Before going to bed the night before, Jacques had left the carefully polished shoes outside Compartment 14. Shining boots and shoes is the job he hates the most, so he was somewhat relieved the previous evening to find the corridors of the sleeping car nearly empty. Just a few pairs, including this one, had been left in front of the closed doors. He had been able to go back to studying earlier than usual. But in the morning a Canadian army major named Templeton had brought his shoes back, telling him they weren’t polished properly, that the army would never accept such a slapdash job and that he’d have to do it all over if he didn’t want a new, official complaint to the conductor. He hadn’t argued – the customer is always right, especially when he’s wrong – and Jacques had brought the shoes to his small cell. In the beginning he’d thought of giving them back as is to see if major Templeton would notice, then decided not to take a chance. He needs this job to continue his studies and he doesn’t want to lose it.

He is now bent over the left shoe, he’s just spat on the toe which in his opinion was perfectly clean and rubs it like a maniac with his chamois square. No doubt a waste of energy because these shoes are perfect! He has put off starting the job in the hope that Major Templeton would have to walk around the train barefoot, but he just saw him in the dining car, shod in gleaming boots and more arrogant than ever. The officer eyes him scornfully before pointing to his footwear.

“These are clean boots, my boy! You ought to spend some time in the army, that’d make a man of you!”

He didn’t have the nerve to ask if shining shoes properly was the prerogative of a real man, if it was the kind of idiotic thing they put into soldiers’ heads, and he turned his back after saying that his shoes would be ready in less than half an hour.

All this pointless rubbing allows him, however, to think back to the conversation he’s just had with young Rhéauna, to the confession that had escaped him when he couldn’t hold it back from a little girl who didn’t know what it was all about. Never before had he talked about it to anyone. It was a secret he’d kept buried since early adolescence when he thought that he was the only boy to have that kind of thought, which haunts him and has several times brought him to the edge of the abyss. He knows now that he’s not the only one, that there are others who have the same tastes and the same desires as his, he has informed himself, read articles, was appalled by the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, but those he’d encountered – a chance meeting, the look in someone’s eyes in a crowd – put him off because they were never equal to his expectations. Because those expectations – and this is one of the things that disturb him most – are to a large degree aesthetic. It’s beauty that he’s looking for in men like himself but he has never yet located it. Not even once. They’re never handsome enough, they’re too fat or too thin, and it’s their fear of discovery above all that can be read in a bitter crease of the mouth that makes them ugly. Is he like that, too? Can he be spotted in the crowd because of that lost look, that easily detected panic that smells of victim ready for sacrifice? Does he have the look of the damned that he sees in others? Does it make him ugly, too? And maybe he’s not handsome enough either for the aesthetic criteria of the men on the prowl he sees now and then, even here on the Montreal-to-Vancouver train …

Brought up Catholic like all Quebeckers by parents who were always talking about God and the Blessed Virgin and with only crass ignorance to guide their behaviour, he’d been so naive as to go to confession when he became aware of his condition in early adolescence. He suspected that what he felt was not altogether normal, but would never have imagined that it was so monstrous. The priest had frightened him so much that, for months, he could hardly sleep, considering himself both sick and dirty, convinced that he was a pariah no one would ever want, condemned to be alone on the fringes of society. He’d tried to change, to direct his dreams and fantasies toward women; he took cold baths – the priest’s advice – he punished his body, he prayed to God, begging to be turned into a boy with healthy ideas, but nothing changed and what he saw when he was masturbating – also forbidden, considered dangerous for both mental and physical health by the priests – even if he made a nearly superhuman effort to disguise it, erase it, transform it, was still the body of a man.

At nearly twenty not only is he still a virgin, but he has never seen a man naked. His own body is the only one he knows and, if he mentally undresses someone, it’s always himself, with his puny physique, hollow-chested and nearly hairless, that’s so unappetizing. Only his eyes are attractive, his mother has always said so, but grey eyes, especially when they’re your own, aren’t enough to fulfill the dreams of caresses and kisses of a young man filled with odd urges.

He has even gone so far as to wonder cynically if he’d only decided to become a doctor in order to see naked men! Since he has been attending university he has studied in detail all the art books in the library, he has crammed himself with paintings from all eras – the sturdy physiques of the Renaissance, the lankier ones of the nineteenth century – he has been moved by the perfection of Greek and Roman sculptures, but there’s not one image, no matter how beautiful, how inspiring, by which he wants to be intoxicated; it’s a genuine flesh-and-blood man with sounds and smells, with amazing, unexpected reactions and an infinitely renewable capacity for sensual pleasure. But his religion and his society forbid it. He’s actually convinced that he is afflicted with a serious, debilitating vice and he asks himself every day how he’ll be able to live the rest of his life if he’s not able to change his nature.

And he has just expressed all of that out loud for the first time in two short sentences in front of someone innocent who perhaps will never even know that it exists or, on the other hand, will, like the rest of society, see it as a dangerous mental illness that must be cured at all costs, or at least overcome.

Does he feel relieved? Did saying those words to someone else, even one who is unaware of the importance of what’s going on, do him any good? He would like to answer yes. That the mere fact of, once and for all, having said aloud in an intelligible voice what has been tormenting him for so many years has rid him, even if only a little, of the anguish that is crushing his heart. But no. He is well aware that she was not the right person and that it wasn’t the right time, that it came out in spite of himself, in vain, and nothing has changed, he is still alone with his pain over the Canadian army’s pair of shoes and his shoeshine kit.

Before his confession he was filled with rage; now he feels drained of rage. Is that any better?