October 1970 (17 page)

He raised his eyes from the paper. Godefroid nodded.

“
‘The fox, you have to take its hind legs and press them against its chest until the heart stops
.' Hmm
 . . .
‘
A rabbit cries like a newborn baby. You hold it by the legs an' whack it with a hard karate chop to the back of the head
.'”

Chevalier raised his eyes from the paper to the student standing before his desk.

“I've docked you a point for the ‘an,'” he said, “and another for ‘whack.' Try to avoid using words from common speech whenever possible. I have one more question for you: did you really watch a man strangle a lynx with his bare hands?”

“Not his bare hands. He was wearing gloves.”

“He was wearing gloves,” Chevalier repeated, transfixed. “That's good. That's not bad. It's a good story. All you need is a title for it
 . . .
”

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

“A text without a title is like a majorette without a baton. The baton doesn't define the majorette, but it announces her. What do you think of
Ecce Lynx
?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘Behold the Lynx.' It's from the Latin,” he hastened to add.

“I know what Latin is. I was a server at mass. My mother says it's a dead language.”

“She's right.”

“Then what good is it?”

Chevalier looked at him with a pensive air.

“This lynx of yours, is it possible it's not dead?”

Gode opened his eyes wide. He didn't answer.

“You can go join the others now.”

But when he was at the door, he stopped and turned around.

“Monsieur?”

“Yes, Richard?”

“What's an oxymoron?”

In 1960, François enrolled in the Franciscan day school, whose mission was, theoretically, to encourage boys with religion vocations to pursue them, but to which certain sympathetic teachers directed promising young minds. They didn't have to dive into a font of holy water at such an early age, it was enough “not to oppose the idea of submitting to the influence of the Holy Spirit” to have the purse strings of the Works and Vocations Fund opened like magic, as well as the doors to the study of the classics. In other words, playing the game paid huge dividends.

For François, the main difference between the day school and the public school was that whereas formerly the brothers questioned him about his “nocturnal practices,” the new brothers were more interested in what he was reading, in particular if he was reading “forbidden” books by authors like Flaubert and Balzac who, in Quebec, were still circulated more or less on the QT. One of the freethinkers at the centre of this trafficking was none other than Professor Chevalier, whose reputation as a social miscreant was already beginning to be taken seriously by the clergy. Gode had gone into the technical stream, received his electrician's licence, and was working for the Canadian National Railway. How many workers did it take to change a light bulb at CN? Nine. One French-Canadian and eight English bosses to tell him how to do it. Gode grew tired of filling out forms in triplicate every time he needed to fart. He handed in his resignation and became a cook in a chip wagon, working out of an old Coteau-Rouge bus in Jacques-Cartier, selling “
hotdogs
stimés
.” In the 1962 federal election, Chevalier ran under the banner of a tiny democratic party that was pretty much socialist, and the collared pack hounds leapt at the opportunity to sack him from teaching.

Gode and François took to hanging around the offices of Top Step Editions, which had just been founded by Chevalier, who had been practically reduced to poverty and whose offices were situated in the “Placard,” a two-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and their offspring (one little branlequetee and two small branlequeettes) above a hardware store on Chambly Road.

Using shoe polish, Gode disguised his windbreaker and vest and turned himself into a kind of poor man's James Dean at the new shopping centre. He read all the poets: Giguère, Chamberland. At the same time, François was working his way through
Nausea
,
Lost Illusions
,
The Human Condition
,
The Plague
, and
The Guermantes Way
. In the Placard, Chevalier supplied them with cigarettes and talked to them like grown men.

“There's a paradox in Malraux's heroes,” he said to them. “For all their metaphysical pessimism, they take part in a revolution in the name of hope. Maybe revolutionaries are unhappy because they believe in happiness more than they appear to
 . . .
”

To François, Sartre was a god. Then he favoured Camus over Sartre. Then it was Hemingway, whom he had just discovered, over Sartre and Camus, then Steinbeck and Hemingway over Sartre and Camus and Malraux. Faulkner he found heavy going.

