He remained motionless in the rocking chair for a long time, remembering and reflecting as Christmas carol after Christmas carol floated in the air, along with the brightly coloured figurines on the Christmas tree, which twinkled so welcomingly in the orange half-light.
An hour later, when he left the Christmas room, his face was relaxed and content. A truth had come to him in the room; he wouldn’t have been able to articulate it, because it had come to him in a confused and fragmentary way. He had come to understand that life, despite its reversals and deceptions, also held joys for those who took the trouble to look for them. They were modest joys, to be sure, but sweet, and instead of waiting around for Great Happiness to descend on him, which it probably never would, he must learn to appreciate the small pleasures, which were always close to hand.
He’d also discovered that a person could be both sad and happy at the same time: sad at the very centre of your being, but happy everywhere else. Sometimes the core of sadness that you carried inside you shrank until it was almost imperceptible. And sometimes it could disappear altogether for hours or even days. But in the end it always came back. The important thing was always to make sure it was surrounded by a cushion of joy.
He understood now that his sadness would be with him forever, and that he’d better get used to it being there. There was no other way to go on.
Acting on some curious impulse, Amélie had made him pancakes with maple syrup. He devoured four of them, not worried for a second about ruining his appetite for supper.
27
For the first few days after Charles and Henri had left to go to summer camp, Blonblon had thought he would die of boredom. Deprived of the company of his friends, he soon grew tired of watching insipid television programs. Monsieur Blondin began to find his son’s enforced leisure weighing heavily on both of them, and he suggested that he start a small business, repairing broken household objects: toys, toasters, flashlights, porcelain, the sort of things that were broken and not too difficult to repair that people keep around in the vague hope that someday somebody would come along and fix them.
His first field of operation was, of course, his own apartment. Then a friend of Monsieur Blondin came over for a visit and saw his son at work. Struck by the boy’s ability and resourcefulness, he brought over an iron that needed fixing, as well as a kitchen garbage pail whose lid no longer came up when he stepped on the pedal, and an old ceramic spoon that had suffered a fatal fall. Blonblon had them fixed in no time. The neighbour mentioned it to the superintendent who, out of curiosity, brought Blonblon an old electric kettle and fourteen fragments of a plate on which there was a coloured photograph of Cardinal Léger, aspergillum in hand, blessing the Berri-de Montigny station on the day the metro opened. Blonblon fixed them all.
Someone suggested he put a notice on the bulletin board in the building’s foyer. Through word of mouth and the good graces of the superintendent, news of Blonblon’s growing expertise spread rapidly. He rarely gave up on a project. Two or three times a day someone would drop off some hopelessly mangled object or other on its way to the dumpster, and Blonblon almost always managed to save its life.
The days passed quickly, and the top drawer of Blonblon’s dresser filled nicely with change and bills. Monsieur Blondin was able to relax and concentrate on his work, which was telemarketing and selling mail-order stamps.
With the return of Charles and Henri, Blonblon’s workshop activities slackened and threatened to stop altogether. But Blonblon had grown so fond of the work, which blended so well with the talents as a conciliator for which he was so admired at school, that he kept up his business by working at it for an hour or two each morning, long enough to hang on to a good part of his clientele.
One afternoon, shortly before it was time to go back to school, Charles dropped into Blonblon’s workshop. After a lengthy, tortuous preamble, which had him in a sweat and almost brought on an attack of the fish-face, he finally managed to blurt out his revelation.
Blonblon listened attentively to the twisting thread of Charles’s words, stammered out in a hushed voice, then gave a horrified gasp.
“That’s not true … You’re kidding me, right?”
Charles shook his head. “No. It’s as true as your father sits in a wheelchair.”
Charles had decided to share with someone the secret of his terrible misadventure with Monsieur Saint-Amour, in the hope that doing so would diminish the black weight that pressed so heavily on his chest. And he knew that the someone had to be Blonblon.
“He got you drunk, the old pervert?”
“He gave me something really strong to drink, and really sweet, and it pretty much knocked me out. I’d already had a beer before that,” he added bravely.
And he recounted the story of his meeting Sylvie Langlois and her awful friend in the restaurant.
“Poor Charles,” murmured Blonblon, as though his friend had just given up the ghost and he was launching into a speech at his funeral. “You must have suffered so much … Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
He put a comforting hand on Charles’s shoulder.
“That guy in the restaurant,” he went on. “He wasn’t much better, giving you a beer like that.”
Charles looked down. “I didn’t have to take it.”
“Maybe not. But there’s no way you could have known what would happen.”
Blonblon turned back to his work table, on which lay fragments of a vase that had already been prepared with glue and were awaiting reassembly. He picked up two pieces and fit them precisely together.
“Blonblon,” said Charles, his voice shaking with anxiety, “don’t tell anyone about this, okay? Especially not Henri. Promise?”
“You didn’t even have to ask,” his friend replied calmly.
“No one in the whole world but you knows about it. No one.”
