by Magali Favre
Gaétan looks helplessly at Louise. She immediately recognizes his predicament and takes the paper from her brother.
“Go ahead, tell me. I’ll write.”
Gaétan gives her a warm smile. He’s always had to struggle to write more than three words without making a mistake. She’s getting him out of a tight spot.
While Louise finishes taking down Gaétan’s information, the boy glances around at the assembly.
He listens to the speaker, who is denouncing the harsh government measures. But his mind wanders, reminding him of his school days. As the teacher explained cross-multiplication, his head would be filled with thoughts about the upcoming hockey game. Back then, the blackboard would be covered in meaningless symbols. Today, the words are reduced to simple background noise.
Louise finishes writing and hands the sheet to her brother. She stays near the table to help others sign the petition. Gaétan decides to wander a bit.
Suddenly, he recognizes a face several metres away. Paul! With his red beard, he is unmistakable.
Gaétan inches closer, but can’t bring himself to address him. This older man intimidates him. He is standing, broad-shouldered and straight as an arrow, listening carefully to the speeches.
According to what Luc has told him, Paul grew up in Ville Jacques-Cartier, a particularly poor area of the South Shore, where he had fallen into the life of a bum.
“It’s easy to find money if you’ve got guts,” he had told Luc. “You buy a gun and rob the first bank you see. Where I come from, you’ve got a choice: either you become a bum or you work yourself to death for peanuts. But my days as a bum didn’t last long.”
What made him change his ways wasn’t so much the fear of ending up in jail as it was the idea of making it on his own. He couldn’t accept the notion of having money and living the good life while watching others suffer. Making money itself isn’t that difficult but wanting to change one’s ways is another story. He wanted to make sure there were no more Ville Jacques-Cartiers a few kilometres away from the Town of Mount Royals. That’s why he became a union leader.
“I started fighting to get us some sidewalks in Ville Jacques-Cartier,” he had told Luc, laughing.
“But what does he really do today?” Gaétan wonders. “Maybe he’s up to his old tricks?”
“What’s your problem? Why are you staring at me?” The man’s tone is cutting.
“You don’t recognize me? I’m Gaétan,” stammers the boy. “We met once or twice at Luc’s.”
“Oh yeah, I remember. You were going to start working at Dominion.” Framed by thick eyebrows, his gaze is both driven and warm.
“Exactly. I was wondering if you knew that Luc’s been arrested,” the boy replies.
“No, I didn’t. With everything going on, I haven’t seen him for a while,” admits the man, visibly irritated by the boy’s presence. He throws anxious glances around the room.
He doesn’t seem to appreciate that he’s been recognized. With a tight smile, he cuts the discussion short. “Look, I’m sorry, but I gotta go.”
Without further explanation, Paul slips into the crowd and heads towards the exit. Intrigued, Gaétan falls in step behind him. Once out on the street, the man walks towards the Sherbrooke metro station. Without hesitation, Gaétan passes unnoticed through the turnstile after him. A train arrives. Paul jumps into one of the cars. Gaétan gets on the next one.
The metro pulls out of the station. It’s incredibly hot. Gaétan discreetly watches Paul, who is reading the newspaper and trying hard to look relaxed. The stations fly by and the boy remains alert. At the Sauvé station Paul rises quickly, like someone who has forgotten he has reached his stop, and steps onto the platform just before the doors close. Gaétan doesn’t have time to react and he watches, powerless, as the man disappears.
His surveillance was short-lived. He’s been had. He thought vaguely that if he discovered where Paul lived he would learn more about him. Now he’s come up empty-handed, realizing to boot that he’s ditched Louise without an explanation.
At the Henri-Bourassa station, he changes direction and takes the metro back towards the assembly. The speeches are over. Few people remain in the room, and Louise is gone. He searches in vain for a familiar face. Discarded pamphlets mixed with cigarette butts litter the floor. The room has the stale feeling of a party that’s just ended.
14
Wednesday, October 28
”What’d you do, go AWOL?”
“What do you mean?”
Gaétan is shivering inside the phone booth. He called Louise as soon as his shift was over, despite the early hour.
“It’s a figure of speech. You’ve got nothing to say to me?”
“I’m sorry about last night, but something came up.”
“You ran into a pretty girl?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll explain tonight. I need to see you. It’s important.”
“I have a lot of work today. I need to study every once in a while, you know. And I have a paper due on Louis Riel. It’s fascinating!”
Gaétan can feel that his disappearance last night has hurt her. How can he regain her trust? Then, he has a sudden idea.
“Louis Riel! My father used to tell me about him.”
“So?”
“My great-grandfather knew him.”
“Is that a joke?”
“No, it’s true. He went out West as a settler.”
“Come by the Chat Noir tomorrow night and you can tell me all about it.”
“Alright. See you!”
“And rest up so you’re in shape. Expect an interrogation.”
Gaétan hangs up. His hands are blocks of ice, but he’s just won a small victory. Now that he’s sure to see Louise again, the boy hurries directly home. He promised his mother he would be there to take care of his brothers.
