When Noah confided in him, Bernardo had a good laugh: “If people only knew what the archives really contain!” he said. For in fact, most of the interesting documents had been reduced to ashes in 1816, during the War of Independence. Nothing remains now of the original archives but bundles of genealogical records interspersed with documents pertaining to church foundations, anonymous shipwrecks, and land registers, all mixed up in some thirty cardboard boxes, which on very humid days give off an overpowering odour of smoke.
It is precisely this sooty stench that hangs in the room when, at nine a.m. sharp, Noah and Simón walk through the doors of the archives.
Simón comes in first, looking rather pleased to be there, although, after serious consideration, a day at the archives is no match for a day at the beach. He crosses the room rubbing his hands together, opens one of the cabinets with the self-assurance of a regular visitor, and takes out a handful of coloured pencils and a sheaf of white paper. Then, satisfied that he is reasonably well supplied, he sits down at the end of the table and begins to draw.
At this point Noah shuffles in, obviously lacking sleep. He pauses in the doorway and sniffs the air.
“Sure looks like it’s going to rain,” he mutters.
“Don’t you read the papers?” Bernardo answers, as he steps out of the washroom holding a copy of Últimas Noticias. “They’re predicting storms all week.”
“Carajo,” Noah complains after an extended yawn. “It reeks of old charcoal.”
Then he lifts his nose again and changes his mind.
“Hey, doesn’t it also smell of instant coffee?”
“Can I serve you a double, very sweet?”
“Well, if you insist.”
While Bernardo is fixing the vile beverage, Noah watches Simón working away with his pencils. On the next table, the checkerboard and pieces have been laid out, announcing an apparently normal day. At the far end of the room, Javier Salazar Ramirez is huffing like a furnace as he pores over a bulky register. He seems not to have left his chair for days, and Noah wonders if he again spent the night in the archives.
“So, muchacho!” Bernardo says as he hands him the steaming cup. “Ready to lose your first game of the day?”
Noah shrugs indifferently.
“You don’t seem to be in very good shape,” says Bernardo, as he places the checkers on the board.
“Insomnia.”
“More nightmares?”
“The Granma again.”
Bernardo gestures to him to start the game. Noah takes a sip of coffee, sits down and distractedly makes the first move. Bernardo counterattacks in the opposite corner.
“So, Arizna has gone to Caracas?”
“How did you guess?”
“Because of the nightmares.”
Noah’s index finger freezes on the checker he is about to move.
“Excuse me?”
“Haven’t you noticed,” Bernardo explains, without raising his eyes from the checkerboard, “that the only time you dream about the Granma is when Arizna is away?”
For a moment, Noah searches for an answer that would cut short this line of questioning. But there’s nothing to be said—Bernardo is right.
“How is your mother?” he finally asks as he moves his checker.
“Fine, thanks, and yours?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Where is she, these days?”
“Somewhere near Medicine Hat, I guess. We always spent December in southern Alberta.”
At the back of the room, the genealogist laboriously turns the pages of the register. The procedure raises so much dust that the old man occasionally disappears behind a cloud, and might be thought to have disappeared altogether if not for his constant coughing and snorting. Bernardo casts an annoyed glance in his direction before moving a checker, muttering under his breath.
“What is he up to, exactly?” Noah asks. “For years now, I’ve watched him sifting through the same papers.”
“Don Javier? He’s half out of his mind. He’s got all kinds of theories about marriages, births … la herencia?”
“Heredity.”
“Lo que sea. He believes that if you unite all the families of Margarita in a single family tree, you can predict the future of the island.”
“I see.”
The cloud of dust grows larger around the old man and turns into a veritable cumulonimbus. Evidently the omens in the old registers are not at all favourable. Noah gives Simón a protective look. The boy has slapped a sheet of paper down on the table and, armed with a grey felt pen, is reproducing the Great Hurricane of 1780.
“Are you planning on going back to Caracas soon?” Noah asks.
Bernardo hesitates. He studies his opponent’s last move, which jeopardizes the western flank of the board.
“Don’t know. Next year, maybe.”
“You said that last year.”
“Nothing is simple where my mother is concerned. Whenever I make plans to leave, she threatens to get sick. Or she asks me to stay one more year. Or she goes on a hunger strike. Or she tries to marry me off to Gladis, the neighbour’s daughter.”
There’s an awkward pause. Bernardo offhandedly captures one of Noah’s checkers.
“The truth is, I should have gone back to Caracas right after my father’s funeral. Now, the situation is becoming more and more complicated. I won’t be able to leave so long as my mother is alive, and she is sure to live to one hundred. And if this goes on, I’m going to end up wishing for her to die.”
He looks up from the checkerboard, horrified at having said these last words aloud. His gaze falls on Don Javier, still immersed in his register.
“I hope to leave before I reach that point,” he murmurs.
Noah wonders if Bernardo meant “leave before wishing for my mother’s death” or “leave before I look like Don Javier” or “leave before Don Javier’s genealogical predictions turn out to be right.” But he chooses not to add anything more, and the rest of the game takes place in an embarrassed silence.
