October 1970 (22 page)

In his summation,
Maître
Grosleau reminded the jury that by the terms of Article 21 of the Criminal Code, they were not obliged to identify the precise way in which the person had perpetrated the fatal act as such. But he did not completely succeed in dissipating the unfortunate impression that the judicial apparatus had already sent Jean-Paul Lafleur, a troublemaker nonetheless provided with a perfectly valid alibi, to prison for the next twenty-five years.

The defence strategy employed by Richard Godefroid, which at first glance seemed incomprehensible, ended up making the jury feel uneasy. First he had reminded Chevalier of his promise to “speak on our behalf every time you get a chance, be our voice ,” and he had then established the innocence of his close friend, Jean-Paul Lafleur. After that, his own trial seemed to have been of absolutely no interest to him.

When it was time for him to deliver his plea, Gode remained seated, his mouth sewn shut. Later, he modified his indifference to the point of applauding when his sentence was handed down: life imprisonment.

THE GHOST OF KAGANOMA

SAM OPENED HIS EYES. FOR
a
brief moment he wondered where he was. But yes. He was upstairs in the big house shaped like the hull of a Spanish galleon, full of hidden recesses and obscure creakings, and engulfed in darkness at the heart of a forest at four o'clock in the morning. He could hear Marie-Québec breathing beside him. After a moment, he realized that she, too, was lying awake with her eyes wide open.

“You're not asleep?”

“No.” A pause. “I heard something downstairs
 . . .
”

Samuel listened.

“I don't hear anything.”

“Someone's there, down there, downstairs
 . . .
”

“Hmm.”

She had gone from hearing “something” to hearing “someone,” and the change was not lost on Nihilo.

The classic scenario left him with no choice. The shotgun was in the next room, where he had set up his office. It was leaning against the wall at the foot of the wardrobe, first door on the right. Moving on tiptoe, he grabbed two cartridges from the box on the table and slipped them into the double barrel. Pellets big enough for Canada geese. He made no sound except for the slight click when he closed the weapon. He crept along the hall as silent as a wolf and as naked as Adam.

And then he heard it, too.

Something
had moved in the kitchen.

Motionless in the shadow of the staircase, the shotgun cocked and held in both hands, he searched the silence. Through the window, the faintest hint of dawn.

Slowly he made his way to the bottom of the stairs, holding his breath, and with a single motion pivoted and pointed the rifle in front of him.

And saw the cat, who without paying him the slightest attention, was batting at a masked shrew with its paw. The shrew slid along the tiled floor like a curling stone. The cat's tail swept dreamily over the squares in the silent dawn.

Noune then flipped its prey straight up into the air and seemed to juggle with it for a couple of dance steps. When the shrew fell to the floor, she grabbed it with her teeth and dropped it at the centre of the ring for the beginning of the next round.

Samuel leaned the shotgun against the wall and went to the woodbox. He picked out a log and tightened his grip on it as he returned to the kitchen. One knee on the floor, one swift blow, and the masked shrew, at four centimetres the smallest mammal in that part of the continent except for the microscopic pygmy shrew, was put out of its misery.

The cat examined the pulpy mass with a mournful eye, reached out a paw, nudged at the lifeless object, then lost all interest in the game.

“What were you doing?”

“I was helping Noune kill a mouse. That was the noise you heard.”

Marie-Québec made no reply.

“You don't look all that convinced.”

Still she said nothing.

They tried to go back to sleep, but the day was too far advanced.

This all took place in 1999, the summer in which they allowed themselves to go for several weeks in a row without thinking, moving only to the rhythm of the wavelets of blue silence on their lovers' bodies. It was the summer of Perfect Days. They had a way of pronouncing those words when evening came that made it clear they had capital letters. Glasses of wine on the pebbled lakeshore. Marie-Québec wrapped in a beach towel adorned with toucans and red macaws. The sun in their faces, setting gloriously into a postcard-purple image of 250 square kilometres of uninhabited forest, still wild, barely touched, dense as sheepskin.

