October 1970 (4 page)

“Is this where you sleep?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma'am. Curled up in the straw. The Lafleur boys are the bread, and I'm the baloney.”

“I mean news about the others,” said Jean-Paul.

Saint-Laurent assumed an air of importance, of being in the know.

“The guys have issued a new communiqué. With a picture of Travers sitting on a case of dynamite
 . . .
”

“Bullshit.”

“But guess what: the next communiqué is going to be addressed to U Thant and sent directly to the UN.”

Gode gave an incredulous guffaw.

“Why not send it to the Pope?”

René aimed a thin stream of spit at the floor.

“What else?” asked Jean-Paul.

“We brought you a can opener.”

“Have you guys considered my proposition?” asked Saint-Laurent.

They turned to face him. Jean-Paul stared at him intently for a moment.

“You can't stay here,” Saint-Laurent said. “You'll freeze to death for one thing, and you've burned your bridges in Quebec. There's people waiting for you in the United States. I can get you across the border whenever you like
 . . .
There's people in New York and Algiers. Black Panthers. You could be in Algiers in no time.”

“Before thinking about sending us to Algeria, you should have started by giving us better instructions on how to get here. We spent the first night between a woodlot and a fence, freezing our asses off.”

“Everything's all set,” Saint-Laurent went on as though Jean-Paul hadn't spoken. “I can get you across the border any time.”

“You can tell our ‘American friends,'” Jean-Paul cut in, “that there's no way we're leaving Quebec. This is where the struggle is, not in Algeria. We aren't going to abandon our friends. We aren't going to abandon the political prisoners.”

“Our girlfriends are in prison
 . . .
You can tell them that,” added René.

After making arrangements for another mission to top up supplies the following week, the visitors were about to leave, to slip back into the night, when Jean-Paul held the Beard back for a quiet word.

“I don't want to see him here again,” he said. “And for fuck's sake, find us another place to hide out.”

CHEVALIER BRANLEQUEUE
(1932–1999)

Where else in the world would you find churches almost the size of cathedrals in villages with populations, including idiots and rubes who rarely came in from the fields, that never exceeded 3,000 souls?

THAT WAS TYPICAL OF CHEVALIER'S
style. Sam had
come upon this passage the previous night, while flipping through his annotated, dog-eared copy of
Letters from a Chevalier in Good, Plain Joual
, which had first been published by Top Flight Editions before being reprinted by the prestigious BQ. It was classic Chevalier — vigorously apostrophizing, facetiously pamphleteering — even from beyond the grave he did his best to thumb his nose at authority, whether political or ecclesiastic.

The man who had styled himself Chevalier Branlequeue was born on the historic Chemin du Roy, the King's Road, a few steps from the river that runs through Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, and within sight of the marvellous neo-Gothic cathedral with its twin hundred-and-ten-foot steeples imitating those on Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. Branlequeue was still in his room in the palliative-care ward of Notre-Dame Hospital, barely a few minutes dead — brought down by lungs as thoroughly coated in tar, he said, as a provincial road at election time, as well as by a few other failed organs — when sundry representatives of Quebec's provincial government began talking through their hats about a state funeral.

They hadn't reckoned, however, on the old codger's last will and testament, which gave instructions for his funeral arrangements: his body was to be dropped through a hole in the ice with the Patriot flag as a shroud, while an academic lecture was being delivered from an ice-fishing hut from his native village, which was famous for its small fish. Chevalier wanted his remains to be wrapped in the national emblem, transported to their final resting place on a gun carriage, and delivered to the shrimp and the sharks. In a typical passage, the testator added:
For once they'll have the whole bull to eat, instead of just the liver
 . . .
By “they,” of course, he meant tomcod, or frostfish, which constitute the basis of the local economy in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade and are traditionally baited with a piece of cow's liver.

The lawyer had suggested incineration. Afterward, the ashes could be spread anywhere, all over the Mouk-Mouk Islands, no problem. But Branlequeue had been adamant. His father was a lawyer and he himself was a Freudian guerrilla-fighter who expected to win. He had therefore prepared two wills: the official, specifying that the grisly remains be deposited in a quiet, out-of-the-way plot in the local cemetery; and the officious, apocryphal and drawn up in the hand of the principal player.

That opened the door to La Grosse Éléonore and the vultures in three-piece suits. The Catholic-politico machinery was set in recuperation mode, beginning with the under-secretary in charge of protocol in the Quebec government who, walking the tightrope between the undeniable importance of the man's work and the potential for controversy, slackened the already intentionally ambiguous formula for “state funerals but not really,” which was then picked up by the literary editor and obituary columnist for the
Trois-Rivières
Nouvelliste
— a man better known, as it happened, for his odes to the dead than for his literary criticism.

