October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  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.

  I won’t describe the “glacialated” (one of Chevalier’s neologisms) village of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade. If you called the municipal offices they’d no doubt mail you a pamphlet, even though there’s almost certainly a web site. This old parish, surrounded by pastures and situated on the border between the northern wilderness and the river, is known as the “tommy cod fishing capital of the world” today, which is fine, Sainte-Anne being the only place in the world where the above-mentioned fish are fished, as far as I know. The village of huts (or the glacialated agglomeration) lasts for only six to eight weeks. Ahead of me, as though rising from the river’s barely buttressed bed, less than a hundred metres wide at this point, lies a blossoming of white, yellow, red, slate, green, and blue cabins, each surmounted by a sheet-metal chimney spewing a thick plume of white smoke into the intensely blue sky. Roads have been ploughed on the ice between the huts, and vehicles are parked between mounds of snow. The village has been divided into “blocks,” identifiable by the fact that the cabins in each block are all the same colour and belong to the same owner and provider.

  I found myself standing in front of one of these fishing palaces, on the door: GASTON NOBERT, PURVEYOR. And I thought that’s exactly what Chevalier Branlequeue never was for his family: a purveyor. After all his years of swimming against the tide, by the time the university reeled him back in, in the mid-1970s, on the strength of the overwhelming success of Elucubrations as much as for any degree he might have had, his children had already flown the familial coop and were spreading their wings somewhere else.

  Not far from me, a tomcod suddenly flew out of an open window and landed on a pile of its fellows to be frozen alive on the ice. I walked over, bent down, and picked up the fish between my fingers. It was still wriggling. I looked at it closely, as though acting out a scene: Prince Hamlet with aquatic vertebrate instead of Yorick’s skull. I don’t know why, but I stuffed the fish into my coat pocket. I could feel it beating feebly against my side. It was still alive. I went back to the church, turned into the cemetery while the last cars were leaving the parking lot and driving off along the Chemin du Roy. Not so much as a cat at the graveside. The coffin had been lowered and was awaiting the gravediggers, who couldn’t be far off, probably huddled around a Quebec heater in the shelter of a tool shed.

  When I took the tomcod out of my pocket, it was no longer moving. I knew that Chevalier Branlequeue would approve of my little joke: a dead fish to bear the message You’re next, like in the Mafia.

  The little frostfish hardly made a sound when it hit the coffin lid. I walked back to the church. The bus rented by the Writers’ Union had already left. Everyone was gone. Except for one old poet, sitting on the church steps, a brown paper bag with a bottle in it held tightly between his legs. He was singing “The Lament of the Mauricie.”

  RUE SAINT-DENIS

  FROM THE WINDOW OF HIS office on the third floor of the Judith-Jasmin Building at the University of Quebec at Montréal (UQAM), Chevalier had enjoyed an unobstructed view of one of the densest concentrations of drinking spots in the city. On traditional English university campuses, usually self-contained enclaves in the verdant countryside, there would be a single pub, justly thought of as a scene of depravity, and that opened only at night. Students spent a few sordid hours in them relieving themselves of accumulated pressures, drinking themselves stupid, trying to pick up anything with a pulse, throwing up in toilets, falling asleep under a table for an hour or two, then getting up for a final hit on whoever looked fuckable and/or to get into a brawl, then go home to sleep it off.

  Relatively speaking, with its urban campus in the Latin Quarter, UQAM was a modest, transatlantic imitation of the Sorbonne: barely a few strides separated the future bachelor of arts in the grip of a brilliant but boring course from a sidewalk café in which intellectually stimulating company sipped pints of beer. A perennial temptation, for students, as well as profs, which may explain why the two organs that had laid Professor Branlequeue low had been his liver and one of his kidneys. He had made a lot of demands on them, Samuel told himself, standing at the window looking down with disinterest at a drug dealer manning his post at the subway exit at the corner of de Maisonneuve and Saint-Denis.

