A Very Bold Leap (24 page)

lust then the doorbell rang. It was Steve, who’d been dropped off by a friend. He was still using a crutch to get around.

“He’s not here already, I hope?” he said. “Good. I’ve got a present for him.” And he held up a small box wrapped in ribbon.

“What is it?” asked Isabel.

“Hey! Hands off, babe. You can see it later. You’ve got to know how to wait for the good things in life.”

“Don’t call me ‘babe.’ It’s vulgar.”

Steve took her hand and kissed it with comical effusion. “Well, pardon my manners, honey-chile … I’m a tad thick in the hade!”

Apart from his limp, his thinness, and a slight lack of balance, which was caused by his skull fracture, Steve had regained his former gallantry, his boyish gaiety, and the tendency he had always shown for tomfoolery.

The door opened again and Charles appeared in it, accompanied by Blonblon.

“What’s all this?” Charles said, astonished.

“We are all so glad to be finally seeing the last of you,” Steve replied, “that we thought we’d get together and celebrate!”

Standing a bit off to one side, Céline gave Charles a timid smile. He strode towards her and impetuously put his arms around her; the next minute, the two lovers were whispering together in a corner. So intimate were their effusions that even Steve turned his head.

The party was a success. They drank two bottles of red wine and several beers and declared the fettuccine a masterpiece of the culinary art, and no mention was made of the tensions caused by Charles’s decision, at least not until dessert, when Steve, who was slightly drunk, decided it was time to give Charles a friendly warning.

“You know what they say, old chum. The dog who goes off hunting loses his spot.”

Charles furrowed his brows and was about to make a sharp response then thought better of it. The rest of the group maintained an embarrassed silence.

But that lasted less than a second.

Steve thought the moment a propitious one for giving Charles his present. It was a compass, encased in a varnished wooden box that was slightly scratched. It had belonged to his father.

“It’s so you can find your way back,” Steve explained, who never shied away from stating the obvious. “Poets like you are always getting lost. I thought of throwing in a can of Cordon Bleu beef stew, too, in case you got lost in the woods, but then I’d have to include a can opener, and the whole thing became too expensive.”

The second awkward point in the evening came when everyone was ready to leave, and again it was poor Steve who put his foot in it. This time, however, no one could blame him.

It was a beautiful August night, warm and slightly breezy; surrounded by his friends, Steve was waiting on the sidewalk for his friend to come and pick him up when suddenly he gave himself a tap on the forehead and turned to Charles.

“Damn! I almost forgot! Guess what.”

He waited for his friend to reply, and when no reply came he went on.

“My mother got a funny phone call yesterday. It was about you.”

“About me?”

“Yeah. I didn’t mention it earlier because I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

He stopped and looked up and down the street, for dramatic effect.

“Come on, spit it out,” said Charles impatiently. “What was it about?”

“It was from your father.”

His words were met by a stupefied silence.

“My father?” Charles repeated, incredulous. “Why would my father call your mother, I wonder?”

“In point of fact, it was me he wanted to talk to, but I wasn’t there. He’s just got back to Montreal, said he wanted to know how you were doing. Man,” Steve added, with a nervous laugh, “he’s got some kind of hard-on to find out what you’re up to …”

C
harles would probably have laughed had anyone told him that one day he would end up loving his job. However, after two months of crisscrossing Quebec on Father Raphaël’s coattails, and despite the exhaustion and the thousand and one inconveniences that being constantly on the road entailed, Charles adored his new life as a traveller. Contrary to his fears, the preacher proved to be an agreeable man to work for; he rarely interfered with his assistants’; work, always showed concern for their well-being, made only reasonable demands on their time, and was never slow to congratulate them warmly whenever they did something right.

The preacher was, however, a solitary individual who, except when engaged in his “apostolic” activities, didn’t seem to put much value on contact with other people, unless it was with fellow pastors and evangelists whom he met in the course of his travels. He often took his meals alone in his hotel room, although he sometimes invited Marcel-Édouard or Maxime (never Charles) to keep him company. He always chose a room (or better, a suite, if one were available) well away from those of his companions, preferably even on a different floor. Before each public meeting, he would be brooding and even nervous, often short-tempered, would refuse to eat, and would spend hours alone in his room, pacing the floor and heaving great sighs. Bringing down the Word of God from Heaven, for which he was the channel, hardly seemed to stimulate in him a sense of charity.

Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, for their parts, seemed to be amiable enough as companions, despite their tendency to dump the less interesting tasks onto Charles. But Charles considered that to be quite normal, in the scheme of things, given his apprentice status in the organization. He would gladly have accepted much worse if it meant still being able to lead the hotel
(or motel) life that had become his; he revelled in it, because it gave him the sensation of being on permanent vacation.

For the first few weeks, Charles’s job consisted almost entirely of observing his two companions in order to get some idea of the various aspects of the job: the preparation of the meeting rooms, which were usually rented; the welcoming of the faithful; the distribution of brochures before each meeting; the sale of books on spirituality (Father Raphaël had written five, and it was those that they had to push the hardest), and so on. But for some time now the preacher, having seen that Charles could express himself well, was fairly literate, and was of a sociable nature, had asked him to take on the role of press attaché. The job involved making the initial contact with the media — the local radio stations and newspapers — announcing the arrival of the group as though it were a major event. Soon Father Raphaël was getting him to run a pencil through his own publicity texts, hundreds of which were distributed in the course of his lectures, and which also formed part of his press package.

Although there were the inevitable repetitions in the never-ending stream of preachings, Charles continued to be impressed by his employer’s oratorical talents, or at least by his gift for playing the mystical tragedian. The breath of cool air that suddenly wafted through an overheated room still raised gooseflesh, for him as well as for Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, whose faces always became graver, their eyes so bright they seemed drunk.

Almost all the meetings were marked by some spectacular event: faintings, trances, prophetic pronouncements, crying, moaning, and once in a while even apparent epileptic seizures. But Charles quickly learned that the most significant moment in the meeting was when they took up the collection. This was always done towards the end, when the religious fervour was at its peak, and the take was generally prodigious.

Charles bothered his head barely at all about what happened to all that money. The important thing to him was that it allowed him to go on living his fascinating life, traipsing around to the four corners of the province with all expenses paid. Of course, the horn of plenty that emptied itself day after day into Father Raphaël’s saintly hands wasn’t an unmixed blessing; it sometimes had its disagreeable aspects. It wasn’t rare for Charles to be awakened in the middle of the night by one of the faithful in a mystical trance, or having a spiritual crisis, pounding on the door of his room demanding to speak to the
preacher — who was, of course, never to be disturbed at that hour, since he guarded his sleep jealously. It often happened that Father Raphaël would be stopped in the street by a follower in search of spiritual orientation; the pastor would always reply with patience and goodwill, but in his absence, the follower would latch on to one of his assistants, sometimes with an unnerving tenacity.

One afternoon, in Château-Richer, outside the Sault-à-la-Puce Inn, a woman threatened Charles with a pair of scissors if he didn’t bring her immediately to the preacher.

“Anyone who prevents us from seeing him is working for the Devil,” she declared, waving her weapon wildly in the air.

In two months the little apostolic team had covered the entire region around Quebec City, all of Charlevoix, and a good part of the North Shore. In Baie-Saint-Paul, home of the Cirque du Soleil, during a meeting held in an auction barn, a true miracle took place: a seventy-year-old man who had not walked for six months got up and walked! The incident made headlines in all the local and regional papers, and the preacher was asked to give five interviews on radio and television. In Chibougamau, the holy man broke the attendance record previously set by the famous stand-up comic Daniel Lemire, and his followers left the room in a far higher state of jubilation than could ever have been provoked by a simple jokester — and the money flowed from their wallets in pretty much the same proportion.

Fearful of exhausting the resources of his audiences by being too generous with the treasures of his eloquence, Father Raphaël wanted to enlarge his “mission territory.” He thought of pushing a front as far as Moncton and Shediac, in New Brunswick, and even spoke of making an incursion into what was left of French Ontario, where he had been told that the people’s fervour could be of a rare intensity. But the way had to be prepared first, a delicate and difficult task, and the subject of his assiduous reflections.

