The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

  "Hey, Manuel!" he said softly, resuming his rhythmic tread.

  "Pitou!" said the other, falling into step beside him.

  For a time they marched together, as if the soldier on duty had acquired a shadow to keep him company in his monotonous comings and goings. Then Pitou turned abruptly, stomped to a halt. His eyes lit up with mischief.

  "Thumbs up," he said in English

  "Thumbs up!" said Emmanuel.

  For the first time he uttered these words with a shade of hesitation, as if his thoughts had refused to follow.

  "D'you like it?" he asked.

  "You bet," said Pitou, again in English.

  On his freckled redhead's face, which flushed so easily, there was intense excitement. His grin almost burst open his round cheeks, shining like polished apples.

  "We'll get together," Emmanuel promised.

  "You bet! In England!"

  "Bye, Pitou."

  "Bye, Manuel."

  Emmanuel continued on his way, slower now, his head cocked slightly to the right. At last he was completely alone with his thoughts. He remembered the conversation at Ma Philibert's and wondered if he had played a part in Pitou's decision. This power of persuasion, which he had often seen at work on his friends, frightened him. Could he perhaps convince others without convincing himself? Was he going around firing others' enthusiasms without keeping a spark for himself?

  Pitou, he thought. Pitou in the army! It seemed incredible, impossible. Pitou, the kid of their group, the one they'd still had to protect not so long ago! They'd called him Chubby, or even Baby-Face. He could hear the sound of the gang running down there along an old towing path, and Pitou, out of breath, shouting, "Hey! Wait up! Wait up! I'm coming!" They'd try to leave him behind sometimes, just to tease him, or because they found him too young for their games.

  But Pitou always turned up behind them, a funny shape in his too-short pants which stopped at his fat calves, his shirt too big and his face shaded by an immense hat. To see him from above, at a distance, you'd think it was a self-propelling hat climbing the slopes, rolling down, activated by some magic power. He was always behind, but never discouraged.

  Those were the days when, trotting in single file, they'd go down to the old canal to swim. They'd find a spot where the abandoned canal gave passage to reflections of leisurely clouds, and rippled between gently sloping banks where almost no one passed. Clumps of trees here and there were like a wood or forest to them, and a field with a single cow grazing on it was their prairie. That had been the countryside of their childhood! Alphonse, who always chose the hardest path, would talk of going on, never stopping, stealing a boat and heading anywhere. Even then the open sky had filled him with bitter confusion, a feeling of freedom, the obsession with going back, the regret at being unable to push on to the limits of solitude. Pitou, struggling after them, would get caught on a barbed-wire fence or fall in a water hole, always holding them up, and Alphonse would shout, "Why don't you go home, you little pest!"

  Later, Pitou had known how to make them wait up. One evening they heard sounds of music from behind a stack of railway ties by the canal. With nothing but his mouth organ, Pitou had held them the whole evening. Alphonse, reconciled, demanded arrogantly: "Come on, give us Home on the Range "

  Then there'd been the circuses and travelling concerts in the suburb, Pitou out in front with his spellbinding music. And the guitar! Warm, stuffy evenings, not a breath of wind. And Pitou on the canal wall, his legs dangling, taking them on his fantastic trips — Pitou, whom they had so often threatened to leave behind! They asked him, "Where the heck did you get the zing-a-ling?" And Pitou, beaming, replied, "There was this old Jew, an' he told me, 'If you can play a piece right off, you can have the zing-a-ling.' So I got the zing-a-ling."

  But as time went by, the tunes Pitou extracted from his guitar grew more and more melancholy. Sometimes when they asked him for a happy song, he would say, "Aw, leave me alone!" And he'd be perched up there on Ma Philibert's counter, asking himself and everyone else, "Is there one job in this town? One lousy job?" As his legs dangled you could see the holes in the soles of his shoes, and his worn-down heels.

