape of a teddy bear he used to give you when he passed by the restaurant on Rue Saint-Hubert on Saturdays? You know, the ones you tried to sell to me, you little devil!
Your letter is full of questions. But where should I start after ten years away? Will try to bring you up to speed as best I can. First you should know I haven’t gone mad. I have indeed, as you implied in your letter, the b(lond)est of reasons to be here in Berlin. All in good time. Her name’s Claudia. No, not Schiffer; even better than that. Am sitting comfortably on the S-Bahn—it’s a commuter train—as I write. It’s still the best way to see Berlin, from the S-Bahn.
You ask why I haven’t been in touch since suddenly leaving home in 1990. Had to reread your question several times. It’s quite simple, Michel: I was sick and tired of being the butt of every joke. Voilà. Do I really have to spell it out?
Back when we were kids, you already showed a disturbing proclivity for torturing me. Need I remind you of the day at school when—we must have been ten—that crazy teacher wanted to put on a play about the colonization of Canada? You said I should be an Indian. You, of course, you got to play a French navigator, a role that fit you like a glove. The teacher dressed me up in some sort of loincloth, made from who knows what dead animal, and coated me with red powder. We performed the play in front of the younger kids one afternoon.
Then, when it was over, I couldn’t find my clothes. I’d put them in a bag, but they were nowhere to be found. Not in the classroom, not in the theater. Someone had taken them. And you, you little asshole, you came rushing in, saying Suzuki couldn’t come pick us up, you’d spoken with her, she was too busy, we’d have to walk home. You made me walk halfway across Outremont practically naked while you laughed. People driving by kept pointing at me and grinning. Needless to say, you hid when we got home so you wouldn’t be around when I found out about your dumb joke. Claudia thought it was funny. That’s because she doesn’t know you. “Still so bitter about a cruel childhood prank?” you’ll say. That was only one of the first symptoms of your illness.
You don’t slam the door on the family nest over something so trivial, you’ll say. Do you really think a simple discussion could have put everything right? Reason with Madeleine Lamontagne? You’d be wasting your time, unless your arguments will turn her a profit in the short to medium term.
Then you started winning competitions. When you were eighteen, you were already singing in recitals alongside established names. I think it was the day Mom bought that TV appearance for you (yes, I know it’s news to you, but Suzuki told me: the whole thing was bought; the piece they asked you to sing, it was Mom who chose it. She knew that having you sing La donna è mobile at five o’clock in the afternoon would boost Mado Group Inc.’s presence in households across Quebec. First, the pancake mix, the cretons, and the frozen meals. Now, the tenor! That’s all that was missing . . .). I’ll never forget the day your singing teacher asked to speak to Mom: you absolutely had to study music, never had she seen such a precocious talent. To hear her, you would have thought you were the new Pavarotti. “Doesn’t his voice remind you of Fritz Wunderlich?” she asked Mom. Do you remember? You can imagine the look on Madeleine’s face! She hadn’t the faintest idea who this Fritz-what’s-his-name might be. But she replied: “Yes, I think so too.” I almost burst out laughing in our Outremont kitchen. Already, when your name was still Michel Lamontagne, I barely existed in Mom’s eyes; but as soon as you became Michel de la Montagne, I was forever condemned to the shadows.
In 1990, it took her a week to realize I was gone, Michel. After that, she had someone track me down. I hung up on her when she called. Our mom’s crazy, Michel. Raving mad. Certifiable! For now, this works in your favor; she mollycoddles you, she spoils you, and even buys you a career as a tenor, but one day things are going to change. Once you’ve dishonored Mado Group Inc.’s reputation for one reason or another, once you’ve blackened your name with scandal, that same craziness that made you will turn against you. There’ll be nothing for it but to beg Mom for mercy. And to keep your trap shut.
There is still so much more I could tell you, but I know I’ll only get carried away and end up writing a bunch of stuff I’ll have to cross out afterward so as not to offend you, which isn’t at all my intention. My S-Bahn is just coming into Westend anyhow. I’ll write again tomorrow. So happy to be back in touch with you, brother.
Gabriel
* * *
Straußberg Nord–Westkreuz
April 30, 1999
Dearest Michel,
I reread the letter I wrote you the day before yesterday. Reading it over again, I realize it skirts the question you’re not asking, namely what has become of me since 1990. In metric or imperial? Weighed myself at the gym this morning—I’ve found somewhere to work out on Landsberger Allee, the SEZ. It’s good, almost better than the place I went to in Toronto—I’m almost ninety kilos! I weighed myself again on the S-Bahn scales. The Germans have scales on their railway platforms. It’s handy: you can check to see if you’ve put on weight as you wait for the train. That’s another reason I left you all. That crappy food all the time. All your body needs, Michel, is two cups of yogurt, a few pieces of fruit, an egg or two, and some lean meat every other day. The rest of the time, you drink water. Period.
