A Very Bold Leap (5 page)
S
teve Lachapelle had moved out of Pointe-Saint-Charles and was once again living in the neighbourhood, where he was a student the Vieux-Montréal Cegep with Blonblon. For him, the move was a practical one: his mother, he said, seemed to have wheels for feet — in one year she had changed apartments three times! Charles therefore saw him as frequently as he had in the old days. His return to the quarter pleased Charles, but at the same time it made him aware of something that bothered him more and more as time went on.
It was the interruption.
Charles was no longer living the life of a student. By leaving school, he had chosen to become a worker before any of his friends, to adopt a rhythm that was different from theirs, to live, in some ways, in a different world. At first he paid scant attention to the situation, but little by little it began to weigh on him.
Despite his best efforts, the gap between him and them continued to widen. He didn’t know any of their professors, still fewer of their friends; he no longer shared their pleasures or their concerns; most of their allusions escaped him; at times they even seemed like strangers to him. If it weren’t for his writing, he might even have begun to feel he no longer belonged in their social class.
But happily there was his writing. Being a writer gave him a certain status, even though apart from Céline no one had had a glimpse of his manuscript. Out of vanity he refused to let them see his rough drafts. Steve sometimes referred to him, jokingly, as the Scribbler, but beneath the banter and the mocking tone was an unmistakable hint of respect. One day he confessed to
Charles that the very idea of having to type more than three pages of original text gave him such a pain in his guts he could hardly breathe.
For his part, Blonblon was very interested in Charles’s project, and every time they got together asked him how “the great work” was going. In the past few years he had become an avid reader, under Charles’s tutelage, although without the latter’s all-consuming passion. Isabel thought writers were cool, noting that in Chile it took great courage to take up the profession. As a young girl, she said, she had seen a writer get the shit kicked out of him by a gang of policemen disguised as thugs. In her eyes, there was something heroic in what Charles was doing. To Céline, of course, Charles was neither more nor less than a genius. Charles himself modestly refused to accept the compliment, but it pleased him nonetheless.
On Sundays, Charles was in the habit of having dinner at the Fafards’; house, after which he and Céline would go for dessert to the Michauds’;, where Amélie, contrary to all the rules of a healthy diet, smothered them in pastries. It was during one of these visits that Charles, having screwed up his courage, showed the notary the first chapter of his novel.
Parfait took the manuscript into his study to read it, then after half an hour reappeared with a slightly embarrassed smile on his lips.
“I can’t say much at this stage,” he said. “It’s still a bit early to tell. Fifteen pages aren’t enough to allow me to form a strong opinion. But if it turns out you have talent, Charles, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
The young man had to be content with this somewhat ambiguous response, full of exit clauses as it was, and forced himself to find encouragement in it. But never again would he show a single line of his work to the notary.
He completed the first draft of
The Dark Night
(his working title) on July 14th, 1985, and immediately set about revising the manuscript. This took him another four months. He found the work exhausting. Every time he corrected one faulty or infelicitous phrase, or eliminated a repetition or a cliché, he found three, five, ten others that were just as bad. His dictionary took on the colour of an old dishrag from having been manhandled so often, and its edges were marked by a huge, greasy stain. Certain passages in the novel that had filled him with pride at first reading now seemed weak and, in some cases,
ridiculous. There were days when he was too discouraged to work on it at all; he would throw the text across the room and go for a long walk in the city, wondering what attack of foolishness had ever made him take on such a cruel occupation.
There were other days, however, when the wind blew more favourably. He would read a few pages and suddenly feel he had never in his life read anything so beautiful. He fancied he could already hear the accolades of his innumerable future readers. Thibodeau: rhymes with Hugo. He saw his photograph on the front page of
Le Devoir
and
La Presse
and
Le Journal de Montréal
, and even in Montreal’s English-language newspaper, the
Gazette
. Just walking down the street would be exhausting because of the many admiring glances turned his way; people would ask for his autograph, pay him huge compliments, and he would receive them all with a modest smile. Unfortunately, such days were few and far between. Usually he felt more like a simple labourer struggling to do good, honest work — a wall, for example, built slowly, brick by brick, subject to the inexorable constraint of the plumb line and with the back of his neck being baked by the pitiless sun.
If only he could lay his hands on one of those Macintosh 512K computers he’d seen advertised in one of the papers! During a televised interview, a famous Montreal writer had declared that the computer had changed his life; it had reduced his workload by half, given more fluidity, more lustre, to his writing style, and allowed a greater
conscientiousness
in his texts. The Mac 512K, however, along with a daisy-wheel printer, cost more than three thousand dollars! He might as well dream of being invited to a party on the Côte d’Azur!