  Pitou, in the army! Emmanuel couldn't get over it. And Alphonse had known, but in some shadowy way was suffering from the knowledge, because he had refused to talk about Pitou. Then Emmanuel remembered: the "good-lookin' little guy, the winker ... all curly haired and healthy . . . the little guy with all his good humour." Good God! It had been Pitou there beside Alphonse in the ranks.

  He's a kid, thought Emmanuel. Nothing but a kid. Yesterday he was playing his mouth organ and guitar, now he's handling a bayonet. And another thought went through him like hot iron: Pitou didn't need to feel bad about not working. Pitou was earning his living at last, a bird's living, slim pickings were all he asked. Pitou could be happy now, no wonder he stamped his heels so hard. He was happy. He was handling his first working tool!

  Emmanuel bowed his head as if he were crushed by the weight of human folly.

  The stars were unusually bright. You had to go up on the mountain to see them emerge so stunningly from the depths of infinity. Emmanuel recalled Azarius' words: "France is like the stars, they still give their light at nighttime when it's ever so dark." The expression had seemed very fine to him as it came from Azarius' lips. He had even felt a surge of enthusiasm. But now he wondered if the world was not about to see a night without light or stars. And he wondered if that night had not begun long before the war to engulf the world in its shadows.

  Where could you find a light to guide the world?

  He was climbing up a street which, with its warm stone houses, Georgian windows, lawns and honeysuckle bushes, was the very evocation of English cosiness. The abyss that lay between his thoughts and this mellow, impregnable calm drove him deeper into his melancholy. Emmanuel had never resented the rich. In the old days, when their noisy gang had ventured up the mountain on a still night to the cry of "Let's go see how the millionaires live up there!" it was not to commit any acts of vandalism but to fill your lungs with fresh air and, secretly taken by such beauty, store up an eyeful of it.

  Emmanuel didn't hate the rich. Perhaps he had never been deprived enough to share Alphonse's morbid envy of them.

  But as he strolled amongst these princely mansions his uneasiness increased. It wasn't resentment or disgust, or even his old embarrassment as a guy from the working-class neighbourhood in this rich part of town. It was an indefinable malaise, nothing more. All the troubles and anguish of the lower town seemed to have stuck to him when he left, and the higher he climbed the more tenaciously they clung to his body. And now it was as if he had no right to enter this citadel of calm and order with the stink of poverty clinging to him like the odour of a sickroom.

  Finally anger took possession of him. It was his turn to ask the question already raised by so many others: We, down there, the ones who join up, we're giving everything we have to give, maybe our arms or our two legs.

  He looked up at the high grills, the curving driveways, the sumptuous facades, and completed his thought: Are these people giving all they have to give?

  The stone, the wrought-iron grills, tall and cool, the doors of solid oak, their heavy brass knockers, the iron, the steel, the wood, stone, copper and silver seemed to come to life with a sneer that was taken up by the luxuriant bushes and trimmed hedges, making its way to him across the night:

  What's this you're daring to think, poor creature that you are? How dare you try to put yourself on our level? Your life? Why, that's the cheapest thing on the market! Stone and steel and iron, gold and silver — we're the things that last, and cost the most!

  "But a life! A man's life!" Manuel protested aloud.

  A man's life indeed! Nobody's ever put a price on it. It's such a small thing, so ephemeral, so docile. . . .

  Wearied at last by the burden of his thoughts, Emmanuel arrived at the Westmount Lookout. Leaning on the parapet he saw the thousands of lights bel
ow.

  He felt an intense distress. It seemed to him that he was alone in the universe, on the edge of the abyss, holding in his hands the most fragile, tenuous of threads, that of the eternal human enigma. Which of the two, wealth or the spirit, should sacrifice itself; which of the two possessed the true power of redemption? And who was he to attack this problem and, tonight, to bear its burden? He was a man who until now had lived a comfortable life, without great worries or excessive ambition, an ordinary young man like many others. If events had not thrust him into this dilemma, he might never have encountered a worry more serious than the everyday concerns of a mediocre existence. The consciousness of his own ignorance was added to his solitude. Only his solitude was measurable: he could judge its depth by the freedom of the winds playing about the heights where he stood; and its duration, by the distance that separated the mountain from the suburb.

