Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  “Alice,” the voice began, heavy with solemnity and sadness, reminding the mourners of the reason for their being there: “Alice, this servant of God, this faithful wife and loving mother, this tireless worker who served as a model employee to those who worked at her side, this Alice is no longer with us. Alice, my dear brethren, my cherished sisters, has gone to Heaven to prepare a place for her husband, her son, and for all her loved ones … God in his infinite mercy, has taken her to be among His chosen children …”

  Charles looked up in amazement at his father and then at his grandmother, as though to say: “Why does he call her Alice? He never met her in his life!”

  And his thoughts returned to the convoy of soldiers he’d been seeing for the past few days in the streets of the city.

  The day after Alice’s death, Wilfrid had stayed home to look after the funeral arrangements. After consulting the Yellow Pages, he’d called several funeral homes, looking for the best price, horrified each time by the figures he was quoted. Finally he found one that gave him a package that seemed slightly less outrageous. Not that he had much choice: a husband has to give his dead wife a proper burial. Charles, sitting across from him, listened without understanding much more than that the whole business was infinitely distressing and terribly expensive.

  “Let’s go,” his father said.

  Wilfrid sat him in the car, and they headed towards rue Darling, where the funeral director was waiting for him to sign the contract and discuss the final details of the ceremony. They had turned east on Ontario but were stopped almost immediately by a barricade that was blocking the road. Soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders were asking all drivers for identification. A long line of trucks, their boxes covered with khaki canvas and their engines idling, gave off the pungent odour of diesel fuel. There were soldiers everywhere, running around in clumsy confusion, rifles clattering, dashing into stores and private residences, stomping up and down stairs, staring hard at pedestrians, cracking jokes amongst themselves, and guffawing loudly. A heavy, continuous throbbing came from the sky, and when they looked up, they saw helicopters appear above the rooftops, hover for a few seconds like gigantic insects, making a deafening racket, then disappear quickly to put on the same show somewhere else.

  Montreal had been besieged by the Canadian Army.

  Charles, on his knees in his seat, turned his head in every direction, his eyes wide as saucers.

  “What are all these soldiers doing, Papa?”

  “They’re looking for criminals.”

  “What criminals?”

  “Criminals,” he spat, then added: “You’re too young to understand.”

  When they returned to the house, Wilfrid turned on the radio and sat in the kitchen with a worried look, listening to a series of special bulletins that kept interrupting the regular programming. From time to time Charles came out of his room, where he was playing by himself, and stood at the kitchen door, keeping quiet, watching, not daring to ask questions.

  That evening they had gone to Chez Robert for dinner, Wilfrid not being in the mood to cook. A strange atmosphere pervaded the place. Everyone spoke in low, serious tones, keeping an eye on the television, as though they all had a stake in the events being depicted. Rosalie had the thoughtful, vaguely disgruntled look she wore on the rare occasions when she went to mass.

  She came over and sat beside Charles, ruffling his hair.

  “Poor Monsieur Laporte,” she sighed. “I hope they don’t hurt him. As if being a minister isn’t hard enough!”

  “You think it’s hard?” laughed a young man wearing a black shirt, who lived a few blocks away and had acquired a certain prestige in the neighbourhood because he went to university. “Oodles of cash, limousines at your beck and call night and day, playing golf with all the fat cats … Ha! Laporte’s nothing but an exploiter. They say he hangs out with the mob.”

  The looks that were turned his way were so fierce and reproachful that the young man sank his head into his shoulders and didn’t say another word.

  When they’d returned to the apartment later that night, Wilfrid sent Charles to bed and went into his own bedroom. He stood for a while looking at Alice’s clothes hanging in the closet, then opened a drawer and examined some photographs. Shrugging his shoulders, he went into the kitchen to get a beer, then sat in the living room in front of the TV; there’d been an announcement earlier that the prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was going to make a statement to the people.

