The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  Charles had just stepped off the porch and was heading down the street when the door reopened and the notary’s head appeared, worried.

  “Oh yes, I forgot to ask you.… Your father, Wilfrid, I mean. Have you heard from him since the … er … incident?”

  “No,” Charles said simply.

  “It’s just …” He stopped, troubled, apparently regretting his question.

  Then he added: “Maybe he’s left the city.… He could be a long way from here …”

  “Could be. Did he say anything to you?”

  “No, no, of course not. He definitely did not speak to me.” And with that he closed the door again.

  Intrigued, Charles walked off down the street, his euphoria gone.

  Charles never saw the Blond Angel again, and never tried to see her. He had no desire to stand by watching helplessly while she slid into the depths (didn’t he recall reading some lines in a poem by Victor Hugo about that?), and he preferred to believe that that dramatic evening in Brigitte Loiseau’s life had been like a warning to her, and that, after having come so close to death, she had decided to take herself in hand. Once, walking along rue Rachel, he had glanced up to the door of her apartment; a “FOR RENT” sign was hanging from one of the posts of the balcony, and he found the sight comforting. The woman who lived downstairs came out to shake out a rug and told him that the actress had gone back to her family in Chicoutimi to convalesce. “Ah,” thought Charles, “I hope she stays there, far away from predators like De Bané. I hope she regains her strength and pours it all into acting.” Fame awaited her, he was sure of it.

  Sometimes he talked about Brigitte to Céline, but he soon realized it was not one of her favourite topics and he determined to avoid bringing it up in her presence. In any case, his new love for Céline pushed thoughts of the Blond Angel farther and farther into the darkness of the past.

  Lucie, who had a nose as sharp as a fox after a three-day fast, had twigged to the relationship between Céline and Charles. There were a thousand little signs. But since she could do nothing to stop it, she decided to turn a blind eye, leaving it up to the two principals to make the announcement themselves, but also hoping against hope that they didn’t end up with a baby in their arms. She said nothing to her husband, who as yet hadn’t noticed anything, preoccupied as he was with keeping his business afloat and, in any case, happy to see that Charles’s misadventure seemed to have had a salutary effect on him, and that he had returned to his former good-natured self. But in the end everything became obvious to everyone. Charles and Céline couldn’t take their eyes off one another. They sat together in interminable conversations, went out on long walks, went to movies together, and disappeared from time to time without telling anyone where they were going. And often they were caught smooching in dark corners.

  Like Lucie, Fernand’s feelings about the affair were mixed. Charles’s trafficking days had left him with some doubts about the boy’s character. But his strong affection for Charles helped him keep an open mind.

  “Céline is as solid as a rock,” he said one night to his wife, “but by the same token she knows what she wants, and we can’t just make her do whatever we want her to do. She’ll be a good influence on Charles, and will keep him from getting into trouble again. And he’s a good lad. His heart is in the right place. I’m sure he’ll treat her with the utmost respect. Still, we should keep an eye on them, don’t you think?”

  One night shortly after the end of classes, Steve Lachapelle called to say he’d landed a summer job at a cheese factory in Anjou, and that there were two or three positions still open. Charles went down the next day and was hired. A few mornings later, he and his friend found themselves wearing white smocks, hairnets, and rubber boots up to their thighs, shovelling cheddar into an immense vat that reeked to high heaven. The work was exhausting, and carried out in a somewhat hostile environment, since the factory’s other employees were non-unionized and forced to work under stupefying conditions, and they looked with envious contempt on the students, whom they saw as pampered little middle-class kids out on a lark to make some extra pocket money.

  Charles got home each night at six, quickly ate his dinner, and went to bed. After sleeping for an hour or two, he got up, took a shower, and spent the evening with Céline. Or with Balzac.