  Leaning on the parapet, he searched the distance among the lights to the southwest, sparkling like fireflies against a lake of darkness, and chose one that might be Florentine's.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The restaurant had seemed very gay to Florentine, with its touch of the garden cafe beside the river — a place where her regrets might withdraw their pursuit, or her thoughts take a less painful turn.

  A few Chinese lanterns were swinging from the branch of a tree in front of the door, its gentle movement shaking and mingling their lively colours. A garland of coloured light bulbs framed the doorway. Having made this concession to the picturesque, the owner had turned his energies to a series of posters on which he advertised every product he sold and a few more besides. The narrow fa$ade and decrepit walls of the restaurant literally disappeared behind these ads: women in bright bathing suits on a tiny beach were supposed, for unknown reasons, to represent the mildness of a certain brand of cigarette. Others, still more scantily dressed, vaunted a well-known thirst quencher. Painted tin sheets, large and small, had been crammed together on the building's front with advertising of all sorts. The effect was wild and gaudy, but Florentine loved it. You just couldn't go in a place like that with gloomy thoughts.

  Under a makeshift bower that created a scanty patch of shade stood a single small picnic table of rusty metal on which a brewery trademark was barely visible. Venturing toward it, Florentine murmured:

  "Say, it looks real nice here!"

  Hoping to please her, Emmanuel had invited her to this restaurant on the outskirts of town. But she had refused to have anything but a coke and a hot dog.

  Inside, more Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling, moving gently in a breeze from the river. The tables were painted bright red and the walls were covered with primitive paintings of Japanese pagodas, triremes cutting through a chalky sea, Hindu temples on a muddy background. There was a nickelodeon in one corner, and Florentine kept Emmanuel busy playing the same vibrant, syncopated piece.

  The owner had served them their light meal, and they were now almost alone. From time to time a couple would come in to buy cigarettes and go off again, laughing and teasing on the riverside path.

  The day was not turning out as Emmanuel had imagined. Yet the element of the unforeseen with its suspense was not unpleasant. He was continually waiting for a word to be spoken between them, a gesture, which would irrevocably change the course of their lives.

  That morning he had gone to High Mass in St. Henri Church, hoping to see Florentine there. His shyness had the upper hand again and he wanted to meet her by chance rather than risk another visit to her home. He would never forget the mixture of joy and hesitation with which she had greeted him. As if she were fighting back her pleasure at seeing him . . . yes, that was it, as if she were struggling against a natural desire to see him and an equally natural instinct to flee.

  The rest still seemed strange and complex. Florentine, at the church door, dressed in her Easter best! Not knowing what to say, he had mentioned her new finery, squeezing her arm a little at the same time. She had granted him a brief, tense smile and then frowned as if he had displeased her. But she said:

  "You see everything, eh? There's men that never see what a woman has on!" As if he could forget her black dress at his party, or her green uniform in the store, and the pink paper flower she stuck in her hair!

  They went down the church steps together. Could he really be there beside her in the sunlight, knowing at last all the details of her new costume! And the joy of saying to himself, We're leaving the church together, we look like real lovers. But he didn't understand her mood. She walked beside him, biting her lips and casting sideways glances at him that were hesitant, perplexed and almost hard. And the words they had exchanged in the crowd inside — embarrassed, very embarrassed, though he remembered every nuance and intonation:

  "You haven't changed, Manuel!"

  "You neither, Florentine."

  "Are you on your way overseas?"

  "Yes, very soon. I've got two weeks' leave, and then. . . "

  "So it's your last furlough! That's not long. ..."

  She had said "That's not long" in such a strange, meditative voice that he had leaned over greedily to see if her eyes explained what her words had left unsaid. But she had looked away, swinging her handbag nervously.

  Why had she said "That's not long"?

  He stretched his hand across the table and took her fingers.

  A little haughtily, half joking, yet genuinely concerned, she asked him:

  "What were you juggling in your head? You were cooking up something, I'll bet you two bits."

