October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “In fact, it was André Malraux who didn’t exist,” Chevalier said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

  “He might well have existed, but he no longer had the time to liberate the people. He was too busy strutting around the Mona Lisa in Washington with Jackie Kennedy on his arm.”

  “No different from your famous Hemingway as the liberator of Paris. We have a better idea now of his military objectives: the wine cellars at the Ritz and Marlene Dietrich. Of course, not everyone has the chance to hug a plane tree in full bloom,” conceded Chevalier, with a bored air.

  And he gave Godefroid a completely obvious wink that said:

  “He’s a tough nut, isn’t he?”

  Chevalier lived like a hermit at home in the Placard. La Grosse Éléonore, his implacable goddess, ruled over the other four and a half rooms. She would have made a great prison guard, but such are the fortunes of life that she became the head nurse in a new hospital built without under-the-table dealings with the Mafia and a handful of federal ministers. She was now the sole breadwinner, and the household was feeling the pinch. It was she who gave her head-in-the-clouds husband the name Branlequeue, which means tail-wagger, a sobriquet he remembered when he came to pick a nom-de-plume. The children, Martial, Pacific, and Vénus, wandered from one realm to another, according to their needs: order, the call of nature, and their stomachs dominated Éléonore’s world; Canada notebooks, washcloths, and toothbrushes drifted into the Placard, where games and the imagination, freedom and beauty could be found among the incredible clutter, in the middle of which the pater familias, silhouette outlined in a fog of nicotine, red pen in hand, glasses on the edge of his nose, feet up on a desk entirely carpeted with ink-smudged papers, coffee cups and Saskatoon-berry jam, officiated. Chevalier let them push their little cars and walk their dolls among the shadows of skyscrapers and mountain chains represented by piles of books and manuscripts. Perched at the peak of one of the piles, an ashtray overflowing with butts smoked away with the majesty of a domestic Etna.

  It was in this smoke-filled Placard that Gode and François first heard about Quebec independence. The idea was a child of the right, but socialism took it and ran with it and impressed it in the minds of the province’s progressive thinkers. Oppressed nations were the powder keg, the ideology of decolonization the lit match. Chevalier wanted their opinions on the situation in the Congo. On the Algerians drowned in the Seine. Everywhere on Earth, people were shuffling off the chains of the old imperial domination and embracing the cause of freedom.

  They joined the RIN, the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale. They volunteered their time. The Montreal office was next to a coffee house called The Patriot. On the South Shore, the soul of the separatist movement took bodily form in the person of Marcel Duquet, the man with the accountant’s moustache and the checked suits. He was said to be of the right, but that didn’t matter. In the RIN, Gode and François met Jean-Paul Lafleur, a large young man in his early twenties, built like a bear. Through him, they got to know his brother René. Patriots and revolutionaries of various plumages joined their circle of friends. There were people like Jacques Cardinal, the ex-cop turned political agitator, a genius at fraud whose supreme ambition was to “fuck the system.” Bad eggs like him were legion, on the left and on the right, scrambling, scheming, and scribbling between the St. Lawrence and the U.S. border.

  Between scorching puffs shot up by the fryer in the chip wagon, I saw the neighbourhood where I’d grown up change. Once a workers’ eyesore stuck under the nose of the big city, the western outskirts swiftly became part of the urban conglomeration. You could get there by subway now. There were still vacant fields, but you no longer ran into the dog catcher, hired by the municipality, who advertised his prowess by stringing garlands of dogs’ ears like bandoleers of bullets across his chest. He was said to have killed three thousand dogs in a single year. And Weston Bakeries no longer distributed free loaves of sliced bread on the street corners, as if we were in Africa. That was mostly around boulevard Taschereau. The only thing that hadn’t changed was on election days the streets belonged to the mob. Yes, there were open sewers, but don’t think for a minute they still reached as far as the mayor’s or the deputy mayor’s offices.

  One night I knocked on Chevalier’s door. He came down in his dressing gown, his little girl hanging onto his neck. He told me to come up.

  To give me something to do while he finished correcting a chapter, he took a slim volume from a box on the floor and handed it to me. It must have been about sixty pages long. I read the title: Damnedamerican. It was Pepe Bourguignon’s latest collection, the new darling of the poetry-of-engagement set. Hot off the press. It smelled funny.

  “Pepe told me,” Chevalier said without looking up, “they’ve printed a thousand copies, can you imagine that?”

  I watched him correcting a typescript with his daughter. He had her sitting on his lap, and she was the one holding the pen. Three years old. Chevalier would indicate the word or words or lines he wanted cut, and she would take the red pen and strike through them, scritch, scratch, screech. From where I was sitting, I could see the huge, red lines: the page looked like the back of someone who’d been whipped.

