October 1970 (19 page)

SAINT-JEAN-BAPTISTE
DAY, 1968

HE TURNED AND SAW SEVERAL
dozen protesters mass
ed between Sherbrooke, Amherst, and Cherrier. They were hoisting fleur-de-lys and shouting, “Quebec for the Québécois!” and “Tru-deau no go!” Across from them, a cordon of helmeted police lined the north side of Sherbrooke Street, creating the single lane the marchers would have to use. Other protesters occupied the grassy slopes of Parc la Fontaine. Fresh police troops kept arriving.

Jean-Paul returned his attention to the platform that had been erected for dignitaries on the steps of the library. He was on the north side of the street, near the enclosure reserved for journalists. The sidewalk around him, and behind him the slope leading up to the Normal School, were crowded with spectators who had come to watch. Squinting, he made out the prime minister of Canada on the platform, waving at the crowd, all smiles, surrounded by bodyguards and official invitees.

There was a small commotion in the crowd, and Lafleur saw Bourgault, the intellectual of the independence movement, lifted onto a sea of shoulders on which he floated like a coconut on the tide. The police, marked by their white helmets, tried to contain the throng of militants distributing tracts to the people crowded in front of the platform. The president of the RIN was not lacking in panache. He had alerted the newspapers that the presence of the prime minister at this Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade, in celebration of Quebec's national holiday, on the eve of the federal election, would be considered a provocation by the separatists. Trudeau having ignored the warning, Bourgault showed up, too, and now it was as though the two men, the extravagant Liberal on his official platform, and the eloquent agitator perched on his human dais, each one as conspicuous as the other, were facing off against each other from opposite sides of Sherbrooke Street.

No sooner had these thoughts flitted through Jean-Paul's mind than a ripple stirred in the crowd and spread in nervous waves around him. From the demonstrators' side, which continued to shout slogans, he saw an onlooker in a red T-shirt shoving and shouting at a young, long-haired man who remained unprovoked. Others in civilian clothing attacked the protesters, pushing them toward the line of uniformed police who, ready with their truncheons, joined in the action. He watched as two policemen grabbed fleur-de-lys from the hands of the demonstrators and tore them up, definitely putting a match to the powder keg.

Without warning, the four horsemen who, a moment before, had been carrying Bourgault in triumph, made a sudden rush toward the platform, broke through the police cordon, and burst out onto the street. There they were quickly grabbed by uniformed policemen, who also seized the separatist leader and carried him like a sack of potatoes toward a paddy wagon parked nearby. They were still waiting for the bulk of the marchers. Police motorcycles came and went between the platform, flanked by the library's Greco-Roman pillars and Parc la Fontaine. Still stunned by the suddenness with which Bourgault had rushed into the arms of the police, Jean-Paul felt himself being pushed from behind. He tried to resist it. Ahead of him, the police were charging through the park, bludgeoning anything that moved. Panicked spectators rushed the barriers, pushed through the police cordon, and surged into the middle of Sherbrooke Street.

Jean-Paul started to run. All around him, billy clubs were rising and falling as the guardians of law and order clubbed men, women, and children at random. He stopped across from the dignitaries' platform, blinded by searchlights and the Corinthian columns, and raised his fist.

“Quebec for the Québ—”

A flashing pain cut through his shoulder, his arm fell to his side, and a hard object whistled through the air, tracing a horizontal arc and hitting his inert arm at the elbow. It was as if someone had shut off the nerve with a tourniquet.

“Oww, Jesus!”

He began running again, sprinting east, fleeing before the parade that, in the distance, was descending the hill with its fanfare and floats. Around him, young people were being grabbed by the police and thrown to the ground and held down while other cops bashed at their heads as though they were baby seals. Then they were dragged toward the fenced-in compounds with the billy clubs still lashing them. There was a whistling sound, and the first beer bottle shattered like a grenade on the pavement ten feet from Jean-Paul. More bottles rained down. The sharp explosions sounded strange, different from the dull thud of clubs on flesh. A clamour arose on the street, the police were trying to clear the area in front of the platform. Jean-Paul leaped to one side to avoid being hit by a sidecar attached to a motorcycle. He turned and saw a demonstrator take several quick steps and throw an empty Molson's bottle toward the platform, then run back, quickly chased by white-helmeted police, their billy clubs raised at the ready.

