October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  In the 22nd regiment this story was often told. It was like a glorious wreath around the brow of the regiment and its mythic commander, to show to the lowliest orderly stationed in Cyprus what sort of stuff Brigadier-General Jean-B. Bédard was made of.

  DORA OF THE JUST

  SAMUEL WAITED FOR MARIE-QUÉBEC IN the Lavigueur Tavern, sitting at a table near the window. When he looked up from his beer, he recognized the portrait of Raoul Bonnard, the former comic and crooner, the Channel 10 man, his face swollen like that of an overstuffed gargoyle covered with make-up that cracked when he smiled. Powder-blue suit, red bow tie, white chrysanthemum in his lapel. Thick Brylcreemed hair of a dubious colour. Le Bonnard from the heyday of cabaret.

  Across the street, between two tattoo parlours, was a pile of boards and rubble that had once been a Hells Angels hangout before it was destroyed by a car bomb. Just to the left was the window of a pawnshop, a favourite with the local petty thieves, and a store selling old clothes whose owner, wearing his perpetual cowboy hat, lit a candle for Kurt Cobain every day in the church next door, which had been taken over by Latinos. At the corner, the masculine silhouette of a homeless person spun like a top at each passing car.

  “Hey! Psst …”

  Sam raised his eyes to the king of entertainment’s painted mug, looked around, and then looked back at the painting. He hadn’t been mistaken: Raoul Bonnard had indeed tried to attract his attention. Above the bow tie, his bloated face resembling the physiognomy of Thing, one of the Fantastic Four superheroes, softened suddenly and spread into a sly, astonishing smile.

  “How’s it goin’ there, young fella?”

  Samuel looked around again, then back at the portrait.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “No, I’m talkin’ to the wall. Hey, kid! What do you call a Negro buried in the sand with his ass in the air?”

  “No idea.”

  “A bicycle rack!”

  Samuel looked quickly over at the waiter.

  “Mr. Bonnard … that’s not funny at all.”

  “Maybe not, but you got a face on you like a bloodhound with a head cold. How come you’re sittin’ here fuckin’ the dog all by yourself?”

  “I’m waiting for a woman.”

  Raoul leaned out of the canvas and gave him a twenty-four-carat wink accompanied by a truly lecherous grin.

  “Attaboy! What’re you drinking there, my son? Scotch? Cutty Sark?”

  “Why not make it turpentine? What are you trying to do, kill me?”

  Then Samuel gave a start: the waiter had come up to his table and was looking at him curiously.

  “A Cutty Sark,” said Sam.

  Marie-Québec ordered an apricot beer. The waiter gave her an uncomprehending look, and Sam went to her rescue.

  “I’d be surprised if they have that here.”

  “Okay, I’ll have a Belle Gueule, then.”

  The waiter still didn’t move.

  “They don’t have Quebec beers, either,” Sam whispered.

  Looking up, she favoured the waiter with a forced smile that seemed the essence of charm.

  “Right. Got it. I’ll have a draft.”

  “Excellent choice, Mademoiselle,” said the waiter, before he moved away.

  Sam asked Marie-Québec a few questions about her work. She had just spent two weeks in Montreal filming a couple of scenes from The Just and was leaving the next day. When Sam asked her what character she was playing, she realized he hadn’t read the play. She supposed she might have been playing the Grand Duchess, but did she really have the kind of head that would be a Grand Duchess?

  She tried to sound Samuel out on the character of Dora.

  “I’ll have to reread the play,” he told her.

  “Because you’ve already read it?”

  “Oh, sure I have. Camus, a must-read.”

  The lie didn’t convince her and they both knew it. The conversation trailed off. After a moment, Marie-Québec got up and went to the bathroom.

  “Hey!”

  Samuel looked up at the painting.

  “Yes, Raoul …”

  “Nice piece of ass. Play your cards right and it’ll take you three, maybe four sentences to get her from here to your bed.”

  “I’m not completely obsessed with sex, if that’s what you think.”

  “Yeah, go tell that to someone else, I ain’t buyin’ it. And stop tryin’ to make her think you’ve read all them French philosophers. Keep that up and she’ll be out of here in ten minutes flat.”

  “No, she won’t, Raoul. She’s an actress …”

  “Yeah, I’ve known a few actresses in my time. They don’t get lips like that from suckin’ lemons.”

  “What do you think of her? I mean, seriously?”

  “Well, to be honest, I prefer blondes with bigger tits. And I gotta ask myself what she’s got against high heels. But listen, she’s got a nice little heart-shaped ass on her, and ever since she got here she’s been tryin’ to rub up against your knees under the table, so I’d say …”

  “What’s with the knees?”

  “Yeah, keep playin’ the innocent. What d’ya think she’s doin’ in there? Crossword puzzles? She’s gonna come back with her face all made up and perfume on her, and then we’ll see what kind of stuff you’re made of, my man.”

  “Marie-Québec isn’t like that.”

  “Hey, listen up, Happy Face. I’m advising you to take my advice, otherwise you ain’t gonna get nowhere.”

  “Dream on!”

