“I’m not acting crazy, I assure you,” Charles said. “I read the whole thing over the other day, end to end. The main problem with it is that throughout the whole thing I’ve written about things I know absolutely nothing about. That’s not literature, it’s more like plywood! There’s nothing to be done with a book like that. The best thing that can happen to it is that it goes up in smoke and no one ever mentions it again.”
“You’ll regret this, Thibodeau,” said Steve, bending over to retrieve a few copies of the book.
“Mind your own business, Lachapelle!” Charles cried, leaping forward and pushing Steve away from the pile. “And you too, Blonblon. Just stay where you are. I asked you here to be witnesses, nothing more.”
A second later he had taken out his lighter, set fire to a strip of cloth, and tossed it onto the pile.
There was a dry sound, not unlike that of a small dog yapping in alarm. Boff leapt to his feet and looked around the yard, which was turning orange and filling up with dancing shadows, for this uninvited canine guest, ready to show him to the gate. Seeing nothing, he turned and gazed into the fire, which was now burning steadily. The books were turning black, the corners peeling outwards, and the whole pile was beginning to sag.
Charles watched with his arm around Céline. Steve and Blonblon also looked on, saddened and silent, as more than a year’s work was consumed before their eyes. Blonblon bent over and picked up the garbage bag that was lying on the ground and began to examine its contents. Charles reached over and took it from him.
“It’s the beginning of my second novel,” he said, “and it’s no better than the first.”
He grabbed handfuls of manuscript pages from the bag and threw them on the fire.
Suddenly a door slammed and they heard shouts coming from above their heads.
“What’s going on down there?” a man’s voice called out.
“Nothing!” Charles called back. “We’ve lit a fire. There’s no danger!”
The man started to say something, but his voice was drowned out by a long howl from Boff, who’d been seized by a sudden fit of uncontrollable anguish.
“We’d better get out of here,” Steve said. “That guy’s probably phoned the cops.”
“They won’t have time,” Charles replied. “It’s almost out already.”
He was right. Where there had once been a pile of books, there was only a mass of thin, blackened, and curled pages, rising into the dark sky in tiny fragments. Charles stirred the ashes. In the light from the dying fire, his face had taken on an expression of sombre pleasure. Céline stood before him, her arms crossed over her chest.
“So, what are you going to do now?”
He looked at her for a moment, as though having thoughts he didn’t dare to express.
“I’m going to live!” he shouted suddenly. “That’s what I should have been doing all along.”
“Live? What do you mean?”
But she stopped. A siren had started up somewhere and was approaching rapidly.
“Okay, that’s it!” Steve exclaimed. “I told you! It’s the cops! Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Charles grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Hang on a sec, will you. I need you to give me a hand. You, too, Blonblon.”
He had thought of everything. A heavy canvas tarpaulin, soaked in water and folded in four, lay at the foot of the Manitoba maple. The three men picked it up, carried it over to the smoking ashes and laid it on top. In a second, the deserted yard was once again completely dark.
With his book denounced and reduced to a pile of ashes, Charles naturally wasn’t concerned in the least about losing the rights to it. He stopped making his weekly payments to Pigeon-Lecuchaux. The publisher called him a few times, and sent him a letter couched in pompous and inflated language, threatening legal action, but Charles had no intention of having any further dealings with Otis Editions. A few weeks later, Céline secretly called the publisher, intending to buy a few copies of The Quiet Rip-Off, since Charles had taken hers back, as he had those of all his friends, but the publisher’s telephone was no longer in service. She went to the office and found it occupied by a company that distributed cups, pens, picture frames, and other bric-a-brac decorated with the Canadian flag, created with start-up capital from the Council for Canadian Unity. The owner, a short man given to oblique and furtive eye movements but nonetheless charming, spoke a mangled version of French laced with bits of English and German, but managed to convey to Céline that the previous tenant had left the country. When Charles heard that, he clenched his teeth and said nothing, not a word.
