“With her it was easy,” Charles said simply, his eyes squeezed shut to keep out the soapsuds.
“Oh? And with Madame Jacob it isn’t?”
“Madame Minoune …” Charles said, and began to laugh, then complained that the rinse water was too hot.
“What’s so hard about getting along with Madame Jacob?” Lucie asked when she had turned the hot-water tap down.
Charles fell silent. He kept his head down, letting the water run down his neck and over his shoulders, and Lucie thought he simply didn’t want to respond to her question. But then suddenly his voice shot up and he spoke rapidly, in clipped sentences, as though a pressure-valve had been released.
“She doesn’t care about me at all! All she ever does is laugh at me, or punish me, or pinch my arm! When I ask her a question she either doesn’t hear me or she gives me a stupid answer, like I’ve interrupted her or something. She thinks I’m an idiot and she can’t wait for the year to be over so she can be rid of me. Madame Minoune …”
Then he laughed again and held his arms out in front of him, fingers spread wide, as though admiring imaginary rings and bracelets.
“Would you … would you like me to speak to her?”
“No! Everyone’ll think I’m a cry-baby.”
After a moment he opened his eyes and asked for a towel to dry his face.
“But Charlie,” Lucie went on in her gentlest voice, “don’t you think it may not be entirely her fault if she’s impatient with you? Maybe if you were a little … calmer in her class and at recess, she would eventually change her mind about you, and realize like Mademoiselle Laramée, and like me and Fernand, what an intelligent, good-natured young man you are?”
Her honeyed tones didn’t work with Charles, who lifted his head and looked her fiercely in the eye.
“She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
It was Parfait Michaud who, without knowing it, would be responsible for mending the fences between Charles and his teacher. One Saturday morning when he was in his library looking for a book, his eye suddenly fell on a bookcase holding one hundred and fifty-seven volumes of Acts of the Historical and Research Institute of Ile-de-la-France, a collection whose usefulness may have been questionable but whose weight was undeniable. It was no doubt the latter, combined with the inherent weakness of wood, that had over the years pushed the bookcase into a hazardous angle that seemed about to prove the axiom that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The most sensible solution to the problem would have been to pitch the collection, which he had never once consulted, but Michaud had inherited them from one of his former professors, a scholar whom he had venerated, and to get rid of them would have been tantamount to sacrilege. Not to mention that the Acts also performed the very useful function of concealing behind their dusty dullness a rather stunning collection of nude photographs and etchings, which he had yet to draw to the attention of his wife, who could be somewhat churlish about such things. He therefore decided instead to anchor the bookcase firmly to the wall, and called Fafard’s Hardware to find out if they sold the appropriate screws and braces. Charles walked through the door of the hardware store just as Clément Labbé was taking the call, and the manager, seeing an opportunity to rid himself of the child’s presence for twenty minutes, sent Charles to deliver the articles to the Michaud residence.
It was Amélie who answered the door; she was wearing a long, mauve, satin dress and mauve pumps, and half a dozen rings sparkled from her fingers; these reminded Charles of the heavily bejewelled hands of Madame Jacob, and a slight frown of disapproval registered on his face.
“Ah, look who’s here! Our famous Charles!” the woman cried. “Come in, quickly, I can’t stand fresh air. To what do we owe this pleasure?”
She looked at him with kindly curiosity. Her wrinkled doll’s face and her heart-shaped mouth quivered with mischievous delight.
Charles held up a paper bag. “Monsieur Michaud ordered some things from the hardware store.”
“Oh, well! You’d better take them to him. He’s in the library, third door on your left. Don’t get lost, now!”
And off she drifted, laughing merrily. Charles knocked on the door and waited to be invited in, then looked about the room with a slow, stupefied expression. He had never seen so many books in all his life! Every wall was covered with them, floor to ceiling. Two large tables at either end of the room each supported a mountain of books that rose to what seemed a dangerous height. Between them, seated in a soft leather chair, the notary smiled at him, surrounded by piles of journals that enclosed him in a kind of semicircular wall.
“You look surprised, my boy.”
Charles nodded, still inspecting the room. “Are all these yours?” he asked.
“Most assuredly they are.”
“Did you buy them?”
“Some of them were my father’s, but yes, most of them I bought myself.”
“You must be rich!” Charles exclaimed.
His face expressed such innocent admiration that Michaud burst out laughing.
“Not really!” he said. “Not rich. I pick them up here and there. It’s amazing how quickly they add up to a fairly good collection. I love books … as you can see!”
“There’s more here than at my school,” Charles said.
“Which mainly goes to show how poorly equipped your school is. In any case, what have you brought me?”
He stood up and emptied the bag on one of the tables, nodding his head with satisfaction. Then he pointed to the emptied bookcase that had held the Acts. “Lucky for me I have a good eye, eh? That thing was about to crash down on my head! It would have flattened me thinner than one of these slim volumes … and the world would have lost a great poet!”
He laughed. Charles laughed too, out of politeness, not because he understood the joke. Michaud went over to the bookcase and examined it, first on his knees, then standing up, then leaning over to one side. His tall, thin, lanky body reminded Charles of a giraffe prancing about on its long legs.
