The Years of Fire (2 page)

Suddenly, moving through the throng of people and the clouds of cigarette smoke, Charles saw a beautiful, young, black girl of about fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a black leather miniskirt and a blouse the colour of liquid aluminum, with a black spiderweb pattern over her incredible breasts. His astonished eyes didn’t know where to come to rest: on her aristocratic face, illuminated by angelic eyes the whites of which seemed almost phosphorescent? On her legs, which were long and fine and magnificently bronzed in the caressing light? On her feet, with their mauve toenails encased in black, high-heeled sandals? On her supple, mobile waist? On her hips, her forehead, her slightly red-tinted hair? Adopting a vaguely disdainful air, she moved with regal slowness through the crowd like a goddess risen from the sacred depths of the jungle for the sole purpose of being admired for her beauty in the dust of Faubourg-à-la-Mélasse.

Charles was thunderstruck. He stood with his mouth hanging open as though he had seen a ghost, staring at her with such intensity that Steve
elbowed him in the ribs, worried that he would draw unfavourable attention from the high-schoolers. Charles hardly noticed. For the first time in his life he had seen Woman, the Great Temptress, the bulging Cornucopia from which flowed the water that turned the great wheels of life.

Finally, fearing trouble, Steve grabbed his friend by the arm and dragged him quickly towards rue Ontario. Like a sleepwalker, Charles let himself be led off without a word. Two or three times he looked back, but the black girl had disappeared, no doubt on the arm of one of the high-schoolers. What boy would be good enough for her?

“Holy shit, that tarbaby sure turned your crank, didn’t she?” exclaimed Steve, after a prolonged silence from his companion.

Charles stopped. “Watch your mouth, you jerk!” he said, furious. “She’s not a tarbaby! You’re not good enough to lick the sidewalk she walks on!”

And he began walking again, his head held stiffly and his eyes staring directly ahead of him.

After a moment Steve hurried contritely after him. “All right, she wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. I’d screw her, for sure. But did you see that blonde walking beside her, the one with the huge tits and the great ass on her?”

Still engrossed in his vision, Charles wasn’t listening. He was savouring the memory of his Black Goddess as he would hold a candy in his mouth, savouring the juice.

That night after supper he went into the garage workshop with Blonblon to help with an emergency repair job. He tried to describe his experience of the afternoon as best he could. Blonblon listened with a surprised smile, then suddenly put his finger to his lips: Céline was leaning against the wall outside the shed, near the open doorway, listening to their conversation. Charles turned and saw the edge of her skirt.

“Céline,” he said sternly.

She appeared in the doorway, her hands on her hips.

“What? I’ve got a right to be in my own yard, haven’t I? It’s not my fault if you’re always telling your stupid stories!”

Her scorn was so obvious that Charles broke out laughing. She ran off, stifling a sob.

He turned back to Blonblon, his mouth screwed up in perplexity. Blonblon sighed loudly and went back to his work.

“What’s up with her?” Charles asked after a moment’s silence.

Blonblon looked up calmly, with that look of wisdom that had always set him apart from other boys his age. He explained that Céline’s anger probably stemmed from her feelings of jealousy. “And when you are jealous of someone, it’s usually because you’re in love with them.”

“Céline? In love with me?” exclaimed Charles, stunned. “But she’s like my sister!”

“No accounting for love, my friend,” said Blonblon. “You’re in love with your Black Goddess, and you haven’t even spoken a word to her yet.”

Blonblon’s revelation troubled Charles for several minutes. Then he told Blonblon that for all his philosophy he didn’t know what he was talking about. How could a little eleven-year-old girl fall in love with a boy of thirteen?

When he saw Céline again that evening, she seemed to have forgotten the scene at the garage. She barely paid attention to him at all. He decided that Blonblon was wrong and that he, Charles, was right. He finished his history homework, breezed through his math (with only middling success), and took his evening shower. In the warm, stinging water he gave himself the kind of treatment he would have liked to have enjoyed with the beautiful black girl.

The next day he was at his post on rue Fullum, ready to worship the Goddess. He barely caught a glimpse of her before she moved off with a group of other girls. The next time he took Henri with him, having let him in on the fact that he’d fallen head over heels for Black Beauty; Steve had refused to go because he found it too risky. But the Goddess didn’t appear. Several days went by. Sometimes he saw her, sometimes he didn’t. His frustratingly Platonic love made him walk around with eyes like a mooncalf. He stood off by himself in secluded places, hands in pockets, lost in reverie,
sighing deeply, counting the hours that separated him from Linda (he had managed to find out her first name). Among his other faults, Steve Lachapelle was also a leaky bucket when it came to confidences, and soon everyone at school was making fun of Charles’s passion. A few well-aimed punches kept most of them at bay.

Finally, one afternoon, his perseverance as a love-starved puppy drew the attention of two high school students. They crossed the street and asked him what newspaper he worked for. Charles opened his mouth, uttered two or three inarticulate sounds, and took off, but not before receiving a solid kick that left a large bruise on his buttock. The incident put a stop to his long-distance, anonymous idolatry.

Two weeks later, Charles came face to face with the beautiful Linda as he was coming out of a grocery store.

He stood stock-still, blocking the doorway, a bag of groceries in his arms, too enchanted to speak.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Black Beauty asked in surprise.

His face felt blistered and his air passages became completely blocked. He looked from side to side for an escape route. Then suddenly, as though someone had come up and pushed him from behind, he moved forward, haltingly, and looked straight into her magnificent eyes.