“So,” scoffed Steve, “the bastard took your four thousand bucks and you’ll never see more than a thousand in return! Man, if that’s not bending over and saying be gentle, then I don’t know what is!”
“Don’t be so hard on him!” exclaimed Isabel indignantly. “What good will it do, making him feel even worse than he does already?” And with a tender, maternal hand she stroked Charles’s cheek. He pushed her hand away with a brave smile.
“Maybe he went bankrupt,” Blonblon suggested. “I just read a piece in Le Devoir that said the publishing business is in a real slump — almost nobody reads anymore!”
“In any case,” Charles said haughtily, “none of you needs to worry — you won’t lose anything over this. I’m going to pay you all back, every penny. But only on one condition.”
“What’s that?” they asked him.
“That you never mention that book to me again. I haven’t just turned the page, I’ve done better than that: I burned every last one of them. From now on, I’m doing something different with my life.”
But it would have taken a seer to know what that was. Weeks went by. Charles went to work at the hardware store, as usual, except that now he worked eight-hour days. And he continued his old ways, loving Céline as much as he could, reading two books a week, going out to bars, cinemas, bookstores, and billiard halls with his friends, with whom he seemed to have as good a time as before.
René Lévesque, haggard and embittered, had left politics in June 1985 with the friendly assistance of his justice minister, Pierre Marc Johnson, who replaced him for a few months until he, too, was ousted in the December elections by a miraculously resurgent Robert Bourassa, who popped up from Limbo like a punching doll. There were those who said his long retirement after his humiliating defeat at the 1976 polls had made a new man of him; others declared that, on the contrary, he was still his wily old self, still giving the same illusion of weakness and indecision while in reality being as adamant as granite and steel, but alas afflicted with a fundamental lack of ambition that prevented him from thinking big. Once again, like a sleepwalker, Quebec entered a long, grey tunnel without concerning itself too much with what lay at the end of it. The province’s muscles atrophied, which is to say, returned to normal. Routine reestablished itself, and life became a little more of a burden.
Near the end of December 1986, while Blonblon and Charles were having lunch together, Blonblon mentioned that he thought he’d seen Wilfrid Thibodeau on the corner of Amherst and Ontario. Whoever it was had been about a hundred metres ahead of him, flagging a taxi. Blonblon had hurried to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, but by the time he’d reached the spot, the man had gone.
Charles didn’t seem to react badly to the news, and after lunch went back to work at the hardware store as usual. But a few hours later he was overcome by a strange nervousness. When he wasn’t serving a customer, he paced up and down the aisles, hands in his pockets, chewing his lips and screwing up his face, and he answered sharply when Lucie asked him whether something was bothering him. Was it the proximity of his father, he wondered, even if it was only distant and hypothetical, that brought on this dark mood? Was he so afraid of his father that he wanted to throw up everything and run for the hills? Whatever it was, one morning he breezed into Fernand’s office and tendered his resignation.
“I have to change my life,” he expl
ained to the stupefied store owner. “I’m spinning my wheels here. I need air. I might even leave Montreal. There’s a whole country out there.”
“A whole country? What country? Our little friend Bourassa’s running a country, is he?” Fernand sneered.
“Leave off politics, Fernand, please. This is something else entirely.”
“Is it me or Lucie? Are we …?”
Charles stepped forward, his eyes bright with feeling. He took Fernand’s hand, a rare gesture. “No, no, Fernand! You’ve always done the right things for me. You’re the best! You know that without the two of you I’d be nowhere right now — I might not even be on this planet. This is not about you, or anyone else. It’s about me, Fernand, me alone…. I’m not happy with myself … and I need to change my life. It’s as simple as that.”
“Okay,” the hardware-store owner sighed, absently stuffing a handful of invoices into his desk drawer. “I suppose you’ve put a bit of money aside that you can live on while you … wander aimlessly about mulling things over…. How much time do I have to find a replacement?”
