The Years of Fire (17 page)

Days went by. One afternoon after a biology class he waited until the classroom emptied, even looking out into the hall to make sure no one could hear him, then went up to the teacher, who was gathering his papers and putting them in his briefcase; a cigarette in his mouth, his throat
tight, his ears burning, for the tenth time rewording the question he had resolved to ask, he waited for the teacher to look up.

“Yes, Thibodeau?” asked Léon Belzile. His voice was grave and a bit hoarse, but his look was friendly. He considered Charles to be one of his most brilliant students, even if he was a bit of a smart aleck. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a strange question to ask you.”

Belzile saw that Charles was genuinely troubled and guessed how difficult it had been for him to come forward. He assumed the nonchalant air usually employed to make timid people feel more at home.

“Strange questions are quite often the best kind. What’s it about?”

“It’s about … er, heredity, I guess, or something like that, anyway.”

“Let’s go for heredity.”

“We know that if a man has a big schnozz there’s a good chance his daughter will also have a big schnozz, right? The same with hair colour, body type, shape of the hands and feet, and certain diseases, like diabetes, for example …”

“Right. We know all that, Thibodeau. It’s called the transference of physical traits via the genes. The subject is thoroughly covered, you may perhaps recall, in the fourth chapter of your biology text.”

Charles hesitated. His eyes left the teacher’s face and drifted over to a half-erased word on the blackboard.

“Is it the same for … a person’s character?”

“Ah, well now, that’s a bit more complicated, because, as we’ve known for some time, education and environment are important influences on character. If you take an Inuit baby living in poverty and transplant it to a family of millionaires in Arizona, it certainly wouldn’t develop the same character as it would have if you’d left it to grow up among its own people.”

He gave a short laugh, pleased with his example.

Charles nodded, thoughtful, but the expression on his face showed that he hadn’t found the answer entirely satisfying. He tried to think of another way to pose the question, and suddenly it came out all at once.

“What about alcoholism, sir?” he asked, turning red. “Is that a hereditary disease?”

Belzile’s eyes widened, his nostrils twitched, and he pursed his lips; the pain and anguish he saw behind the question were quite disconcerting.

“Hmm. How can I put this, Charles? To be honest, no one knows the answer to that. There are those who believe alcoholism to be a genetic deficiency, but so far I find their studies unconvincing. Let’s say it’s still at the hypothetical stage. Why, is there something worrying you?”

Charles took on a serious air. His troubled look had almost entirely disappeared, as though he felt better for having resigned himself to making a clean breast of it.

“My father is an alcoholic, sir. I mean my real father. I don’t live with him, I live with another family, where things are fine.… I don’t want to become like him, not at all. And yet I’ve been drinking beer for some time now. At first I didn’t like the taste, it even made me sick. But lately it’s like I’ve gotten used to it, and now …”

He gave a pitiful smile and looked away.

Belzile was touched in a way he hadn’t been touched for a long time. He came around from behind his desk and put his hand on his student’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Charles. In my opinion, you’re getting upset for nothing. In any case, the very fact that you’re worried about it is reassuring. And of course, if you do discover that tendency in yourself, there’s a solution, isn’t there? You could … well … exercise your willpower, as it were, decide not to touch it again. Simple as that! I have a friend who used to have a terrible problem with alcohol, and I mean terrible. His wife left him, he lost his job, his health was starting to go down the tubes. No question, he was bottoming out, this friend of mine, the very bottom.… And then one day he decided to quit, and he took steps to break the habit. It’s been ten years now since he touched a drop, and he’s been living a normal life, as happy as I think it’s possible to be in this world. Of course, you’re not bottoming out yet, are you?” he added, patting Charles on the shoulder.

“No, I don’t think so,” Charles replied with a weak smile.

A feeling of relief washed over him and, at the same time, a strong desire to end this conversation, which he now regretted having started.

“Thank you,” he said, making his way to the door.

Belzile lit a cigarette and watched him go, not knowing if what he had said had been enough. The problems that had driven his student to confide in him could very well be more serious than they seemed. Should he have got the boy to open up more?

“Charles …”

Charles stopped and turned, already thinking about something else; the look he gave his teacher was tinged with indifference.

“Don’t be too hung up about it, eh?” he said with an embarrassed smile. “At the end of the day, we’re all the masters of our own destinies. Good luck.”

Charles’s face brightened for a second. He gave a brief nod and left.

“Is that true, I wonder?” the teacher asked himself, stroking his chin and leaning against his desk. “Are we the masters of our own destinies?”

Charles lost much of his interest in playing pool and drinking beer – activities that even without his private fears had provided him with only a limited amount of pleasure. The fear of finding himself once again in the same room with his father, and worse, developing the same habits as his father, made him avoid hanging around with Steve, who took to calling him “Gramps” and “home-boy” and “a cool turd.” But he still kept seeing Marlene. In a way, he couldn’t help himself. He was fond of her, despite her crudeness, and didn’t take offence at her sluttish ways, mostly because he benefited from them. But the pleasures of sex alone didn’t account for his attraction to her.

Marlene possessed the evenness of temper and spontaneous generosity of all good-natured voluptuaries: uncomplicated, seeing only the surfaces of things, easily satisfied because they demanded so little of life. Charles liked her easy, rippling laugh, a laugh that reminded him of Christmas bells, and above all the heart she put into it. When he was
with her, he found himself resorting to all sorts of buffoonery in order to hear her laugh. In short, he enjoyed her company immensely. She introduced him to the mysteries of the female anatomy in ways that he would remember for the rest of his life. She taught him how to cook, which he would also find useful later on. For her part, her contact with Charles refined her slightly. She no longer thought of Harlequin Romances as the
ne plus ultra
of literature. She had her first taste of wine with him – an inexpensive Valpolicella that Charles had had before at the Michauds’ – and she no longer thought that men with a vocabulary of more than four hundred words were effeminate.

