Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  “Hey!” he called to her happily. “Could you give me a hand? I can’t seem to get my school bag … I just need you to lift it …”

  The girl stopped, a little disconcerted, then came up to him and adjusted the leather straps on his shoulders; but the bag nearly fell to the ground, and he grabbed it at the last minute with his left hand. As she walked away she turned two or three times to check on his progress, and he, oddly enough, did the same, waving his free hand.

  “Thank you!” he called joyfully. “You are very kind!”

  He was now having more and more trouble walking in a straight line. The street and its buildings had begun to wobble gently, as though they were trying to bend over and hug him; he suddenly felt an enormous tenderness towards them. His eye fell on a brick wall that looked particularly warm and inviting. Cutting sharply across the sidewalk he nearly bumped into an old man coming in the opposite direction, who looked disapprovingly at him and grumbled something. Charles broke into laughter and made faces at the man, but they were friendly, one might almost say affectionate, faces, because he also felt an enormous sympathy for the old man, despite his impatient gestures, and if he hadn’t been so far away Charles would have loved to have had a little chat with him.

  Leaning against the brick wall he let its delicious warmth spread through his body. He half-closed his eyes (he couldn’t close them entirely or everything would start spinning). That Gilles and his beer had taught him a lesson! But why? “To make fun of you, you little jerk,” someone inside him said, and he saw Sylvie’s indignant face with its sad, worried eyes. “Because you’re a man, a real man,” said another voice, and Sylvie’s face morphed into that of her companion. Charles admired his moustache – so neatly trimmed – his strong, cheerful voice, and the curly hair hanging down over his forehead. “Yeah,” chimed in the first voice, mocking now, “a real man, just like your father.” He knit his brows; he didn’t like that comparison at all. Even though he was now in the same state he’d so often seen his father in … Had he become like him? Was he going to fall into the same habits and mannerisms as his father?

  Time passed and he began to feel a sudden tiredness come over him. His vision blurred, his legs turned to rubber, and all he wanted to do was stretch out along the brick wall. But he knew that wasn’t a good idea. He had to keep walking, he had to get home, or at least to the home of those people who, fortunately, had taken him out of his own home. He shook his head to rid it of such complicated and embarrassing thoughts, then noticed that a man was standing in front of him. He blinked and squinted his eyes a few times and finally recognized Monsieur Saint-Amour, who was looking at him and smiling. To his great surprise he felt not in the least bit afraid of the man; on the contrary, he felt the same friendship and tenderness towards him that he felt for everything in the world at that moment.

  “Hello, Charles. How are you?”

  “I’m very well, thank you, Monsieur Saint-Amour.”

  He could hardly move his lips. They seemed to have turned into lead. But rather than feel embarrassed by this, he was greatly amused.

  “I’ve had a bit to drink,” he added. “I’ve been drinking beer.”

  Saint-Amour looked at him for a moment, thoughtfully, then with an affectionate solicitude, said:

  “Yes, I can see that. I can see that you’re not your usual self. It feels good to get outside yourself once in a while, doesn’t it? But you look tired, my boy. Wouldn’t you like to come inside and lie down for a while?”

  Charles turned his head and saw that, to his surprise, he’d been leaning against the front of the building in which Monsieur Saint-Amour lived. A definite need to lie down came over him. The old man’s voice sounded so gentle, so warm, that he was tempted to accept the invitation. But a small remnant of mistrust, half-dissolved in the alcoholic haze, still stirred inside him.

  “Thank you, Monsieur Saint-Amour, but I have to be getting home.”

  The old man gave a frank but cordial laugh. “Surely not, Charles?” he said. “You can hardly walk. Everyone will make fun of you!”

  It was this last argument that swayed him. Saint-Amour looked warily about him, then led Charles into the building, even taking him by the hand to help him down the few metres of corridor that brought them to the door of his apartment. He took out his key chain and looked around again to make sure they were quite alone. Charles noticed the tremble in the old man’s hands when he opened the door, but he attached no significance to it, thinking only of how pleasant it would soon be to lie down for a few moments on a sofa or in a bed and go to sleep.