“Take as long as you need, Fernand! There’s no rush. Did you think I’m such an ingrate that I’d run off and leave you in the lurch?”
Four days later, however, Fernand had to call Clémont, the clerk he had laid off a few years back and who had gone into a kind of semi-retirement, to help him out of a jam until he could find someone permanent. Charles, it seemed, had found another job. Fernand received the news with a cynical smile when Charles first told him about it, and was even more skeptical when he found out what the job was. It seemed to have been created specifically for Charles, so perfectly did it conform to his natural disposition and reflect his deepest tastes. He was going to be a barker.
With the perfectly legitimate aim of increasing revenues while at the same time taking action against illegal practices, the City of Verdun had decided to be more rigorous in enforcing its bylaws concerning the issuing of dog permits. Too many citizens, it believed, owners of little long-haired, clipped, and frizzy Fidos, were neglecting to pay the annual tax that the municipal authorities had levied on all dog owners. Such cases of tax evasion, although clear, were difficult to detect, since the dogs in question were mostly of the lapdog variety (Pekinese, Pomeranians, poodles, and the like) and their owners hardly ever took them outdoors, tending to regard them more as a sort of decoration of a purely domestic nature than as pets, thus making any kind of tagging policy extremely difficult to enforce.
But then a clever employee had come up with the brilliant idea of creating the position of barker. Like most brilliant ideas, this one was also blindingly simple. It consisted of hiring someone able to bark loudly and convincingly, and charging that person with the task of patrolling the city’s residential areas at night, notebook in hand, and barking regularly and loudly. If there happened to be a dog in any of the houses within earshot, that dog would not fail to bark in response to the barker’s cry. All the barker had to do then was make a note of the address of the dog’s owner, and verify whether said owner had or had not paid the stipulated dog tax. If the owner had not, then the barker presented himself at the door the next day and demanded immediate payment, plus, of course, a stiff fine.
It was while searching through the want ads one Sunday morning that Charles’s eye was caught by this curious item. It was the word “barker” that naturally drew his attention. The job description amused him, and then it suddenly occurred to him that the position would be perfect for him. He would make an excellent barker.
“Well, well, well,” he mused, “why not?”
Looking up from the paper, he saw Boff sitting on his haunches, looking up at him. Charles stared deep into the dog’s eyes and saw not a trace of disapproval in them. Sure, this job would depend on tricking his canine confrères, but the punishment wouldn’t be to them — it would be to their owners, and only to those who had broken the law. And then there was the attraction of spending his nights roaming around the streets of a city that he barely knew; he found the prospect exciting, almost romantic.
Without telling anyone, he went the next day to the Human Resources Department in Verdun and filled out the job application form. A few days later, he attended an audition before an evaluation committee, which consisted of a veterinarian, a zoologist specializing in canines, and Verdun’s former chief of police, a big dog-lover. After questioning him at some length about his previous experience, they asked him to bark. He put all his heart into it. The committee members looked at one another gravely, made a few notes, and studied the candidate with their hands under their chins. Charles kept on barking enthusiastically, although his voice was beginning to crack. The former police chief smiled at him kindly and told him he could stop. Someone brought him a glass of water and he rested for a moment, then began barking again.
“That will do,” the zoologist said curtly, and, with a polite gesture, indicated that the interview was over.
Charles thanked them, walked out through a small waiting room in which six other candidates were awaiting their turns, and went home, where, feeling queasy with discouragement, he tried to concentrate on a television program about the manufacture of moccasins.
Three days later he received a letter offering him the job; he was asked to report the next day at eight o’clock to the office of the tax collector. The director, a tall, ascetic-looking man with grey hair and a head that appeared to have been stretched backwards by some kind of secret tornado, received him with a disarming smile and proceeded, in a serious, careful voice, to regale him for half an hour on the importance of the mission that was being entrusted to him. A secretary then furnished him with a map of the city, a list of routes for the coming week, and the keys to a small, nondescript Honda that he would use to make his rounds. He would work four nights and one day a week — the day to be spent collecting the permit fees and penalties that he had unearthed during the rest of the week.