The two boys, just back from school, jump on his bed to wake him up. Gaétan looks at them through half-opened eyes. The sun is already beginning to fade away. These days, it seems that the sun is always angry with him. Gaétan goes to bed and it’s barely light out. He gets up and it’s already dark.
“Mama said you have to take care of us,” says the younger boy.
Gaétan pulls himself wearily out of bed and drags his feet into the kitchen. As long as he’s home he would have liked to sleep a little more. But he did promise.
“You guys want toast with peanut butter?”
“No, cookies from the box!”
Gaétan smiles. “The box” is the red metal container where his mother puts her famous cookies—oatmeal, molasses, or gingerbread, depending on what she feels like making or what’s left in the kitchen cupboards. All the children on the block have tasted them. At Christmas, she uses it to store her fruitcake, which can stay there for a month. Even empty, the box smells spicy enough to tempt a saint.
“Want a glass of milk, too?”
“Can we watch TV?”
“Go ahead, I’ll bring everything in.”
Deep down, Gaétan is proud to be taking care of his brothers, to be responsible enough to say yes or no. He enjoys preparing their snack, which he puts on a tray and brings into the living room.
“Wow, what service! Thanks!”
“I’m giving you a treat today, but don’t think it’s gonna be like this every day. After Fanfreluche, go do your homework,” he says in a voice he wants to sound authoritative.
“We don’t even got any!”
“I doubt that. If I remember correctly, Mme Paquette gave homework every night. Don’t even try to pull a fast one on me.”
“I just have a little math to do,” admits Patrick.
“I got some grammar exercises,” Richard adds. “You gonna help us?”
“We’ll see. In the meantime, move over! I want to watch Fanfreluche, too.”
The two boys jump aside to make a place for him in the centre of the sofa. The show’s theme song begins and Fanfreluche appears, opening her enormous book. Today, the
mischievous doll with her pigtails pointing in all directions is going to the circus, where Mme Dora will predict her future. As usual, when Fanfreluche doesn’t agree with the story, she jumps into the adventure to change the ending.
Gaétan prefers Sol and Gobelet, the two clowns who always get themselves into crazy situations. But they’re on Tuesdays. And anyway, the boy doesn’t want to deny himself this pleasure. A good snack in front of a children’s show is always a special treat.
The boys have just opened their notebooks on the kitchen table to start their homework when their father’s voice rings out.
“Man alive! It’s good to be back home!”
The whole family comes to surround him.
His wife, who has come in with him, smiles broadly when she sees the notebooks on the table. She hugs Gaétan and thanks him for taking care of his brothers.
“You might not be so happy when you see that the cookie box is empty.”
“I’ll make more. You can see they didn’t keep him too long. I bet they’d had enough of him!”
“It’s unbelievable, arresting people like that!” exclaims Gaétan’s father.
Before his son’s sceptical gaze, he recounts the events surrounding his arrest while Gaétan’s mother begins preparing the evening meal.
“I wanted to make sure people weren’t cheating at the polls. I was positive that the big guy with the brown hair wasn’t Mr. Gosselin. I’ve seen Mr. Gosselin before, thought he was a little tubby guy, an’ what’s more, he died last spring. I said as much to the election officer, but he didn’t wanna hear it. I got mad and they had to call the police to come take me outta there.”
Gaétan smiles, imagining the heap of abuse the police must have taken.
“Laugh if you want, but I know I was right. So I’m being charged for insulting police officers. I gotta appear in court in a month. You call that justice, arresting the guy who saw someone cheating and letting the cheater off the hook? Those damned cops, can’t find the guys setting off bombs and kidnapping a minister, but they sure can give us regular folks a hard time!”
“Spaghetti’s ready! Time to eat!”
They all gather around as the mother fills their plates, happy to be together again.
15
Thursday, October 29
He pushes the café door open. A thick cloud of smoke envelops him. Charlebois’La Marche du président is playing softly. In every corner, the young and the old with their long hair and scruffy beards are smoking and drinking, talking loudly and lustily. A little unnerved, Gaétan sweeps the room with his eyes. Eventually he can make out a shadow with short hair, the shortest of the room, boys and girls combined. Louise is bent over a notebook, surrounded by several volumes. He sits down in front of her, his eyes already red from the smoke.
“How can you work in this place?”
“I feel less alone than in my room. I like it. So, what happened to you the other day?”
Since waking up that morning, Gaétan has been searching for a way to avoid telling her about Paul. But he can’t lie.
“I have a friend who has a friend…”
“What?”
He has to start from the beginning. As he moves through the explanation, Louise is listening to him with increasing attention and maybe even a hint of admiration. At the end of his story, she exclaims, “Wow! I didn’t know you hung around with guys in the FLQ!”
“It’s not what you think—and don’t talk so loud! Luc’s been my friend since forever. He’s a good worker. He only wants to improve the conditions on the job, and Paul offered to help him. I don’t really know him. But Luc’s not a ‘revolutionary’ like you say, let alone a member of the FLQ. He knows that killing a minister won’t ever make things better.”
“Obviously if we do nothing, we don’t risk a thing!”
“But when we do too much, we give our enemies the ammunition they need to scare everyone.”
“And you say you don’t understand politics at all.”
