A Very Bold Leap (2 page)

“See you tomorrow, tough guy,” she murmured tenderly, kissing him on the cheek in front of the dusty window of the abandoned grocery store. Weakly lit by a nearby streetlamp, the store’s emptiness made the night seem all the more desolate.

T
he next day dawned a beautiful autumn morning. A light breeze, chilly around the edges, swept down streets inundated with so much sunlight that they seemed wider, more open. Charles awoke feeling refreshed and invigorated. He leapt out of bed and walked about naked in his apartment with an extraordinary sense of well-being. Every so often he glanced at the soles of his feet; they remained fresh and pink; the floor had been well washed.

Boff, still uneasy, followed Charles closely. He hadn’t slept well, getting up constantly to look out the windows, sniff the corners of the rooms, drink a bit of water, utter a few fretful moans, then turn his head anxiously in the direction of the bedroom door, as though expecting to be rebuked for keeping his master awake.

Charles sat at his work table — actually a card table with a fibreboard top and folding legs, sprinkled with white and green paint, which he had bought for two dollars at a junk shop. Through the window he could see the big brown dog sleeping by the rusty drum, its forepaws lightly crossed. Standing at the window on his hind legs, Boff called to it with short, muffled yips and danced a sort of quadrille. Charles assumed that the animal must surely belong to whoever lived in the next apartment, whom he had never seen and whose presence was betrayed only by the occasional turning on of water taps and draining of sinks.

He stretched out his legs, pulled up the ancient typewriter that Lucie had secretly given him the day he’d moved out of the Fafard house, leafed through his pile of notes, then turned a sheet of white paper onto the machine’s roller and typed:

That was it. He was a writer. That was all there was to it. All you had to do was want to write, and to do it long enough to produce a book, which was his firm intention. He would write until two o’clock, then go out and look for a job. What a life! He was free, completely free! For the first time in his life! He’d never guessed how intoxicating it could be, what a feeling of power it would give him! Obstacles? Bring them on! I’ll crush you like so many apple pips, one by one! Sure, it’ll be hard sometimes, maybe very hard — I’ll suffer a bit, I know that. But in the end I’ll reach the goal I’ve set for myself, and everyone will look up to me. Céline will be so proud of me…. People will call me “Sir,” newspapers will run photographs of me, and beautiful women will want to sleep with me. But I won’t even look at anyone but Céline, because I love her.

Leaning back in his chair, he lightly tapped his feet on the floor in an improvised sort of victory dance, then got up, went into the kitchen, and drank two full glasses of water; the previous night’s beer had left him with a terrible thirst. When he returned to the table, his exaltation had diminished. It was all well and good to dream, he told himself, but now it was time to set to work, the sooner the better, unless he wanted to expose himself to ridicule.

One thing perplexed him, however. He had chosen to be a writer, that was certain, but what astonished him was that he felt that
nothing about him had changed
. He was still the same person, still with the same vague ideas about what he was supposed to do — except, of course, that he had to write like a demon in order to create the most beautiful possible work. In fact, he hadn’t even started to do that; he was still fussing about with the outline for his great
adventure novel, still gathering material — his precious preparatory notes — and telling himself that a brilliant, compelling idea would leap into his head at any moment and provide him with the unifying vision that would allow him to organize his material. So far all he had were a few dim observations about life (reading them over now, he found most of them pretentious and empty), a few personal memories (almost all of them painful), a welter of notes of an erotic nature (fairly crude), and some thoughts engendered by his recent reading, most of which had been the novels that made up Balzac’s
The Human Comedy
.

All in all, it wasn’t much to go on. A few days ago, Blonblon had told him that before he could write, he had to live. Charles didn’t think that was always the case. Wasn’t writing a form of living? If you were going to create an entire imaginary world, wasn’t it necessary to keep to the margins of the real one? How could Balzac have written his ninety-five novels and short-story collections if he’d lived the same life as everyone else? He’d had to withdraw, or rather retreat, into his writing, and
from there
make his observations about life — and with what penetrating insight! He had to trust in his writing, throw himself completely and blindly into it, and to hell with the rest. Nothing else mattered, except one thing: lack of talent! Obviously, that one missing item could bring the whole house of cards down around his head. And there was only one way to find out if he were afflicted with such a terrible and incurable malady: he had to write!

So he set to work. He covered three and a half pages (he typed with only two fingers, but fairly fast), then suddenly felt the urge to get dressed. The apartment was beginning to feel chilly, since the heat hadn’t yet been turned on; Charles had decided to wait for the first snowfall before buying a kerosene heater, in order to save a bit of money.

Around eleven o’clock he began to feel very hungry, as though a hook had gone in and scraped out his stomach and spread the feeling throughout his entire body. He’d prepared for that by laying in a dozen boxes of Kraft Dinner from the local Family Food Mart, a charitable euphemism that allowed the poor of the district to buy low-priced groceries without having to advertise their poverty at a huge supermarket.

The directions, which he was following for the first time, called for a dab of butter, which he didn’t have. He went out into the hallway and was about
to descend the stairs when the door of the neighbouring apartment opened and an old man appeared, wearing a green woollen vest and a grey fedora, stuck sideways on his head. The man smiled, leaned against the door jamb, and seemed unable to walk any farther.

