Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  “Come on, let’s go, hop-hop! Outside, Charles my lad, you need some oxygen, I can tell by your face. Come on, now, hurry, hurry. Stop dragging your heels!”

  Or:

  “Okay, okay, okay, enough reading for now! Lucie needs a quart of milk! Do her a favour and go to the store. The fresh air will do you good! I don’t want to see you back in the house for at least an hour, understood?”

  Charles would get up, perturbed but obedient, and leave the house to go for a walk around the block, or join his friends who were shouting themselves hoarse in some game in the freezing air.

  Sometimes, however, the compulsion came from within himself. After hours spent among the Kurds of the Victorian era, or in the jungles of Vietnam, bullets whizzing past his head, or in the shadowy slums of east-side Chicago, he would suddenly be overcome by a feeling of claustrophobia, as though his brain were stuffed with images that seemed to be trying to squeeze out through his eyes and ears, and a raging hunger for the real world would suddenly come over him. He would toss his book on the floor, run out of the room, and start teasing Céline, or find Henri and Blonblon and spend the rest of the day taking part in their fantastical activities.

  Late one afternoon, after having read an article about coffee in a back issue of Reader’s Digest, Charles decided to try an experiment on Boff. In a quiet corner of the basement he mixed four tablespoons of instant coffee with an equal amount of vanilla ice cream that Blonblon had smuggled out of his own house, poured a cup of corn syrup over it and gave it to Boff, who lapped it up in three slurps. Half an hour later the animal exploded into an state of intense misbehaviour. He raced from room to room, yowling and baying, seemed to settle down when called but then jumped up on people without warning, climbed up on the furniture, pulled rugs across the floor with his teeth, slammed into doors and pulled down a curtain in the living room, became tangled up in it and struggled to free himself while the children doubled over with laughter, albeit somewhat worriedly – until Lucie appeared, having returned from a visit to a neighbour’s.

  Boff had to be tied up in the yard, where he threw himself into an operatic cycle of barking before digging deep holes in the frozen ground. When it was time to go to bed, Charles, distressed at the thought of his dog spending the night out in the cold, begged permission to put him in the basement.

  Around two o’clock in the morning, Fernand was roused from a deep sleep by a strange noise. He got up, went into the kitchen, and turned on the light. A sound of crunching was coming from the basement. He opened the door. Boff scurried down the steps in a cloud of splinters; the bottom of the basement door had been chewed to the thinness of cardboard. Another fifteen minutes and the dog would have escaped into the house.

  “As far as coffee is concerned, Charles,” he said the next morning at breakfast, with a slightly mocking smile, “would you agree that you have pursued your experiments to, let’s say, their logical conclusion?”

  Charles’s reading produced other results. One day while Lucie was busy tidying the basement, Charles, inspired by the adventures of Kim Barsac at the North Pole, persuaded his friends to build an enormous snow-fort on the slightly inclined roof of the shed, which would give them control of the entire neighbourhood. Henri and Blonblon carried up huge blocks of snow by means of a ladder, while Charles put them in place and cemented them with water. They had just finished building the fort when a loud crack came from the roof, which slumped significantly in the middle. The boys made an emergency call to Fernand and, to their great disappointment, the hardware-store owner dismantled their fort as quickly as he could to avoid a complete collapse, then had to hire a carpenter to spend a day repairing the roof joists.

  On both these occasions, Fernand sensed that his precautions against too much reading should be cut back; at least books, he thought, had the advantage of keeping Charles out of trouble.

  It had not escaped Madame Jacob’s notice that a profound change had taken place in her pupil’s behaviour. The sudden improvement in his marks in dictation was her first clue. Was he cheating? Close observation revealed nothing. Then one morning she became convinced that Charles was borrowing his knowledge from some other source. She’d asked the class to write a ten-line composition on the theme of a trip to the country. Inspired, Charles wrote sixteen fully imagined lines almost without a single grammatical error. Set in the centre of the piece was the following astonishing phrase: Clouds of dust hovered over the road. Clouds of dust hovered over the road? There was about as much chance that a small boy from an over-crowded neighbourhood in east Montreal, a boy near the bottom of the class, no less, would understand the meaning, let alone the orthography, of the verb “to hover” as there was that he could recite elegies in classical Greek.