“Four nights!” Céline exclaimed when she heard the news. “When are we supposed to see each other then? You’ll be sleeping during the day. And working in Verdun? Jeez, Charles, it’s like you’ve moved to Chibougamau!”
“It won’t be that bad,” Charles said. “You act as though I’ve gone into a monastery or something! It’s just a job I took, sort of off the cuff, something to do until it gets too boring. Six months from now, maybe less, and I’ll have moved on to something better.”
“We’ll hardly see each other,” Céline repeated, still dejected.
Despite his best efforts, Charles was unable to cheer her up. Did she sense that he was trying to distance himself from her? He asked her out to a movie and she accepted, but she remained morose and cool throughout the evening and went straight home to her parents’; house after the film, refusing to go up to his apartment, as was their custom. Feeling miffed, Charles was beginning to find her tiresome.
His first night on the job filled him with a marvellous sense of adventure. He had been instructed to show up at the Collection Office on rue Bidoux at ten o’clock at night; an inspector would make his first rounds with him in order to show him the ropes.
The inspector was a man in his fifties, with a vast beer belly, sagging shoulders, and cheeks that drooped like a spaniel’s. His name was Roger Laprotte, but everyone called him Dopey, a nickname that at first surprised Charles, although he soon came to see how he had earned it.
Laprotte couldn’t bark himself, but after twenty-eight years on the job, he had become an authority on the subject of dog licensing, and had earned the respect of his fellow inspectors, despite a flaw in his character that could easily have destroyed his career.
He was given to profound fits of depression, as though he had, deep within his being, a kind of San Andreas Fault that would open and close quickly and without warning at any moment of the day, and for unknown reasons. Suddenly an internal earthquake would transform him into a physical wreck, plunge him into a stony apathy from which no one and nothing could rouse him. He
would collapse in a corner, his face haggard and drawn, his arms sagging, deaf and blind to whatever else was going on in the room; or else he would hurry home and go to bed, sometimes in the most pressing and inappropriate of circumstances. Fortunately, such bouts of depression were short, lasting only an hour or two, sometimes even less. People would leave him alone, pretend that nothing untoward had taken place, and eventually everything would return to normal. But his attacks would sometimes also cause frustrations.
From the first, Laprotte displayed a kind of paternal affection for Charles. He made Charles bark for him, congratulated him on the perfection of his modulation, then conducted him to the little Honda that awaited them in the parking lot and told him to get in behind the wheel. He then showed Charles the city, pointing out the more dangerous neighbourhoods, where he would have to be careful; the streets down which amateur race-car drivers would zoom; the restaurants that were open all night, where he could stop for snack breaks; and the sections of the streets that needed repair and could be fatal to the Honda’s shock absorbers. Most important, he gave Charles a long list of the city’s suspected lawbreakers, at least in the matter of dog licensing, and suggested the best way to apprehend them, since he was familiar with a number of them. And while he was on the subject, he explained how Charles should file his reports, how to fill out the many different forms that his job required, and gave him many other ad hoc but useful bits of information.
All went well until about three in the morning. Charles had been stopping the car at various street corners, rolling down the window, and barking loudly. When a dog responded to his bark, Charles would write down the address, then move the car down the block and give his bark once more. Dopey, meanwhile, would grin and let out little yips of satisfaction, rubbing his hands together happily.
By three o’clock, Charles had noted four dogs he suspected of not having tags. At Laprotte’s request, he had stopped the car in front of a Canadian Tire store, above which there were two apartments. After taking a drink of mineral water to wet his throat, he gave out a long series of barks. Three dogs replied to it at once! Laprotte was ecstatic.
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