“Factory workers can understand things, too. My father’s an active member of a citizens’ committee to get rid of Mayor Drapeau, who’s been wreaking havoc on our neighbourhood for years. And now a bunch of bums who think they’re better than everyone come and screw everything up.”
“Speaking of your father, I bet you were just messing with me when you said that your great-grandfather knew Louis Riel.”
“Not at all!”
Gaétan begins to tell her the family legend, carefully handed down over the past three generations.
His great-grandfather’s name was Lionel Simard. He had only one leg, and when you asked he’d tell you how he lost the other one in a battle against the English. It was his pride and joy.
He had begun to work in Montréal at a young age, as a day hand for the Masson family. There he’d met a young man from the immense prairies that stretch as far as the eye can see on the other side of the Great Lakes. His name was Louis Riel. He studied at the Collège de Montréal’s Petit Séminaire and had only one desire: to return to the banks of the Red River. Lionel listened for hours as Louis described the immensity of the region’s fertile land and the miraculous buffalo hunts. In his mind, this wild, bountiful nature was meant to be shared among all people of good will. So when Louis Riel returned to his lands, Gaétan’s great-grandfather, then only seventeen, didn’t think twice before going with him.
Lionel cleared a plot of land that ran like a strip up from the Red River and a long way into the land behind. He built a camp with help from Louis Riel and his Métis friends. The families were very close-knit. Whenever one of them went through a difficult spell, they all helped each other. Life there was rough, and without the knowledge picked up from the Indians, few would have survived. Lionel managed one wheat harvest, but the following year everything was destroyed by locusts. Luckily, there was hunting, fishing, and the fur trade with the highest bidder winning, be it the American or the British companies. So they managed to survive, even when crops failed.
But the Canadian government at the time had strong views on how the region would be developed, since it had just been bought from the Hudson Bay Company. And the Métis had no place there.
When government surveyors came to divide up the land English-style, as if no one had ever lived there, the Métis banded together to prevent them from completing their paperwork. Louis Riel became their leader and formed a temporary government. Lionel was wounded during a battle with the English settlers who had come from Ontario to settle on land he had cleared himself. He was wounded in the leg and it had to be amputated. For him, it was the end of a dream. He came back to Montréal, never to set foot on the Prairies again. As family legend goes, Lionel Simard, the tough, uncompromising man who had managed to raise a family of twelve children on only one leg, had cried the day they hung Louis Riel.
“I even think my father still has a picture of Lionel in front of his camp on the Red River.”
“You’ve got to show me! I’ll make a photocopy and put it in with my paper,” says Louise.
Gaétan can’t believe that an old family story he’s never paid much attention to fascinates the girl. He watches her earnestly write down his story in her notebook, savouring being the object of her interest.
16
Friday, October 30
It’s three o’clock in the morning. Gaétan takes his place next to the spinner with a heavy heart. At the end of the large machine room where the noise is deafening, a shabby little room with a few picnic tables and a vending machine invites the workers to have a bite to eat during their breaks.
As he does every night, Gaétan goes in to gulp down two bottles of Coke to keep his eyes open until the end of his shift.
Today, a woman who could have been his mother was crying in a corner. She had just been fired for missing a few days of work because one of her children had been sick. When she returned, she had already been replaced by a younger girl. The foreman hadn’t even warned her. She had tried to negotiate a
nother position, even one less well paid, but it was no use.
Now, the roar of the machines scrambles his thoughts. Gaétan can’t get the woman’s expression out of his head. He would have liked to help her. He has a sudden desire to drop everything, to run away from this place where life seems to count for so little. He remembers Luc’s words: “Cheap labour. All we are is cheap labour.”
A nagging question runs through his head. How many years will he spend in front of this machine? Thirty? Forty? He is sick to his stomach.
Suddenly, his machine gets caught and a few of the threads snap. It’s a catastrophe. He pushes the red emergency button and the foreman comes running.
“Goddammit… Better not let that happen too often, or believe me you won’t stay here long. It takes three hours to get that machine going again—that’s three hours’ production time lost.”
Gaétan says nothing.
“You can get the hell out of here for today. In three hours, your shift’ll be over. But I’m holding a half-day on your paycheque.”
Gaétan turns and bolts towards the stairs.
“You heartless bastards!” he yells behind him. Fortunately, his voice is covered by the noise of the machines.
Gaétan finds himself outside under a starry sky. At this time of night, it is more than just cold. Neither the buses nor the metro are running. He will have to walk back across the entire city. Tonight is a night full of anger. Gaétan clenches his fists.
He is now trudging down Sainte-Catherine. Usually so full of life and light, it is strangely deserted. Tomorrow is Halloween, and the store windows decorated with skeletons, ghosts, and witches end up giving off a gloomy feeling. There are hardly any cars; only a few taxis circulate, looking for the last stragglers after a night on the town.
The boy arrives at the corner of the Main. It’s the only place in the whole city where snack bars are still open at this late hour. Boulevard Saint-Laurent, its real name, is the stomping grounds of prostitutes and other non-conformists of all types. Gaétan decides to go eat a hot dog at the Montréal Pool Room before going home. A woman beckons to him from the door of a nightclub. He quickens his pace.