An hour later, as Noah and Simón leave the colonial archives with bundles of drawings rolled up under their arms, the first drops of rain have started to come down.
All Directions at Once
IT HAS BEEN RAINING FOR THREE DAYS NOW. Ever since this morning, I’ve been hoping for the incursion of some unusual customer: an armed Sandinista, Bluebeard or simply a second-hand bookstore robber. But no one has come through the door as yet, and I’ve spent the whole day wrapped up in my dreams and an old woollen blanket.
I stretch and blink at the clock. Five to five. I decide to close right away, and to hell with convention. Just as I’m about to get up, the little doorbell jingles, and for a brief instant the door opens onto the storm. As soon as the mist clears, I recognize my favourite book thief, dressed in a raincoat with blackened seams and a pair of jeans soaked to mid-thigh.
She greets me with a nod, drops her sailor’s bag on the doormat and, before I can say a word, vanishes between two sections.
The whole scene plays out so quickly that, without the sailor’s duffel and the puddle spreading around it, I would think I was dreaming. I rub my eyes and look out the display window. No bookseller in his right mind would do overtime in this miserable weather. I slip out of my blanket and go over to the cookbook section. The girl is not there. I crane my neck toward the computer section. Not there either. I scratch my head. Something in the universe is awry.
I find the girl at the back of the bookstore, near the washroom, in front of the travel section. While trying not to rush her, I ask her if she needs any help. She thanks me nonchalantly and lets me know she can manage on her own.
“It’s almost five o’clock. I’m going to have to close up.”
“Oh?” she says, looking at her watch. “I didn’t notice how fast time was passing.”
“No problem. Have you found what you were looking for?”
“Not really. I’m looking for a travel guide.”
Unfortunately, I explain to her, our bookstore is rather poorly stocked in travel guides, whatever the destination might be. We do, of course, have a travel section—one can’t do without—but, to be perfectly honest, I snap up most of the guides as they come into the store. We all have our little obsessions.
The girl looks put out. Undaunted, I offer to lend her a guide from my personal collection. (I subtly stress the word lend, but she does not react.)
“I’m going away very soon,” she replies, after a brief moment of hesitation. “I won’t have time to return it to you.”
“Well then, take it with you. Books have to travel. You can give it back to me when you come back, or you can send it back to me in the mail, covered with exotic stamps.”
“I don’t know … I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“No, I insist! Just tell me what sort of guide you’re looking for. I’ll bring a dozen of them tomorrow morning and all you have to do is come by and make your choice. How does that sound?”
“Tomorrow will be too late. Do you think we could meet later tonight?”
This catches me off guard. I agree and scribble my address on the back of a bookstore business card.
“It’s in Little Italy, right opposite Dante Park …”
“I know the neighbourhood. Say around seven?”
I nod yes. She smiles as she slips the card in her pocket and, without saying anything more, heads toward the door. Just as she is about to leave, I come to my senses and ask her name.
“Joyce,” she answers, after wavering for a split second.
The next moment she disappears into the cyclone. Rooted by the door, I stare at the bell dancing in midair. The clock shows 5:03 p.m. I do a little jig and set about closing the shop. There are no receipts to total up—an advantage of the days when there are no sales—so all I need to do is camouflage the cash-register drawer in its usual hiding place, behind the ten-volume Encyclopaedia of Maritime Disasters.
Outside, St-Laurent Boulevard has vanished beneath a dun-coloured downpour. Anything lying on the ground is mercilessly borne away toward the river: newspapers, gloves and tuques, fast-food wrappers, crumpled plastic bags bobbing on the current with jellyfish throbs. Not a car in sight, no one on the sidewalks.
A foretaste of the end of the world.
When I arrive home, I look like a drowned man who’s just been dragged from a lake by the Sûreté du Québec. I remove my shoes, hastily wring out my socks, and cross the living room without turning on the lights. Somewhere in the shadows, I trip on the grating of the hot-air vent that I’ve been planning to screw back down for two months. I wrench my ankle and crash to the floor. The grating slides across the wood floor, ricochets with a clang and disappears into the darkness.
Right then, someone knocks at the door. I limp over to open it.
It’s Joyce, an hour ahead of time. She drops her old sailor’s duffel in the hallway and, shivering, hangs up her raincoat.
“Am I too early?”
“Not at all,” I say, rubbing my little toe. “You look like you’ve just rounded Cape Horn in a cardboard box. Can I get you a dry sweater?”
“No, thanks.”
“A hot drink, then?”
“That would be nice.”
I hobble over to the kitchen. While I’m putting on the kettle, Joyce tosses her boots in a corner of the hallway and ventures into the living room.
“Watch your step—there’s a hole in the floor.”
The warning is wasted. She’s found the switch. Out of the darkness come sea serpents and horned whales with torrents of water spewing out of their nostrils.
Amused, Joyce contemplates the facsimile of a nautical map dated 1675, the margins decorated with compass roses and legendary monsters. She adjusts her glasses and steps closer to the map, evidently intrigued by the environs of Hispaniola Island. I spy on her as I measure out the tea leaves.