On the afternoon of the 20th of November, during the early stages of a snowstorm that was casting a grey pall over the city’s streets, swallowing up whatever faint light that came to them from the dismal sun, Charles entered a print shop on rue Masson and walked out an hour later with a self-conscious expression on his face and, under his arm, four photocopies
The Dark Night
carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. Three copies were for his friends, whose opinions he valued (and hoped would be laudatory), and the fourth was to be sent to Les Éditions Courtelongues, the publishing house he dreamed of being taken on by, alongside Michel Lemay and Antoinette Mailhot. The transaction had cost him forty-three dollars and forty cents, which meant he would have to cut out movies and beer for the next few weeks or else rely on televised films and the generosity of his companions.
The manuscript came to two hundred and seventeen pages of double-spaced type. It represented by far the hardest, most exacting work he had ever done in his life. He had put the best of himself into it, and his hopes for it were just as high. Placed end to end, the manuscript pages would make a path sixty metres long, the length of six hundred and sixty-six cigarettes. Each line had cost him dearly; certain passages had brought him to the edge of despair. He’d had to rewrite Chapter Eight five times; it contained a love scene that he had found almost impossible to describe.
As a reader, he had come to appreciate the importance of a strong opening; any vessel that didn’t grab his attention from the start ran the risk of an early shipwreck. Such knowledge had made shivers run up and down his spine. He had reworked his opening paragraphs seven times! Here are three versions of it:
Night fell on Montreal. Stretched out across its island, the metropolis flung its yellowish light to the heavens as though returning that of the stars. Drowsiness spread from one neighbourhood to the next, and through them all blew a chill, damp October wind. Only in the city’s centre was there any movement. On rue Papineau, just north of Sherbrooke, on the sixth floor of a twelve-storey building, a man leaned out his window and, with the aid of a powerful telescope, observed a scene taking place far below, in La Fontaine Park.
“Shhh! Leave me alone, can’t you? Turn off the light!”
Leaning toward the window, Robert Cormier, armed with a telescope, was looking at something at the base of his building.
“Is it them?” inquired the woman, her voice charged with emotion.
“I think so. Damn, if only it weren’t so dark. There they are, they’re heading towards a street light. I … I think …”
The telephone rang.
“Don’t you dare answer it!” Cormier ordered, half turning from the window.
The apparatus continued to ring in the darkened apartment, the air of which hung heavy with the odour of cigarettes and whisky.
This late at night, La Fontaine Park was deserted. The first cold weather of October had stripped the trees of their leaves. Somewhere off in the distance the weak light of a streetlamp fought off the night’s shadows. The young woman shivered and looked about her as she walked, then stopped beside a bench. A low murmur rose from the half-sleeping city. She looked at her watch and for an instant a flash of impatience distorted the harmony of her beautiful face. Another shiver ran through her. Then, hearing the scrape of a footstep on the path, she turned around. A man wearing a thick, brown cardigan was approaching her, his hands thrust into its pockets.
“Sorry I’m late,” he muttered harshly.
He went up to the woman and motioned her to sit down.
From a nearby building, someone with a telescope was watching the couple with an anxious eye.
He had puzzled over these paragraphs for two days, becoming more and more perplexed, dissatisfied, and anxious; each version seemed banal, lifeless, insipid, spineless. He knew he had to strike
the magic note
, find the words that
would catch the reader as if in a net and hold him prisoner until the final page, and set his work firmly in the tracks of great literature. He was in no doubt that the entire novel rested on its opening lines.
And yet he was in the grip of a strange form of stage fright, like a case of opening-night jitters. In version after version, two opposing certitudes took hold in his mind. The first was his conviction that
there was only one perfect opening
. And how on earth was he to find it? The second and seemingly contrary certainty was that
there was an infinite number of perfectly good ways to begin a novel
, and obviously a writer could choose only one of them. But which one?
After a number of failed attempts, he finally settled on the following version:
Robert Cormier could not recall ever having lived through such a depressing October night. A damp, somewhat cold wind was sweeping through Montreal, and the city seemed on the verge of death. The all but leafless trees in La Fontaine Park resembled skeletons. From the sixth floor, where he had ended up, Cormier looked down at a forest of branches raised entreatingly into the air for as far as he could see. Suddenly, an exclamation escaped his lips. The long-awaited moment was about to arrive. He grabbed his telescope and focused it on the park below.
He was going to mail one copy of his manuscript to Les Éditions Courtelongues. By the middle of the afternoon, Céline and Blonblon would have received their copies with the request that they read them as soon as possible, pencil in hand, so that they could write their comments — positive or negative — in the margins. Steve, for whom literary culture consisted of perhaps a dozen sentences, most of which he only partly understood, would have to wait until one of the others had finished with his or her copy and could pass it on to him. The delay wouldn’t bother him in the slightest.