Blonblon took one of the shards of the vase and made a tiny cut in his forearm. He squeezed his skin and a large drop of blood fell on the table: he pressed his thumb onto the drop.
“I swear on my own blood. Is that good enough?”
“Good enough,” said Charles, with a faint smile.
Blonblon applied a small piece of paper towel to his cut and wiped the table off with a cloth, then, after thinking for a moment, said, “We have to report him to the police, Charles. He needs to be punished. You can’t be the only kid he’s lured into his apartment, and you certainly won’t be the last! I’ve never liked the look of the old pig, and now I know why.”
He went back to working on the vase.
Charles kept his eye on his friend’s forearm. Despite the piece of paper, the blood was still flowing lightly, although Blonblon appeared to be unaware of it. He knew that although Blonblon was pretending to be absorbed in fixing the vase, it was just to make Charles feel more at ease, and to show him that, disgusting as his story had been, it didn’t make any difference to the high opinion in which he was held. And for this Charles was extremely grateful.
“I don’t want to report him,” Charles said after a while.
He explained that if they told the police and the police arrested Monsieur Saint-Amour, he would be brought before a judge. There would be a trial, and Charles would have to appear as a witness. Then everyone would know that when he met Monsieur Saint-Amour he was already drunk. And he didn’t want anyone to know that.
“Okay, then we have to do something else,” said Blonblon. “I don’t know what we could do, though,” he added.
The vase was standing on the table in one piece. Blonblon turned it around with a slight frown of dissatisfaction; one of the cracks was still more visible than he would have liked. It was like a crack in his reputation.
“I’ll let the glue set for a while, and then I’ll go over the crack with a wax crayon. That should hide it.”
“I know what we can do,” Charles said, as though he hadn’t heard his friend’s words.
Blonblon looked at him.
“I’m
going to get my revenge. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. But I need your help. If I don’t get even with him, I’ll always have this on my conscience.”
The familiar sound of rolling in the hallway told them that Blonblon’s father had finished his nap. They decided to continue their conversation outside.
Two days later, at about seven o’clock in the evening, while Monsieur Saint-Amour was walking down rue Ontario, fanning himself with a folded newspaper – the evening air was so cool after the blistering hot afternoon – he saw Charles and Blonblon leaning against the window of Chez Robert; both boys were smiling broadly at him.
This was the third time in two days he’d run into them, and their behaviour had not been without interest. At first he’d thought they were mocking him, and a huge shiver had trickled down his spine and into his soft, fat thighs. The second time, doubt had crept into his mind. They sounded so friendly, the way they said, “Good evening, Monsieur Saint-Amour,” and they had even waved to him.
This time there could be no doubt: the two boys were making a point of greeting him. Could it be that the little blond one, the one he had always thought of as mean and vicious, had somehow seduced the other, and now both of them were making advances to him?
If so, he would have to be extremely careful. He would have to exercise the same caution that, so far during his twenty-eight years as an adventurer, had kept him from suffering any of the usual consequences associated with his penchant for little boys. The sacrifices he had had to make, he thought, in order to appear as though he were conforming to the stupid moral code invented by hypocrites who would not hesitate for a moment to take their own pleasures where they found them, so long as no one was looking.
So again he contented himself with passing the two boys, nodding casually to them and continuing on his way as though nothing unusual were in the air.
But once he was home, he began to be haunted by delicious images. He planted himself before the television, but no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on Andréanne Lafond’s interview with cabinet minister Camille Laurin, it was as though the program were being broadcast in Chinese. How pleasant it would be to have two young boys here at the same time! Nothing like that had happened to him in such a long, long time!
He clicked off the television, turned off all the lights and went over to look out the window. Then he left the apartment and walked down the street, keeping his eyes peeled. But he was too late. The little dears were probably long in their beds, curled up like kittens. He decided to follow their example. After a good night’s rest he got up early, feeling refreshed and full of energy, with a clear head and eager to see what the day held in store. Such a morning always boded well, he thought, for a day full of pleasant surprises. He decided to have breakfast at Chez Robert and read the newspapers.
Rosalie was her usual considerate self. She gave him an extra-large portion of her homemade strawberry jam, which he ate on toast dripping with warm butter, and washed down with three cups of freshly brewed coffee. When he left the restaurant he felt strong enough to knock down Montreal and build it up again in a single day. The cloudless sky was such a clear blue that it made him wish he could turn into a bird and fly off and never come back. The sun was already beginning to make itself felt, but was still well within the bounds of politeness. He bought himself three pairs of boxer shorts at Woolworth’s, stopped at the grocery store for his twice-weekly brick of butterscotch ice cream, took it back to his apartment, then decided to go for a little stroll in Stewart Park; he had sometimes seen Charles and his friends playing there on the teeter-totters or chasing one another around the public washrooms; but the only people there today were two mothers with their babies and an old rubbie snoring on the grass, as though lulled to sleep by the incessant hum of the Macdonald’s Tobacco plant just down the street. He walked back towards rue Ontario, slightly surprised at not having seen the boys again. All this coming and going had made him thirsty, so he went back into Woolworth’s and ordered a large glass of iced tea at the lunch counter.
