Oscar Read online

  He dashed diagonally across two or three streets, chased away some stray dogs sniffing at his behind, waved to people he knew, and, hearing the cascade of notes his brother was loosing from the family piano, which always reminded him of a drunken bum tumbling downstairs in a bar, he entered his house, sliding past the music lovers huddled in front of the door. He stopped at the edge of the living room to watch Brad’s fingers race across the keyboard and he was filled with joy, but also a curious melancholy. What exactly was he feeling? Both a deep admiration for his brother and already a faint stirring of envy? The pride of belonging to the same family as someone remarkable, along with the chagrin of knowing that he was not one of the elect? Reluctantly, he grabbed the trumpet and took it to his room, hurriedly applying himself to the exercises his father had assigned him.

  As soon as he arrived home, Josué took off his porter’s uniform, the jacket with multiple buttons that was tight around his neck, and the cap he abhorred, and shut himself away to take a warm bath. He then sank down into the living room armchair, where no one else dared rest his backside during his absence, to listen to O.P. on the trumpet. But as soon as he heard the discordant moan his son extracted from the instrument, he shook his head, his eyes dimmed with disappointment, and as the doors to all the rooms in the house shut one by one as if there were spirits at work, he reminded Oscar, just as his own father had once admonished him, that idle souls never get what they want, while the souls of the diligent are always rewarded.

  In less time than it takes to play a game of dominos, the neighbourhood was swarming with members of his community and its streets were redolent with jerk chicken and plantain, whose aromas overpowered the reek from the factories and excited the taste buds of all who passed that way. One summer, something strange occurred that attracted the attention of the keenest minds in Montreal. The sun, it appeared, was setting almost an hour and a half later in the neighbourhood than anywhere else in the city. This remarkable observation was succeeded by another the following autumn: the neighbourhood’s maple leaves changed colour three weeks later than those in the other boroughs. It was then noted that that winter was giving up the ghost earlier than usual; the snow melted in the streets like sugar in coffee, even as blizzards blew in the surrounding districts. Finally, when spring showed its first signs of life, the tulips rose from the ground a month before those in the flower beds in the centre of town. Bloodseed, what did it all mean?

  On a sunny Saturday afternoon, while Brad was rehearsing a ragtime that was all the rage on the radio, O.P. went out looking for his friends in the park, and his eyes were greeted by a rainbow so vivid that it seemed as if he could touch it. Dazzled by the unreal colours, O.P. suddenly stopped where he was, because he could have sworn that he saw rain in the distance, over the business district. So as to be clear in his own mind, undistracted by his friends’ intrusive questions, O.P. made his way to the edge of Little Burgundy and found that he was right: rain was pouring down on the other side of the street, while where he stood, not a drop was dampening the sidewalk. For weeks he turned the question over in his mind, but he could not solve the mystery: why was his neighbourhood being blessed with a milder climate than others?

  After several days of surveillance, perched all alone up in the park’s bleachers while his friends begged him to stop brooding and to come and play, he had a revelation. A few moments before, just as Brad was coming out of the house to take up his position as shortstop in the middle of the road, a mass of dark clouds had rolled across the sky, provoking a sudden violent rainstorm shortly thereafter. Later that afternoon, as Oscar was looking on, Brad slammed the door of the family home to head down, now, to the port, where he was working on the docks to earn some extra money. Once again, the cloudless sky covered over in an instant, and a torrential rain beat down on the neighbourhood. Bloodseed, murmured O.P., his eyes shining: as soon as Brad stopped playing his transcendent music, the bad weather returned. Oscar climbed the steps leading to his house four at a time, and it’s said that in the middle of the living room, with great solemnity, he revealed his discovery to his father and his brothers and sisters. When he had finished speaking, the family members just looked at him, with knowing smiles on their faces. Davina, his mother, who had heard everything, stalked into the living room, wiping her hands on the apron she never removed. With a fierce scowl she sucked air in through her teeth, just like the good-for-nothings who hung out at the end of the block. Are you some kind of birdbrain, or what? she asked him. Is this some kind of joke? It’s just come to you now that the All Powerful has blessed Brad with a gift that brings light into our lives? As Oscar looked on stupefied, she uttered a string of words under her breath that he had only heard before from the mobsters cruising the neighbourhood. Then she went back to her stove. But that sentence—Are you some kind of birdbrain, or what?—came back to him without fail for the rest of his life in times of crisis, suggesting that even as he stepped up to the canal, determined to end it all, they were echoing in his head.

