Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  Original title: Charles le téméraire

  Copyright © 2004 by Éditions Fides

  Published under arrangement with Éditions Fides, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

  English translation copyright © 2006 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Translated from the French by Wayne Grady

  This translation comprises the first half of Charles Le Téméraire: Un temps de chien.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Beauchemin, Yves, 1941–

  [Charles le téméraire. English]

  Charles the Bold : the dog years : a novel / Yves Beauchemin ; translated by Wayne Grady.

  Translation of Charles le téméraire.

  “A Douglas Gibson book.”

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-162-7

  I. Grady, Wayne II. Title. III. Title: Charles le téméraire. English.

  PS8553.E172C5213 2006 C843.′54 C2006-901892-8

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  For their generous help and invaluable advice, the author would like to thank Antoine Del Busso, Georges Aubin, Lucille Beauchemin, Diane Martin, Viviane St-Onge, Michel Therrien, and the indefatigable Michel Gay

  For its financial assistance, the author also wishes to thank La Société de développement des arts et de la culture de Longueuil

  A Douglas Gibson Book

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  To Viviane

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  1

  A lot of serious praying on his behalf had gone on by the time Charles finally poked his glistening head from between the thighs of his mother, who was bent double with pain. A light but steady rain was falling on the streets of Montreal, and buses wove along them loaded with half-soaked, half-awake passengers. Just down the street, on rue Ontario, waitresses in scuffed shoes replied kindly to the equally scuffed pleasantries of their customers. On the ground floor of the building across the street, a hardware-store owner was taking a shower, vigorously soaping his bulging belly while trying to recall where he’d put a stack of invoices. As usual, the Macdonald’s cigarette company was busy filling the neighbourhood with the smell of tobacco smoke. Twenty metres straight down, in the dark bowels of the island of Montreal, a brand-new subway train was creeping along a tunnel that still smelled of fresh concrete; its driver, a serious, even formal man, held himself rigid between two inspectors in suits who were taking notes for the official inauguration, which was to take place in three days. The eleventh of October, 1966, was underway.

  “Push, madame, push! It’s almost over,” cried the ambulance driver. He’d arrived fifteen minutes earlier, too late to be of much help in the birth.

  He was tall and blond and a bit pudgy, an aficionado of sausages and beer, and he didn’t like being hurried. When he had to move, though, he knew how to do it smartly and efficiently. With a curt nod to his partner standing at the other end of the rumpled bed, he grabbed Charles’s head (the baby’s name had been decided on for some time) and gently began to pull. The face appeared, then the shoulders, at which point the ambulance driver’s eyes widened with surprise.

  In the course of his dozen-year career as a paramedic he had assisted in a good many childbirths, some of them under unbelievable circumstances. But the newborns had always come out looking pretty much the same – red in the face and scowling, as though furious at having been forced to leave the warm, dark bubble they’d been floating in for the past few months. But this one was different: his skin was pink and smooth, his facial features calm, apparently unfazed by the violent efforts being made to extract him. He seemed to have remained plunged in deep, delicious sleep. “He’s dead,” the driver thought with a shudder.

  Hurriedly he removed the afterbirth, cut the umbilical cord, grabbed the infant by the feet, and gave him a few good whacks on the backside. Charles gave a sharp cry, which cleared a glob of mucus from his throat, then immediately calmed down again. While he was given a quick bath before being placed in the arms of his mother, who gazed on him adoringly with eyes half-crossed from exhaustion, he went back to sleep, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “Brain damage,” the driver thought. He looked at his partner, who was busy drying the mother’s face, and motioned towards the door with a questioning lift of his chin.

  Seated in the kitchen with a full beer in front of him and two empties on the table, Wilfrid Thibodeau gazed at the rain-spattered window and stretched his legs. There were already nine butts in the pig-shaped ashtray at his elbow, and a tenth was dangling from his lips. He’d had the radio on low in an attempt to drown out his wife’s screams; an announcer, his voice vibrating with sincerity, was describing the magnificent sale of household electrical appliances being held at all the Brault & Martineau stores, but no syllable of his panegyric reached the carpenter’s ears, for his thoughts were as sullen and grey as the rain that was soaking the city. This premature birth had really screwed up his morning. Looking up, he saw one of the ambulance drivers standing in the kitchen doorway, smiling and motioning for him to get up.

  “It’s done, Mr. Thibodeau. A bouncing baby boy, chubby and content.”

  The other driver appeared behind the first, then came into the kitchen and shook the new father’s hand.

  When Alice saw her husband, she forgot the contractions that had so recently torn at her body, and a sweet but worried smile smoothed the creases in her face:

  “Come and see him,” she breathed, her voice softened by exhaustion. “He’s so beautiful … a real little prince … Aren’t you happy? It wasn’t so bad, was it? Did you get hold of your boss?”