When I left Outremont, I wound up, as you probably heard, at Chantal Villeneuve’s, our old French teacher at Brébeuf College. I can hear you laughing. We’d been seeing each other for a few years already, but never openly. When I met her, she was thirty-three and married. Remember? We were finishing high school. It doesn’t take long to realize you’re good-looking, you know. If schools weren’t run mostly by women and staffed by so many gay men, it might take a little longer. At Lajoie elementary school, for instance, I soon noticed the women teachers looking at me differently.
No matter how I misbehaved, I always got away with a reprimand, while the others were suspended for a day or two.
But there’s something I have to tell you.
Remember the girl who taught us English at Lajoie before Mom ruined our lives and packed us off to Brébeuf? Her name was Caroline; she was from Saskatchewan. You were sitting up front, as usual, so the teacher could get a good look at you. I was at the back because I really, truly, couldn’t have cared less about learning English, right up until the moment Caroline turned up. We were twelve. She was twenty. Long, straight red hair. Less makeup than most of our teachers. Often came to school in jeans and a long white blous
e we could see her dark nipples through. A gap between her two front teeth, a little like Madonna. Difficult-to-understand French, but it didn’t matter because she was there to speak English to us. Big dangling breasts.
The day she arrived, in September, the English teacher put her in charge of the weakest students, namely me and five other boys who didn’t give a shit. You stayed behind in the classroom to keep up your a-do-ra-ble shtick. She led us into an empty classroom with a guitar, had us sit on the floor with our legs crossed.
“So guys, do you know any songs in English?”
She had a slight lisp. One of the boys started bellowing I Was Made for Lovin’ You at the top of his lungs, making obscene gestures and clutching his balls. Caroline may have looked like a bit of an idiot from a distance, but she just looked him in the eye and said:
“Are you sure you have what it takes, little fucker?”
We weren’t sure we’d heard right. I mean, I knew what I’d heard, my English wasn’t all that bad, but the others weren’t sure. So I laughed and laughed until tears ran down my cheeks. The others couldn’t believe it. Caroline didn’t even seem worried we might tell someone what she’d said; she was convinced our English was that bad. She gave me a half smile. The moron asked us to translate for him.
“She wants to know if you’ve got what it takes, asshole!” I said.
I think I heard part of him dying inside. It was the big fat French guy who couldn’t skate and had been kicked out of Stanislas lycée for “gross indecency.” Guillaume was his name. Anyways. He didn’t say a word for the rest of the class and asked to stay behind with the teacher the following day. Lovely Caroline picked up the guitar she’d set down beside her and ran her fingers through her long auburn hair. I can still see her, the color of her hair . . . And that’s when it happened. She used the same shampoo as Suzuki did back then. It smelled of citrus. The scent hit me like a bucket of ice-cold water to the face. It felt like I was being born, discovering America, walking on the moon, piloting Apollo 11, bringing down King Kong, shooting Adolf Hitler between the eyes, occupying my own body at last. Caroline rested her guitar against her breasts, and I imagined I was the instrument, keening at her every touch.
“So, you guys don’t know any songs in English?”
The others fiddled with their shoelaces, mouths open, gaping at her like monkeys staring at the moon. I could only think of Suzuki and her disapproving look, of Caroline’s hair, and again of Suzuki’s voice as she sang “Will you love me all the time . . . ?” you know, the song she said she learned from our grandfather.
“Oh Lord! Where did you learn that?” she asked with her wheaty accent.
I didn’t know how to tell her about Suzuki. I’ve never really known how to talk to anyone about Suzuki, how to define her to other people, how to justify her existence in our lives. So I just said:
“My mother.”
“Your mother knows some very old songs! Is she American?” she asked. Well, it’s true. Suzuki was the closest thing I had to a mother. After, she had us sing Suzuki’s song. At that moment, I fell head over heels in love with her.
When she wasn’t wearing her see-through white blouse, Caroline was fond of tight turtlenecks. She came from North Battleford, a little town in Saskatchewan, she told us, and her father was a music teacher. At any rate, she was in charge of the library Tuesday lunchtimes while the librarian took her break. I suddenly discovered a passion for reading. The school library was usually empty over lunchtime, so Caroline was left to read in peace. I remember, because it’s forever etched in my memory, her reading The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. She gave me a half smile as she watched me approach.
“What do you read?” I stuttered.
“A book about a boy who tries to remain honest in a corrupt world. Are you an honest boy, Gabriel?”
“Not always, but I go to confession.”
And it was true. Back then, Mom would still drag us off to church in Rosemont so we could confess our sins to Father Huot two or three times a year. I think it was around then that Father Huot started reacting to what I confided in him. I could tell he was nervous when I confessed the episode with Caroline to him, and sometimes I even thought I heard him cry. What a big softy he was! Caroline laughed when she heard I went to confession. A lovely unwavering laugh, not too shrill, just enough to leave you under its spell.