“How’s it going this morning, Monsieur Saint-Amour?” asked Berthe the waitress, a nice girl, if a bit thick, with whom he chatted from time to time.
“Not too bad,” he replied, “if you don’t count all the problems.”
She stopped and gave him an admiring look: “Ah, if only everyone was intelligent like you, Monsieur Saint-Amour, life would be a lot easier …”
He left the dimestore and headed towards Chez Robert. A car passed so close to the curb that he felt its wind, and a piece of crumpled paper swept along and became entangled in his feet. For some obscure reason it merely added to his good spirits.
There was no one standing in front of the restaurant, and a quick glance through the window told him that neither of the boys was inside, either. He was used to these periods of waiting, when desire raced inside his ribcage like a demented squirrel, making the days seem endless. But what could he do but wait? To do anything to hasten matters was far too dangerous. There were times when he’d permitted himself a furtive shake of the branch to dislodge a fruit that seemed almost ripe for the plucking, but oh, the anxiety it had cost him! “I’ll go home and wash the dishes, straighten up the apartment,” he decided. “That’ll help pass the time. Then I’ll come back after dinner.”
Two big black men were walking down the sidewalk carrying a case of beer between them, their faces lit up with delight. As they passed, one of them said to him: “Hot day, ain’t it, gramps?” and patted him on the shoulder. The familiarity made him recoil. What did they think he was, senile? He went on walking, then suddenly smiled. When you thought about it, being taken for a senile old man could be an advantage. No one paid any attention to senile old men, which allowed them to do more or less what they pleased.
When he arrived at his apartment building, something in the air – a certain fluttering in the street lamp? the distant sound of a locomotive? the slight squeak coming from his left shoe? – told him that he was in for an agreeable adventure. With one foot on the sidewalk and the other on the cement step that led up to his porch, he was just slipping his key into the lock when his eye was drawn into the alley that ran along the side of the building. There he saw the two boys, the blond one and, coming out behind him, Charles, both smiling impishly.
“Hello, Monsieur Saint-Amour,” they both said in unison.
They stopped a few feet from where he was standing.
“Well, well, you two again?” he said, his heart leaping and pounding in his chest. “Goodness gracious me,” he added. “Anyone would think you were following me.”
Charles and his companion exchanged glances, then Charles said with a nervous edge: “We’re not following you, but it’s always nice to run into you.”
“Especially now,” added Blonblon.
“Oh?” said the hairdresser, struggling to keep his voice from trembling. “And why is that?”
“We could discuss it down there,” said Blonblon, indicating the alley.
The old man scrutinized their faces. The boys smiled and held his gaze without batting an eye. There was something deliberate about their attitude, some tension that awakened the old caution in him. Everything seemed too easy. But all the same it had not escaped his notice that for several years now changes had taken place in society that never ceased to amaze him. Was it the influence of television? The arrival of all those airplanes full of immigrants? The declining influence of the clergy, who no longer seemed able to attract any but the elderly into their churches? So many divorces, and people living together in sin. Who knew? People let themselves go more, didn’t seem to be so worried about appearances. It amazed him, and made him sorry he was no longer a young man.
He put his key in his pocket and stepped down onto the sidewalk. “Fine, let’s go,” he said. “But I don’t have a lot of time. We’ll have to make it quick.”
He walked the few steps into the alley and stopped by a fence of large, grey planks whose lower edges were ea
ten ragged by rot. Behind the fence rose a tall, brick building with blank windows, an old factory turned into a warehouse. Across from it were the backs of a row of tenements. No one was at their windows, or out on their balconies. They could talk in private.
“So, what’s this about?” he said. “What can I do for you, my friends?” He was trying to strike a breezy tone, but the quiver in his voice made him sound pathetic.
Again the boys exchanged a look, then broke into nervous laughter. Of the two, the blond one seemed surer of himself. He joined his hands behind his back and promenaded back and forth staring boldly at the old man.
“You know what we want,” he said.
And he gave his companion a light punch of complicity.
“We’ve got some wieners to sell you,” said Charles, his cheeks reddening as he uttered the forbidden phrase.
Monsieur Saint-Amour hid the trembling in his hands by thrusting them deep into his pockets. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! The table was set for the feast, all he had to do was sit down and dig in. No supply problems. No pretence about what was really going on. Nothing to fork out but a little cash. It had been a long time since he’d run across two such resourceful children. It was refreshing! But the sudden change in Charles’s attitude still surprised him. “It must be the other one who’s leading him on,” he told himself. “Everything is so simple with children.”
“How much?” he asked, his voice heavy and hollow, like the hoot of an owl.
“Fifty bucks,” said Charles.
Charles the Bold Page 36