It was the summer they rode their mountain bikes along an ancient portage route that had been converted into a hiking trail all the way to the Kino River, which ran wide and glacially slow, tinted a brownish-green by the reflection of the birch and white spruce forest that flourished in this part of the world, before joining the Ottawa River farther south. They picnicked on tuna sandwiches, feet up on the plank that served as a handrail for the narrow porch in the hunting camp they found in the tall grass above the clayey riverbank. Blueberries picked nearby. The summer of fresh walleye fillets dipped in Shake'n'Bake and pan-fried on a campfire in the gentle evening twilight. The plaintive calls of loons filling the warm nights, and the illuminated violence of summer storms. The lake alive, like a huge, indigo animal. They moved through its darkly transparent skin, writhing like midnight worms. Above their heads, meteors consumed themselves like matches flaring out in a sea of ink seeded to infinity. The summer they made love rolling on carpets of hawkweed and fireweed. The summer of Perfect Days.

Just below the 48th parallel, Nihilo, at the wheel of a rented truck with a storage space of sixteen cubic metres that contained most of his worldly goods (a dresser, an old sperm-encrusted mattress, and a TV that worked only when it felt like it), realized that he had crossed a border, literally and figuratively, when he saw a truck painted with a sign that said
GAME
and showed illustrations of caribou instead of the usual deer and moose.

He'd rented, with the option to buy, the large house on the shore of Kaganoma. All around it the filigree of black spruce, with their roots clinging so superficially to the soil they would crash to the ground at the slightest wind, and there they would remain until their trunks crumbled underfoot and their tops were methodically nibbled away by the larvae of insects. Shears in hand, he and Marie-Québec attacked the shrubs and long grass, the scrub pines, the scouts sent in by the boreal forest that waited calmly to reconquer the strip of land it had conceded to the chainsaw. The henhouse, the old greenhouse, the posts of the ruined dock sticking up through the reeds by the lakeshore: everything was in disrepair. The lake was a mirrored screen decorated with spruce and birch. They bought chickens and chicken feed and let the poultry wander freely at the edge of the woods. Silence filled with the whine of insects and the twittering of birds rippled in deep, concentric waves all the way to the horizon.

Marie-Québec's legs were exposed in her light cotton dresses. Here it was not unusual to get a thin screen of ice on shallow puddles in mid-June, and the next week enjoy ferocious sunlight and the intense, shimmering, Abitibi heat. The summer season was like a race against the clock, in which everything that lived and was driven to reproduction had to move fast. Marie-Québec's body seemed to soak in sunlight as though it were soft wildflower honey, and Samuel would spread his hands over her perfect breasts like a musician playing a harpsichord.

I don't call myself Nihilo for nothing. I'm as skeptical by nature as it's possible to be, but I'm no champion of rationalism. I consider UFOs, telepathic transmissions, and some form of posthumous survival of the consciousness other than that of the ego to be possible, if not probable. I believe, among other things, that the numerous cases of people returning from the dead can be explained by the persistence, beyond our knowledge, of a certain kind of vital force (call it the soul, if you believe in such a thing). But I stop at believing in little reptilian beings who live at the centre of the Earth and only come out to kidnap and rape motorists. What else? I prefer Nietzsche to Descartes. When faced with some object that is new to me, I have the simple good sense, inherited from my peasant ancestors and refined by my own skepticism, to approach it with an open but critical mind. I do not find a panacea in science, but it is also true that my brain stimulates the production of antibodies and begins to secrete them whenever it hears people talking about Reiki and the Cosmic Network, the turiya, mandalas, the energy of consciousness, reprogrammable kinesiology, the teachings of Ramtha and the magical properties of chocolate, fractal homeopathy, suling flutes and spending two days reharmonizing the angelic vibrations given off by the enigmatic Madame Houannannah (Germaine Trudel to her husband, three children, and neighbours). And if the aura is a common electromagnetic phenomenon that a photographic plate can render visible, as I believe it is, why not, I am not thereby convinced of the necessity to balance it as though it were a set of winter tires.

Marie-Québec was different. She was the universal believer. She kept her generous heart wide open twenty-four hours a day as a safe haven for any stray superstition or theory that came along. The existence of a paranormal reality was dogma in her eyes, and her mind functioned like an assembly line: in went the raw material of some foolish notion or other, and out the other end came gospel.

Her conviction that the house in Kaganoma was haunted grew the longer we stayed in it, and gradually it came between us.

In the morning, I would look for her wherever the house or the yard received the most sun. It wasn't unusual to find her curled up in a ray of sunlight, purring like a kitten. She was like one of those grass snakes that, in the spring, before the sun has sufficiently warmed the ground and raised the temperature of their blood, allow themselves to be picked up without showing the least alarm. The quality of her sleep was almost that of a coma. The night was a vast nothingness from which she had to return every time she opened her eyes.