  Fulfilling his promise to Parfait Michaud was not a problem for Charles. He began reading the different volumes of The Human Comedy at random. After being disappointed with The Country Doctor, which he thought for a while he would never get through, he picked up Splendours and Miseries of the Courtesans, then Lost Illusions, and finally Old Goriot and Cousin Bette. With these he became a devoted Balzacian. Characters such as Vautrin, Lucien de Rubempré, Esther and Eugène de Rastignac became part of his daily life. He talked about them constantly, and in his proselytizing zeal went out and bought several paperback copies of Balzac’s novels and tried to convert Céline and Blonblon – without much success, it must be said. But it was when he tried it out on Steve Lachapelle that the real disaster occurred.

  One night he had insisted so fervently that Steve read “at least a bit of Balzac” before he passed on to his greater reward that when Steve left he took with him a collection of the great novelist’s short stories, promising to return it within a week. Still under the influence of Charles’s enthusiasm, he opened the book in the metro and took a run at “An Incident During the Terror,” a tale of courage and goodwill. All through school he had never read any more than he’d absolutely had to, relying on his memory, guesswork, and the notes he’d borrowed from his fellow students. But after a few pages he found that the story was taking a run at him. “An Incident During the Terror” became mysteriously transformed into an incident during the drowsiness that slowly overcame our novice reader, who, with the book resting on his lap and his head bent over it, started his night before arriving at his home.

  He was awakened by a sudden jolt. He looked wildly around the empty carriage. The ceiling lights were blinking on and off and a low rumbling was coming from under his feet, giving the impression that the earth was cracking open everywhere and soon he would be swallowed up.

  “Holy shit!” he cried, leaping to his feet. “I’m in the garage!”

  Through the window he could see he was in an immense cavern, darkly lit in places by blue and white neon lights. The ground was covered by an intricate lacework of rails and electric cables.

  Suddenly the carriage stopped and he was engulfed in complete silence. The prospect of spending the night in such uncharming surroundings suddenly gave him the energy of a bull. Gripping the sliding doors with both hands and exerting all his strength, he managed to force them apart and he jumped out of the carriage. He was cautiously making his way through the darkness, looking for a way out, when he was stopped in his tracks by a loud yell.

  “Hey! You there! Stop where you are!”

  The voice came from behind him. He turned and saw two shadows moving in his direction. A beam of light played over his body.

  “What are you doing here?” the voice demanded menacingly.

  “I … I fell asleep,” Steve stammered.

  “Yeah, we know all about that, you guys who fall asleep,” the other man said, as they both continued to draw closer.

  The one who had called first was a tall, muscular man, wearing a mechanic’s overalls and sporting a handlebar moustache. He had enormous, glistening teeth that made him look vaguely like a beaver. His companion, shorter but equally sturdily built, had a jacket draped over his arm and was carrying a lunch pail; he favoured Steve with a ferocious smile.

  “They fall asleep,” said the beaver, “then suddenly they wake up and start scrawling filthy words on the sides of the carriages with cans of spray paint.”

  They stopped when they reached Steve and the beaver began roughly patting his clothing.

  “No cans,” he grumbled. “He must have got rid of them when he heard us calling him.”

  “But I told you,�
�� Steve protested, becoming increasingly alarmed, “I fell asleep, for crying out loud!”

  “I’ll just take a look,” said the short man, moving off.

  “What’s this? Some kind of book?” asked the beaver, taking the short-story collection from Steve’s pocket.

  “It’s mine,” barked Steve.

  The employee held the book close to his eyes.

  “An Incident During the Terror,” he read slowly.

  The short story Steve had been reading was the title story.

  The man looked again at Steve with a strange pursing of his lips. The book’s title seemed to have had a galvanizing effect on him, although he hadn’t been able to make out what it meant.

