The Years of Fire (6 page)

While an emaciated Roberto spent his days lying on a hospital bed, his face blank and dark, not speaking, not even opening his mouth except to say he was getting out of the restaurant business, Rosalie searched frantically for a new cook. They were coming up to Christmas and its incessant shopping, one of the most lucrative times of the year.

When she reappeared behind her counter, Charles thought she looked older, more worried and impatient. She took Liette to task for the least little thing, not letting her get away with the smallest error. Her new cook, Rémi Goyette, was a tall man with large ears that stuck out from his head. He had a taciturn manner, an expressionless face, and a thick moustache that made him look like a Tartar. He had learned his trade in lumber camps and knew how to conduct himself in front of a stove well enough, but he sometimes came to work drunk and would turn the kitchen into a circus! One morning, without warning, he didn’t turn up at all. Rosalie managed as well as she could for the day by herself, and when he showed up the next morning, explaining that he’d had laryngitis and had had to stay in bed burning up with fever, she pretended to believe him and swallowed her anger as best she could. She needed him.

Three weeks later it happened again. This time she didn’t say a word. She began looking for a replacement, and as soon as she found one she stopped the Tartar as he was going out the door one evening, and with a perceptibly shaking hand gave him an envelope and told him not to come back. He favoured her with a tight smile, took the envelope, and bowed her way without saying a word. As he was leaving, however, he stepped hard on her left foot and slammed the door so violently that the glass cracked and Mademoiselle Galipeau, who worked in a ladies’ dress shop, spilled her tea on her lap, causing, as she complained endlessly to Rosalie for the next several weeks, a severe case of skin irritation on her thighs.

A black cloud seemed to have settled over Chez Robert. Hardly had the year 1980 begun than the new cook was seized by a bout of homesickness and decided to return to the Magdalen Islands. Rosalie found another, this one so terrible the customers started complaining. On February the 14th a cold snap hit Montreal and a water pipe burst, flooding the restaurant.
Two weeks later Roberto reappeared, looking grey and pale but smiling bravely, and, to the great delight of his wife and their customers, resumed his place in the kitchen. But his illness had greatly reduced his abilities, and after a few days they had to hire an assistant, which was an extra expense. Business, meanwhile, for them as for everyone else, was not what it had once been.

In fact, the country was in a recession that showed itself in a thousand depressing ways. The neighbourhood became poorer and shabbier as the more successful elements began to move out. Houses and storefronts became vacant, very suspicious fires broke out, and factories that had been operating since the turn of the century, even earlier, shut their doors.

There was less and less work for Charles at the restaurant. Rosalie shook her head sadly to see him sitting in a booth, sometimes for an hour or more, reading a newspaper or with his nose in a book, waiting for the telephone to ring with a delivery order and the usual tip.

One particularly slow Saturday evening, as he was watching the television suspended from the ceiling in a corner of the restaurant, trying with a couple of customers to whip up an interest in a particularly slow hockey game, she brought over a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies and set them down on the table in front of him.

“You didn’t have to do this, Madame Guindon,” he said to her, smiling broadly. “I had a big supper.”

“Bah!” she replied. “You need a few calories in you with this wind blowing outside. If you ever have to go outside, that is,” she added with a frown. “Which doesn’t look likely …”

She sat down heavily across from him, watching him attack his food.

“Charles,” she said. “I need to speak with you.”

Her serious tone made him look up quickly, his eyes wide with surprise.

“It might be best for you to start looking for a job somewhere else. I don’t have a lot to offer you here, and it hurts me to see you wasting your time like this. You need to earn money just like the rest of us, after all.”

Charles pursed his lips as if to contradict her and looked away, chewing.

“I’m serious, Charles.”

The boy placed his hands on the edge of the table and looked at her with such gravity that it made her smile in spite of her worry.

“Madame Guindon,” he said sternly, “you should be ashamed of yourself, talking like that. You should have more faith. Things will pick up around here, you’ll see. Roberto has only been back for two weeks and there are still a lot of people who don’t know that yet. Besides, I like working here. I feel as though this were my home. If you want me to go you’re going to have to fire me, the way you did those cooks.”

Rosalie took his hand and kissed it, a very unusual gesture for her; Monsieur Vlaminck, a retired plumber who had come down to get away from his wife for a few moments, was amazed by it.

But despite Roberto’s efforts, the business did not get back on its feet. Even more serious, the cook began to find his work distasteful. “It’s a killer; it’ll lead to the graveyard before the year’s out.”

One morning in March as they walked to school, buttons announcing
YES
pinned proudly to their windbreakers, Charles and Henri saw a sign in the restaurant’s window. Roberto and Rosalie had put the place up for sale. Charles stopped for a moment in stunned silence, then shrugged his shoulders and continued on his way.

“It’s best to sell, don’t you think?” Henri said, trying to console his friend. “Roberto can’t take it any more. Would you rather he worked himself to death?”

“I’m sure it’s never going to be like it was before,” was all Charles could reply.

He was downcast for the rest of the morning.

The school year ended with no further fireworks between Charles and the principal. Doyon maintained his constant and meticulous surveillance over his student, but the latter had decided to knuckle down and play it safe, behaving as well and with as much discretion as was possible for a boy of thirteen in his first year of junior high school. There were a few clashes, but
they were over things so minute that the principal found no excuse in them to awaken the full majesty and invoke the power of his authority.