That morning, I brought her her café au lait and found her sitting on the new steps of the henhouse: two flats, one on top of the other, on top of four cement blocks. Nature surrounded us like a freshly waxed parquet floor in the new light. A few metres away, Noune was stalking, centimetre by centimetre, ears back, crouched up as though auditioning for the part of a lion ready to defend herself to the death in a Hemingway novel, a rabbit busily eating its breakfast of corn that we'd scattered for the chickens.

“I was awakened again
 . . .
” Marie-Québec announced.

“It's a big house. It's bound to creak a bit
 . . .
”

I turned and glanced back at the house: square as the muzzle of a sperm whale whose tail formed the plateau that looked out over a perfectly calm Lake Kaganoma. And I said:

“Tonight, I'd like you to wake me up
 . . .
when
it
happens.”

But that night nothing happened. In the morning, though, Marie-Québec was still in her Wiccan mood. She wasn't the only one who had had a bad night. When I went out to collect the eggs for breakfast, I found the hens still in their coop, looking frazzled, their feathers ruffled, rolling their little black eyes wildly in the deep, odoriferous darkness of the shed. They seemed terrified.

Later that day, I was shuffling my papers about listlessly in the humid heat of my office when I heard my name being called through the open window. Marie-Québec, a book in her hand, was standing at the forest edge in a small peach-coloured summer dress and a large straw hat. She was signalling for me to join her. The afternoon was quiet, the lake as still as oil. I ran downstairs and out to her.

When I reached the part of the yard where she was standing and saw, twenty metres farther off, the animal she'd been watching, it took off down the laneway. I ran after the fleeing animal, past Marie-Québec down to the fork in the road, where I looked around, breathing lightly, and saw it, sitting on the roadside as if waiting for me.

It had a strange head, with brushlike muttonchops, and massive, muscular paws, almost as big as its body. Its shoulders were higher and more powerful than its hindquarters. Its summer coat was molting, a yellowish beige colour showing through the grey. It was the second time in my life that I'd seen a lynx.

The small wild animal stayed where it was, immobile at the edge of the trees. A sense of antiquity emanated from it. It showed not the slightest hint of fear. In its eyes, which never left me, I could read nothing but an intense and yet tranquil curiosity. And something that resembled infinite patience.

* * *

At the beginning of the 1980s, when the exiles returned and the others were released from prison, the trajectories of the former October kidnappers diverged considerably. Those who hadn't sought and found forgetfulness were for the most part recycled into perfect representatives of the left, ready to resume their parts in the speculative bubbles of the Reagan years, the shenanigans of Québec Inc., and the government subsidies to Canadian-style socialism. They sat comfortably on the ruins of the collective dream, keeping their speech politically cool, their goal nothing more than a decent retirement plan. Some of them even managed to live lives that could, at least in part, be called public.

Far from past ideological torments, a single trait continued to link them together after all those years: the silence surrounding the death of Lavoie. Explanations had been demanded but never given. Incredibly, the pact of silence sealed in that pit at Saint-Marc by three desperate men still held thirty years later.

Sitting in the stifling heat of the room that served as his office, Samuel was going over the file he'd painstakingly put together over the preceding months — he felt that he hadn't discovered anything but the tip of the iceberg of a story. Somewhere, under the thousands of tonnes of ice and language that constituted the iceberg, lay the body of a man in a perfect state of preservation: Paul Lavoie, victim of an improvised revolutionary justice whose corpse obstinately refused to die.

But the dozen men and women who'd formed the avant-garde of the Quebec revolutionary movement never did manage to reinvent their lives.

Jean-Paul Lafleur became a journalist, cinematographer, documentary maker, etc. He wrote a regular column for
Bélier
, the journal of the hard left. His brother René worked in renovations. He'd had the bright idea of setting himself up at the end of Lac-Carré as a contractor specializing in patching up old cottages for next to nothing. This was just before the company Intrawest moved in and, by placing a good bit of money in the right pockets, transmogrified Mont Tremblant into a gigantic, model Swiss village made of marzipan.

Richard Godefroid talked about films that were never filmed and formed his own production company: Lynx Sightings, whose films seemed destined, in most cases, to end up committing daily suicide on Télé-Québec. Apparently, he didn't have enough money to hire someone to answer the telephone.