  “Vénus is a more severe critic than I am,” Chevalier said complacently.

  “Whose work is this?” I asked, pointing to a manuscript on his desk. A huge stack of papers, maybe a foot thick. He didn’t reply right away.

  “Mine.”

  “You wrote all that?”

  He looked at me.

  “It was easy. Simply put, I’ve rewritten our history.”

  He went to put the child to bed. When he came back, I’d found the courage to take a sheaf of papers folded in thirds from under my jacket. He took them without a word, sat down, offered me a whisky, and looked at the title page.

  “Hot Doggerels. Hmmm.”

  He read it while I was watching. To pass the time I chain-smoked and refilled my whisky glass. Then I started examining the manuscripts piled on the chairs and even on the floor around where I was sitting. I picked one up, placed it on my lap, and read:

  Click Beetles

  A Novel

  By François Langlais

  I was floored. I counted the pages: three hundred and seventy-seven!

  “He took the title from Le Survenant,” Chevalier said, barely looking up from my manuscript. “Guèvrement used the term to mean something like ‘a strong man’ … It’s a Québecism, like ‘boulé,’ which means almost the same thing. Do you want to know if it’s any good?”

  What could I say? That if it wasn’t completely awful, a piece of shit, I would kill him?

  “Umm.”

  “Your friend François is a very intelligent young man, but that’s not enough to make him a writer. He’s written a kind of detective novel, in which thugs rule the roost. There’s a local Sherlock Holmes, a clone of Arsène Dupin, who likes to don disguises … There’s a bit of Proust in it as well: in the end, we discover that every character is … no, not a homosexual: a spy. It’s brilliant, actually, very nuanced. Needs to be rewritten top to bottom, of course. So, now, shall we talk about your poems?”

  He poured me a slug of whisky in a waterglass covered in fingerprints, then lit himself a cigarette, and offered me one.

  “There’s something you need to know, Richard, and the sooner you know it the better. ‘Many are called, few are chosen …’ You’ll thank me one day.”

  Touché, Chevalier. My first taste of whisky.

  Nineteen sixty-eight arrived. It was spring. “Everything happens in Paris …” Langlais told me, and so we pooled our money, got our passports and tickets, and left. Student unrest had sprung up in Nanterre and spread to the Latin Quarter, and those in power had reacted by shutting down the Sorbonne. On boulevard Saint-Michel, two thousand students had confronted the riot police.

  The minute we arrived in the Place de l’Odéon, we started crying like babies, not because all the old grey stones that sur
rounded us were impregnated with literature, or because we were treading on the same cobblestones as Marcel Proust. It was because the students had been tear-gassed and Boulevard Saint-Michel was blanketed by an acrid pall that was blowing our way. We stepped on broken glass and all kinds of other debris. Someone had overturned a Peugeot: it lay on its back like a beetle on top of a pile of ripped-up paving stones. Farther along, men were busily tearing down a barricade: cobblestones, wooden beams, bags of cement, wire fencing, metal grilles, tree trunks, upside-down cars. Red and black flags flew over everything.

  Ambulances were parked in front of the Sorbonne. A line of overturned, blackened cars stretched along the rue Gay-Lussac. Protesters had torn up trees and built barricades all around the Latin Quarter, and fought off the forces of law and order until six o’clock in the morning. They’d thrown bricks at the riot police, and the police had charged at them with billy clubs swinging, and blood was running in the streets. It looked as though the police had also used the kind of grenades known as crickets, which gave off a disabling nerve gas. And the students, joined by the young unemployed and the broke and homeless denizens of the suburbs, had returned the police fire with Molotov cocktails and blasts of sand jets from compressors stolen from the work crews trying to take down the façade.

  Just before we left Montreal, someone gave us the address of a Parisian willing to rent us a room for next to nothing. His place was on Saint-Germain, between the Café Mabillon and the Café de Cluny. One bed. One dresser. One heater. Cold water and Turkish toilets at the end of the hall. We took it. It gave us front-row seats to the arrival of the revolution.

  In the morning, François let me sleep in and went down to the Café Flore to nibble on a croissant and drink a cup of coffee served in a cup the size of a thimble. I found him immersed in the novel A Sentimental Education and pulled up a chair and asked him the obvious question:

  “Seen Jean-Paul Sartre yet?”

  It didn’t get a rise from him.

  “He doesn’t come here any more …”

  We’d read in the paper that Sartre had addressed the students in the occupied Sorbonne. Rumour had it that the author of Nausea, taking his place at the podium, had found a message to him scribbled on a piece of paper: SARTRE, BE BRIEF! Our spies reported that the “little father,” Charles de Gaulle, had also talked about “democracy run wild” and “a liaison between socialism and liberty.”