“I get the feeling the crisis has passed,” Fernand said one evening as he and his wife were walking home together from the hardware store.

“There’ll be others, Fernand, don’t worry. No one becomes a man in six months …”

Without knowing it, Wilfrid Thibodeau had had a salutary effect on his son. But in a short while, and again without his being aware of it, he was going to plunge him into a real horror show.

S
everal months went by. One night, in July 1982, after his last delivery for the pharmacy, Charles helped Henri Lalancette decant two litres of port dregs into small vials. The pharmacist had procured the dregs through his acquaintance with the director of a laboratory run by the Liquor Control Board of Quebec, and he was going to make use of them in a series of (according to him, in any case) definitive experiments. Afterwards, Charles left to meet Blonblon at the Frontenac metro station, and the two young men sat for a moment on a bench by the entrance, enjoying the delicious freshness of the air settling over the city after a blistering, completely still day, a day when even the idea of doing anything made sweat roll down the middle of one’s back.

An old, partly crippled man appeared, looking stern and solemn in a black suit and tie, and began hobbling across the square as though walking barefoot on hot coals. Charles leaned towards his friend and whispered something, and Blonblon burst out laughing. Realizing that they were laughing at him, the man stopped and gave them a withering look, and they laughed again, although more quietly this time. Then Blonblon suggested they watch
Apocalypse Now
on television; his father had just had air-conditioning installed in their living room.

Both of them were going through a bad patch. Blonblon had split up with Caroline two months before and was wallowing in prideful solitude, obstinately refusing to say a word about the cause of their breakup, despite
the fact that he had heard so many of Charles’s confidences. Charles was still seeing Marlene, off and on, but less and less. They had grown tired of each other; she had quit school and was working as a cashier in a Provigo supermarket, spending her time picking up clerks and customers. Charles had gone out with two or three other girls from school, but for the moment he preferred being alone, dreaming of the ideal woman.

He hardly saw Steve at all any more. Steve’s family had moved to Pointe-Saint-Charles at the beginning of the summer, and it looked as though the day was fast approaching when they would be total strangers, with nothing whatsoever to say to each other.

Since the film wasn’t coming on until late, Charles convinced his friend to take the metro with him to McGill Street, to a bookstore called the Palais du Livre, where he bought a used copy of
Gone With the Wind?
that was nearly falling apart; Blonblon picked up a copy of René Ducharme’s
The Swallower Swallowed
, which Charles had praised to the skies.

The film lasted until one in the morning, and left them in such a disturbed state of mind that they sat talking in the little park in front of Blonblon’s building until two-thirty. Charles walked home whistling “The Ride of the Valkyries,” struck by the strange charm of the sleeping city and thinking with satisfaction that he would soon be turning sixteen, that his whole life was stretched out ahead of him, and that it would be filled with an incalculable number of perfectly wonderful nights like this one that was just coming to an end.

He quietly slipped his key into the lock, and closed the door carefully when he got into the hallway. There he took off his shoes and tip-toed along the corridor, keeping to the right, where the floorboards didn’t squeak. A quiet return home avoided all sorts of excuses and explanations.

To his great surprise the kitchen door was closed and light was coming from underneath it. He took a few steps down the hall and stood at the door to his own room, listening. He heard a series of loud sighs followed by the clinking of glass, a sound that was all too familiar to him from his previous life. Someone was drinking himself into a foul mood. It could only be Fernand. A faint odour of rum, the hardware store owner’s favourite
drink, came to his nostrils. What was Fernand doing drinking rum in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning?

What terrible thing had happened to him?

Charles was torn between going to bed (and lying awake all night, torturing himself with questions) and risking a conversation with a man who was drunk (the idea frightened and sickened him at the same time). Suddenly he heard a stirring and Lucie appeared, tying her bathrobe. He barely had time to withdraw into the shadows before the hallway was flooded with light as she pushed open the kitchen door. He heard her subdued voice, pleading and very worried, in the otherwise silent house.

“Fernand, come on, come to bed. Please, Fernand. What’s the use of staying up the whole night like this?”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Come and curl up against me anyway. It’ll be nicer that way, won’t it?”

“I’m in no mood to curl up against anyone.”

There followed a conversation that seemed to have taken place many times already. Fernand was unable to stop brooding over whatever it was that was tormenting him, and his bitterness continued to increase. Charles was riveted to the spot. Time stopped. How long did he stay there in the darkness, his eyes unfocused, his mouth trembling, trying to figure out what was going on? Ten minutes? Thirty?

Gradually, through the snippets of conversation he could overhear, he was able to piece the story together.

As if Fernand didn’t have enough to worry about, a new problem had appeared, one much bigger than all the rest. Bigger and more appalling, because Charles was involved in it, in a way – a horrible way.

Wilfrid Thibodeau had gone to see Fernand two weeks before to ask him for more money. He hadn’t worked in months and he was saddled with debts. The brief confrontation had taken place in the small warehouse beside the hardware store. Furious, Fernand had shown Thibodeau the door, and Thibodeau had threatened him: “I’ll give you some time to think it over, my friend,” he had said coldly, “but if you want my advice, you’d be wise to take out a lot of insurance on this place.”