The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  He flung open the cabinet door, which banged against the wall. His eyes swept the bottles of pills, feverishly looking for something that would give him some relief, any kind of relief; what he saw was a packet of razor blades.

  A light went on in his head. He picked up the packet, opened it, and took out a blade. He held the blade up and examined it closely. Here was a way to put an end to his misery. Simple, nothing complicated about it, the choice of thousands; all it required was a bit of courage. Not even courage, really. Surely it took more courage to go on living the way he was!

  Holding the blade firmly between his thumb and forefinger, he ran it gently, gently, across his wrist. He felt nothing but a slight tickling sensation. He repeated the gesture several times, to get used to the feeling and to prepare himself for the real thrust, the one that would surely make him feel pain.

  Then suddenly, quickly, he slashed through the flesh. He felt a sharp burn, but a very localized one, something he could easily stand. Blood spurted out in small, crimson arcs and poured down into the sink, making tiny sounds that pulsed to the rhythm of his pounding heart. It wasn’t nearly as messy as he would have expected. And it was so easy, as though this were something he was supposed to be doing. He watched his blood run into the sink with a kind of detached interest, only his throat a bit tight from the line of fire that was burning his wrist. He was astonished that such a thing could be accomplished so easily.

  There was a small stepladder behind the door. Holding his left arm over the sink, he reached for the ladder with his right hand, opened it with a jerk, and sat on it. His legs were beginning to feel weak. In fact his whole body was beginning to sag. Black spots had begun to leap around him, as though thrown into some wild kind of dance. He understood that in a few more minutes he would be dead. What was it, this death? A one-way street. But leading where? No one knew. The only sure thing was that the choice he had just made superseded all the other choices he would ever make.

  The burning on his wrist was almost gone, but the heaviness continued to weigh him down. It felt to him like a relentless pressure. The blood still trickled into the sink; it had made a sort of pink tulip shape at the bottom, lighter at the edges, very pretty, except that it was vibrating, constantly coming into and out of focus. It was his vision that was failing, he thought, and rapidly. A curious gurgling sound rose from the drain and blended with the pounding that now filled his eardrums.

  He realized suddenly that it was himself that was running down that black hole, from which there now came a faintly disagreeable odour. He was going to vanish forever! A sense of horror gripped him, forced him to cry out, although weakly. He ran his right hand along the shelves of the medicine cabinet, knocking everything onto the floor. A Band-Aid, where were the Band-Aids? A kind of mist was filling the room, making his search more difficult. He finally found a roll of gauze and, grabbing it in both hands, unrolled a long strip and tried to tear it off with his teeth. This caused the blood to drip onto his shirt and down to the floor, where it landed with a series of dull splats. The gauze would not tear. Desperate now, he wound it around his wrist anyway and pulled it as tight as he could manage. His skin was slippery with blood and the gauze would not stay wound. He took a toothbrush and slid it under the gauze, then turned it like a tourniquet. Slowly the bleeding lessened. He stood up from the stepladder and left the bathroom, staggering, careening off the walls. The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He could barely see it. After every step he had to stop to catch his breath. “My God,” he said to himself, “what have I just done?” A confused noise began to rise within him, turning into a small voice that told his head to start spinning dangerously. He found himself standing by a table with the television remote in his hand. He must have spun into the living room. The pressure had now reached his head, making any sort of thinking impossible. His fingers played awkwardly over the telephone buttons as they danced before his eyes. A woman’s voice answered. He spluttered a few words, looked around for something to lean against and, not finding anything, crashed heavily to the floor. Outside, sensing something bad was happening, Boff began attacking the back door, sending up a spray of wood chips.

  The two boys stood on the sidewalk and looked at the door.

  “I hope he hasn’t moved,” Charles murmured, his voice tight. “He’s always moving.”

  Blonblon walked up the minuscule cement steps and thrust his hand into the black metal mailbox. He took out an envelope.

  “Well, Hydro-Québec has just sent him a bill, anyway.”

  Charles joined him, rang the bell, and coughed several times, a small, dry, nervous cough. Blonblon glanced at him, and seeing that Charles still looked strained, he began to whistle as a way of comforting him.

  No one came to the door. Charles rang again and then noticed a small piece of paper taped to the inside of the window: “ENTER.”

  They opened the door and found themselves in the tiny kitchen. The damp heat exacerbated the rank smell of stale cigarette smoke, grease, and fresh paint.

  “I’m in the bathroom, Liliane. I’ll be out in a minute.” It was his father’s oily voice, the voice he used when he was talking to a woman. Charles had heard it when he was a child and the carpenter had been in a particularly good mood.

  The boys looked at each other without speaking. Blonblon smiled and held a finger to his lips.

  “It’s not Liliane,” Charles said after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s me.”

  There was a pause. They heard the sound of a toilet flushing, then a sigh, and the carpenter appeared in the doorway doing up his belt.

  “So,” he said quietly, his face serious. He looked at Blonblon, who was looking at him closely. “Who’s he?”

  “A friend.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  Charles hesitated again. “He came with me,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say.

  Thibodeau laughed mockingly. “Afraid to come on your own?”