How strange it is to see this girl in my living room. I know nothing about her, really, except for her tendency to steal computer-programming handbooks. She seems harmless enough, with her little reading glasses and her short hair, but for all I know she could be a dangerous outlaw on the run. Tired of petty thievery, she may have knocked off six banks in a row. In which case, her old sailor’s duffel probably contains a gun as long as a harpoon, and a sheaf of blood-soaked banknotes.
I can almost hear the sound of gunfire, but then a high-pitched whistle interrupts my flight of fancy. Shaking my head, I take the kettle off the stove and crane my neck toward the living room. “The travel guides are in the small bookcase, behind you.”
When I step out of the kitchen with a steaming teapot of oolong, Joyce is perusing my travel guides.
“You’ve travelled a lot,” she says, without taking her eyes off the bookcase.
“Me? Never set foot outside Montreal. My longest trip was when I left Châteauguay.”
“So why all these guides?”
“My mother collected them. After she died, I kept up the collection.”
“Your mother liked to travel?”
“No. It’s quite odd, actually, because she worked in a travel agency. She could have gone around the world for free, but she preferred to spend the summer in the backyard with her feet in the plastic wading pool and a pile of books at her side. Ultimately, I think she liked travel guides better than travelling.”
I pour the tea through a cloud of steam. Joyce takes the cup between her hands to warm herself and sits down on the couch cross-legged. “Tea …,” she murmurs as she sniffs her cup. Immediately, a peculiar tautness seems to flow out of her body. She suddenly appears exhausted, slightly stooped and with dark rings under her eyes.
“When I was small, I would go see my grandfather every day after school. He had a Ming dynasty teapot, blue and white porcelain, with a long crack running through it, and completely red on the inside. We drank bitter tea, and he would tell me pirate stories.”
She yawns. There’s a pause. Her eyes grow smaller and smaller, swollen with fatigue.
“What sort of pirates?” I ask, by way of prompting her to continue.
“All kinds. I think he’d learned his stories from an old sailor’s almanac. But he talked mainly about our ancestors. It seems my great-great-great-grandfather was a renowned Acadian pirate. I was never able to verify that. He talked so much about it that I ended up wanting to become a pirate. My cousins said women pirates didn’t exist, but the more often they said it, the more I wanted to prove them wrong. Sometimes kids get strange notions into their heads.”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, women pirates did exist. There were two of them among the crew of Calico Rackham.”
“Red Rackham?!” she exclaims in a burst of laughter. “Aren’t you getting that mixed up with a Tintin story?”
“Hergé always drew on true stories. The real Red Rackham lived in the Bahamas in the eighteenth century. His name was Jack Rackham, but he was nicknamed Calico Rackham. He had a pretty run-of-the-mill career, and the English hanged him after a few years.”
She perks up, visibly revived by the discussion.
“My grandfather never told me about him. Who were the two women?”
“I’ve forgotten their names. One of them was called Bonny something.”
“Bonnie Parker?” she jokes.
“I can’t remember. But they’re relatively well known. Legend has it they were the only ones to defend the ship when the English broadsided them. The rest of the crew were dead drunk and cowering below deck.”
“How romantic!”
“I’ve got a book on the subject, if you’re interested.”
I have an e
xact picture of the book in my head. It’s the Three-Headed Book, forgotten by a customer at the bookshop in 1994.
As I walk over to the bookcase, I realize I haven’t laid eyes on that book for quite some time. I quickly locate a number of books without covers—I like books that have had a rough time of it. I grab the first one, but it’s only a threadbare copy of the Ashley Book of Knots. With the second book I’m sure my luck has turned, but it’s the 1945 edition of Damase Potvin’s Saint-Laurent et ses îles. The third is an inexpensive copy of Robinson Crusoe, and the fourth a fragment of Japan Expedition by Matthew Perry.
After going through my entire library, I have to face the fact: I’ve lost a book, an extraordinary delinquency that makes me the disgrace of the Guild of Booksellers. I resign myself to consulting an ordinary travel guide on the Bahamas.
“Have you found it?” Joyce asks, pouring herself more tea.
“No,” I reply, blushing. “But as Jack Rackham was based on Providence Island, there should be some mention of him in the history of the Bahamas.”
“Isn’t Providence Island to the north of Haiti?”
“No,” I explain, while scanning the table of contents. “It’s the island where Nassau is situated. Actually, these days it’s called New Providence.”
I turn the pages, looking for the historical section. Joyce has moved closer and she is staring at me.
“What are you wearing around your neck?” she asks.
“A Nikolski compass.”
“A what?” she presses, her hand reaching for the compass.
I don’t know why, but I trust this girl. I put down the Bahamas guide and carefully untie the string from around my neck. But my hands are unsteady and the compass slips from my fingers. I don’t yet fully realize what’s happening, what is about to happen. I watch the compass drop in slow motion. There is a noise of shattering plastic as the casing breaks apart. The central sphere, freed from its shell, bounces on the floor, flies between Joyce’s feet, spins across the living room pointing in all directions at once, and rolls down the gaping hot-air vent in the middle of the room.
Nikolski Page 15