  Pointing a finger at the suspect verb, she said to Charles:

  “Nice work, this composition. Where did you copy it from?”

  “Pardon?” Charles replied, turning red. “I didn’t copy it.”

  “All right, then, what does ‘hovered’ mean?”

  “Hung in the air over the road, I guess.”

  Madame Jacob eyed him for a moment without comment, a look of deep suspicion on her face. She slowly flexed her ring-encrusted fingers, and an expression of cruel cunning curled the edges of her pinkly painted lips.

  “Do you mind if I look in your desk?” she asked.

  Charles, more and more embarrassed, shook his head. The room was as silent as if a blanket of snow had fallen over it. The pupils watched bright-eyed, not moving a muscle, and the smile curling the teacher’s lips could also be seen on many of the faces throughout the room.

  The search of Charles’s desk produced nothing.

  “Where did you learn that word, Charles?” asked Madame Jacob, beginning to lose patience. “I have never used it in this classroom, and I doubt very much that anyone else has ever used it in your presence.”

  “I read it in a book … I don’t remember which one.”

  “You read books?”

  “Does he read books!” snorted Blonblon, coming to his friend’s aid. “He’s read hundreds of books. He hardly does anything else these days.”

  Madame Jacob told him to keep his comments to himself and turned back to Charles. “What books, Charles?”

  He rhymed off a list of books that astonished her.

  “You’ve read all those?”

  Charles, sensing victory, nodded his head and tried to maintain a look of modesty so as not to annoy his teacher.

  “Right to the end?”

  “Yes, right to the end.”

  “He even reads in his sleep!” Blonblon added quickly, fascinated by the turn the conversation had taken.

  “No one’s asking you!” she hissed, striking out with reptilian suddenness. Her hand swept empty air, to the great delight of the class.

  But from then on her attitude towards Charles changed, albeit gradually. Her opinion of him as a ne’er-do-well, destined to a life of obscure dullness, began to crack and fade, and the somewhat malicious indifference she had always shown towards him evolved into astonishment; a faint hint of interest, perhaps even a certain level of affection, was born in her for this larva about to sprout the wings of a beautiful butterfly; fragile, diaphanous wings that would lift him, she began to imagine, above the mediocre circumstances of the life for which his lowly birth had prepared him.

  His reputation as a reader of Olympian stature spread as far as Chez Robert. He had been going to the restaurant much less frequently since his transfer to the Fafard family. Now that he no longer worked as a delivery boy or as a commissioned salesman, his adoptive parents wisely considered it more important that he focus his energies first and foremost on his school work. Nor did he go so often as a customer, given that Lucie made sure that all meals were prepared on time and that Charles had as free access to the refrigerator and cupboards as anyone else in the household. But he had kept in touch with Rosalie and Roberto, who, without knowing the details of the scene with the parin
g knife, certainly knew that a tremendous rift had taken place between father and son, even that Charles’s life had been in a certain amount of danger; their affection for the child had increased accordingly.

  One afternoon in March, on his way home from school, Charles dropped into the restaurant with Henri for a hot chocolate and a Joe Louis, as had been his former habit. They sat at the counter and amused themselves with elbow jabs to the ribs while the hot-chocolate machine gave out its little businesslike hum as it filled the porcelain cups with a layer of sweet-smelling froth.

  “Well, Charlie,” said Rosalie, setting the cups and cakes before them, “how goes the battle?”

  “Fine, Madame Guindon. Everything’s great!”

  “How about your reading? You still enjoying it?”

  “He hardly enjoys anything else,” teased Henri, giving Charles another jab in the ribs, which caused a miniature tempest in his friend’s cup.