  From the very outset, O.P. had feared his mother, who never left the kitchen other than to go to bed and dream of dishes she would prepare the next day. The only exception was on the last Thursday of the month when, with a shawl over her head that she’d brought with her from the island of her birth, she went to deposit her husband’s paycheque at the neighbourhood bank. She was not always easy to fathom, she had her quirks: she never sat down just after someone had freed up a chair, it’s well known that brings bad luck; when she pulled hair off her comb, she was careful to toss it into the garbage can right away so that birds wouldn’t get hold of the tufts to make a nest—everyone knows that can give you terrible headaches. Countless times since his early childhood, O.P. had seen his mother’s unlikely predictions come to pass, and he had total faith in everything she said.

  That is why the whole family—except for Josué, who at that very moment, in a first-class car, was handing an extra cushion to a disdainful, pouting lady—drank in every word when she came home one Thursday afternoon, awash in tears. This woman, who was as formidable as the local toughs, who virtually never cried, not even when she hurt herself, was visibly shaken. She began by telling them, short of breath, her lips trembling, that she had accidentally dropped her purse at the bank. As her comb bounced off the ground and her coins rolled to the four corners of the vast hall with its marble floors, another lady—just as absentminded, you’d have to believe—also lost hold of her purse. If Davina had been the only one to make that blunder, she and only she would have been hit with a stretch of bad luck, and things would have ended there, she said, rubbing her hands together as if trying to rid herself of a mote of imaginary dust. But two purses on the ground, did they see what that meant? While the cashiers, handymen, and security guards were down on their hands and knees, she could only foresee the disastrous impact this would have on the world, and Montreal in particular. A death-like silence descended on the room; then, to everyone’s astonishment, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with a quick gesture, turned on her heels, and went back to her stove.

  When Josué came home a few days later, the children told him about Davina’s misadventure at the bank. Josué straight away burst into the kitchen to demand that his wife tell him in detail what that “disastrous impact” was to be. But she, as if fearing the power her predictions had of coming true, chose to remain silent. Josué spent the entire day pleading with her to tell the family something so it could prepare itself for the calamities that were to befall them, but Davina went about her business as if she were deaf. Josué, for his part, decided to answer in kind: when she tried to talk to him about the children’s neglected geometry assignments, or about the men’s shirts that he’d been offered by the church, he also behaved as though he’d lost his hearing.

  One night, according to Oscar’s sisters, as Josué was listening to the news on the radio, his wife appeared at the door to the living room. In a sepulchral voice, she predicted that the worl
d was to face terrible suffering, that fathers of families would lose their jobs, that women of good character would be forced to debase themselves in order to survive. She saw them all, she said, as if they were filing past her in the living room, both working men and men of privilege sinking into despair, some going so far as to hang themselves or cut their throats. Josué remained silent, petrified. The children, hearing these horrifying prophecies, clung to their mother’s skirts. Reluctantly, Josué agreed to Brad’s proposal that the older offspring be allowed to work as long as the hard times lasted. Davina, who was not done with her revelations, confessed that she had one last prediction to share, the most terrible of all. If she could trust the abundance of porcelain roses and balsamic perfumes that appeared in her dreams, one of their own would depart this life, probably one of the children. Josué went to her and seized her hands, imploring her to find out the cause for this loss that was bearing down on them. For once she obeyed, rolling her eyes upwards and chanting invocations, calling on the spirits to come to her aid, but as she was only able, apparently, to make out a single picture in her head, she could just say over and over again: The child will die from asphyxiation, as though drowned at the bottom of a lake.