  "I was thinking about you," he said very simply.

  She smiled with satisfaction, withdrew her fingers which he was pressing too hard, and took out her compact. Since they'd been together he had seen her make up her face three or four times. He found it amusing, like a kitten washing its whiskers. He had noticed that she pursed her mouth and stiffened her face when she powdered her nose, and that she never failed to take a little spit on her fingertips for her lashes, curling them gently with her nail.

  He was more entertained than astonished by all this, but what intrigued him was to catch her continually poring over her tiny mirror, absorbed in her own reflection, and somehow quizzical or doubtful about what she saw. What on earth did she find there that was so upsetting?

  For a time they sat there, glancing warily at each other. Then she said:

  "Put a nickel in the machine, Manuel."

  He was no longer surprised by her need for noise and movement. Since the previous evening he himself was in an over-excited state that matched hers. He went to the music box and chose a piece he particularly liked. It was from Bitter Sweet, a melody that expressed for him the bitterness and delight of seeing her again.

  "What's that you put on, Manuel?"

  Then she stiffened. I'll see you again, whenever spring. . . The sentimental phrase pierced her heart. Her lipstick skidded onto her cheek. She saw herself again at the entry to the movie theatre the night she had begun her descent into the unknown, the night of her downfall.

  "Let's dance," said Emmanuel. He took her gently in his arms.

  All day he had been hoping to hold her for a few moments to the rhythm of a waltz, and feel the warmth of her body.

  As she danced she barely saw what she was doing or where she was going. She was remembering how cold she had been as she waited in front of the theatre. That was an arctic night! And all the dark streets by which Jean could have arrived - silent, deserted and empty! I'll see you again. . . The nostalgic refrain filled her with gloom. Everything was ugly in the depths of her thoughts. No hope, no joy. And the cold! A whirling winter wind chilled her heart. No one had come through the storm that night. No one, for that matter, had ever come.

  "You're not following,'' Emmanuel reproached her gently.

  And he began to sing softly in her ear: I'll see you again. . .

  She was waltzing stiffly with him, stumbling, trying to sound the depths of those strange words that reached her from so far away, words which Emma
nuel was now repeating in her ear. She saw someone sitting in the movie, comforting herself with the thought that Jean must have been delayed. How could she have been so naive, so silly, such a child! Suddenly she wanted to take her revenge on Emmanuel. She would have liked to find an unkind word, just one hard word, to wound him and see how suffering looked on someone else.

  "We danced so well together last time!" said Emmanuel.

  He noticed that her cheek was smeared with lipstick, and offered his handkerchief, but she didn't notice his gesture. He wiped her cheek himself, very gently.

  Then she broke into a mocking, bitter laugh:

  "Look at you! You've got it all over. There. Anybody would think we were in love!"

  She knew she had gone too far and that he was hurt. She had not really wanted that. Hurt him a little, yes, but not insult him and turn him away from her. She had to stay friends with Emmanuel. She shook her long hair and gave him a smile that was more provocative than friendly.

  For a moment the cherished notion he had had of her dissolved. In its place he saw a girl who was nervous, unstable and loud, with too much makeup. This can't be Florentine, he thought, I'm losing my mind, I must be wrong. But a second later he saw a simpler, sadder truth: she was like himself, anxious and caught among conflicting emotions.

  "Let's go," she said, "there's nothing doing here. D'you want to go?"

  Wherever they stopped, she was the one who wanted to leave. It's harder than I thought, she said to herself, to pretend I love him . . . and make him love me. But she knew that despite her feelings her mind was made up and would not change.

  He helped her on with her new coat. She had told him with a touch of defiance: "Yeah, it's new this spring. It cost a lot. Do you like it?" The coat was of light knop wool pleated from the hips and with a great tortoise-shell buckle, and it could be seen in all the stores of St. Henri. It had broken his heart as she said, "Well, do you like it or don't you?" He had replied, "Yes, of course, it's really nice, Florentine."