  “Yeah, well, what else can I do, jump into a cab? You gotta score for both of us …”

  From the corner of his eye Sam saw the young woman in question coming back. Walking silently in her running shoes, she moved with a graceful modesty and simplicity that could not have been put on, even though her self-assurance and a certain tightness in her gestures spoke of effort and self-consciousness. Sam imagined the former stars of the music-hall stage, like Denis Drouin and Ti-Zoune Gimond, salivating as she walked past their portraits.

  He cast a final glance at the painting. The old straight man gave him a spicy eyeful, the whole Bonnardian gamut. The facial equivalent of an all-dressed with extra anchovies.

  The last thing I read of Camus’s …”

  Samuel stopped himself. Bonnard, from his frame, was holding his head in both hands.

  “What’s going on?” Marie-Québec asked.

  “Nothing. The last thing I read of Camus’s was his defence of Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus.”

  “Oh? And what did Camus think of Don Juan?”

  “First, he was a pretty good Don Juan himself. By which I mean he was someone who knew he was mortal and believed in holiness down here.”

  “And is that what you are? A Don Juan?’

  “Not yet. But I’m working on it.”

  “Not very hard, from what I can see.”

  “When I was fifteen, I wanted to be an engineer. At twenty, a biologist. At twenty-five, a writer. But when I turned thirty, I really understood what I wanted to do with my life. It was Don Juan or nothing.”

  “Well, in my case I didn’t get off to much of a start.”

  “But you’re an actress. Your goal in life is to seduce.”

  “No. My goal is to change the world.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’ve been put on earth to give pleasure. Changing the world, that’s something else altogether. You need an AK-47 for that.”

  “What’s an AK-47?”

  “An assault weapon. Soviet made.”

  “So you’re a nihilist.”

  “I may well be.”

  “It’s people like Dora who change the world. With their love. And me, when I’m being her.”

  “I adore Dora.”

  “But you don’t know her.”

  “I’ve read the play. But it was a long time ago.”

  “If ever. And you haven’t read The Myth of Sisyphus, either.”

  To prove to her that he had, Samuel launche
d into a long harangue about reconciling the Casanova and the actor/actress in the Camusian absurd, which quickly embroiled him in a web of conflicting ideas, a total cerebral miasma in which, in the end, every possible position was abolished by its opposite, and from which he extracted himself only in time to see the young woman stand up and hold out her hand.

  “I think I’d best be gone.”

  Samuel looked at her hand with a stupid expression on his face. He took it with as much enthusiasm as if it was a venomous snake or a baited marten trap.

  “Are you staying here?” she asked him.

  Fully aware of the immeasurable inanity of the only word that he could bring to his lips, he said it anyway.

  “Yes.”

  She gave him a fixed look, turned on her heel, and left.

  “Bravo.”

  “Not you again.”

  “My boy, it’s not as though it’s your face on the marquee, you know what I mean? You gotta work at it a bit!”

  “I’m socio-affectively maladapted, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Look, that wasn’t a pole she was handing you when she left, it was a whole goddamn Hydro-Québec pylon. What are you waiting for? Get off your ass and run after her. I’ll pick up the tab.”

  “Thanks, Raoul …” Sam murmured as he jumped to his feet.

  When he emerged onto the street, he had to run barely thirty metres to catch up with Marie-Québec at the next corner, apparently waiting for someone. She looked up at him.

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Here I am, sitting at the kitchen table nibbling at the heel of a baguette and reading, for the third time, a paragraph in an article by Réal “Real Life” Poirier on the Pavlovian Saga — Sergei Pavlov, the hockey player that is, the Red Light, the Russian Missile, recently acquired by the Montreal Canadiens, and whose mysterious upper-thigh injury and his eight-million-dollar-a-year contract are the hot topics of the day. In a few seconds the coffeepot on one of the burners on the stove is going to explode. Through the open bedroom door, I can see her stretched out on the bed, at the foot of which the rumpled sheets make a kind of elongated lump, and I think: cat. She has that suppleness of body, nervous and languid at the same time. And I remember when I entered her last night and again this morning the sound that escaped from her lips and her chest could only be described as a growl. The impression of having spent the night fucking a cat, and having shared enough secrets to last a thousand years, and of not having felt this good since Christ knows when.

  “What do you want to do later?”

  “I’m almost thirty years old. This is later.”

  “I mean in your life. By today’s standards, you’re still an adolescent.”

  “I want to live alone, in a cabin, in the woods. In voluntary simplicity and truth. That’s it.”

  “But that’s no ambition for a young woman like yourself …”

  “What’s an ambition for a young woman like myself? To be celibate?”

  “Among other things.”

  “And why is living in a cabin not a legitimate ambition? Too difficult?”

  “Yes, for a woman living alone.”

  “But if it’s so difficult, is it not therefore a legitimate ambition?”

  “You have a point.”

  “And to be celibate, is that difficult or isn’t it?”

  “Not so difficult, it would seem. But all right, I just can’t see you doing it.”

  “Doing what? Living alone in a cabin or being celibate?”

  “Both.”

  “You don’t have enough imagination.”

  “And you, you have absolutely zero ambition.”