  “Yeah, yeah, no problem,” he replied, a bit ashamed of himself for feeling so annoyed. “Get some rest now,” he added, trying to put more tenderness into his voice than he felt.

  He cast a curious and somewhat startled glance at the tiny being, asleep and wrapped up in a towel in his wife’s arms. Okay, then. That was that. She had what she wanted, a baby. As weak and vulnerable as he was, he’d be taking up all her atte
ntion from now on. He’d be the one running things around here. That’s the way things worked. Wilfrid Thibodeau was the eldest in a family of six kids, and he knew all about the upheavals that came with the appearance of a new baby. He felt helpless, out of sorts and vaguely irritated, and floating over all these feelings was a wave of emotion that he had no idea what to do with.

  Alice laid her hand on his arm:

  “I’m sorry this all happened so suddenly, my poor Wilfrid. If I’d known it was coming so quickly, I’d have asked you to bring me to the hospital …”

  He answered her by caressing her arm distractedly. The ambulance driver appeared again at the door:

  “I called a doctor to come and take a look at you,” he said, “just in case … You can’t be too careful in situations like these. He said he’ll be here in half an hour.”

  He took another look at the baby. “Jeez,” he thought, “what a mug he has on him! He’s not sleeping in that towel, he’s basking in it! Not ten minutes old and already he’s got the world by the short and curlies. If Jocelyn handed me a baby like that I’d kiss her feet! … Nevermind, nevermind,” he chided himself. “You’re getting all worked up over nothing, you idiot. It’s all in your head.”

  But the ambulance driver was not mistaken. Charles Thibodeau was born with a natural gift for happiness. One week after his birth he was sleeping through the night, he hardly ever cried, and he suckled determinedly but without insistence, as though he sensed that he had to go easy on his mother. Nature spared him almost entirely from colic, indigestion, and diaper rash. When his milk teeth appeared, his swollen gums didn’t seem to bother him at all; he chewed contentedly on the ends of his fingers, or on the little rubber lamb his mother gave him, or on anything else that came within reach, his peaceful and joyful disposition hardly affected. When he slept, the house could fall down around his crib without waking him up. He was smiling at two months, then laughing in great bursts, at everything and nothing. Smiles sprang to his lips like dandelions on a spring lawn.

  “He’s always happy, this one!” exclaimed his grandmother, a tiny widow who, though only sixty-five, was already bent with age. She lived in the Gaspésie and came to visit her daughter once a year. “He’ll be a good little boy. He’ll make his wife happy and he’ll get along well with his boss.”

  Where had his good disposition come from? Certainly not from his mother, who was pretty enough but timid, pale, and a bit on the scrawny side, forever struggling against fatigue (her job at the clothing factory exhausted her), and who had hardly told a joke in her life. An air of resigned melancholy hung over Alice; it was so subtle and had become so much a part of her that she mistook it for life itself. And yet he got it even less from his father, a short, taciturn man given to flashes of anger, for whom life was nothing but an endless series of chores and drudgery made occasionally tolerable by beer, televised hockey, and sex.

  If Charles got his pleasant nature from anyone it must have been from a distant ancestor, someone to whom black thoughts never occurred, and who, at the end of a long and satisfying life, had died peacefully in the consoling knowledge that he had lived in the best of all possible worlds. Either that or at the moment of his conception a mysterious explosion had taken place somewhere in the galaxy, and he had somehow become the beneficiary of its influence …

  So much so that at the age of one Charles was such a beautiful child, so chubby of cheek, so bubbling over with health, so content with his lot in life, that he made his pediatrician feel completely useless. These qualities were accompanied, moreover, by an inexhaustible supply of energy and a voracious curiosity. The apartment on rue Dufresne was for him a vast terrain of discovery that occupied his every waking minute. No corner, no matter how many doors or gates were in the way, was immune from his impetuous need to explore. Merely walking into the kitchen required his father or mother to exercise a certain degree of caution and a great deal of attention, since the floor would generally be strewn with pots, casserole dishes, platters, plates, utensils, and all sorts of other things (he had figured out how to open drawers and had even pulled one or two of them down on top of himself). When he went into his parents’ bedroom, it was to empty the drawers of the night tables and the dresser, crawl under the bed or pull off the sheets and blankets, which he liked to wrap himself up in. The bathroom towels were his carpets, he filled the toilet bowl with pots and pans, laundry detergent, and bars of soap, and one morning Wilfrid, forgetting to check the tub before getting in, stepped into a pool of shampoo that the grimacing Charles was in the process of eating.

