A Very Bold Leap (44 page)

“But aren’t you exaggerating a bit, Amélie? It seems to me we also write about music, and concerts, and films, and TV shows, and even about the theatre once in a while. Why, just this afternoon I was at Brigitte Loiseau’s …”

“It is only interested in such things insofar as they provide opportunities to mention money, cottages, and tits … and most of the time they do so in an incredibly vulgar way. You’re a bit better than most of them, I’ll admit, and sometimes I think you even write well, almost as well as you wrote in your novel…”

Charles smiled. “You’ve read it?”

“You never gave me a copy, but I did read it. However, I must say, my dear boy, that just because you write well doesn’t mean everything is just going to fall into place for you; on the contrary, it could all come tumbling down around your head. You are squandering your talent writing that muck, Charles. It doesn’t matter that your colleagues are doing it too: they’re just using dirt to make muck. But you! You! Every time I see one of your articles in this rag, if you’ll pardon the expression, I become so sad, so sad that I stand at the window for hours not able to do a thing…”

Charles was moved to take her hand, and this time she didn’t draw it away. He gave her the same response he had given Brigitte Loiseau, only going a bit farther; he hadn’t given up his literary ambitions (which was almost a lie), he was only working at
Artist’s Life
to gain some experience; he really hoped to work at a much more ambitious magazine and was even thinking of going back to school in the meantime.

“Really? What would you study?”

“Well, first I need to get my college diploma, then enrol at a university in literature or poli-sci, I haven’t decided which yet.”

“Do it soon, Charles. Time waits for no man. How old are you? Twenty-five, I think? You’ll get old sooner than you think, take it from me.”

The reference to time’s flight made him glance at his wristwatch. He had to leave right away in order to write his piece on Brigitte Loiseau before the deadline.

“Good heavens!” Amélie cried. “You haven’t touched your cookies! And they’re your favourites!”

She wouldn’t let him get up from the table until he had eaten six of them. A few years earlier he would easily have put away a whole box of them by himself. They were oblong cookies with rounded edges, covered with a thick layer of dark chocolate streaked with zebra-like stripes of vanilla that had earned them the nickname “stinky beasts” in the neighbourhood. He still found them incredibly sweet, but also incredibly delicious. As he was finishing his sixth, Edouard flew into the kitchen, landed on Charles’s shoulder, and gripped him painfully with its talons.

Amélie wriggled with pleasure.

“You see? You see? He’s getting used to you! Soon he may even get to like you!”

Charles thought it a good time to leave. But first he had to accept two gifts. Amélie gave him a small, green-jacketed book entitled
The Joy of Transeologic Thinking
, by a certain Dr. Uri Numène.

“This book has helped me a lot, Charles. I might even say it saved my life!”

“I’ll read it, I promise,” Charles said in his most convincing tone.

Then, with a mysterious smile, Amélie handed him a cardboard box.

“Don’t open it until you get home, when you’re alone. I think you’ll really like this one.”

Poor woman
, Charles sighed on his way back to the magazine offices.
She always was a bit odd, but now I think she’s really gone around the bend. I must go back to see her. If only her bloody parrot would kick the bucket! I’d cheerfully buy her a rosewood coffin for it
.

Drinking cup after cup of coffee, Charles worked long into the night on his Brigitte Loiseau piece, then went home, arriving just before midnight. When he opened the cardboard box, he saw that it contained the electric crèche that he had admired so often in Amélie’s Christmas Room. He turned off the lights and plugged it in: it filled the room with a bluish pink glow as
the Holy Virgin tenderly rocked the Baby Jesus on her knees, with Joseph and the donkey nodding their heads beside her in an alternating rhythm. It was a long time before he pulled himself away from this innocent contemplation.

Yes, he decided, I’ve got to get a move on. After all, in five years I’ll be thirty.

A
t four o’clock in the morning, unable to sleep, Charles decided to get up; he sat down at his kitchen table and began reading
The Master and Margarita
, a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov that Bernand Délicieux had lent him, saying that anyone who hadn’t read it, whether they knew it or not, had a hole in their head that would never fill up by itself.

He was hooked after the first few lines. How? How could someone write like this despite being sick, under the Stalinist regime, and without even knowing if it would be published?

Far from calming him down, the novel made him more and more excited. At five thirty he closed the book and decided to take a walk. Walking often relaxed him.