  “Ron! Come back here. Never mind the cans … I think I might’ve got that wrong. Looks like we landed ourselves a bigger fish … I think we got us a terrorist or something like that …”

  Steve was taken to a police station and interrogated for a long time. He found himself suddenly an ardent defender of literature and the right of each citizen to read whatever and wherever he wanted. He defied the police who were holding him, calling them thick-skulled illiterates (a word he used for the first time in his life). His sharp tongue didn’t help his case any. The police roughed him up a bit, but they couldn’t find any solid reason to put him in jail; to get back at him, they kept him stewing in a small room for a couple of hours, with only a bare electric light bulb, a cabinet, and a wooden chair with no cushion for company. At three in the morning he found himself back on the street, his book confiscated and a dollar twenty-five in his pocket. He had to phone his mother to ask her to have some money ready when he got there in a taxi. Madame Lachapelle paid the driver, then gave Steve a piece of her mind, of which a little went a long way.

  “Don’t you dare mention Balzac to me again,” he fumed to Charles the next day. “Or any of your other bloody writers, either!”

  18

  Charles was experiencing a new period of happiness. He was devouring Balzac, he was truly in love for the first time in his life, and, despite the unlooked-for turn of events he had gone through, he felt he had paid at least part of the debt of gratitude he owed to Fernand and Lucie by having saved them from a huge danger. For how long? Almost certainly forever, since Thibodeau, having been frightened out of his wits, had decided to seek his fortune in Manitoba; that at least was what Liliane, Thibodeau’s mistress, told Lucie when Fernand sent her as a spy to check out Thibodeau’s neighbourhood, a role that Lucie, with her good manners and apparent naïveté, was able to fill quite easily.

  “There’s been a huge boom in construction out there,” Liliane told Lucie during a long conversation about the high cost of living and the difficulty of bringing up kids. “People are making money hand over fist. And since he’s perfectly bilingual he thought he’d get a jump on it. He said he’s gonna send me money for a plane ticket one of these days, so I can go out to see him. It’ll be okay by me, I guess, I’ve always enjoyed travelling.”

  “I hope he starves to death out there, that goddamned piece of crap,” grumbled Fernand when he heard the news. “Manitoba can have him and good riddance. We’ve put up with him long enough.”

  Charles was more relieved than anyone by his father’s departure, but his deliverance still didn’t inspire in him the kind of exuberance that others might have expected. We get used to happiness, and after a while it begins to seem ordinary to us. If only we could take as much pleasure from our good health as we suck misery from our sicknesses! But for us, everything eventually becomes stale and flat, and we seem to be condemned to dissatisfaction.

  His love for Céline monopolized his attention and distorted his view of things. He more or less forgot the suffering his father had caused him, and welcomed the latter’s disappearance with a slightly absent-minded joy. He thought only of Céline. He couldn’t believe he had lived in the same house with her for so long without loving her to distraction, as he did now.

  “How is it possible? How is it possible?” he said to her over and over. “Was I blind? Was I insane?”

  “I’ve always loved you,” she would reply, looking serious. “I loved you when I was still playing with dolls. My heart sang every time I looked at you, long before I knew that that was what love is. My teacher was right: girls aren’t made the same way as boys. We fall in love more quickly than you do.”

  She read The Duchess of Langeais and was swept away by the story of love and pain – to the great delight of Charles, who now found his own alter ego in her (as Parfait Michaud was more of a master than a kindred spirit). Carefully choosing books for her that conformed to her tastes as much as possible, he gave her Modeste Mignon, then Cousin Pons, and Old Goriot; she took little pleasure from the last title, although it did set her heart to racing.

  One night Marlene called him. He hadn’t spoken to her for a long time, and he spoke to her now with a lightness and indifference that humiliated the poor girl, although Charles was unaware of his cruelty. Even the Blond Angel would have had trouble rekindling the fascination he had once had for her. Whenever the two lovers found themselves alone, far from anyone’s prying eyes, they tore off their clothes and made love, lying in each other’s arms for hours afterwards in a chaos of bedsheets, marvelling at one another and murmuring sweet nothings into each other’s ears.