Good old human nature took over from there. From his observation point in the choir loft, had Samuel not seen, just a second before, the premier of what was still the province of Quebec advancing up the long centre aisle under the priceless pre-Conquest pascal chandelier and the famous sculpture in oak representing the mother-in-law of Christ, alone, with no first lady and without a bodyguard? And a few minutes earlier, had he not recognized the Minister of Culture, under his thick, carrot-coloured perm, dark as dye could make it, his face tinted a deep bronze with the aid of an extract of Guadeloupe sulphur, granting an interview to a television crew on the steps of the church?

Yes, he had.

In other words, without making too much of a fuss about it, the politicos had embraced the compromise so typical of them: the quasi state funeral. Cosily wrapped up in his own thoughts, Sam watched the ceremony roll beneath him like water under a bridge. He had made the trip from Montreal alone. In his grey Corolla or his new Protegé or his red Colt. The whole inner circle was there, assembled under his feet. He could take them all in without moving his head, contain them in a single thought. The body of the deceased was laid on a bier at the precise spot at which, subject to the same tidal forces, the great River of Literature and the remorseless Storm Surge of Politics met and joined before flowing into the eternal Sea of History. Poets and politicians, senior civil servants and novelists, critics, pillars of the law, protesters and theatre directors, university presidents, rockers, technocrats, pollsters, swashbuckling intellectuals, men who worked the fields and men who worked crowds: from ivory hunter to Ivory Tower. The nation's great mythmakers were gathered under Nihilo's astonished gaze.

It was the man himself, not his work, who was the centre of attention. Did the colleague who came to the microphone to honour his “master and friend” pass up the opportunity to regale the unjustly private assembly with extracts from his own semiological treatise, called
Branlequeue, or the Tail That Wagged the Dog
, completed during his recent sabbatical? Did he read from a chapter called “Elucubrations,” “about the miracle of a work that exists forever in the future, since it is a unique text that has no end, is now and will forever remain unfinished, destined to find its ultimate achievement in our collective future, its only possible posterity.”

Yes, he did.

“
Elucubrations
is an unclassifiable classic, a forever-unstamped passport to the Nobel Prize. The book of a single man who will only ever write a single book.” And so the colleague, like so many others, erased the existence of the
Letters
to accommodate his own theory of the man.

The service went downhill from there, with authentic, touching, personal anecdotes in which the initiates, who formed a good four-fifths of the congregation, went on about the torrential drinking bouts that took place during interminable lunches at the Frères Jacques on rue Saint-Denis. Every one of them was delivered with broad winks in the direction of the well-roasted deceased lying in his box.

Next came his filthy rich publisher, who had plucked the author's little box of faded dreams from the cluttered chaos of a room in the apartment Branlequeue shared with his wife, Léonore, and their three children. One had to wonder how they got by after he had taken emphatic leave of the woman he had termed his “companion of the road.” There followed a tribute from a revolutionary Trotskyite who had recently disclosed in the back seat of a limousine his bipolar difficulties. The Minister of Public Works and Paperwork evoked Branlequeue's valiant efforts, in the days leading up to the last sovereignty referendum, when the prematurely stooped author, brandishing a pilgrim's crook like the lance of a chevalier (a few polite titters from the audience, quickly smothered under one or two bouts of coughing), undertook a tour of the province's CEGEPs, not only those in the rural areas but also in Greater Montreal, in hopes of convincing the students of the advantages of political independence for a small nation as crucified by its differences as Quebec had been. By the time someone told Chevalier that the majority of CEGEP students were too young to vote (average age: seventeen), the referendum had already been lost.

“We came within a hair's breadth, I hasten to remind you all,” the Minister of Paperwork continued in his bass vibrato, only partly justifying the lengthy series of daily meetings, the sum total of which had served only to mystify his driver. Moving on from evocation to invocation, the minister solemnly reaffirmed that there are never two without there being three, and that the next time we shall see what we shall see. “In sum, the people of Quebec owe a great debt of gratitude to Chevalier Branlequeue,” concluded the minister, who obviously believed what he was saying about as sincerely as he believed that Charles de Gaulle would be reincarnated and dancing the Brazilian samba.

Applause.

Several family members went to the podium to try to shore up as best they could the façade of their father's or husband's respectability.