“Good day,” he said. He took three feeble steps towards Charles and held out his bony hand. “So you’re my new neighbour. Welcome to the shack!”

“Hello,” Charles mumbled. His face had turned pale and he touched only the tips of the old man’s fingers.

“Would it be asking too much,” said the old man, apparently not noticing his interlocutor’s discomfort, “for you to go down and bring my dog up from the backyard? He’s very gentle, no need to be afraid of him. I’d go myself, but I try to avoid taking the stairs as much as possible, on account of my legs, you see. It’s all I can do to get him down there in the mornings. My doctor tells me I should get a wheelchair, but it’s out of the question! My niece usually comes to make a meal for me at eleven,” he continued, seeming at a loss for something to say, “and I send her down to fetch Prince, but she’s not coming today, I’m not sure why.”

“I’ll bring him up,” Charles said without looking at the man.

A few minutes later he returned with the dog, which followed him obediently at the end of its leash. Boff heard, or perhaps smelled, them through the door and began barking furiously. The old man was waiting for them at the top of the stairs, and was about to launch into long-winded gratitude when Charles, to his neighbour’s astonishment, turned abruptly on his heels, took the stairs two at a time, and slammed the outside door of the building.

Charles walked away quickly, chewing his lips. His throat was dry, his heart beating wildly, and he was so distraught he had no idea where he was going.

“It’s him! He, of all people, is my neighbour! A million people in Montreal, and I have to land next door to him! If only I’d known, if only I’d … son of a bitch! And to break my lease now would cost me three months’ rent! What am I going to do, for the love of Christ?”

Charles had recognized the frail old man as Conrad Saint-Amour, the former hairdresser and pederast on whom he had taken such spectacular revenge
those many years ago, but without expunging the memory of that horrible afternoon.

The box of Kraft Dinner remained open on the counter beside the pot of cold water waiting on the burner of the stove. Unable to return to his apartment, Charles ate at a snack bar, reading handwritten messages tacked to the wall, then spent the afternoon job-hunting. At five o’clock, tortured by the need to confide in someone, he called Blonblon.

“Where are you?” Blonblon asked, alarmed at the tone of his friend’s voice. “Hang on, I’ll be right there.”

Ten minutes later Blonblon appeared at the Rivest Tavern, his hands still covered with contact cement (he’d been repairing an old Prussian teapot for Mademoiselle Laramée, his former schoolteacher, who had recently moved into one of the Frontenac Towers). Stretched out in a captain’s chair in front of two draft beer glasses, one empty, the other half empty, Charles had been waiting for his friend to join him. The latter took the seat across from him, ordered a beer, and listened to Charles’s story.

“If I didn’t like dogs so much,” Charles said when he’d finished his recitation, “I think I’d have beaten the damn thing to death with a piece of wood just to make the old bastard suffer! Ah, if only he’d croak! If only someone would grab him by his bloody scrawny neck and squeeze until his eyes popped out of his head and his lungs burst! Christ on a crutch! I finally find the perfect apartment, at a rent I can afford, and now I’ve got to sublet it and go out looking for another one!”

“Charles, Charles,” said Blonblon, “listen to me. Please. You’ve just said yourself he can hardly walk and he didn’t even recognize you. So forget about him, that’s all you have to do. Just pretend he doesn’t exist. He certainly isn’t going to bother you again; he doesn’t sound capable of bothering anybody.”

Charles leaned forward over the table, tears filling his eyes.

“It’s all right for you, you’re not the one who fell into the bugger’s clutches. It turns my stomach just to feel him close to me. I’d throw up every time he looked at me. He’ll find out who I am sooner or later, make no mistake…. And then, my friend … I don’t know what I might… I’m afraid I’d … No, it’s impossible. I’ve got to move out of that place.”

The conversation went on for a long time, stimulated by the arrival of fresh beer. Gradually, Charles was able to calm down. Blonblon was even able to make him laugh, describing to him in minute detail Ginette Laramée’s fussiness
when she’d handed over her precious teapot. Her personality had not changed a bit in the years since she’d been their teacher.

“I’ll come up and say hello to her sometime,” Charles promised. “I haven’t seen her in ages. I like that woman a lot, despite the fact that she acts like a police chief. I was thinking about her just the other day, when I was arranging my books. I even wondered if she was still alive. You say she hasn’t changed much? You know, I think I’ll get her a little gift — that should bring a tear or two to her eye. I should have done it before this. After all, she helped me at a time when I most needed it.”

The two went to the Villa Frontenac for smoked-meat sandwiches. Then Charles, having calmed down, thanked his friend with unusual warmth and hurried off to join Céline, who was waiting for him at the apartment.

That night, in a moment of candour, he told her the sad story of the former hairdresser and the foul trick he played on a little boy, who still hadn’t recovered from the incident. Céline listened in horror. From the next apartment they could hear a fit of coughing rising above the murmur of a television.

“You can see why I can’t stay here?”

Céline nodded and stroked his face. They remained quiet for a long time, stretched out side by side on the bed, which smelled of freshly laundered sheets and young, overheated bodies. Charles’s arm rested on her stomach as he dozed, a small smile curving his lips. Now two people knew his terrible secret, the two who were closest to him. Their knowing eased his pain, as though the weight of his suffering was no longer his alone to bear.