  “I’ve never seen a girl as beautiful as you, not in person or anywhere else, I swear,” he told her over and over. She would laugh, flattered, and shrug her shoulders. “You’re so beautiful you drive me crazy! You could be a supermodel, or a movie star, you could marry a millionaire.… And yet you love me!”

  The passion we feel for another person always embellishes that person in our eyes, but in this case passion had little to do with it, since it was true that Céline had become a ravishing beauty. Charles was amazed that Fernand and Lucie, with their thick, fairly ordinary bodies, could have produced such a marvel of perfection. Her face had a kind of Asian delicacy, with a lively and determined expression, and deep, twinkling, superb black eyes; her limbs were graceful, almost frail, almost like those of a child; her perfect breasts were as smooth and white as porcelain, but with nipples so sensitive that they trembled voluptuously at the slightest touch; her tiny feet seemed made to be kissed, which Charles delighted in doing passionately, although never as much as he liked because she was a bit ticklish. Her temperament perfectly disposed her for love, and her apprenticeship in that art proceeded effortlessly. She mildly chastised Charles for having created insatiable needs in her, needs that she condemned him to satisfy for the rest of his life, on pain of unbearable tortures. At which Charles laughed, smugly, pleased with himself, as if the credit for her perfection were all his.

  Charles finally accepted Blonblon’s invitation to meet Isabel, certain now that she would be little more than a pale imitation of Céline. And so she turned out to be. It was a double date; they went to see Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours, then for a spaghetti dinner at Da Giovanni’s, a restaurant famous for its high prices. With her mocha-coloured skin and small nose with its slightly flared nostrils, Isabel was pretty in an oddly comical way, and her Québécois accent, lightly oiled with Spanish, was extremely charming, even Charles had to admit it. Céline watched his reactions closely, but finding no reason to be alarmed decided that Blonblon’s friend was a very nice person.

  Steve had met Isabel a few times already, and to him she seemed to be a bit of “a suck” – a category he had a great deal of difficulty defining but which included people he felt should be avoided if at all possible. Of course, Blonblon was Charles’s friend, not Steve’s. Steve found him too “out of it,” there was something “spaced out” about him. He needed to “get it together,” although he wasn’t so bad, Steve hastened to add, as to fall into the dreaded “wuss” category. But he definitely hadn’t got it together, which was the nicest way Steve could think of to put it, as he came up with obscurely fashionable words to describe him. And anyway, hadn’t Blonblon always been a
ferocious adversary of smoking cigarettes? So what was he doing working in a tobacco shop, where his bland affability was raking in the customers like gangbusters?

  “It’s a question of principles, Charlie boy,” Steve explained. Steve was already a pack-and-a-half-a-day man, although it didn’t stop him from energetically manhandling his cheese shovel at the factory. “I mean, would a guy going to AA take a job at a liquor store? Would a vegetarian work for a butcher?”

  “Why not?” Charles replied. He felt a deep, visceral affection for Blonblon, reinforced recently by the fact that he was reading and enjoying César Birotteau in his spare time behind the counter. “You make your living the best way you can. Not everyone has a choice. What about you, do you love cheese all that much?”

  “You better believe I love cheese! I’ve always loved it! Mind you, it’s beginning to turn my stomach. The way they make us sweat in that retarded goddamn factory of theirs is enough to kill anyone’s appetite!”

  Charles had gone back to visit the notary a few times, and Parfait Michaud was amazed by the effect The Human Comedy had had on him. One night Charles confided in him that he sometimes thought of becoming a writer.

  “Hmm … now there’s a dangerous occupation, old man. Like anything involving the arts. I suppose you could do what so many others have done, take a stab at it in your spare time, wait for success to come knocking – as it does sometimes, although nobody knows exactly why.”

  “I think our young friend has pulled himself out of it,” Michaud announced to Fernand and Lucie the next day, when he paid them a visit. “I’ve never seen him so full of beans. And all thanks to good old Balzac! What a marvellous thing literature is, when you think about it! It can change a person’s life, believe me!”