It was the beginning of June. The sun was just rising, and its rays were already beginning to pump freshness into the air. Rue Saint-Denis, still deserted at such an early hour, shone blue and red with a few shadows where night was making its final stand. He headed up towards Sainte-Catherine, gazing at the clock tower of the Université de Québec à Montréal, a part of the old Saint-James Church that UQAM had integrated into its new facade in order to salve its conscience, the way one would toss a coin to a beggar who was freezing in a windstorm.

“Right… university,” Charles thought with a disdainful frown. “There’s one place I’m not ready to park my butt in yet…”

An old, beige mutt with matted hair appeared at the corner and, as though recognizing Charles, headed straight towards him, limping. The young man searched his pockets and, by a happy chance, found a piece of biscuit.

The dog stopped in front of him and waited on its haunches, its gaze friendly and its tail sweeping the sidewalk behind it.

“Here, old boy. It’s all I have. Where did you come from, eh? You look lost.”

The dog swallowed the biscuit with a single gulp, then waited as though to say, “Is that all?”

A moment later, when it seemed apparent that Charles had nothing else to offer but pats on the head, the dog licked his hand politely and limped off, its nose sniffing the wind, still full of beans despite its wounded paw.

Charles continued his walk, once again eyeing the clock tower that shot like an arrow above the street, pointing towards a sky growing bluer by the minute. “Smartass!” it seemed to be saying. “Well on your way to conquering Montreal, are you? Ha! Some conquest! A scribbler for a muckraking magazine! Congratulations!”

Charles chewed his lip. Sarcasm from a tower seemed to him to demand a reply.

Rue Sainte-Catherine was beginning to fill up. Pedestrians had appeared; they ambled along, or else hurried, practically racing each other, no doubt late for work. Delivery trucks rumbled, stopping with much grinding of gears and clattering of doors. At a red light, two cars nearly collided. There was a great honking of horns.

Charles crossed the street and continued up Saint-Denis, still worked up with a feeling of vexation that, to his surprise, refused to leave him and in fact threatened to blossom into full-scale anger. How can a person get angry at a clock tower? It seemed ridiculous. Obviously insomnia didn’t agree with him! Then he bumped into a pedestrian; the stranger groaned.

“Sorry, sir, I didn’t see you.”

“I can see
that
,” the man replied, moving off without looking up.

Charles realized he was standing in front of the entrance to the old Saint-lames Church, still closed at this hour. He looked up again at the arrow surmounted by a weather vane flashing in the sunlight. How he would like to give these old towers a good shaking, get right up there and shake the living daylight out of them, or even give them a couple of swings with a wrecking ball. Why? He would have been hard put to explain his feelings.

“Hey, you,” called a hoarse voice, “what, is your girlfriend locked up in that tower or something?”

A panhandler emerged from the shadows. He came up to Charles with an unhealthy grin that showed two missing canines. He was wearing broken-down shoes and a long, bottle-green woollen coat that was so clean
and so well cut that it emphasized the ravages that forty years of alcohol had visited on his face.

Taken by surprise, Charles studied him with some distaste. The man’s long, dirty hair escaped from under a white tuque splattered with stains.

“Won’t answer me, huh?” the man went on, planting himself in front of Charles, looking at him with a watery, mocking eye.

“My girlfriend is sleeping with the verger this morning,” Charles said jokingly. “I’m pretty sure they’re not doing that in the tower. I wouldn’t mind going up there myself, though.”

“What for?”

“Just to have a look around.”

“I can fix you up, cap’n. Ten bucks and I’ll let you into the tower.”

Charles looked at him dubiously.

“You don’t believe me? Ten bucks and in five minutes you’ll be at the top. You can get a goldarned good view of everything from up there.”

By way of confirmation, the man took a ring of keys from his coat pocket.

“This one’s for opening the gate, which is right over there, on the right. And this one’s for door number J-1825. Behind it there’s a set of stairs that’ll take you straight up to the bells, even higher if you want.”

“What about the alarm system?”

“I’ll take care of that, cap’n, don’t worry.”

Charles shivered and his eyes lit up. He had just had an idea that was so foolish, so ludicrous, and yet so majestic, that he felt carried away by it.

The rubby shuffled over to the gate that barred entrance to the portal of the former church and, after carefully looking up and down the street, signalled to the young man to hurry over.

“Shake a leg, cap’n. No one’s supposed to see us, okay?”

There was a clank and then a small, creaking sound. The man quickly slid through the gate and, when Charles followed him, he closed and locked it again. The next instant they were both hidden away in a dark recess, away from prying eyes.

“How did you get those keys?” Charles asked, suspiciously.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, cap’n. All the same, it’ll cost you ten smackers.”

He went up to the iron-bound door and slid the second key into the lock.