  Once or twice his enthusiasms nearly ended in tragedy. One afternoon in October his parents took him to Expo ’67, which at the time was still sparkling with its final glory. Jumping up in Alice’s arms to reach a bunch of balloons that were bouncing in front of him, he nearly fell from the top of the monorail. His mother just managed to grab him by one foot and hold him as he dangled over the side, screaming in terror.

  “There’s no bloody end to it!” his father cried out in despair. “What’re we going to do when he’s fifteen?”

  For his second birthday Alice made a vanilla cake with chocolate icing, placed two candles in it, set it on the table and invited the neighbours and their three children to come over for dessert after dinner. They arrived at the appointed time, and Wilfrid showed them into the living room. Alice, making coffee in the kitchen with her back to the table, heard a spongy sound followed by a sort of sigh that made her turn around. Charles had tugged at the tablecloth, and the cake and its plate had fallen on his head, which was now unrecognizable as a head except for the tip of Charles’s nose poking out through a mound of cake and chocolate.

  “Oh my God, Charles, what have you done?”

  Wilfrid came into the kitchen and uttered a cry of rage. He managed to control himself while his wife, with her neighbour’s help, made a pitiful attempt to wipe her son’s face. But as soon as she had finished he grabbed Charles by his waist and began slapping him with the palm of his hand as though the child’s backside were a drum. Charles pursed his lips, puckered his brows, let out a tiny moan, but he did not cry. When his clothes had been changed and he was put back on his feet, he took refuge in a corner, sitting with his back against the wall, and gave his father a look that Alice would never, ever forget. Two minutes later his good nature had returned and he was playing happily with a pile of blocks in his bedroom.

  “I’m going to do something about that kid, you just see if I don’t,” Wilfrid said to his neighbour while the two women worked at the table trying to salvage some of the cake for the other children, who were whining. It was clear he would go to any length to instill a little discipline in the child’s head.

  Two days later Charles terrified his mother. Coming home from work, she stopped to pick him up at the babysitter’s and was getting ready to carry him up the stairs in his stroller (they lived on the second floor) when she suddenly remembered she needed something at the grocer’s and that she didn’t have any money with her.

  “Wait here one second, Charles, Maman will be back in a minute.”

  And she ran up to the apartment. Fifteen seconds later she was back at the top of the stairs, where she let out a piercing shriek. Charles, bent forward with his arms outstretched, had his head stuck (or so it seemed to Alice) in the jaws of an enormous German shepherd. Her shriek frightened the animal, and it ran off.

  “Oh my God, did that dog hurt you, my precious?”

  But apparently it had not. On the contrary, Charles’s cheek, shiny with dog slobber, suggested strongly that he had been holding the dog affectionately and that the dog had been returning his affection. Charles screwed up his face and waved his arms, wildly upset that the dog was no longer there.

  Charles attracted hugs and smiles from neighbours, even from strangers, but he also attracted dogs. In incredible numbers. He had only to appear in the street and every dog in the neighbourhood would come running. Like humans, they seemed to go bananas over his
chubby face with its cheerful, sparkling eyes, over his impetuous, cascading laughter, even over his awkward grapplings, which often left tufts of hair between his fingers. Taking Charles for a walk was a complicated and somewhat tiring affair for Alice, who was not fond of dogs. Had that damned German shepherd, which had not been seen since, spread the word around in canine circles? Did dogs possess some kind of communications network that could get them massed together on the sidewalk in an instant? No one in the neighbourhood had ever seen anything like it before.

  The hardware-store owner who lived across the street, and whose name was Fernand Fafard, used to come across to see the “dog king” playing in his yard: he’d ruffle the boy’s hair, pinch his cheeks, tickle the point of his chin; in short display all the marks of affection that strangers bestow on children who have captured their hearts. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and burly, with a large mouth and a big voice. He was sort of puffy, especially around the waist, and he was already losing his hair, but his face was open and friendly.

  “They like you, those pooches, eh, kid?” he’d say. “You have a way with them, kind of a magic touch.”

  Then, turning to Alice, who always listened to him with a nervous smile:

  “A tiger would crawl under a door to please that kid, Madame Thibodeau. It’s a gift he’s got. A rare gift! You should encourage it.”

  It was a strange and often amusing state of affairs, but it had its downside: when it was time for Charles to go indoors and leave his four-legged friends behind, his parents had to suffer twenty long minutes of kicking and screaming. It was absolute torture, like having a wisdom tooth pulled.

  “Maybe we should get him a dog,” Alice suggested to her husband one night.

  “What would we do with a dog?” Wilfrid replied. “You work all day, I work all day: a dog’d go nuts cooped up in the apartment by itself. And bored dogs always take it out on their owners. We’d come home and find it shitting on the carpet or chewing the leg off the table. No way, no dog for us.”