“Really? What do you confess? I mean, what can you possibly be guilty of?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret between me and God.”
“Catholics are adorable!” she said, shaking her head. Her smell wafted over me. She really had a hold on me.
I sat down at a table to hide my erection. She had started touching up her eyeshadow. I was the only other person in the library, there was no reason for her to be redoing her makeup. She looked at me. Then she came over to see what I was reading. Back then I was finishing Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. I’d just got to the bit where Captain Nemo comes face to face with the giant squid for the very first time. Right before heroically fighting off a school of giant squid, when he saves a character known as “the Canadian” from their tentacles. The book was very nicely illustrated. She glanced down at the page.
“Squid? You never read in English, Gabriel?” she reproached me gently. I admitted I didn’t enjoy reading in English; it was too difficult. She asked if she could help with my reading and sat down beside me. She wore a little gold cross around her neck, exactly like Mom’s. I still don’t know how she was brazen enough to come teach in an elementary school dressed like that. She put her hand on my thigh. I immediately went rock hard, and of course she noticed.
“You have such lovely, curly black hair, Gabriel.”
Then she ran her fingers through my hair. I thought she was funny. I didn’t really feel like I was doing anything wrong. Slowly, she moved closer to me and pressed her lips against mine. She asked me to follow her into a tiny office she had the key to. There, she pulled down my pants and knelt before me. She held my hand in hers and squeezed it when my moans got too loud, as if to hush me. Hiroshima came and went. I was glistening with sweat. Afterward, she kissed me on the mouth.
“You’re quite a big boy, Gabriel!”
Back then, I didn’t understand. I thought she meant I’d just been through a rite of passage.
“Make good use of it!” she concluded.
It took me years to understand what she’d meant. I found myself outside in the hallway with the other boys, a little shaken. What had happened to Captain Nemo? I ask you. On my way out of the library, I felt like she owed me something all the same. I slipped her book, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, into my school bag. I’ve kept it ever since. You should read it. It’s very well done.
Caroline didn’t stop there. I went to see her in the library every Tuesday. It must have been November. As soon as I came in, she’d start her little game again and come over and touch me. I noticed she’d lock the door behind me so we wouldn’t be disturbed. And always in the librarian’s little office. The librarian’s name was Florence Bilodeau. There were photos of her two children and her mother on her desk. The two little boys stared up at me while Caroline was on her knees. I remember one of them was dressed in an old-fashioned maroon turtleneck that his mother must have made him wear for the photo and that he’d probably taken off right away. My biggest fear was Mrs. Bilodeau coming back from lunch earlier than usual. We must have kept it up until December. And then it was exam time. It was Caroline who gave the English oral exams. Do you remember the grade I got? Mom couldn’t believe it.
“For once you get one hundred percent and it has to be in English!”
For Madeleine, of course, math was all that counted. Caroline went back to Saskatchewan in January. I never saw her again. Then there was the woman who worked in the school cafeteria. Diane, wasn’t it? Half Italian, I think. Since I always waited until the others had finished before going to get something to eat, she’d noticed me. “My little straggl
er,” she called me. I was always nice to her. She must have been at least thirty-five. One afternoon, it was just after Caroline left, she put her hand on mine as she gave me my change. Nothing happened with her. Nothing more than the confirmation of what Caroline had taught me. It was my last year of elementary school and Mom and Suzuki wanted us to go to Brébeuf. You needed good grades to get in. Caroline had shown me how to get them. Besides her, there were other teachers with grades to hand out. Do you remember Mr. McIntyre, the Irishman? Gay Jesus, we called him. You know, the one who used to turn up with his Vietnamese lover at Christmas? He taught music. And he worshipped you! He wouldn’t even look me in the eye I made him so uncomfortable. He was a skinny guy . . . you know the one I mean? He used to lead the choir and he played the trumpet so often his lips were always puffy.
The day of our music exam, I wore the tightest pair of jeans I owned. Mr. McIntyre was very much “peace and love.” He really did look a little like Jesus with that beard. He let us choose when we would take our exam.
“I have the utmost respect for you all,” he’d say before every class.
He’d set a date—which he would arrange with us—for the performance part of our exam. Since he refused to subject us to the “cruel stares of our peers,” as he put it while turning to the louts in our class, the ones who’d openly insult him, he allowed us to play the piece we’d learned with no one but him for an audience.
He’d left the door open, but I closed it, claiming I was embarrassed that the others might hear me playing out of tune. There wasn’t much to it. I played my piece on the tuba with an erection I’d given myself by turning my thoughts to Caroline, then I “rearranged” myself to be sure it’d have the desired effect. His forehead began to glisten. I think I could have made him cry if I’d unzipped my fly. At any rate, he gave me a grade well beyond what I’d hoped for, with the tacit assurance that he’d never breathe a word of it to anyone, to boot.
“Thank you, Gabriel. I . . . I think that’s enough.”