  The days that followed were filled with dread. Everything was viewed in a dismal light: a new acquaintance of one of the boys’ was regarded as suspicious, a new pastime of one of the girls’ looked as lethal as walking on the guardrail of a bridge. When one of the children went for a walk downtown, Josué asked another to follow in case something happened and he needed help, you couldn’t be too careful. If he had a day off during the week, Josué spied on his children in the schoolyard, monitoring in secret the girls’ feats with the skipping rope and the boys’ dexterity with their marbles.

  To help out, and because it paid better than his little jobs at the dock, Brad performed as a pianist just a few steps from the house, in a jazz bar whose owners came from the same island as his parents. For a while now the neighbourhood had been alive with these places, from which there escaped, along with the inevitable neon glow, bits of heartfelt solos along with bursts of applause, like a cricket concert on a summer night. It was for the most part West Indian musicians who played there, the same ones who, oddly, were denied access to the other bars in the city because, it was claimed, they might make some clients uneasy, sensitive souls unaccustomed to island behaviour, which was seen as being “too spontaneous.” Strangely, those same sensitive souls were not at all troubled when members of the community cleaned their houses or their train compartments on the way out of town. Still, you could find in the local bars West Indian musicians from the United States who, if you could trust what they said, were beleaguered even more by those sensitive souls threatening to faint away every time they spotted an islander in one of their watering holes. What is more, there was something strange going on south of the border. Preachers, made uncomfortable by the growing proportion of congregants that enjoyed the odd tipple, had started banning alcohol, persuaded that it was Satan’s elixir, put there to pave the way for His seizing power. After having convinced the politicians of the urgent need to outlaw the production of this satanic poison, they now dreamed of shutting down all drinking establishments, thereby purging towns and villages of every last drop of alcohol. That is why, when the Americans wanted to forget their cares over a glass, their only option was to cross the border and spend an evening or weekend in a nearby city, most often Montreal.

  In the neighbourhood, opinions were divided on those places. Some vaunted the creativity and determination of the musicians who played with their guts, hearts, and heads. This jazz, it was argued, wasn’t just music for shaking your bones, but was also for elevating your spirit. Had one forgotten the cricket song of which the elders spoke, which calmed them on their native island after a long day slaving in the cotton fields? Well, these improvisations were the same thing, bredda. Others, like Josué, saw them on the contrary as dens of iniquity, where the community’s bad apples could find an outlet for their morbid impulses. It was even said that all they did was to regale a rabble of hot-tempered bandits, devious pimps, and prostitutes, proving, as if proof were needed, that woman is a cat, and man a zombie.

  Josué allowed his son to work there, on the condition that he would go with him to the bar’s door and wait for him, studying one of his astronomy manuals. When O.P. and his friends passed the bar where Brad was playing, they tiptoed to the steamed-up window as if a fabulous dream were unfolding beyond it, and they scanned, wide-eyed, the feverish activity on the inside: women sat on men’s knees; cigarette girls zigzagged between round tables, showing off their net stockings; jazzmen sporting gangster hats came and went and, when they emerged for a breath of fresh air, lifted their sunglasses to wink at them; men in three-piece suits arrived in shiny cars; and always and forever, gang bosses with angular faces stamped their feet, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, making themselves scarce as soon as the police came by doing their rounds. It all ended abruptly for O.P. and his friends when the doorman burst onto the sidewalk and ordered them to get lost. Once in the park’s sports stands, his friends talked about envying Brad, who was earning pocket money, had risen to be a local celebrity, and could now make conquests among the prettiest girls in the neighbourhood. Oscar shrugged his shoulders and said he was happy for his brother but that that was no life for him, practising scales for hours at a time, thank you very much.