  “Did you like my book, Charles?” asked Saint-Amour after gently closing the door behind him.

  “Yes, I liked it very much,” said Charles, feeling more and more tired. He leaned back against the edge of a chair that was piled high with old magazines. “I read nearly all the stories. Thank you very much for giving it to me.”

  Then he was shaken by a sudden fit of laughter.

  “Jeepers but your kitchen is stuffed with junk, Monsieur Saint-Amour! There’s enough stuff in here to sink a ship! You should clean it up sometime!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re absolutely right, I should do that,” replied the old man, wandering about the room with a furtive air, looking here and there. “Ah, here it is.”

  He returned with a large, yellow plastic cup and leaned towards Charles with a paternal smile.

  “Here, drink this, my boy. It’ll make you feel better. You look so tired, I’m almost afraid you’ll be ill.”

  His wrinkled, large-knuckled hands were trembling more than ever, and the amber liquid danced in the cup. Charles looked into the old man’s eyes and felt another surge of mistrust pass through him, but the warmth and friendliness he saw there reassured him once again.

  The liquid was slightly syrupy and acidic at the same time, and Charles could not hide a grimace as he drank it, but obeying the advice of his friend he drank it to the last drop; almost immediately he was seized by an immense feeling of well-being. He chatted easily with Saint-Amour, who responded with great bursts of laughter and an invitation to step into his tiny bedroom.

  From that point on, Charles’s memory became very confused. He later remembered sitting on the edge of a bed, still feeling happy but almost overwhelmed by a crushing need to sleep. He remembered the soft, caressing voice of his host.

  “Perhaps slip off your trousers, Charles. You’ll be much more comfortable.”

  After that it was as though his memory simply refused to function. Tiny bits of images floated in his mind, but in such a strange swirl that it was impossible to see them clearly. For a fraction of a second he saw Monsieur Saint-Amour hovering above him, mouth half open, and his own legs sticking up in the air while someone did something to him, he couldn’t say quite what but it amused and disturbed him at the same time, and then he remembered a cry. Was it his own voice? Someone else’s? Then he was back in the corridor with a strange taste in his mouth, and he was vomiting. He vomited twice in the corridor and again on the sidewalk in front of a young man in a bicycle helmet who laughed at him. Then he was running (his legs suddenly working properly), crossing a street at an angle, down an alley, and ending up to his amazement in the little park on rue Coupal. He crawled under a bench, exactly the same park and the same bench where he’d hidden after the terrible scene with the paring knife. He curled up into himself, his eyes closed, breathing hard from running. A horrible headache nearly split his head open. But the worst of his suffering came from shame, a vague, imprecise but profound sense of unbearable humiliation that poured over him like warm, stinking grease. After a time he started to cry, but the tears, far from comforting him, increased his rage and despair, the rage and despair of someone who always feels at the mercy of those who are stronger and more evil than himself.

  He returned home at seven, looking deathly pale and haggard, thin-lipped, dragging his feet. Lucie was standing by the door, looking up and down the street like a nervous bird. When she saw hi
m she let out a cry.

  “Gracious God in heaven! What in the world has happened to you, my poor child?” She threw open the door, banging it against the vestibule wall. “Nevermind the phone, Fernand. He’s here!”

  Then she ran and took him in her arms. His clothes, the smell that he gave off, and most of all the devastated expression on his face told her that something serious had happened. After having dozed for a while under the bench and vomiting a few more times, and then being chased from the park by a gang of kids who had gone there to play, Charles had set off for home, preparing as best he could for the interrogation he knew he would receive once he got there; he had decided to tell only half of the truth.

  “I ran into Sylvie while coming home from school,” he admitted, crying. Lucie and Fernand seemed bigger and more frightening than ever. “She was with a man in a restaurant on rue Ontario. They asked me to join them at their table and the man made me drink beer and it made me sick … I’m so ashamed! I’m so ashamed! You don’t know how ashamed I am!”