Sartre had written that for Hemingway, style came from ethics rather than from metaphysics, Langlais told them, to show that he, too, knew how to use the word “metaphysics.” After that he kept quiet, as though he had said all that needed to be said on the subject.

“I think Malraux and Hemingway had a lot in common,” Chevalier suggested. “A fabulous talent for personal advertisement. But when we're talking about writers, as opposed to, say, soap brands, then we have to talk about myths. Don't we run into Malraux at the end of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
?”

“No,” François corrected him. “There's a French guy who fights on the Republican side and who calls himself André Marty in the book, but he really existed. I checked
 . . .
”

“In fact, it was André Malraux who didn't exist,” Chevalier said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“He might well have existed, but he no longer had the time to liberate the people. He was too busy strutting around the Mona Lisa in Washington with Jackie Kennedy on his arm.”

“No different from your famous Hemingway as the liberator of Paris. We have a better idea now of his military objectives: the wine cellars at the Ritz and Marlene Dietrich. Of course, not everyone has the chance to hug a plane tree in full bloom,” conceded Chevalier, with a bored air.

And he gave Godefroid a completely obvious wink that said:

“He's a tough nut, isn't he?”

Chevalier lived like a hermit at home in the Placard. La Grosse Éléonore, his implacable goddess, ruled over the other four and a half rooms. She would have made a great prison guard, but such are the fortunes of life that she became the head nurse in a new hospital built without under-the-table dealings with the Mafia and a handful of federal ministers. She was now the sole breadwinner, and the household was feeling the pinch. It was she who gave her head-in-the-clouds husband the name Branlequeue, which means tail-wagger, a sobriquet he remembered when he came to pick a nom-de-plume. The children, Martial, Pacific, and Vénus, wandered from one realm to another, according to their needs: order, the call of nature, and their stomachs dominated Éléonore's world; Canada notebooks, washcloths, and toothbrushes drifted into the Placard, where games and the imagination, freedom and beauty could be found among the incredible clutter, in the middle of which the
pater familias
, silhouette outlined in a fog of nicotine, red pen in hand, glasses on the edge of his nose, feet up on a desk entirely carpeted with ink-smudged papers, coffee cups and Saskatoon-berry jam, officiated. Chevalier let them push their little cars and walk their dolls among the shadows of skyscrapers and mountain chains represented by piles of books and manuscripts. Perched at the peak of one of the piles, an ashtray overflowing with butts smoked away with the majesty of a domestic Etna.

It was in this smoke-filled Placard that Gode and François first heard about Quebec independence. The idea was a child of the right, but socialism took it and ran with it and impressed it in the minds of the province's progressive thinkers. Oppressed nations were the powder keg, the ideology of decolonization the lit match. Chevalier wanted their opinions on the situation in the Congo. On the Algerians drowned in the Seine. Everywhere on Earth, people were shuffling off the chains of the old imperial domination and embracing the cause of freedom.

They joined the RIN, the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale. They volunteered their time. The Montreal office was next to a coffee house called The Patriot. On the South Shore, the soul of the separatist movement took bodily form in the person of Marcel Duquet, the man with the accountant's moustache and the checked suits. He was said to be of the right, but that didn't matter. In the RIN, Gode and François met Jean-Paul Lafleur, a large young man in his early twenties, built like a bear. Through him, they got to know his brother René. Patriots and revolutionaries of various plumages joined their circle of friends. There were people like Jacques Cardinal, the ex-cop turned political agitator, a genius at fraud whose supreme ambition was to “fuck the system.” Bad eggs like him were legion, on the left and on the right, scrambling, scheming, and scribbling between the St. Lawrence and the U.S. border.

Between scorching puffs shot up by the fryer in the chip wagon, I saw the neighbourhood where I'd grown up change. Once a workers' eyesore stuck under the nose of the big city, the western outskirts swiftly became part of the urban conglomeration. You could get there by subway now. There were still vacant fields, but you no longer ran into the dog catcher, hired by the municipality, who advertised his prowess by stringing garlands of dogs' ears like bandoleers of bullets across his chest. He was said to have killed three thousand dogs in a single year. And Weston Bakeries no longer distributed free loaves of sliced bread on the street corners, as if we were in Africa. That was mostly around boulevard Taschereau. The only thing that hadn't changed was on election days the streets belonged to the mob. Yes, there were open sewers, but don't think for a minute they still reached as far as the mayor's or the deputy mayor's offices.