  As Brad was now performing at night, the sun refused to set, disturbing the sleep of many of the neighbourhood’s residents. To combat their insomnia, the men began asking their wives to prepare them a glass of hot milk mixed with a spoonful of lime-blossom honey and a little orange-flower water, picked up at a West Indian grocery store that had just opened in the neighbourhood. When the jazzmen came out of the bars and were greeted by this strange nocturnal sun, they gazed up at the sky, and those with wristwatches stared at them, grumbling that they had to get them repaired, while those who had none decided that while they were playing, they’d lost track of time. The women were ecstatic: the fruits and vegetables in their gardens grew as rapidly as the calabash trees on the islands their parents had left behind.

  Meanwhile, Davina’s baleful prophecies were being fulfilled one by one. It seemed that the evil had its source in the highest spheres, among those most favoured, bankers in particular. A strange vermin, ravenous and insatiable, which attacked both wood and stone, was patiently eating away at the structures of their businesses, until they collapsed like houses of cards. What is more, it turned out that by sitting all day long on their behinds counting banknotes behind iron grills, these wealthy individuals had themselves been stung by the vermin, which had somehow managed to migrate from the employees’ chairs up to their buttocks. These individuals began to lend money impulsively, their shoulders rocked by an infectious hilarity, to the point where they engineered the failure of their own institutions. Doctors put these curious patients under observation for days at a time, strapped into straitjackets to stop them from making more loans, and, after careful deliberation, concluded that they had contracted the virus of magnanimity. All of Montreal suffered the consequences: factories closed, businessmen were condemned to live in dire poverty, and thousands and thousands of workers, often after an enormous binge, ended their lives, just as Davina had foreseen.

  No one paid much attention on the rainy afternoon when Brad came home with a cough, given that it was the magnanimity virus that was on everyone’s mind. And not for nothing, because day and night, the radio spoke only of the industrialists’ despair, the workers’ joblessness, and the helplessness of the authorities. It was only when he began to spit copiously, to visibly lose weight, and to be afflicted with night sweats that his mother had him drink water with lemon juice, honey, and a pinch of cayenne. That drink was administered to him every half hour, to the point where he spent half his time crouched over the chamber pot. For a few days it calmed the tickling in his throat, and it seemed th
at the problem had been solved. But a week later his cough was back in force. One night, while Brad was coughing hard enough to break the hearts of those dear to him who were gathered round, Josué remembered having seen some musicians from Brad’s group coughing, one harder than the other, on the way out of the bar one night, and he slapped his forehead: he’d been wrong to attribute that to too much smoking. Certain that he’d discovered the cause for the sickness eating away at his son, he told his wife about his discovery, while reconfirming his loathing for those places of debauchery. Davina placed the back of her hand against her son’s mouth while closely monitoring his response before concluding: He’s struggling to breathe, it’s as if he were underwater. Then she froze, realizing what she’d said, remembering her terrible prophecy that one of her children would perish as if at the bottom of a lake. She understood that the die had been cast, that the All Powerful had already determined the fate of her child prodigy.

  It’s said that over the following days Brad lost so much weight that he seemed to shrink, even to appear younger. He seemed to want to go back in time, because he no longer behaved like an adolescent, but like a child who, between two fits of coughing, pointed to an object such as a vase or a mirror, asking what it was, and inquiring about God, the purpose of our passage here on earth, and life after death. Josué, who in a kind of trance, watched him constantly from a dark corner of the room, felt as though this sickness was inhaling human beings the way one star might swallow up another. The whole family began going to church every day. They begged the Lord to spare Brad, the family’s pride, in exchange for all sorts of exemplary behaviour. They lost their voices on Sundays, singing themselves hoarse while belting out the gospels. In the room where the invalid lay, Davina had set up a small altar decorated with pictures of Christ and Brad, with incense and musical scores. During this time, everyone noted that rain was pouring into the neighbourhood at will, no longer kept at bay by Brad’s exhilarating music.