  Charles looked again for a reply but none came, so he merely pursed his lips and crossed his arms.

  “If you want to talk to me, tell him to get lost.”

  “We didn’t come here to cause you any trouble, Monsieur Thibodeau,” Blonblon said, with a warmth and ease that even Charles found surprising. “Charles wanted to talk to you about a few, er, delicate matters, and since there are no secrets between us, he thought maybe I could … help out in the discussion. That’s all.”

  Thibodeau stared at him as though he had just turned into an Oriental prince, or a kangaroo. Obviously it was the first time anyone had addressed him in such a cordial manner. But he soon regained his composure.

  “If you want to talk to me, tell him to get lost,” he said again, this time with a degree of menace in his voice.

  Charles frowned and shook his head.

  Thibodeau walked behind them and opened the door to the street.

  “Fine, then, get lost the both of you. Go on, get the hell out! This is my place and I’ll let in who I want.”

  “You’ll want to hear what I have to say, Papa. I’ve come to tell you something important.”

  “Important things are talked about one on one, man to man, no bloody eavesdroppers to go spreading our business around.”

  “He’s not an eavesdropper. In any case –”

  But he had to stop because his father was trying to push him through the door.

  “If you want, Charles,” Blonblon said, “I could wait for you outside.”

  Father and son stared at each other for a moment, then Charles turned to his friend and accepted his offer with a nod.

  “If anyone calls for you,” Blonblon said to Thibodeau with a smile, “I’ll tell them you’re busy.”

  Without acknowledging he had heard, the carpenter closed the door behind him with his knee.

  As soon as he was on the sidewalk, Blonblon regretted his offer. He had made it only to be accommodating, but wasn’t it also an act of cowardice? He had left his friend inside, al
one and defenceless with an unpredictable, vindictive, and apparently unscrupulous man. How could he be of any possible use to him now?

  He walked up and down the street in front of the door, his mouth set, a scowl on his face, telling himself over and over that the carpenter wouldn’t dare hurt Charles knowing that one of his friends was waiting for him a few feet away. But he was also aware that with people like Thibodeau you never knew what would happen. If this Liliane person showed up, he wouldn’t tell her that her boyfriend was busy. He’d let her ring the bell and go in. But no Liliane appeared. She’d seen the two boys through the corner store window and thought it better to postpone her visit to a more opportune time.

  Henri Lalancette was taking advantage of a quiet moment in the pharmacy to leave things in the hands of his buxom, trusty cashier, Rose-Alma Bissonnette, while he went downstairs to spend some time in his laboratory. He had no qualms about doing this: Rose-Alma’s green eyes were perfectly capable of spotting the most furtive of movements in any of the pharmacy’s four corners, or all of them at once, for that matter, a quality that had earned her the hatred – and the fearful respect – of the neighbourhood shoplifters.

  As soon as he entered the lab, his nostrils were assailed by a sickly sweet odour, like that of overripe figs. He quickly approached a counter on which stood an uncovered jar labelled “Port-Wine Dregs – Sample 83-44” and replaced the lid, then looked around irritably for signs of further negligence. There were none. He was in a medium-sized room, its windowless walls painted white, with the usual cupboards, tables, counters, and varieties of containers and other equipment made of glass, plastic, and stainless steel. In short, an ordinary-looking chemical workplace, but one in which for the past six years he had been conducting the experiment that had come to be his main interest in life.

  He pulled up a chrome-legged stool and sat on it, issuing a grateful sigh. Being a pharmacist was beginning to take its toll on his legs. His heels had been burning for the past two hours, and his knees felt like jelly, while his calves seemed to have turned to concrete. But if advancing age was making itself felt in his lower extremities, the same could certainly not be said for his head, which fairly hummed like a factory. The delicious fruits of his long labours now hung mere centimetres from his outstretched fingertips. One or two more cross-checks and he would be ready to pluck them down and sink his teeth into them!

  How his trials and tribulations had tested his patience, demanded his obstinate will to go on, dragged him willy-nilly into the heady regions of scientific adventure, through hair-raising rapids and gut-wrenching whirlpools, banishing boredom forever – that dull companion of the insignificant dunce!

  No one, it seemed to him, was happy with his lot. The bus driver wanted to be a cook. The cook dreamed of being a pilot. The pilot knew in his heart he would be happier running a hotel. And the hotelier was born to be a boxer, it was as plain as the nose on his face, never mind that he had neither the courage nor the physique for it.

  Henri Lalancette saw himself as a biological researcher. He’d opted to become a pharmacist at the last minute, for the purely prosaic reason that it was safer, easier, and more lucrative. But he had always regretted it, especially since exciting new drugs arrived at his pharmacy daily, mocking him for his lack of audacity. “If only we could have two lives!” he had once sighed, the banal refrain of all those dissatisfied people who feel they have blown their golden opportunities. The birth of his children and the demands of his occupation had drawn him farther and farther away from his dream, until it had almost vanished from his mind forever.

  But on the 7th of June, 1976, all that had changed.