  Five minutes later Fernand, crimson-faced, his biceps bulging in volcanic rage, stormed into the Valencia restaurant intent on breaking a chair over the head of the vile human wreck who had amused himself in such a disgusting way with his little Charles. Fortunately Sylvie and Curly-Head had already left the premises and no one in the restaurant knew them.

  He returned home feeling a little sheepish, his anger subsided, humbled by his own impotence. He took the telephone book and looked up this Sylvie Langlois who kept such dubious company, but not one of the dozen S. Langloises he questioned was the one he wanted, and three of them told him so in no uncertain terms.

  Meanwhile, with Henri and Céline looking on in amazement, Lucie took Charles into the bathroom, as he was in great need of a wash. He refused to let her undress him, insisted that she leave the room, and he locked the door when she had done so. Twenty minutes later, when he reappeared, he looked a hundred times better; he did not want dinner, however, and went straight to bed.

  The next morning he was miserable, running a fever and aching all over. He asked if he could stay home from school. Lucie kept an eye on him all day. He watched a bit of television, then lay down on his bed beside Boff, barely responding to her questions, ate practically nothing, seemed to have his mind elsewhere and be preoccupied with dark thoughts. “Something else happened to him,” Lucie thought, “I’m certain of it. But how can I find out what it was?”

  “Try getting him to talk, just about anything,” she said to her husband on the phone. “He trusts you. Something happened yesterday that was much more serious than he told us, I’d bet everything I have on it!”

  “Not everything, I hope,” replied Fernand. “Save some for me. I didn’t marry you just for your fine thoughts, you know. Okay,” he went on more seriously, “I’ll do what I can, but you know me: I don’t like anyone pussyfooting around trying to get something out of me, and I’m not very good at pussy-footing around someone else, either.”

  When Céline came home after school she invited Charles to share her snack with her, and he accepted. They ate alone in the kitchen. From time to time she placed her hand on his, smiling at him as she chattered away, and after a while Charles’s face cleared perceptibly. He suggested they go for a walk with Boff, who’d been sitting by the table eyeing their cookies like a castaway on a desert island. Their walk lasted almost until suppertime. Céline’s carefree happiness, her naive and sometimes ludicrous comments, were a comfort to Charles, and one of her remarks even made him burst out laughing. Curiously, however, he was almost cross with her when she suggested walking down rue Ontario. The very idea nearly made him throw up.

  Two days later Lucie and Fernand felt they more or less had their old Charles back. But despite all his subterfuges – some of which, it must be said, were a little ham-fisted – Fernand never succeeded in finding out exactly what had happened between the time Charles left school on that afternoon in June and his arrival at the house. He resigned himself to not knowing; Charles’s life was his own, after all, and no one had the right to go through another person’s dirty laundry.

  He had no idea how apt his metaphor was.

  A few weeks after these events, Charles was leaving Chez Robert with Blonblon when he found himself face to face with Monsieur Saint-Amour. It was then he realized that their roles had been reversed. Now it was Saint-Amour who was afraid of Charles. The old man turned white, babbled a few words, and ran blindly down the street, even though it was obvious he had been going into the restaurant.

  “Wow!” whistled Blonblon, “you’d almost think he was running away from you! What did you do to him?”

  Charles shrugged and said nothing. He watched the fleeing old man, sick at heart about the secret that he shared with the pederast.

  That week he encountered Saint-Amour twice more, and each time the old man seemed stricken with terror and scuttled off down the street. One afternoon, however, when Charles was on an errand for Lucie, he was walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket looking for a can of stewed tomatoes when he ran into Saint-Amour for the third time.

  They were alone. Charles turned on his heels, but Saint-Amour grabbed his arm and held him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said breathlessly, “I don’t mean you any harm. I just want a word with you.”