  Curled up under his blankets, Charles tried to go to sleep, but the events of the day swirled in his head and filled him with misgiving. He tried singing himself to sleep, with Simon on his chest, but after a while he got out of bed and quietly made his way to the living room, attracted by the murmuring sound of the television.

  On the screen he could see a man with not much hair and a thin face with bright red cheeks, sitting at a table with papers in front of him. With an icy stare, his face white as though too heavily made up, he looked like a dead man recently risen from the grave. In a nasal, firm voice he was justifying the extreme measures the government had just taken:

  “… Tomorrow the victim could be the manager of a bank, or a farmer, or a child. It could even be a member of your family …”

  Wilfrid turned and saw his son standing immobile, listening. The seriousness of the events had changed the carpenter. Instead of yelling, “What are you doing there, you? Get back into bed this instant!”, he simply said: “Can’t sleep?” Then he added: “It’s the prime minister … the head of Canada.”

  Charles remained in the doorway for a few minutes, then went back to bed. Wilfrid drank two more beers, occasionally muttering vague imprecations at the Quebec Liberation Front, then was overcome by fatigue. Before falling asleep, however, he checked each window and made sure both doors to the apartment were locked. His son heard him and the unusual precautions frightened him.

  Charles awoke in the middle of the night with a start; there was a loud beating above the house, incredibly powerful, making the windows of his room vibrate. Helicopters! Had the criminals decided to kidnap a child? And could that child be him? The sound moved away quickly, but he couldn’t go back to sleep. He was filled with a kind of terrified exaltation that made him glad they were gone, yet left him wishing they would come back.

  These curious events had an extraordinary effect on Charles; Alice’s death lost all sense of reality in his mind. He knew he would never see his mother again, that she had gone somewhere to join his little sister, she of the terrible voice, and would not be coming back, but the dark cloud that had taken over the city, the serious and strained faces of the grown-ups, the whispered conversations, the continuous barrage of special newscasts on the radio and TV, to which everyone listened eagerly despite their unceasing repetition, had somehow served to numb his childish sorrow.

  The priest returned to his position behind the altar; he raised his hands above his head, pronounced the ritual words, and everyone went down on their knees. Charles preferred to remain standing, because he could see better that way. But his mind soon began to wander; he wiggled about, scratched his behind, picked up a small, black book that was on a shelf in front of his chest, opened it, then closed it again. Behind him, Lucie Fafard leaned toward her husband and whispered:

  “Poor thing … I really wonder what’s going to happen to him now … I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut his father doesn’t pay any more attention to him than he would to an old boot!”

  The hardware-store owner thought he detected an obscure longing in her tone; he gave his right shoulder a brusque shrug, as though a flea had just bitten him, which in him was a sign that he was annoyed. His wife noticed it and looked at him, alarmed. “I know where this is going,” he said to her in his head. “You want to take him in. Out of the question! With two kids already and a business to run I’ve got enough on my plate, and so do you. Why the hell do you have to go around solving everyone else’s problems for them?”

&n
bsp; The service ended. The priest walked up the central aisle sprinkling holy water on the coffin as the pallbearers rolled it slowly towards the exit, followed by the family and friends, most of whom were coughing, exchanging suitable looks, tugging at their ties, straightening the folds in their dresses; then the doors opened wide, and that was when there occurred the event that made the strongest impression of the day on Charles.

  The small group of mourners were scattered about the forecourt when they heard a loud rumbling coming from the right, from the direction of rue Fullum; everyone stopped and looked, and all conversations abruptly halted. The rumbling continued and increased, punctuated by backfirings and blasts of horns. Suddenly a long line of trucks crammed with soldiers appeared at the corner of the street; an arm was raised through the window of the leading truck, there was the crackling sound of walkie-talkies and fragmented voices, and the line stopped with a great squealing of brakes; soldiers jumped out of the trucks, weapons in hand, and regrouped on the sidewalk. A man in a black helmet, his shoulders flashing red braid, took several steps towards the stairway leading up to the church, at the top of which the mourners stood transfixed, watching the scene unfold below them. Then the man turned his back, shouted an order in English, and the soldiers fell into tight formation, two deep, heels clicked, arms shouldered, facing the church. The lack of precision in their movements caused a long, low clatter. The trucks were turned off. Silent faces appeared in every window on the street, doors were opened by the curious, others came out onto their balconies. The usual racket that filled the neighbourhood gave way to silence, pierced only by the distant sounds of the city, a weak and confused rumbling punctuated now and then by sharp squeals, low growls, lingering frayed voices.