“And you’re sure the alarm system won’t go off?” Charles asked.

“What do you take me for, cap’n, some kind of fool? D’you think I’d open the door if I hadn’t shut off the alarm?”

“Stop calling me captain. It’s getting on my nerves.”

“What do you want me to call you then? Boss?”

“Call me Charles.”

“Hey! We have the same name.”

Charles blanched. Fate was still sending him signals. But what a dire warning this was! Same first name and perhaps, if he wasn’t careful, the same fate.

“My name’s Charles Dion,” the rubby said. “But everybody calls me Squeezy,” he added, sensing that something he had said had upset his new friend and might cost him ten dollars.

He pushed open the massive door and went in. Charles started to follow, but the man was blocking the entrance with his hand out.

“My ten bucks first, cap — I mean, Charles. Thank you.”

They proceeded up a feebly lit stone staircase and soon found themselves on a large landing.

“The wainscotting room,” said Squeezy in a respectful hush, pointing with his index finger to a door with a small, square window. “Goddamn nice in there! That’s where the bigwigs meet from time to time. I wouldn’t mind sleeping in there, I tell you, the rug’s as thick as a mattress! Too risky, though. I make do with the bell tower. It ain’t so bad, either.”

They continued their ascent, climbing the stairs, some of which were metal, some wood. Squeezy began to puff. Every so often he would lift a heavy trap door leading to the next level.

Suddenly he turned to Charles with a hideous smile.

“Okay, boss,” he murmured, panting. “You’re making me earn my ten bucks, that’s for sure … I ain’t never climbed this high before.”

They were standing in semi-darkness, surrounded by strange odours, as though something from a distant, long-gone era had remained imprisoned in these massive stone walls. Huge wooden beams, beaded with condensation, rose vertically above their heads and disappeared into the gloom.

Finally they came to the bottom of a long ladder that ascended through metal hoops affixed to the wall.

“Now you be careful, eh?” Squeezy warned, a hand on one of the ladder’s rungs. “One false step and you can crack your head open real good, Charles.”

After climbing for a dozen metres or so, the rubby, groaning with effort, pushed open a final trap door. A square of sky appeared above his head. In seconds they were standing in fresh air on a rectangular gallery that hung out over the balustrade of the enormous clock tower.

In the distance they could see the Jacques-Cartier Bridge leaping majestically across the flaming St. Lawrence River. Charles gave a shout of pure joy and began running back and forth on the gallery while his companion, leaning against one of the tower’s stone flanks, lit a cigarette with a huge, gold-coloured lighter.

“This is perfect. This is perfect!” Charles murmured, running his hand along the zinc metalwork on the balustrade, then sticking it out into the wind, on which was carried the sharp scent of hops and freshly ground coffee beans.

The city sprawled out at his feet towards the west, where it ran up against a hedge of skyscrapers that the sun was turning into a wall of mirrors.

Charles went up to Squeezy just as the rubby was flicking his cigarette butt over the side.

“I want to come up again tomorrow. To take some photos.”

A greedy expression crept over the beggar’s bony face.

“That’ll cost you twenty bucks, boss.”

“Twenty!”

“Look, boss, the more we come up here, the more risk there is of getting caught. The greater the risk, the higher the price.”

“But you sleep in the tower every night!”

“Yeah, but by myself. It’s not the same.”

There followed a short discussion, during which Squeezy came down by five dollars. They agreed to meet the next morning at six thirty.

“But don’t play me any tricks, boss,” the rubby cautioned. “It’s a long fall from up here!”

The next morning, at six fifty-two, pedestrians in downtown Montreal anywhere near the University of Quebec were surprised to see a long, black banner strung across the top of the venerable clock tower, on which they could read in big, white letters:

CHARLES WILL MAKE IT … EVEN WITHOUT A DEGREE!

A few people gathered here and there. Some laughed, pointing up into the air; some looked thoughtful and wondered who Charles was; some thought it was a student prank, others that it meant another strike was in the offing; everyone found the whole thing amusing. Security had the banner down in good order, but not before the photographers had done their stuff.

And so it was that the next morning, Pierre Péladeau, ruler of Québécor, nearly choked on his coffee when he saw the banner floating across the front page of the
Journal de Montréal
.

He showed the page to his pretty young companion, who was spreading raspberry jam on her toast.

“Take a look at this, my dear,” he said. “What a laugh! I wonder what joker had the idea to …”

Seized by a sudden misgiving, he reached for a copy of La
Presse
, his newspaper’s perennial rival, and confirmed his darkest suspicions: the banner floated across its front page as well, with an equally delightful effect.