“Well, Charles,” he said, turning towards the boy, “could you spare a few minutes to give me a hand?”
It was the first time in his life anyone had spoken to him in such a manner. The request pleased him greatly, filled him with a delicious feeling of importance that was increased tenfold by the admiration he felt for the man who had asked for his help.
“I could use your help in getting these brackets in place,” Michaud continued. “It’ll save me a lot of time.”
Charles replied that he was in no hurry and he would be happy to make himself useful. The notary left the room and returned with a drill, a wooden stepladder, a tape measure, and a screwdriver. The work began; Charles held the brackets against the wall while Michaud drilled and fixed them in place. As they worked, Michaud questioned Charles lightly about how things were going, how he liked living at the Fafards’, what the neighbourhood was like, how he was feeling, how he was doing at school. He even asked about his dog, whose operatic talents he had so admired. Feeling emboldened by the closeness, Charles chatted easily and, without really being aware of it, gradually opened some of the hidden recesses of his heart. He talked of his difficulties with Madame Jacob, the warmth with which he’d been received by the Fafard family, and even hinted at the deep sadness that overcame him from time to time for no apparent reason, especially at night, and kept him lying awake in his bed. He didn’t mention his father. Michaud listened, secretly moved, pleased by the boy’s candour but not quite knowing how to respond to it. When the bookcase was firmly in place, he took out his wallet and handed Charles a dollar bill. Charles adamantly refused to take it.
“No thank you, Monsieur Michaud. I didn’t mind helping you. I didn’t have anything else to do. No, I don’t need the money, really.”
What he would have liked to have said was that after the notary’s generous help at an extremely difficult time of his life only the most heartless brute would
have taken a single penny, but he didn’t quite know how to put it into words.
“Come, come, Charles. How else can I show you my gratitude? I’m not in the habit of making people work for me for nothing, you know!”
Unnoticed by Michaud and Charles, Amélie had come into the room and was watching the scene. Only she noticed the look that escaped from the corner of Charles’s eye and landed on the rows of books, along with the slight trembling of his lips from which no sound emerged.
“I think he’s interested in your library,” she said loudly.
Both the others nearly jumped out of their skins.
“Dear God, Amélie, what are you playing at, ghosts and goblins? You’re going to end up giving me a heart attack! Well, Charles?” he went on, smiling as though he had already forgotten the incident. “You’re interested in books, then?”
“I’ve read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland … and Through the Looking Glass, too,” Charles said proudly.
“Have you? Splendid! In that case, my friend,” he said, leading Charles deeper into the room, “I think I may have a few things that would interest you. For some inexplicable reason I still have the novels I read when I was about your age … I, too, loved to read when I was a young man like yourself.”
He bent before a shelf and ran his fingers along the spines of a row of books, taking one out and replacing it, then stopping at the next, abandoning it as well with a small frown.
“Let me see, let me see,” he murmured, a serious expression on his face, as though he were about to commit an act of incalculable significance.
Amélie had come up behind them and was watching her husband, while with a teasing smile on her lips she ruffled Charles’s hair. Completely intimidated, Charles stood as stiff as a fence-post.
“Let him have Treasure Island,” she said quietly. “I just re-read it myself last week and it’s still every bit as good as it was when I read it the first time.”
“Excellent choice!” cried the notary with boyish enthusiasm. “Here you are, Charles,” he added, handing over a large volume with a slightly frayed cardboard cover. “Pictures and everything! I must have read it ten times! Robert Louis Stevenson was a great storyteller! Let me know what you think of it.”
Charles looked at the cover illustration: a young boy not much older than himself, standing on the deck of a sailing ship with his arms held in a very theatrical pose, staring in terror at a pirate with a wooden leg who was advancing upon him, pistol in hand and a fierce, man-eating grin on his face.
“Once you start it,” said Amélie, looking straight at Charles, “you won’t be able to put it down. You’ll see.”
Charles thanked Michaud, promising to take great care of the book, and returned to the hardware store, where he imagined his long absence was beginning to be noticed.
18
He worked for the rest of the morning in the stockroom, sorting screws and nails, then dusting the shelves. At noon he went home for lunch with Treasure Island wrapped in a plastic bag. When he got up from the table, he decided to have a quick look into the book, and was not seen at the hardware store for the rest of that day. At two in the afternoon, Henri poked his head into Charles’s room to see if he wanted to play baseball with Blonblon and a few other friends in the schoolyard. Charles was lying on his bed, reading. He looked up, said he didn’t feel like going out, then went back to his book. He read until supper, ate quickly with an abstracted air, barely responding to questions, and returned to his room. A few minutes later, out of a sense of duty, he returned to the kitchen to help Lucie tidy up while Céline and Henri engaged in a lively discussion about whose turn it was to do the sweeping. When his chores were done he hurried back to rejoin young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, whom he had left glaring at each in the midst of a ferocious quarrel. The next morning at ten after ten, after a somewhat abbreviated night’s sleep, he closed the book with a sigh of regret.