  Lined up in front of the church, the soldiers remained motionless, waiting for the command from their captain, who seemed content to stand staring at them with his hands behind his back.

  “What are they doing here?” asked a woman in a low voice behind Charles. “Are they going to arrest someone?”

  Charles turned to look at his father, who, looking straight ahead, cleared his throat and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. Far from being reassured by this, Charles broke out in a sweat and his calves began to twitch.

  Suddenly there was a shuffle of movement to their left, the sound of muffled protestation, and then Fernand Fafard charged forward, his face scarlet, and began descending the stone steps in the direction of the officer:

  “Get the hell out of here!” he shouted in a voice strangled with anger. “Let us bury our dead in peace!”

  A tremor ran through the line of soldiers, and the small group in the forecourt also stirred.

  “Fernand! Get back up here!” called a woman’s voice.

  “He’s flipped his lid!”

  “Monsieur Fafard! They’ll arrest you! Come back!”

  The hardware-store owner seemed already to have regretted his outburst; he hesitated a second, but then his pride forced him to continue advancing on the officer. The latter turned towards him and fixed him with a withering stare, which seemed an extension of his fine, black moustache.

  “Go away!” Fafard shouted, although with somewhat less assurance. “You’re upsetting everyone here. We haven’t done anything. Go away!”

  Calmly turning his head towards his men, the officer gave a brief order and Charles, his hands covering his mouth, saw two soldiers detach themselves from the formation, grab the hardware-store owner, and force him into the back of one of the trucks. Everyone in the forecourt shouted “No!” and began running down the stairs in confusion.

  Fernand Fafard was released two days later. Some higher-up decided that a show of military strength at a funeral was tactless and in bad taste, and the officer in charge had been reprimanded; he weathered his disgrace at the Four Seasons Hotel with a prostitute and a bottle of dry gin; his binge further impaired his judgment so that he cracked his head on the corner of a table and vomited prodigiously for two straight hours; six months later he developed an abdominal hernia and an extremely uncomfortable fistula in his anus.

  The hardware-store owner’s denouement was more complex; some considered him a hero, others thought he’d been a fool, although the latter were clearly in the minority. The Montréal-Matin published an article about him, complete with a photograph in which the “simple shopkeeper” was praised for “having plenty of pluck” and for knowing “how to instill proper respect for the solemnities of a funeral.” In the weeks following his arrest, business at the store improved by fifteen per cent, and even after that it settled down to around a steady six, which prompted the simple shopkeeper to declare to his wife and children and anyone else who happened to be listening that “it pays to stand up for what’s right, and to hell with pussies!”

  But the incident at the church had burned a black hole in Charles’s memory: he was never able to recall his mother’s burial. Alice’s coffin disappeared into the earth and into oblivion; similarly, the child’s sorrow suffocated and became lost, stealthily disappearing into a filigree of holes that would eventually result in a painful collapse.

  For the moment, however, his attention and energy were completely taken up by the need to adapt to his new life.

  Wilfrid set about putting his things in order with a great deal of determination. First off, to save money he decided that Charles would go to daycare only on Mondays and Fridays. The rest of the week he would play near the restaurant, under Sylvie’s lacklustre eye. Two or three times a day she would glance out the window or the rear door to see if the boy was still in the vicinity and keeping out of trouble. Not that she worried if he wasn’t visible, even for long periods of time; it hardly interfered with her work, although it would drive Rosalie and even Roberto crazy. They stuck their noses outside regularly to make sure Charles had not been run over by a truck or snatched by a child molester or dragged off by the pack of dogs from the little park on rue Coupal, where anything could happen and often did, or at least to make sure he wasn’t setting fire to a stack of old newspapers in their garbage bin. But most of the time he could be found in the Fafard’s yard on Dufresne, playing with Henri, the Fafard’s little boy, with whom he had formed a close friendship after Alvaro had so suddenly moved away.