  In the man’s shrivelled, yellowish face Charles saw only his huge, protruding eyes rolling back and forth like terrified billiard balls. He fumbled feverishly in his pocket and took out his wallet, then handed the child a twenty-dollar bill:

  “Here, take it, there’s more where that came from, if you know how to keep a secret.”

  Charles threw the money in the old man’s face and ran out of the store, to the great surprise of a cashier and a clerk who exchanged long, suspicious looks.

  He ran down the sidewalk, frightened and furious, so filled with self-loathing that tears welled up in his eyes. He ran and ran, crossing a dozen streets before he remembered that Lucie was waiting for the stewed tomatoes. He stopped and looked down the row of shops until he saw the front of a small convenience store displaying, along with tins of fruit salad with their faded labels, a pile of overripe bananas on sale.

  Calm returned to him as he walked home. Shuffling slowly along, the groceries in his arms, slightly tired from running, he went over his latest encounter with the former hairdresser in his mind. A cruel smile appeared on his lips. He knew how he was going to get his revenge.

  21

  At the beginning of August, Lucie fell ill with a mysterious intestinal disorder and had to be taken to the hospital. Fernand was upset by her absence because he couldn’t take time away from his business. He looked around for a sitter for the children, then decided that the best thing for everyone would be to pack them off to a summer camp. Despite the lateness of the season, he found one on Lake Mailhotte, in the Lanaudière region, about forty kilometres from Joliette. It was an all-boys’ camp; Céline went off to visit one of her aunts who lived in an ancient, dark, Victorian house on Boulevard Gouin, in Montreal’s Sault-au-Récollet district.

  One Tuesday morning around six o’clock, Charles and Henri climbed sleepily into the Fafards’ car. Fernand yawned expansively behind the wheel, his mouth stretched wide, and loud, bovine noises issuing from his throat as a devastated Boff watched their inexplicable departure with his feet up on the living-room windowsill.

  In order to coax the boys out of bed, Fernand had promised them breakfast at a restaurant, anything on the menu they wanted. And to underscore the adventurous nature of this early-morning trip, instead of taking them to Rosalie and Roberto’s, he chose The Night-Owl, a restaurant on St. Laurent near the Metropolitan Autoroute. It was one of those greasy spoons open twenty-four hours for those who were too busy to go somewhere else, or who couldn’t sleep, or who preferred eating alone, or who liked genuine home-style fast-food cooking.

  They entered the place during a rare moment of calm. There were only two other custome
rs, both sitting at the counter: an old man with a pointed chin contemplating his fingers before a cup of coffee, and a young woman with purple lipstick and a baby on her lap, flipping through a copy of Montréal-Matin and eating a piece of toast. A fly circled the room, landing here and there without staying long in any one place, in the melancholy way that flies have.

  Charles and Henri slid into a booth feeling they were momentarily entering the realm of adulthood, and watched while the waiter finished washing the dishes. He was a short man with thinning black hair and a long, funereal face, who gave the impression of having been somewhere else on the day of his own birth. He smoked small, thin, slightly crooked cigarettes, and sighed constantly with sharp movements of his shoulders.

  Fernand succeeded in cheering him up a bit with a few pleasantries delivered in his strong, clear voice that thundered in the small restaurant like cannonfire on a holiday. He ordered a cup of coffee and an omelette.

  “And what will the young gentlemen have?” the waiter asked morosely, his face half-hidden behind smoke from his cigarette.

  Despite the tone, the expression pleased the two boys. After once again checking with Fernand that they could order anything they wanted, Charles opted for pancakes with maple syrup, an apple turnover, and a glass of chocolate milk. Henri chose poutine, a hot dog, and a Coke.

  “Go on, you’ll never eat all that!” said the woman at the counter, her mauve lips expressing amused condescension.

  Charles and Henri proved her wrong. The baby stared at them wide-eyed without moving, as though astonished by such a display of piggishness.

  Back in the car, the boys didn’t talk much between themselves. Their well-rounded bellies combined with the abbreviated night’s sleep so effectively that within five minutes their snores were buzzing about Fernand’s head as he pulled the car into the passing lane.