  He went back and sat down behind Branlequeue’s desk. He took in, for a moment, the familiar disarray. At the foot of the paper Everest piled on it, or leaning against it, perched the professor’s talismans. A wolf. A postcard from Percé. A hairy, eighteen-centimetre gorilla wearing green shorts with tri-coloured stripes and a pair of red boxing gloves. A key for who knew what. A card from a small hotel in Paris’s Eighth District. A roadrunner feather. A chain of paperclips (32 mm, number 1) approximately fifteen feet long, folded into a pile, patiently assembled while a succession of students covering a large spectrum of intellectual possibilities sat across from him, droning away bravely about new theories concerning the Barthesian concept of textual bliss. And a chequebook with two rubber rectangles pasted to a piece of cardboard for a cover, a bit of bric-a-brac that Chevalier used to flog the same old chestnut every time the waiter at the Frère Jacques presented him with a bill: “Hold on, I’ve got my rubber cheques right here …”

  On the back of a departmental directive announcing a new policy concerning student spelling mistakes, Chevalier had written, in his perky hand: Zero taller ants.

  Energetic knocking on the door — he had left it half-open to conform with the spirit of ORAL, which Branlequeue had dubbed: Omni Regulations Anti-Libido — made him quickly look up.

  Emma, who had seen the last of her forties, was wearing knee-high boots, breeches, a white blouse with flared sleeves and a neckline low enough to show a bit of dark lace, and a red vest that would have been more at home under a circus tent. A necklace weighing at least two kilos was rubbing the skin of her neck raw. This riding-to-hounds look rarely failed to draw a comment around the office, at union meetings, at the front of a class, at the cinema, the opera, and the cafeteria. Emma Magy had been six in 1956 when she crossed the Austro-Hungarian border at night on her father’s shoulders. She was fond of saying that the Soviets had been stopped in Poland by the Catholic Church, in Czechoslovakia by the intellectuals, in Romania by poverty, in Yugoslavia by Tito, and in Hungary by the people’s joie de vivre.

  Shortly after Samuel earned his master’s, in the late 1980s, the Literature Department underwent a veritable theatre of back-stabbing. In the space of two or three years, the top echelon of professors, veterans from the Collège Sainte-Marie, survivors of the series of heroic strikes that took place throughout the seventies, were decimated as surely as old Bolsheviks during the Stalinist purges. Not all of them had been let go, but none of them lasted long. It was as though they had disappeared under the table, victims of one vice or another: alcohol, cigarettes, boys, garlic butter, poker. It was a kind of poetic justice that they had perished by the same swords that had been their principal sources of pleasure for most of their lives. The most erudite of them had even died of brain cancer. The silent survivors moved in the corridors like damned souls, kept alive by lithium and antidepressants.

  And now, Chevalier … But the woman who had just come through the door with a raucous, Valkyrie-like “Hi!” that echoed from one end of the corridor to the other was different. None of the excesses inventoried in the King James Bible and Sister Beatrice’s Manual of Corporeal Hygiene seemed to have done her any harm.

  With an imperious gesture she signalled Sam to remain seated, then broke into Homeric laughter while managing to be extremely feminine.

  “Hey, there, sweetie pie. We wondered who was going to be sent to clean up this mess …”

/>   “No kidding.”

  He invited her to set her muscular thighs on a chair. They had to clear a path through the stacks of books and mountains of paper that covered every flat surface of the office, as though they were cutting a trail through a forest.

  She said she was surprised not to have seen him at the funeral.

  “I was there. Last row, just like in kindergarten …”

  “Not just there,” she said, winking. “That’s where you sat in my classes, too.”

  “I don’t know what was worse, the protestations of posthumous friendship from his colleagues, who avoided him like the plague all these years because of his supposed ‘chronic conspirationism’ the well-oiled public-relations blitz coming from the propagandists in the premier’s office, or the family’s pious attempts to whitewash him. In fact, I think it was the culture minister’s deep tan …”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Emma said, casting an eye at the muddle in the office, the overstuffed bookshelves spilling their burden of books, bristling with bookmarks like an old sofa losing its stuffing, the piles of papers, and learned journals that rose from the floor around them.