Over the next few weeks, thanks to Parfait Michaud, who was delighted at having kindled a literary flame in the heart of his young protégé, Charles devoured Kidnapped and The Black Arrow, both by Stevenson, then plunged into novels of lesser merit but which nonetheless fed his growing hunger. He spent the winter in the company of the characters from Nobody’s Boy, The Princess’s Jewels, Escape from Sirius, The Caravan of Death, and The Pontinès Castle, then, entering the world of Jules Verne, found himself journeying to the centre of the Earth, travelling twenty thousand leagues under the sea with the enigmatic Captain Nemo, charging on horseback across the Russian Steppes with the courageous Michael Strogoff, and marvelling at the inventiveness shown by the inhabitants of the Mysterious Island as they soared in a hot-air balloon through the eye of a terrible storm.
The seed that had been planted somewhat haphazardly by Mademoiselle Laramée was now, after a long period of germination, blossoming into a magnificent, multicoloured flower. As he explained one day to Blonblon, he was “enjoying himself in his head”; whole worlds, entire centuries, stretched out before him to a limitless horizon, and he felt he had been given a miraculous gift: he could cross oceans, clamber over frozen ice fields, traverse jungles and deserts, struggle through fierce blizzards, explore wild, strange, barbarous, incredible countries, and at the same time make the acquaintance of an infinitude of characters, all without risking a single scratch. In fact, he could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. It was total freedom.
Reading also played another role in Charles’s life: that of refuge. If, for one reason or another the world became too much for him, he had merely to open a book to escape from it. Except for the times he was at school he could make his getaway easily and discreetly, by day as well as at night.
Movies and television worked in a similar fashion, but were never quite able to bewitch him as much. Their magic was all too fleeting, and they did not fire his imagination the same way.
At first, reading cut him off almost completely from his friends. Eventually his body adapted to this sedentary life. His face rounded out, his arms became plump, an absent expression dulled the sparkle in his eyes and softened the contours of his face. He became silent and almost invisible, constantly stretched out on his bed or curled up in a chair with his nose in a novel. Reading rendered him deaf. Calls to meals or to do his homework or to come to the telephone were lost in internal space. He had quickly come to feel at home in his new family, and so he now monopolized the bathroom or the living-room sofa. The outside world became anathema to him: it was either too cold or too windy, and he arrived either too late or too early to join in his friends’ games, which in any case seemed insipid to him compared to the adventures he was missing in his books. His friends began to complain. One day, Henri even called his interest in books “girlish,” an observation, overheard by Lucie, that earned him an hour in his room to contemplate the deeper implications of language. Only Boff seemed to know how to take part in Charles’s new life. Curled up against his master, he revelled in the warmth of his body and dozed for hours, emitting occasional deep sighs of bliss.
Without actually articulating it to himself, Fernand was of the opinion that there was a connection between a passion for reading and certain forms of mental illness. It must be said that his temperament and tastes were singularly resistant to the charms of literature. The only novel he had read in his entire life – the product of one of his cousins, a secular priest in Trois-Rivières who had had it published at his own expense – had taken ten months of laborious effort (most of it in the bathroom), and by the time he’d arrived at the end he had completely forgotten the beginning. And so he began to worry about Charles. A child “who didn’t move,” as he put it, and was neither yelling nor pestering someone, who preferred to stay indoors, silent as a stone, shut up tight as a clam, was, in Fernand’s eyes, a child in desperate need of help, of the kind that, delivered as energetically as possible, would put the child into some kind of motion, since without motion the body stiffened, the joints fused together, the patient gained weight,
grew up deformed, and, what was worse, risked becoming prey to certain bizarre and disquieting states of mind that would end up with his frittering away his entire life.
Fernand’s fear of books, however, dwelled alongside a deep respect for learning. Books represented both Knowledge and Danger, the one not being found in Nature without the other, a fact that complicated everything. The fundamental thought that underlay all his other concerns was this: a certain amount of ignorance (not too much, mind) made for a simple, healthy life, not unlike a good bowl of mashed potatoes with real butter and whole milk. On the other hand, it had not gone unnoticed that even after a dozen or more years of schooling the need for diligent, prolonged study did not seem to diminish, and it was becoming more and more difficult to get a decent-paying job without having first handled an extraordinary number of books on a wide variety of subjects. On still another hand, he had also noticed that it was mostly women who were great devourers of novels (his own wife usually read one or two a month). Was Charles somehow hormonally deficient? When he mentioned this concern to Lucie, she laughed in his face, which did not reassure him in the least.
Fernand thus found himself in a state of great confusion with regard to Charles. His conscience urged him to remain even-handed, since he was in many ways the boy’s father, at least for the time being. As a result, after two weeks of observation and reflection, he decided to adopt an ambivalent position based on equal amounts of tolerance and coercion. When Fernand was at home, Charles could read in peace for an hour or two, and then Fernand would suddenly storm into his bedroom or the living room, voice raised, arms flapping, shouting in his brisk, resolute voice:
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