sadness everywhere, as though it were tethered to his forehead. Fernande was his second wife, with the exception of a few casual cohabitations. Mature and deeply wrinkled, yet just recovering from childbirth, she snuggled up to him on the seat, beer squeezed between her thighs in the mild evening. They looked like a pair of teenagers heading to the drive –in. A raft of colourful children dangled over the side in the back as the tires rolled over the gravel. Many of the kids belonged to César, who still wasn’t thinking of abstaining from the pleasures of procreation. The others, snatched from bad mothers whose breasts spurted more alcohol than milk, had been placed in the couple’s good care. Flamand’s reputation for abstinence, and paternal kindness taken to the point of self-denial, reassured social workers.
Salomé appeared calm and introverted amid the noisy fray. Dressed all in red, she was shy and anxious, averting her eyes. Her sisters, half-sisters, brothers, and half-brothers, a howling swarm, swept through the entire store. The smallest ones, unsure and incredibly cute, jolted along the aisle in short, hasty, and conquering strides. Flamand and his wife wandered amid this brood with indulgent smiles. All they wanted was to linger tenderly. They had all the time in the world while the Old Man taunted them amicably, “Hail! Hail César! Hail Fernande!”
They were the only Indians that Benoît and the Old Man saw as not covered in war paint. This laudable effort at tolerance was mainly due to the austere Aboriginal’s tacit vow of sobriety. As well, Flamand was fond of Benoît, perhaps because of his morbid dolorism, and respected the Old Man, since that pale morning when, suspenders dangling, the latter had gone to pick up his son, back riddled with .303 bullets, in front of the hotel. Without ever recognizing it openly, Flamand was deeply grateful to the Old Man for having spontaneously performed the gruesome task.
Though he’d forsaken the bottle, you could see at first glance that César Flamand had drunk a great deal, to the point of saturating his yellowish flesh, and that before stopping completely, he’d had to go to the bottom of things, to where truth and horror lie. Whenever Flamand spoke, you always took a few seconds, at first, unsure whether that chain of imperceptible chin movements corresponded to a living tongue.
As soon as the mercury climbed a few degrees, the sale of Mister Freezes increased by leaps and bounds. It’s crazy how much I’d sell of this frozen pasteurized water(as specified on the product label). I expected the parent company to send me a bonus at any moment. The craving for something cold spread among the young people, each wanting a small column of ice wrapped in cellophane. And Flamand, following the customary protests, would take grumpy pleasure in organizing the distribution. Salomé deliberately leaned on the fridge, where she remained still, literally seated on the supply of Mister Freezes. With a glimmer of defiance in her eyes, she waited for me to feign pushing her to tumble down gracefully. My fingers became several stems running aground. She again hoisted herself to the same spot, staring at me unexpectedly, pensively sucking her colour crystals, oblivious to the awful insolence of the purple stick liquefying in her mouth. Flamand coughed up the cash.
Rounds of Mister Freezes wouldn’t have been complete without Admiral Nelson. He’d burst into the premises, inquisitive, as though he’d been able to sniff the chemical colourings from a distance. Little girls made fun of him, but he paid no attention and made do with claiming his share. Dealing with other humans was painful to him.
Admiral Nelson was a solitary boy, already accustomed to the minimal compassion the world offered him. He was a young Indian, about 10 years old, cheerful as the devil but able to be serious. Afflicted with a harelip, he chattered like a magpie and looked like a squirrel: he was prescient and nervous. Since he was called Nelson, his surname had followed quite naturally. His infirmity made speaking difficult, and you had to go up to him and lean over somewhat to make sure you got everything. Contrary to a majority of brothers, sisters, and cousins, Nelson had plans for the future and, each winter, on hills covered in grey pine, he trapped martens to be able to afford his dreams. He wanted to become an engineer, get his pilots licence, and buy a hydroplane. Sometimes the Old Man would vaguely encourage his aspirations. This kind of acceptance of the rules pleased him.
Young girls from the band got into the habit of surrounding the store each night, a venue more respectable than the hotel after all. The Old Man, filled with impartial clairvoyance, suggested that they came to check out some new guy, evaluate the merchandise, as it were. They’d set out from Flamand’s cabin beside the lake after supper, moving as a group along the railway, leaving it near the overpass, landing on the Outfitters like a volley of birds. Their arrival terrified Benoît, who wasn’t the most sociable individual in such circumstances. His policy dictated that he conceal the pleasure he felt at this feminine invasion. No guilty inclination could get in the way of his business vocation. As soon as the first skirt was spotted in the area, he quickly took refuge behind the counter, stuck to the cash register, as though he feared the lasses would make off with the day’s proceeds.
This impervious reserve undermined his popularity. Girls would finally get fed up with his grim expression and impassiveness, and I became the new focal point without trying too hard. When, from the confines of my room, I heard the shouts, laughter, and other warbling signalling their visit, I’d spring out of my lair, approaching with studied casualness, calmly going over to lean on a shelf. Their banter, interrupted by brief chases and democratically distributed blows, was quite simply dizzying. Nothing embittered the Old Man so much as this habit of cluttering the premises without the slightest intention of buying anything, of filling all useful space with the wind of frivolous prattle, often chanted in a foreign language, taking out their coin purses only when threatened with expulsion, something never really enforced since the general store couldn’t disregard its status as a public place.
Salomé’s shyness set her apart from the group. Her integration into the rest of the band, besides, was very relative: remaining stubbornly aloof from the teeming swarm, she looked at the ground, radiating a kind of heavenliness that was the antithesis of the surrounding merriment. She realized I was observing her and took refuge atop the refrigerator whose mass provided soothing warmth.
The provocative ingenuousness of the gaze the graceful shape of the cheeks the eternal anticipation on the mouth with curled lips the ebony hair the bronzed skin the indecent perfection of the face.
A precocious tendency for procreating, and the likely influence of genetic programming, determine that most Indian women mature early. Salomé was already approaching the crumbly ridge where she’d stand around the age of sixteen, and the burgeoning was breathtaking. During the peaceful nights that preceded fishing season, she opened the first breech in my vow to practice a little abstinence that summer. She gave me a taste for simply being there, after the meal, when the small troop that scattered through the store was trying to taunt Benoît. Simply being there to look at her, and forgetting she’d someday be twenty, thirty, forty, likely fat and wrinkled, perhaps a boozer, doomed to suffer the fleeting desire of empty-handed fishermen getting loaded at the hotel.
These young girls, barely emancipated from parental attention, were quickly promoted as baby-sitters, dragging along the most recent offspring of those prolific lineages. And then, carelessly displayed by their elders, the most beautiful tots in the world made their inaugural walks into the world, at my feet. They frolicked like ducklings on the old planks, rolling on the ground, wretched bundles of innocence that the social services had taken from decrepit mothers, relocating them to more stable homes. Their beauty seemed to reach all the way back to the origin, to the hardness of the egg, and I felt that if I’d been able to contemplate an Indian zygote for only a moment, I’d have experienced ecstasy, discovered the crux of everything and swallowed the core of the world.
Benoît was trying to raise a brimming spoon to his mouth.
“They’ll burn him, they’ll burn him!” the Old Man repeated, walking back and forth.
We