Chevalier, get up
, Sam begged from the depths of his reverie.
Push aside the lid of your coffin, raise your ruined lips in protest
.

He remembered the unofficial will with its codicil, specifying that Chevalier wanted “no religious music. But if someone could sing ‘The Lament of the Mauricie' rather than mouth some celestial beatitude, they would make my soul very happy
 . . .
”

Suddenly there was a mild commotion. The novelist Jehan Bora, the terror of his generation, had slapped his wide-brimmed felt hat on his head and made his way from his seat, stepping on the toes of three or four people as he went, including those of the fair-weathermen who had come for the free coffee and cookies. Enormous and majestic, the neck of a bottle plainly sticking out of the pocket of his ample coat, he made his way up the side aisle, pausing at the door to the confessional to raise his hat only as much as was necessary to make sure his respects to the bier holding the corpse at the foot of the altar did not go unnoticed. Samuel knew him well enough to know that Bora had crushed those feet deliberately and had put his hat on for the sole purpose of paying tribute to the fallen Chevalier.

The loud snorts that bounced off the closed oak door of the confessional and rose upward to the loft had nothing to do with outrage. They were soon drowned out by the first measures of Handel's
Largo,
which played while the assembled faithful, roused from their stupor, went back to pretending that nothing at all ever happened.

Mistress of the hour at last, La Grosse Éléonore received her condolences in front of the church with ill-concealed impatience. Under a violet hat and her helmet of blue-white hair, a bland look and a mouth like a stingray, she struck the pose of a vestal virgin beset by virility. Although she'd been repeating to anyone who would listen her one and only criticism of the immortal work of her pitiful husband and even more pusillanimous head of the family — “Don't waste your time reading it
 . . .
” — on this day, she was cashing in on his fame and making her peace with posterity.

Samuel had no intention of giving her the satisfaction, not that she would notice. Now that she was rid of her husband, the Dogsbody, as Chevalier's students had dubbed her, had become the centre of attention of the young people he had liked to surround himself with.

The Patriot flag waved in the forecourt, whipped by a strong breeze blowing up from the river. It blew over the young militants wearing toques and
ceintures fléchés
who were carrying it, lacking only the pipe between their teeth and an ancient musket to complete their costumes. In the midst of it all, the Minister of Culture, his make-up visibly cracking in the cold, was giving another interview.

Nihilo had almost managed to slip away to the parking lot when a stern-looking man called his name from a distance and caught up with him. Athletic, in his forties, blond, forehead reaching all the way to the back of his head. Sam recognized Chevalier's long face, hooked nose, almost feminine chin, and receding hairline.

They shook hands. The man's name was on the tip of his tongue.

Chevalier had married Éléonore shortly after experiencing a traumatic homosexual incident in Copenhagen in 1950. That, at least, was how he'd explain the marriage after a third bottle of wine. He'd fled Copenhagen and its abundance of Good Samaritans, all wearing their hearts on their sleeves in the post-war clubs. He'd strayed into one one night, where the men all danced with one another (which had aroused more than his suspicions). He came back to Montreal to have a ruptured appendix attended to, thought himself to be dying, and married the nurse who had washed away his sins. His fear of being a fag gave them three children in short order. It was one of those offspring, the product not of love but of doubt, who stood before Nihilo now.

“Thanks for coming.”

“It's
 . . .
nothing. You have
 . . .
uh, my sympathies.”

“There's a small buffet
 . . .
later
 . . .
for
 . . .
”

“I'd like to, but I have to go.”

“You know that my father had just retired when
 . . .
”

“Yes.”

“But he stayed on, anyway, as a visiting professor. He still had his office. His papers are there waiting for him. No one has touched a thing. My mother asked me to find someone to straighten out his affairs, you know, go through them first before the evaluator from the National Library shows up. I found it
 . . .
interesting, let's say
 . . .
what you wrote about my father in
Statut particulier
.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“You know his work well. You're familiar with his research. I thought it might interest you.”

“Yes.”

The young Chevalier turned and, for a moment, watched the funeral cortège move off on foot toward the neighbouring cemetery. He smiled sadly.

“You aren't going to accompany the coffin to
 . . .
” he asked Sam.

“Into the hole with him?”

The son sighed with a kind of relief.

“Yes. There.”

“In my own way, I suppose,” said Sam.

And here I am, drifting away from the church, out on the frozen river covered with snow and ice-fishing huts as the death knell sounds in the wintry sky that drapes over the village like God's own cheesecloth.