  “I do what I can. I’m in a play in Abitibi.”

  “Dora. That’s a really nice name.”

  She had a small, striped kitten inside her that growled when he opened her up and brought her to the end of herself and raised her up like a feather a fountain a full moon, and it became her gravitas, her risen rose.

  The Mazda, or Colt, or Corolla pulled up behind a taxi in front of the bus station on rue Berri, and Samuel put on the four-ways. He turned to Marie-Québec, who was huddled in her winter coat.

  “Funny, but I have the feeling that what I’m going to say now is bound to sound stupid, not that it matters.”

  “Ha!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you don’t have to say anything.”

  “No, I know. See you soon?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No? Why not?

  “You see, I was about to say that if you wanted to see me again you would drive me to where I’m going, but of course that’s crazy.”

  “You mean …”

  “Yes, up there.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Seven hundred kilometres. But I was kidding.”

  “Seven hundred kilometres from Montreal to Maldoror.”

  “It’s not far.”

  From where he was sitting, by stretching his neck a bit he could see a small piece of the Judith-Jasmin Building. If he worked at it, he could probably pick out the window of the office in which he’d been sorting papers a few days earlier.

  “I’ve got a lot of work waiting for me. A pile of things to do … Research …”

  “It was a joke, okay?”

  He managed a smile.

  “One of these days, though. Why not?”

  “You just said that because you felt you had to.”

  “I didn’t say it like that.”

  “You even said that like that.”

  “Hang on, I’ll park a bit farther up.”

  “No. Don’t bother.”

  He watched her get out, her large backpack trailing in her hand. A homeless man dressed like a lumberjack held the door for her and bowed as she went into the station, as if she were a princess.

  At five in the morning he was listening to the Chinese couple quarrelling in the next apartment while he took four crackers at a time out of the box and stuffed them into his mouth. He chewed the dry purée while standing on one foot in the morning light, remembering Marie-Québec perched, rather than sitting, on the sofa chair he’d inherited from his grandfather, and that she’d dragged over to the sliding glass doors in order to catch the first light of day coming in from the alley, naked, her knees drawn up to her chin, letting her body soak in the sun’s warmth as naturally as the pot of herbs on the neighbour’s balcony. And the perfect curve of her breasts, their self-assured line, the way they pointed toward the sun like phototropic fruit. The delicate, precise outline of her darkly pink nipples, as if they’d been carved from coral.

  He remembered the way she talked about a film or a play, unravelling the narrative without paying the slightest attention to the main dramatic line. She would pick a thread and pull on it, and a single episode would go off in a dozen directions at once. She put works of genius and complete dogs through the same mill, Lelouch and Fellini, treat them all the same, and have them come out totally indistinguishable from one another.

  He surprised himself by smiling at the memory, his lips frosted with white soda-biscuit dust.

  He called the lawyer, Mario Brien, the next day. The preacher famous for his fire-and-brimstone defences seemed much less disposed toward writers than his cop friend had been. Sam never got a word in edgewise. The conversation left him feeling like he’d gone three rounds with George Foreman in his heyday. When he heard the phone go dead at the other end of the line, he realized he had just let himself be harangued like a stinking fish for twenty minutes and that Brien, apparently a pathological motormouth and a consummate artist at drowning out the opposition, hadn’t made a single reference to the antiterrorist squad or to the deliverer of the chicken. Hurling a string of insults at his interlocutor, he said he was doubly bound, not only by the pact of silence he’d made with the members of the Chevalier Cell, but also by his professional oath, and that’s the way it is, monsieur, and so I’m going to hang up now without wishin
g you good luck or good day or good anything.

  Samuel was depressed for a day and a half after the call. He finally decided that feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to get him anywhere, so he made some coffee and sat back down at his desk. He took a sheet of paper and wrote “pact of silence” on it.

  The next day, he went to the public library and took out The Just, a play in three acts by Albert Camus.

  AN EVENING IN

  THE COUNTRY

  IN HIS DREAM, THE RINGING telephone was the alarm that sounded the general alert in the Parthenais Prison. He’d climbed up a ventilation shaft and was standing on the prison roof, the village illuminated at his feet. Then he grabbed a rope of knotted sheets and, with its aid, started to lower himself hand over hand down to rue Fullum.

  Instead of which he woke up at the bottom of the bed, tangled in a different set of sheets. His own. Foolish man, thought Chevalier Branlequeue. He was thirty-eight years old, his children were asleep, the news program had ended hours ago, and the pulsating, sonorous heap under the sheets beside him was La Grosse Éléonore.

  It was December 28, 1970. Chevalier was wide awake and the bloody phone was still ringing. He struggled to untangle himself, managed to get his feet onto the carpet beside the bed, stood up, and left the bedroom, heading toward the telephone table at the end of the hall. It was a black contraption, fitted with a round dial made of clear moulded plastic and a handset that had bulges shaped like shower heads at each end. It was a time when the only function required of a telephone was that it convey the human voice from one location to another. He picked up.

  “Chevalier? Prosecutor Grosleau here. Sorry if I’ve disturbed you …”

  “My dear sir, do you have any idea what time it is?”