  5

  Was it the (relative) solitude of widowerhood that became intolerable for Wilfrid? Did the ache of loneliness mercifully reduce the pain of losing his wife? Whatever it was, barely three months after Alice’s death, Sylvie Langlois and all her belongings moved into the carpenter’s apartment. Not that that made any difference to Charles’s eating habits; since Sylvie worked four nights a week at Chez Robert, the boy continued to take most of his meals there.

  His life at home, however, underwent a sea change. Sylvie didn’t exactly show open hostility towards him, but neither did she display any particular affection. She decided, for example, to turn his bedroom into a “television room,” and moved Charles in the room once occupied by his sister Madeleine, which was much smaller and harboured no fond memories for the child. What was more, because she wanted “to take better advantage of our nights off,” she convinced Wilfrid to send Charles off to bed the minute he swallowed his last mouthful of dinner. Charles had grown used to having things a certain way, and now everything was turned on its head. He resisted it at first, but in the end he bowed to the new regime, even though it often took him a long time to get to sleep. Curled up with Simon, staring up at the ceiling, he listened to the shouts of children playing in the street, tried to make out the television programs he could just hear coming from his old room, which the dividing wall transmitted to him with a benevolent indifference; sometimes he was distracted by the strange sighs and groans interspersed with sharp cries and laughter that came from his father’s bedroom (he could not bring himself to call it anything else).

  Sylvie also decided that he needed to change his socks and underwear only every two days, because, as she said, “she had better things to do with her life than spend i
t bent over a washing machine.”

  On the other hand, she got up every morning and fixed Charles a good meal (which Wilfrid could not, since he left the house very early to go to work). She considered it a tenet of healthy eating that the day could not properly begin without a well-filled stomach, and she would have considered it a mark of shame if Charles ate his breakfasts at the restaurant – although it would have seemed quite natural to Charles, since he took all his other meals there.

  Sometimes she could be surprisingly generous. One afternoon, for example, Mademoiselle Galipeau, the local hairdresser, came into the restaurant with a haggard look on her face. Taking a stool at the counter, she ordered a hot chocolate in a trembling voice, and after three sips broke down and poured out her heart to the entire restaurant: Mittens, her beloved cat, with whom she had shared her life for going on fourteen years, had died two days before in the most atrocious agony, having swallowed a length of nylon thread that literally sliced through her intestines. She cursed the veterinarian who hadn’t found the cause of her suffering until after she was dead! Monsieur Victoire, who owned the building the Thibodeaus’s apartment was in, said something mildly consoling, and instantly regretted it, for Mademoiselle Galipeau burst into the most wretched sobs, crying with her face in her hands like a little girl; the death of a child could not have been more painful to her. Sylvie stood behind the counter watching her for a moment, somewhat taken aback, then leaned over and began patting the woman on the shoulder.

  “Take her home,” said Rosalie, her eyes moistening as she twisted the corner of her apron.

  “But I haven’t paid for my chocolate,” protested the hairdresser as Sylvie led her towards the door.

  “I’ll take care of it, Mademoiselle Galipeau,” Sylvie told her, “it’s no trouble, don’t even think about it.”

  In her apartment, the old woman insisted on making Sylvie a cup of tea, then launched into a long list of Mittens’s virtues, which could only have been appreciated by those who were extremely close to her, since she was also shy and very particular. Sylvie listened, smiling, nodding her head and patting the woman’s hands. Two days later, after a diligent search, she found Mademoiselle Galipeau another cat, “gentle, quiet and fixed,” although it took her a week to convince the hairdresser to take the animal into her home; Mademoiselle Galipeau felt she was betraying the memory of her poor Mittens.