  “Easy, there,” Rosalie scolded, handing Charles a paper napkin to wipe up his spill. “It wouldn’t hurt you to take up a bit of reading, Henri. Might calm you down a bit. Boys!” she sighed, pinching his nose to take the sting from her reprimand, “they say every one of ’em gets ants in their pants the minute they come into this world! But it doesn’t matter, we love ’em just the same! So tell me, what are you reading these days, Charlie?”

  “The War With the Salamanders.”

  “The War With the … what?” said Rosalie, flabbergasted.

  Just then Roberto showed his head at the kitchen door.

  “Salamanders,” explained Charles gravely. “They’re kind of like frogs, only very intelligent. They know how to use dynamite.”

  “Sweet Mother of God!” exclaimed Rosalie, taken aback.

  “It’s just a story, Madame Guindon,” Charles hastened to add, while Henri burst into laughter at her naïveté.

  Roberto came to the counter. “You mean djou can read books like that?” he asked incredulously.

  “Of course. I even have it in my school bag.”

  He rummaged through the deep recesses of his bag and produced the Karel Capek novel. It was a soft-covered book, a bit worn, on which was depicted a photograph partly consumed by flames, showing a young man and woman smiling enigmatically.

  “Could djou read us a bit of it?” asked Roberto.

  Charles hesitated for a second, then opened the book and began reading the first page.

  “If you look for the little island of Tana Masa on the map, you’ll find it smack on the Equator, just to the west of Sumatra; but if you were standing on the bridge of the Kandong Bandoeng and asked Captain J. van Toch about the island off which he’d just dropped anchor, you’d first be rewarded with a string of curses, then with the information that it was the meanest corner of the Sonde archipelago, an even more wretched hole than Taba Bala …”

  His clear, young voice contrasted comically with the roughness of some of the expressions in the book; he articulated each word without hesitation, stumbling only over Kandong Bandoeng, but is wasn’t so much the ease and speed with which he read that impressed his audience as the sense he imparted that they were actually witnessing the beginning of a fascinating story that could keep them enthralled for hours on end. Roberto and Rosalie, mute with astonishment at the strange words coming from the mouth of a child they’d known since he was in diapers, who had taken his first steps on the sidewalk outside their restaurant, looked as though they’d suddenly found themselves in the presence of the Holy Ghost.

  Two young girls, students from the local high school, had left their Cokes and moved silently close to Charles, and were listening to him with smiles of ecstasy; a furnace-oil deliveryman, his cap a bit askew and his chin stubbled with a three-day growth of grey whiskers that emphasized the fatigue showing on his face, also approached, entranced. Charles looked up, saw that everyone was listening to him, turned beet red, and stuffed the book back into his school bag. There followed a long silence.

  “Well,” sighed the deliveryman, “now I’ve seen everything.”

  While everyone was complimenting the boy, Roberto put his hand in his pocket and handed Charles a two-dollar bill.

  “Here,” he said, “djou can buy a few books with this. Books, I said, no cigarettes or bubble gum, eh?”

  Charles was dumbfounded. He hesitated a moment before accepting the money. Henri watched him enviously. True to the code of polite conduct that had been instilled in him, Charles thanked Roberto profusely, promised to use the money as directed, and even said he would bring the books to the restaurant to show him.

  “I wasn’t so wrong after all,” said Rosalie. “You’re going to go far, my dear!” In her entire life she’d read only two Harlequin Romances (that was when she’d been laid up in hospital). As for her partner, even that exploit remained in the realm of the unthinkable.

  That day marked the beginning of Charles’s second period of glory in the neighbourhood. His first had been for the way he had with dogs; now he enjoyed a reputation as a boy wonder, someone who knew a great deal more than anyone would expect from a child his age. Rosalie and Roberto were certain that their numerous friendly customers were aware of the privilege they were enjoying, just being in the presence of someone who was perhaps going to put their neighbourhood on the map.

