in the broth and the kitchen echoed with the sounds of our palates. The Old Man, with no request besides silence from warmed throats, was telling his stories. Sometimes it seemed as though only his voice held us in the present. Its music and false notes, distinct tempos, scores, signs and keys, its outbursts, sudden changes from low to high notes (when he’d strive to imitate Mr. Administrator’s tirades) and the intangible structure of his rhythm affected Benoît like an irresistible lullaby. This was the hour when lack of sleep tried to catch up with the manager. The young fellow had the odd habit of drinking five or six instant coffees before turning in. Strange how he didn’t realize the practice caused his insomnia; after all, it’s only a temporary concession to unproductiveness. The Old Man never slept more than four hours a night, and took pompous delight in his ability to bounce to his feet each morning at dawn. At 4:00 a.m. sharp, all the pots and pans rattled at the same time, and the shrillness of the radio took on a chorus of crows getting agitated outside: the Old Man went into action, it was his hour of glory, he reigned on a sleeping world, he made himself useful. His favourite pastime during those moments was to wash the previous day’s dishes and, since he was growing more hard of hearing, the transistor would bellow its stream of crackling at full volume, while the clanging of porcelain rose from the sink.
This infernal racket cruelly cut short our nights. I’d see Benoît nodding in front of me at the table, the amplitude growing more pronounced with the grating of the elderly human trumpet. He raised his utensil painfully, like the wand of a conductor lacking the strength to reach his crescendo. And then, oops, the spoon deviated from its course, missed its target and Benoît burned his cheek, drenching his lap with wonderful smelling hot soup; he suddenly awoke, cried out, and came to.
The Old Man would then agree to interrupt the meandering course of his reminiscence.
“Go to bed, Ti-Kid! Go to bed! You’ll burn yourself!”
But in the shelter of his pride, Benoît stood firm. And, as though to highlight the danger of any quietude, we immediately heard urgent knocking at the door. Prompted by that signal, he stood up like a robot, turning his head slightly to look at the individual who’d disturbed his lunch. Then, eager to fulfil the requirement of his vocation, he’d hurry to the entrance. Forgetting his own problems, the Old Man would then take pains to go over the flaws and misfortunes of this blasted hamlet, this unredeemable pandemonium whose case could only be settled with a good lock! Everyone got their due; whites and their cowardice, shareholders and their smug ignorance, Indians and their laziness. Indians, those parasites, flea-bitten dogs, thirsty-horned animals only interested in ruining the business of honest citizens and sullying all that Grande-Ourse still had of industriousness!
To lighten his burden, Benoît was determined to teach me, if not how to count, then at least how to use the machine designed for that purpose. I was a very bad student right from the beginning. It must be said that, amid all the uninhabited space around Grande-Ourse, numbers enjoyed a special status. Appropriate names are a luxury found only with civilization. Over there, people didn’t say at Lake Such and Such, but rather at the ThreeMile Point They didn’t refer to the bridge over a given river, but to the Twenty-Mile Point The land had not been cleared, and therefore had to be explained. The pickup’s odometer took care of place names and, obsessed with distances, people exorcised their seclusion by tossing numbers onto the map. They felt remoteness to be less frightening with those particulars nailed into it. Emptiness faded into the reassuring linearity of a collective consciousness marked with imaginary milestones.
Patiently and imperturbably, Benoît showed me the cash register’s secrets. He initiated me to the keyboards coded language, acquainted me with the joyful rolling of the till that jingled as it slid on its hinges, taught me the best way to handle crisp banknotes forming wads in different compartments, encouraged me to carefully examine the tape rolling out like a streamer from the top of the machine and, finally, inducted me into the secrets of the safe by entrusting me with its three-number combination.
“The important thing is to balance!” he liked to repeat gravely, with a somewhat sinister complacency.
Our finances, as I understood them, were based on the same principle as the black box: it was enough to know what went in, what came out, and to always establish an equivalency between the two amounts.
But the machines keys refused to line up in the right sequence beneath my fingers. I added up gaffs faster than the price of goods multiplied by their number. Each new blunder stared my supervisor in the face, breaking his heart, as he leaned over the distressing white ribbon which was an insult to all mathematical rigour. When Benoît was out of sight, Id settle on noting any calculation that didn’t add up on a piece of paper which I then concealed under the cash, without losing my cool, whispering to myself, like an incantation: Benoît will manage. Benoît will balance.
It was important to show unflappable confidence before the shrewd and paunchy humanity that regularly filed through our establishment. I couldn’t afford to hint at the least blunder in the eyes of those large woodsmen on welfare, bearded poachers with piercing eyes, brawny and griping lumberjacks on unemployment, and other friendly barbarians inclined to stinginess whenever it wasn’t a question of eating or drinking. They would’ve pulverized me for less. Id sometimes see their eyes bulge after they’d glanced the price of an item. They’d cry robbery just to test my resolve. I tried to remain calm, taking their money, recording transactions. I was gradually learning to figure them out.
They all seemed more or less cut from a pattern that took up space and was draped in abundant flesh. Midriffs were rather rotund. Local custom flaunted a joyful disregard for public health standards regarding consumption, and no restraint mechanism could’ve prevented those flabby paunches from spreading out and dangling around waistlines. Around here, stomachs were the last refuge of wealth.
Mornings when the heat wasn’t too intense. Big Ben, a Metis, would show up on the horizon above the tracks, his four limbs making short and comical rotations around his pudgy body, like a locomotive’s connecting rods in slow motion. Not much of him had been seen during Mr. Administrator’s stay: Big Ben belonged to that race of honest idlers, unable to feign efficiency only to dazzle. Though not among the heaviest of his counterparts, he did carry about an imposing and impeccably circular mass.
When the Old Man introduced me to him, the enormous factotum stretched out his hand uselessly, in an uncertain gesture halfway between a handshake and a simple vague sign, a result of his arm’s limited reach and his obvious reluctance to move his feet without a compelling motive. Quiet and modest, he gazed at the ground, its immediate view being forever denied him due to his corpulence. This fat boy, who was the perfect audience for any compulsive chatterbox, had mastered the art of tolerating the flapping of lips in others. He seemed intoxicated by the infinite variations in voice tones.
“What’s happening with you, Big Ben?”
“Um Well UhWell.”
Perhaps to confront the contradiction inherent to his being Métis, Big Ben had created his own dialect which rested on purely iterative rhetoric. It always drew on the same monosyllabic repertoire reduced to a minimum, and borrowed from a level of evolution barely beyond the grunt. This lexical impoverishment seemed perfectly deliberate. Big Ben had everything of the friendly gorilla who’d accidentally discovered the principle of mantras.
“What’s new, Big Ben, old buddy?”
“Well Um Well Uh.”
He liked to examine shelf contents, walking along the aisle, hands on his stomach, getting excited over nothing, over the tiny breeze which, filtered by the half-open door, stroked his pathetic sweat-drenched carcass, or over a bag of potatoes delivered by the train that very morning and destined for the corner restaurant’s foul-smelling fryer. Leaning with all his weight on the potato bag, he repeated,