“Because I think you’re really beautiful.”

Had she noticed him before this? Had someone told her of his passion for her, a passion that made him burst into flame?

“That’s sweet,” she said, laughing. “It’s always nice to hear that.… But you better run home and drink up your soup, little guy. You still got some growing to do. Maybe we’ll meet again in a couple of years …”

Still laughing, but with a gentle, tender laugh that made her look more beautiful than ever, she patted him on the shoulder and continued into the grocery store. Charles took off at a run, both delighted and humiliated. He never spoke of this encounter to anyone. And the few times he saw Linda after that, he made a point of avoiding her.
Charles excelled in all his subjects except mathematics, in which his performance was only mediocre. In November, at the suggestion of his French teacher, Jean-René Dupras, he began tutoring two of his fellow students, Steve Lachapelle and Olivier Giammatteo, both of whom delighted in torturing both spelling and syntax and were well on their way to the ambivalent land of illiteracy. It was known as the “help with homework” system, based on the observation that the transfer of knowledge often went more smoothly between members of the same peer group, who spoke more or less the same language, than when it came down from above, and it usually produced excellent results. The sessions took place during the lunch hour or after class and were entirely voluntary.

Charles was proud of his new role. He put a lot of effort into it and showed himself to be a good teacher. His skill was highly appreciated by his fellow students as well as by the faculty. Beneath his flippant exterior there lurked a seriousness not often found in thirteen-year-olds, especially those who had gone through as many difficult experiences as Charles had.

After several weeks the number of errors in Lachapelle’s and Giammatteo’s homework began to decrease to the point that they were actually fewer than the total number of words they had written. This was hailed as a vast improvement.

However, it was because of this generous assistance that Charles was to undergo a painfully humiliating experience.

At the tail end of one afternoon the trio was working away in a classroom. They’d been going at it for half an hour when Olivier Giammatteo, brought to the end of his tether by the rules of agreement of past participles, decided to break a different set of rules by lighting up a cigarette. He even succeeded in convincing his two colleagues to join him; Charles did so mostly to stay on his good side.

That was the moment destiny decided to bring Robert-Aimé Doyon onto the scene. The principal’s infallible sense of smell immediately detected the forbidden odour. He opened the door of the classroom, surprised the culprits, and, his face brick-red, ejected them from the building. In a few harsh, clipped words he ordered them to appear in his office the
first thing next day. The affair, it seemed, had assumed in his mind the proportions of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or the October Crisis.

The next morning the three students were subjected to a long sermon on the cumulative effects of nicotine and insubordination and were ordered to spend the next three afternoons, from four o’clock until six, cleaning out the school basement, which was a junk heap of dusty, useless items that the caretaker had never found the time to chuck into the garbage bin.

Robert-Aimé Doyon had always believed in combining the requirements of discipline with administrative efficiency.

On the second day, Steve Lachapelle, between a sneeze and a fit of coughing, stumbled on an old cardboard box jammed between two eviscerated desks. It contained books.

“Hey, Thibodeau! Look at this! I found something for you!”

Charles looked in the box and took out the books. Along with stacks of old health manuals and moral guides for Catholic youth, he found an illustrated edition of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
, the complete plays of Corneille (in two volumes), a copy of
The Other World, or The States and Empires of the Moon
by Cyrano de Bergerac, and
The Comic Novel
by Scarron. Except for the first, most of the titles meant little to him. After flipping through them, however, he set them aside to take home, assuming that they, like everything else in the basement, were meant to be thrown out.

Fifteen minutes after the three students had left, Robert-Aimé Doyon went down into the basement to inspect their work. His eye fell on the cardboard box, which they had placed on a pile of old boards. Curious, he opened the box and was surprised to see that some of the books were still covered in dust but others had been wiped almost clean. His instinct told him that these last had been handled, and that others had no doubt been liberated. The identity of the thief was not hard to guess. It wasn’t so much the taking of the books that bothered him as that they had been taken without his permission. Everything in the school belonged to the school, and nothing must be allowed to leave the school without official authority and due consideration.

The next morning, as Charles was entering his classroom, a student came up and told him that the principal wished to speak to him. Surprised and worried, he knocked on the office door.

“Come in!” came the muffled, imperious voice.

Monsieur Doyon was seated at his desk, his chin resting on his joined fingers. He was wearing a black suit and tie because later that morning he was going to the funeral of one of his aunts, but the effect was to accentuate the hollowness of his eyes, making them seem like a killer’s as they shot icy looks around him.

Charles stood in the middle of the room and felt his mouth become dry.

“How are you this morning, Thibodeau?” the principal asked with fake friendliness.

“Fine.”

“Fine, sir.”

“Fine, sir,” Charles repeated submissively.

“Your marks are satisfactory, or so I hear, despite the fact that you can be … disruptive, at times.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re doing well enough in French to be tutoring some of your fellow students. You have my congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure. I’m curious to know how it is that you do so well in French.”

“Because I work at it, sir.”

“Yes, of course. Nothing can be accomplished without work. It’s one of the laws of nature. Is there not another reason, though, Thibodeau?”

“Maybe because I also like to read,” Charles said, after thinking about it for a moment.

“Yes, yes, that doesn’t surprise me … I would have bet both my ears and the tip of my nose that you were a book-lover. To the extent, I would also wager, that when you see a book your head begins to spin so much that you no longer know quite what you’re doing. Am I correct?”

Charles’s face began turning a telltale red.