One night I knocked on Chevalier's door. He came down in his dressing gown, his little girl hanging onto his neck. He told me to come up.

To give me something to do while he finished correcting a chapter, he took a slim volume from a box on the floor and handed it to me. It must have been about sixty pages long. I read the title:
Damnedamerican
. It was Pepe Bourguignon's latest collection, the new darling of the poetry-of-engagement set. Hot off the press. It smelled funny.

“Pepe told me,” Chevalier said without looking up, “they've printed a thousand copies, can you imagine that?”

I watched him correcting a typescript with his daughter. He had her sitting on his lap, and she was the one holding the pen. Three years old. Chevalier would indicate the word or words or lines he wanted cut, and she would take the red pen and strike through them, scritch, scratch, screech. From where I was sitting, I could see the huge, red lines: the page looked like the back of someone who'd been whipped.

“Vénus is a more severe critic than I am,” Chevalier said complacently.

“Whose work is this?” I asked, pointing to a manuscript on his desk. A huge stack of papers, maybe a foot thick. He didn't reply right away.

“Mine.”

“You wrote all that?”

He looked at me.

“It was easy. Simply put, I've rewritten our history.”

He went to put the child to bed. When he came back, I'd found the courage to take a sheaf of papers folded in thirds from under my jacket. He took them without a word, sat down, offered me a whisky, and looked at the title page.

“
Hot Doggerels
. Hmmm.”

He read it while I was watching. To pass the time I chain-smoked and refilled my whisky glass. Then I started examining the manuscripts piled on the chairs and even on the floor around where I was sitting. I picked one up, placed it on my lap, and read:

Click Beetles

A Novel

By François Langlais

I was floored. I counted the pages: three hundred and seventy-seven!

“He took the title from
Le Survenant
,” Chevalier said, barely looking up from my manuscript. “Guèvrement used the term to mean something like ‘a strong man'
 . . .
It's a Québecism, like ‘boulé,' which means almost the same thing. Do you want to know if it's any good?”

What could I say? That if it wasn't completely awful, a piece of shit, I would kill him?

“Umm.”

“Your friend François is a very intelligent young man, but that's not enough to make him a writer. He's written a kind of detective novel, in which thugs rule the roost. There's a local Sherlock Holmes, a clone of Arsène Dupin, who likes to don disguises
 . . .
There's a bit of Proust in it as well: in the end, we discover that every character is
 . . .
no, not a homosexual: a spy. It's brilliant, actually, very nuanced. Needs to be rewritten top to bottom, of course. So, now, shall we talk about your poems?”

He poured me a slug of whisky in a waterglass covered in fingerprints, then lit himself a cigarette, and offered me one.

“There's something you need to know, Richard, and the sooner you know it the better. ‘Many are called, few are chosen
 . . .
' You'll thank me one day.”

Touché, Chevalier. My first taste of whisky.

Nineteen sixty-eight arrived. It was spring. “Everything happens in Paris
 . . .
” Langlais told me, and so we pooled our money, got our passports and tickets, and left. Student unrest had sprung up in Nanterre and spread to the Latin Quarter, and those in power had reacted by shutting down the Sorbonne. On boulevard Saint-Michel, two thousand students had confronted the riot police.

The minute we arrived in the Place de l'Odéon, we started crying like babies, not because all the old grey stones that surrounded us were impregnated with literature, or because we were treading on the same cobblestones as Marcel Proust. It was because the students had been tear-gassed and Boulevard Saint-Michel was blanketed by an acrid pall that was blowing our way. We stepped on broken glass and all kinds of other debris. Someone had overturned a Peugeot: it lay on its back like a beetle on top of a pile of ripped-up paving stones. Farther along, men were busily tearing down a barricade: cobblestones, wooden beams, bags of cement, wire fencing, metal grilles, tree trunks, upside-down cars. Red and black flags flew over everything.