  He had been vacationing in Portugal with his wife. On the day in question he was sprawled on a divan in the lobby of a small hotel in Lisbon, handkerchief in hand, sweat running down his forehead, trying to find the strength to get up and follow his guide out onto the city’s red-hot cobblestones, when an old man who had been listening to their conversation came up to them and, in passable French, asked them what country they came from. He said he had been unable to place their accent. They fell into conversation and, deciding it was far too hot to play at being tourists and that their new acquaintance was a friendly enough fellow, Lalancette invited the latter to join them in a glass of port. The old man bowed his head with a faintly superior smile and accepted the invitation. Their choice of beverage was fortuitous, he said, for he had worked for many years for a port producer and would be happy, if they were interested, to introduce them to the intricacies of that marvellous fortified wine of Portugal.

  Two hours later, the pharmacist, his wife, and Augusto Soares had drained a bottle, eaten a tray of hors d’oeuvres, and cemented a lasting friendship. The wine, the heat, the tranquility of the locale, and the friendly, florid faces of his new friends prompted the Portuguese gentleman to confide that, thanks to his former profession, he would probably live to be a hundred, and that in any case he was presently enjoying an incredibly youthful old age, one that showed not the slightest sign of diminishing. He owed this good fortune, he said, to his habit of drinking two small glasses of the dregs of port wine each day. He had been doing this for many years now, having picked it up from an old friend of his, who had been a cooper. Despite the fact that he was seventy-eight years old, he said, he could still piss a line as straight and strong as that of any young man, and he had lost none of his vigour in bed – as could be attested to by a number of his female friends (he had been widowed some fifteen years before), some of whom were quite young and were delighted by his unique combination of experience and virility.

  Lalancette was intrigued, and he questioned Soares closely. It was clearly not a question of genetics: Soares’s parents and three of his grandparents had died young, and his grandfather on his mother’s side had been taken at the age of fifty-eight by prostate cancer. No, the prolongation of his youth was due solely to the dregs of port wine, affirmed the old man. It was a gift. And he advised the pharmacist, as he advised all his friends and acquaintances, to do as he did, which sometimes produced extraordinary results. They then ordered dinner, and drank a great deal with their meal, after which the old man brought them to his house and gave Lalancette a bottle of his precious dregs of port wine.

  “This will last you about three months,” he told the pharmacist, “after which you’ll have to replace it. The effects go on for eight days after you take the last dose.”

  Upon their return to Quebec, Henri Lalancette began drinking a small glass of the dregs each morning. At first it was more or less as a joke, but after two months Augusto Soares had himself an ardent disciple – and Madame Lalancette, to her amazement and alarm, found herself with the husband she had not known since the early days of their marriage.

  Lalancette had long been aware of the beneficial effects of some substances on benign tumours and hyperplasia, or the enlargement of certain cells: green tea, pygmy-palm bark, citrus seeds, soya, tomatoes, all of which contained high levels of zinc, flavoproteins, and lycopenes. But they were of limited effectiveness, and in any case were used mainly as preventatives. These dregs were a different thing altogether. They seemed to have rejuvenated his prostate by at least twenty years, and it was the prostate, after all, situated at the base of the bladder, whose smooth functioning was so indispensable not only to masculine comfort but also to masculine pleasure and pride.

  He realized that Fate had given him a sign. He could take this empirical evidence supplied to him so fortuitously by an elderly Portuguese gentleman, submit it to the rigorous examination of science, and quite possibly come up with an important medical discovery. It would take a great deal of time and money, of course, and present almost insurmountable difficulties. How, for instance, would he be able to convince twenty or thirty patients with enlarged prostates or benign prostate tumours to undergo regular rectal examinations, over a period of several months, which were still the only way known to ascertain the state of their prostates?

  He enlisted the a
id of a former medical student named Igor Troelhen – a great lover of port wine – and the two men worked day and night for more than six months on the problem. They ran up against a thousand hurdles, managed to get over them all one by one, and now a blinding light was perhaps on the verge of being turned on – a light bright enough to place the name Henri Lalancette on the same stage as that of Louis Pasteur, or Albert Einstein, or, at the very least, Armand Bombardier.

  He reached out, picked up a notebook, and became absorbed in the final report that Troelhen had dropped off that afternoon, after having kept him waiting for three days.

  A faint smile of satisfaction softened the somewhat unprepossessing features of his face, which normally seemed to have been sculpted as an illustration of melancholy or indifference or simple ill humour. Everything was in place. In a few months people totally unaware of his existence today would be shaking his hand.

  He placed the notebook in a drawer, sat back down on the stool, stretched out his legs, and wrapped his arms around himself, amazed at his own reaction. If everything was going so well, why was it that he felt so morose? What infernal bête noire was clawing at his entrails, preventing him from giving himself up for once in his life to unalloyed, trumpeting joy?

  He heard the door of the pharmacy open upstairs, and someone ask: “Is Charles here?”

  There was such anxiety in the voice that Lalancette jumped to his feet, hurried up the stairs and down an aisle, almost toppling a pyramid of perfume bottles in his haste, and found himself standing before an unsavoury-looking young man whom he recognized as a friend of Charles’s. He seemed on the verge of collapse.