Then Jean-Paul saw stars. A hardwood truncheon had struck him just above the ear, and for a second he lost consciousness. He quickly came to, his face squeezed in the armpit of a police officer who had him in a headlock and who should have been wearing more deodorant.

“You goddamn piece of shit,” said the cop, his head bent close to Jean-Paul's.

The cop was regulation size, but Jean-Paul was built like a logger. He shrugged off his assailant, helped him lose his footing, pulled his head from the vise of the cop's arm encircling his head, and ran off without looking back.

He ran up the grass in front of the Normal School and headed back towards rue Cherrier just as the parade was arriving at Sherbrooke Street. It was blocked by the tangle of motorcycles, human forms milling about, and a row of idling ambulances. Police chased the demonstrators into the ranks of a marching band, the musicians standing at attention silently holding their instruments. He could hear music from another band mingled with shouts, slogans, explosions, the nervous revving of the motorcycles coming and, from the direction of the platform, the popping of beer bottles and windshields and the sound of sirens slicing through the air. Jean-Paul slowed his pace to catch his breath. He could see that fires had been lit in Park Lafontaine. The smell of smoke floated toward him, it tingled in his nose.
Molotov cocktails
, he thought. On rue Cherrier, a police scout car left unoccupied was being pushed backward by rioters. Then a second, and a third, and then a private car. Jean-Paul was heading toward it when he was stopped by the spectacle of three policemen animatedly beating a young man in the centre of a circle of indignant citizens slowly closing in on them. He shoved his way between their shoulders. The young man had stopped defending himself, and the blows continued to rain on his face, his legs, his testicles. A fountain of blood spurted from his bare head.

Jean-Paul went up to the policemen.

“Hey!” he shouted.

“He was throwing bottles,” explained one of the officers, who kept Jean-Paul at a distance with his billy club dripping with blood.

But the spectators began closing in, and the policeman seized the young man by his arms and began dragging him onto the grass while the other two kept on bludgeoning and kicking him.

“We need weapons
 . . .
” Jean-Paul said to himself, stunned.

Then, looking around at the crowd, he repeated it out loud, almost shouting:

“We've got to arm ourselves!”

He was standing there, incredulous, when someone near him shouted, “Look out!”, and through the storm of panic that was blowing over that section of the park, Lafleur turned and saw them coming. It wasn't the charge of the Cossacks from
Doctor Zhivago
, or young Winston Churchill's regiment launched with drawn sabres against the Bedouins at Soudan, but the Montreal Mounted Police charging through Park Lafontaine. They came six abreast on their beasts, equipped with wooden batons four feet long, and their white helmets with the short visors made them look like polo players, rigged out like a laughable colonial cavalry. They charged the crowd, falling on women, children, and old-age pensioners who had come to watch the parade, beating on shoulders and backs, and cracking skulls indiscriminately. Gaping holes appeared, disclosing trampled grass and those who in the general mélée had tripped and were trying to stand up, a forehead bleeding here, a nose smashed there, a cheekbone crushed, a shoulder blade cracked, all under the avalanche of blows amid rearing and prancing horses.

One mounted cop passed so close to Jean-Paul, who protected his face with his forearm, that he felt the heat of the beast on his cheek, and experienced an animal terror while the man above him shouted, his truncheon pointed ahead of him like a lance:

“Charge the French-Canadians,” he shouted.

An officer, he thought.

All this time the tightly packed crowd was trying to escape by flowing back in a herd onto Sherbrooke Street, further paralyzing the parade. Jean-Paul zigzagged down the slope to avoid the horses that had been spurred into the mass of demonstrators like a tournament of truncheons. He turned again toward the officials' platform, clenching his teeth, rage in his heart. As he set foot on the street, he saw a young protester cornered between a reporter's car and a horse, the rider of which was pounding away at the young man's back, rhythmically and methodically, using both hands on his long club. Suddenly, the club broke in half, and the policeman continued to beat on his victim with the half he still clutched, until explosions between the horse's hooves caused the animal to rear, dumping the attacker beneath it. Onlookers' arms shot into the air as if Maurice Richard had just scored on a breakaway.