  One Saturday morning, on his way back from shopping, Charles dropped into the restaurant to show Roberto three books he had purchased with the money; he’d been to a used bookstore on rue Ontario with Lucie.

  “Good timing!” said Rosalie. “Someone was just here and left something for you.”

  She handed him a parcel carefully wrapped in craft paper.

  “Who’s it from?” Charles asked, surprised.

  “Open it and see.”

  With some difficulty, Charles finally managed to get the wrapping off. The parcel contained a superb children’s edition of 1001 Arabian Nights. Tucked inside the front cover was a card with a few words written on it:

  To my little Charles, who keeps on growing and growing.

  Happy reading.

  – Conrad Saint-Amour.

  Months passed. Charles had at last found peace. His relationship with Madame Jacob had changed radically; she actually displayed a certain warmth towards him. More and more often it was Charles she selected at the end of the day to clean the blackboards (which was considered a signal honour), and one day – a red-letter day – she even asked his opinion about something: her memory, she said, had failed her as to the respective positions of the letters y and i in the word olympic. Even so, Charles felt little friendliness towards her, and continued to treat her with mistrust.

  However, his quasi-chummy relationship with the teacher was not lost on his classmates. One morning Fats Dubé planted himself in front of Charles in the middle of the schoolyard and, after twisting his face into a series of astonished grimaces, much to the delight of his henchmen, asked him if he liked licking a schoolteacher’s arse, and what did it taste like? Charles, who had over the past two years acquired a certain amount of self-confidence, not to mention strength, turned as red as if he had been slapped in the face and threw himself at his enemy, landing a punch on Dubé’s nose that caused him to lose half a cup of blood and stopped the laughter that had sprung up around him in its tracks; his reputation from then on was as someone it was better to insult from a safe distance.

  One afternoon, as he was leaving school, he ran into Mademoiselle Laramée in the corridor. She was walking slowly, shoulders a bit hunched, holding a black notebook with frayed corners in her arms. Her body was thinner than seemed possible, and her austere, thoughtful expression made her look like a tired, old woman who was going to have to rally her strength just to become a habituée of doctors’ waiting rooms. Upon seeing Charles, however, her face lit up with pleasure, a radiant smile smoothed the wrinkles on her face and instantly had her looking like a young woman again. She turned quickly towards him.

  “How are you, Charles? I’m hearing a lot of good t
hings about you. Madame Jacob never stops singing your praises! She says you’re the highlight of her career!”

  She discreetly brushed his hair with her fingers. Charles smiled modestly, slightly embarrassed by the mocking looks he was getting from the other pupils in the hallway, who slowed down as they passed. The teacher understood his unease.

  “Come on, let’s have a little chat in private.”

  She went into an empty classroom, waited until he had joined her, and then shut the door behind him.

  “Is everything going well, Charles?” she asked, sitting on one of the desks in order to put herself more at his level.

  Her voice, which normally sounded a little harsh, had taken on a sweet, almost syrupy softness that Charles found intimidating.

  “Yes, very well, thank you, Mademoiselle.”

  “Are you happy at the Fafards’? I’ve been hearing about the problems you had with your father. Don’t feel too badly about that, such things often happen,” she added when she saw his troubled expression. “Honestly, I could tell you a few things you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Yes, they’re very kind towards me. Much kinder than my father was!” And he gave a strange little laugh that caught in his throat.

  “Madame Jacob tells me,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder, “that you have become a great reader.”

  “That’s thanks to you, Mademoiselle,” Charles declared with sudden exuberance, as though the idea had just occurred to him.

  And for the first time in the history of their acquaintance he gave her a broad smile, a golden, lucid smile that gladdened the heart of the fifty-year-old. She laughed and, taking Charles by the shoulders, gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “You know I’ve always been very fond of you, don’t you, you little rascal!”

  Just then the door opened noisily and the janitor came in, a clumsy, loosejowled, unshaven man pushing a huge vacuum cleaner in front of him. For a second he stopped and contemplated the scene with a stupefied expression, not knowing whether to enter the room or back out.