Since the beginning of his travels, Charles had been back in Montreal only three times, each time for a brief, two-day respite. One of these holidays had coincided with his twenty-first birthday. Céline made him a gift of a pretty knitted sweater, into the folds of which she had hidden a framed photograph of herself.

“So you won’t forget me,” she said with a smile that managed to combine both an entreaty and a warning.

“How could I ever forget such an adorable little squirrel as you?” Charles had replied, and he had pressed his lips to hers and held her in his arms with such suave tenderness it had almost taken her breath away.

Each time he returned, Céline welcomed him happily and, to all appearances, without rancour, and spent the greater part of her time with him. She was even allowed to spend the two nights at his apartment, a new privilege that her status as the forsaken lover had earned her, it seemed, without too much difficulty. Steve and Blonblon pretty much left the two alone to, as Steve put it, “make up for lost time.”

Fernand was not quite so considerate. One Saturday afternoon he more or less summoned Charles to dinner at the Fafard house, partly out of curiosity, partly because of his affection for the young man, and partly out of nervousness at seeing his daughter associating with someone who might be in the process of becoming a crackpot preacher.

By the middle of the meal, however, he was reassured about Charles’s mental state, although he was also somewhat shocked at the cynicism with which the young man regarded his new job.

“Doesn’t it make you feel bad, seeing all those poor people emptying their pockets just to listen to a bunch of fairy tales?”

“What would you have me do, Fernand? I have to believe they need to hear them. No one is forcing them to come to the meetings. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.”

“All the same! I think the police should look into it… I took a gander at that
Heavens Pilgrims
pamphlet you gave me earlier on … I could have written it in my sleep. It wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell. A piece of trash. A waste of trees. In other words — and I don’t mean to interfere — I think it’s high time you got as far from that jackass as you can before he ends up in the Bordeaux jail.”

Lucie put her hand on his arm to quiet him down. “I think Charles more or less gets your point. We can talk about something else now.”

As if on cue, Boff padded into the kitchen to launch a new attack on his master. Charles’s return had rejuvenated him. He’d changed from being a taciturn, apathetic, and often grumpy old dog into a young, delirious puppy who didn’t know what to do with all this happiness. Delighted, Charles
would welcome him each time on his knees with an infinite show of patience, cuddling the dog endlessly to Boff’s untiring delight.

“He’s heartbroken every time you go away,” Lucie said sadly. “It’s getting hard to look after him, I must say. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s somewhere else you could keep him.”

“Thank you so much for doing it,” Charles said, giving her his most seductive smile.

That night, Céline, curled up against him after giving him a long, passionate kiss, murmured into Charles’s ear, “I wish you loved me as much as that dog loves you.”

“You want a slave, do you?” Charles said. “Well, that’s what I am, my little squirrel. You can do anything you want with me.”

She didn’t reply, but gave him a long, thoughtful look. Handsome as he is, she thought, how many women could he have slept with in the two months he’s been on the road?

Father Raphaël maintained that his destiny in the world had been revealed to him one night when he was eighteen years old, while he’d been hitchhiking in Austria with a friend. To be precise, the light was shown to him in a youth hostel in the tiny city of Gadatz-Katapunkt. It didn’t come in the form of an apparition, no celestial voice had boomed down on him, there had been no spectacular phenomena of that nature. He had simply undergone a profound internal experience, a sort of sublime transport that had taken him more or less out of reality for three days, during which time he had not needed to drink or eat, much to his friend’s consternation. His friend had wanted to call a doctor.

It wasn’t the fact of this mystical experience that intrigued Charles — he heard it often enough over the two months — but rather the place where it had occurred. Intrigued by the name of the city, which made him think vaguely of some kind of German rock band, he’d asked Father Raphaël to write it down on a piece of paper. Then one day when he found himself in Quebec City, seated at a table in a café on rue Saint-Jean after having driven Marcel-Édouard to the train station (his two companions were now taking turns going on the road with Charles and the preacher), he had the idea of
going to the municipal library to look the place up on a map, to see where in Austria this bizarrely named city was located.