Lafleur heard more bottles whistling over his head. Ahead of him, young men and women were being arrested and dragged by the police along the broken-glass-covered street. Shards sparkled in the light from the spotlights. A clamour arose from the area of the platform, now being targeted by the bottle-throwers, and Jean-Paul raised himself on his tiptoes to get a better look at the mayhem: the frantic retreat of the diplomatic corps and the honoured guests from the bombarded dais, a chaos of chairs, and then the prime minister, evading the approaching guards and advancing to the front of the colonnaded portico, facing the enemy alone, the grand seigneur, a proud smile on his lips, his moment of glory broadcast coast to coast. All cameras on him, his parliamentary majority in the bag.

Almost at the same time, Jean-Paul received a billy club to the chest. When he was able to breathe again, he was surrounded by five police officers who jumped on him, calling him a “goddamned separatist” and a “flea-bitten dog” as they escorted him toward the nearest paddy wagon. Once they were screened from view, they made sure their client got its money's worth, going to work on Lafleur as he lay stretched out on the ground, no longer feeling anything, like a caveman being trampled by a wart hog. Then they grabbed him by the arms and legs and threw him into the van.

There were twenty others in there already, it was hot as an oven and the atmosphere was one of dejection. Standing, sitting, lying down. Gashes, broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, a fractured elbow, a few eyebrows transformed into gushing faucets, and enough bruises to repaint half of one of the three Canadian oceans. One of the victims had slipped into unconsciousness. A rapid examination showed a possible skull fracture. Someone stood up and pounded on the side of the van with the flat of a hand.

“Someone is seriously injured in here!”

“He's dying!”

The police officer left behind to guard the van gave his opinion through the ventilation duct:

“Let him die like a dog, I couldn't care less
 . . .
”

Jean-Paul turned to the guy sitting beside him, a thin man in his early twenties. He had a scalp wound and his head was covered with coagulating blood. Fresh blood was flowing from one of his eyelids and covered half his face.

“Let me wipe that,” he said, tearing off the sleeve of his shirt and folding it into a pad, which he applied to the man's temple as a kind of bandage.

“Hold it there. Have you been here long?”

“About an hour,” replied the man.

“Water!” someone called out.

“Die!”

When the paddy wagon began to move, the young man held out his bloodied hand to Jean-Paul and managed a smile.

“My friends call me Lancelot
 . . .
”

“As long as I don't have to call you Sir Lancelot, no problem.” Jean-Paul shook his hand, took his own back with the man's blood on it, and said, “Jean-Paul.”

“I never thought they were capable of such barbarity
 . . .
”

They were driven west along Cherrier. They couldn't see the huge float stuck in the middle of a bunch of brawlers a bit farther down, between Montcalm and Wolfe streets, with its gigantic papier-mâché figure of St.-Jean-Baptiste suddenly decapitated by a beer bottle thrown accurately from a distance of thirty feet. Police charged the float and hopped up onto the truck bed amid a bevy of young shepherdesses who, in the general confusion, were screaming. An evacuation order was given.

The van followed rue Ontario to Division 4 and turned into the courtyard. The prisoners held their breath.

The door opened with a clang. Between the paddy wagon and the police station a dozen officers stood in a receiving line. Each had a billy club in his hand. Some of them fondled the tips of their clubs, grinning, while others pounded them impatiently into the palms of their hands. And all of them were shouting insults.

“What the hell are they playing at?” Lancelot asked.

He gave a sudden lurch and bent over to vomit, but nothing came out.

“Cowboys and Indians,” said Jean-Paul. He was struck by a sudden inspiration. “Try not to fall down, okay? I'll go ahead of you. You hang on to me
 . . .
”

“But
 . . .
”

“Don't give them the satisfaction
 . . .
Stay on your feet.”