Chez Robert closed its doors at the end of spring. Roberto had put aside a bit of money, and he decided to go on a long vacation with Rosalie in the Laurentians. They rented a cottage and put the sale of the business in the hands of an agent. On closing day they held a goodbye party for all their friends and regular customers; they gave out free beer and soft drinks and pizzas – the last pizzas, Roberto swore, that he would ever make in his life. There were a lot of teary eyes. Rosalie seemed tired but happy, and she bestowed kisses on everyone in the room. In his deep, resounding voice, Fernand delivered a comical eulogy to the departing couple, his attempt to turn a sad event into a cause for laughter. Monsieur Victoire took a different tack and veered off into lofty sentimentality. He stood between the cook and his wife, his arms around both, and with his sumptuous voice soon had most of the room in tears, and even choked out a few sobs himself. Charles sat alone in a corner, a can of pop in hand, contemplating the scene with a pensive eye.

Perhaps it was puberty. Blonblon had pretty much abandoned the appliance repair shop, thereby delivering a mortal blow to his associate’s interest in their small business as well. He now preferred to spend his spare time ambling down the streets of the neighbourhood with Charles and Henri, a much less lucrative occupation but one that seemed to hold a great deal more interest. They drifted down rue Ontario and hung around the Frontenac metro station, checking out the telephone booths for forgotten coins, picking up returnable cans and bottles, falling into occasional conversations with strangers, and absorbing as much of what the street had to teach them as they possibly could. Lucie began worrying about this sudden change in Henri’s and Charles’s behaviour. She confided her concern to her husband, who thundered about the house, imposed stricter rules, issued threats, and pointed out moral consequences, all to very little effect. Afterwards he told himself that the boys’ natural goodness, along with the penchant for reading that Charles still displayed, meant that things would sort themselves out eventually. On the other hand, he read
with careful attention a long article in
The New Observer
on the dangers of drugs, which their friend the notary, Parfait Michaud, had passed on to him one evening with a significant look.

Truth to tell, poor Fernand no longer knew what to think about anything. Despite his best efforts, business continued to fall off. He who had always been able to make a good living could see the day coming when he would barely be able to scrape by.

“We’ll just have to wait out the storm,” he sighed each night when he climbed into bed with his wife. “All we can do is try to keep our heads above water.”

He was powerfully affected by the defeat of the
YES
side in the referendum. A smirch on the honour of all Quebeckers, he said, and he declared to anyone who would listen that a people so in love with their own mediocrity that they refused to even ask for the freedoms owed to them deserved every kick in the backside, constitutional or otherwise, that anyone cared to give them. However, he added in the same breath, one mustn’t be too hard on one’s compatriots. Trudeau and his team of federal tricksters had trampled all over the law governing referendums in conducting a campaign parallel with that of the
NO
camp; the law allowed each camp to spend no more than two million, two hundred thousand dollars on its campaign, but Ottawa had spent an additional seventeen million urging Quebeckers to vote
NO
! Why had the party simply denounced the fact without doing anything about it? Why hadn’t they laid the thing out before a commission of inquiry? Appealed to international authorities? Held a new referendum, this time one with a real chance of winning? But no! Instead, everyone simply sank into a stupid and humiliating depression, wanting nothing more than to be left alone to forget about it, at any price, and to give themselves over to all kinds of stupidities. What a bunch of potato-heads!

Despite his criticisms of the Quebec government’s strategies, Fernand had worked his tail off during the campaign, partly out of loyalty to the cause, but also as a way of taking his mind off his own financial difficulties, which nonetheless made him bitter and kept him awake at night. He went
door to door, organized kitchen meetings, spent entire nights on the telephone conducting polls or trying to convince voters to vote
YES
; a huge
YES
sign hung across the front of his house, and his wife practically had to throw a fit to stop him from putting a similar one in the window of the hardware store. Though no less fervent a sovereigntist than her husband, Lucie was more prudent; she warned him against making his political convictions so well known; it could only cost them more customers, and the Lord knew that was the last thing they needed!

“I don’t need that kind of customer,” Fernand replied with superb disdain.

But then the businessman in him resurfaced.

“Besides, you’re worrying about nothing, my love. When the dust has settled – and we finally have a country like any other normal people have, for crying out loud! – they’ll all come back to me, you’ll see. The law of the best quality and lowest price always wins out in the end. In fact it’s working now, as we speak. There may be a few hotheads in the neighbourhood crazy enough to spend an extra five bucks for a screwdriver at my competitor’s simply because they don’t like my ideas. But they’re not going to make me rich or poor, and it gives me great pleasure to be sending them off to suck on Pierre Trudeau’s toes!”

In early April, René Lévesque was touring the riding when he was informed of the courageous support Fernand was giving to the cause. Late in the afternoon he paid a visit to the hardware store, along with a bevy of local bigwigs.

All of Fernand’s objections vanished in a puff of smoke. He felt that that day was the most beautiful day of his life.

“Monsieur Lévesque! What a great honour!” he babbled, blushing with pleasure, when he saw the premier coming through the door of his shop.

He hurried towards the great man, hand outstretched, accidentally stepping on the foot of a customer who had come rushing down an aisle.

“Careful, Monsieur Fafard,” laughed the politician, “you might have just cost me a vote.”

“It’s nothing, nothing at all, Monsieur Lévesque,” managed the customer, wincing with pain.

Just then Charles walked in, looking for a bolt for his bicycle. He was rooted to the spot, as though he had seen a vision of the Messiah. Fernand introduced him to the premier.

“Charles, my son. One of my two sons, in fact. I also have a daughter.”

Lévesque shook the boy’s hand and smiled broadly, looking him straight in the eye, and for a second Charles sensed that he was receiving the man’s entire attention, burdened though he must have been with so many heavy responsibilities.