  “You know,” François said, holding up A Sentimental Education, “the events taking place under our noses will go down in history and will find their place in the books exactly like those of 1848.”

  “What happened in 1848?”

  “The July Revolution, of course!”

  “I thought that was in 1789 …”

  “That was only the first. They never really stopped after that. They have an average of one a century.”

  François read L’Humanité, which in those days was calling for a GGI, an unlimited general strike. Pompidou had reopened the university, but the unions and student associations were still out and a huge cortège stretched from Place de la République to Place Denfert-Rochereau. This time, there were almost as many workers as there were students, all marching under the banners with arms linked. The floodgates were opened: factory workers were out, strikes were spreading like a contagion over the entire the country.

  Once again, the red and black flag waved above the Sorbonne. The lecture halls were full to bursting with young men and women working to upset the establishment, to have their say, to hand the reins of power on to someone else. They were making placards, printing tracts and manifestos and broadsides, forming human chains, smoking unfiltered Gitanes, electing committees, representatives, delegates, naming those responsible, voting for programs and resolutions, picking up followers from the extreme left, from the far right, and bottling them all up in Paris with such … You’d see them with their feet sticking out of sleeping bags, couples making love or just talking quietly about the importance of approaching the question of sexual politics from a dialectic perspective.

  I met a girl from the Britanny Liberation Front, but it didn’t work out. I lacked nerve. I hadn’t yet understood that the trick was to lay it on as thick as possible. I was more the laid-back type. Everywhere you looked you saw kids with their hair falling down over their eyes holding cigarettes like they were characters in a Truffaut film.

  “The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love,” shouted one signpost. Another, in blood-red letters two feet high: “Fuck Who You Want!” Easy for them to say.

  One day I saw the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, the Place de la Madeleine, and the Eiffel Tower. After that, in the early evening, I met up with François at the Old Navy. He was almost finished A Sentimental Education. The night before, the General had addressed the nation. All of France had tuned in. And all of France agreed: “He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.” Pathetic.

  “It’s bizarre, though, don’t you think?” François said.

  “What is?”

  “Less than a year ago he was announcing Quebec’s liberation from the balcony at City Hall. And now he’s the incarnation of the most reactionary power. What do you make of that?”

  “That maybe Malraux should step down.”

  “You’re forgetting Chevalier’s theory: Malraux doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, and ordered two more espressos.

  One of François’s friends dropped by, someone he’d recently met. He looked interesting. As though lurking behind his eyes was the missing link between the post-war hip cat and the hippie. Mick Jagger with half the testosterone, give or take. Quite androgynous. His name was Luc Goupil, and he was French from France, a Quebecker by adoption, and was now living in London. He was part of the first wave of the FLQ. He had been arrested in 1963 for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at a barracks. Imprisoned. He wasn’t yet twenty years old. When he got out, he went underground.

  “So, you think the Communists are going to take over?” he asked us.

  “Civil war. Anything’s possible,” replied François. It was the phrase we’d been hearing everywhere: Anything’s possible.

  “I like that,” Goupil drawled.

  “The Americans would never allow it,” I said.

  Goupil leaned over the table and looked at me earnestly.

  “The Americans?” he said. “They love all this shit … The old General said he wanted his own nuclear bomb, and look what he gets: a bomb up his ass!”

  He laughed.

  “I hear that Pompidou is complaining that his usual sources aren’t reporting to him, his pools of spies aren’t keeping him up to date with what’s happening. Poor Pompy … What does he expect? Students are hard to keep an eye on, hard to infiltrate. You agree?”

  I was beginning to understand François’s fascination with the guy. With Goupil, a conversation always seemed to be taking place on two levels at the same time.

  “What do you mean? That the French secret service …”

  “The secret service works for the secret service, and if their interests happen to correspond with the interests of the government, then so much the better. The Communists don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of seizing power, but in the meantime the Old Camel has a nice little revolution on his hands. Nothing too serious. But the next time he’ll think twice before pulling out of NATO,” Goupil said with a gracious smile. And ordered drinks. And more drinks.

  Long before dawn I managed to drag myself toward the exit.

  “Stay with us, Gode,” Goupil said. “We’re going to get some breakfast — stuffed crêpes smothered in Calvados.”

  “Makes my stomach heave just thinking about it,” I said. “I’m going to bed …”

  But we ordered one for the road. We drank to our little maid’s room on Saint-Germaine-des-Prés, and to the health of maids in general, to their disappearance in a classless society of the future, and also to the health of Karl Marx, who
liked maids well enough.

  On the afternoon of May 29, hundreds of thousands of people marched from the Bastille to the Saint-Lazare station. Jean-Luc Godard was rumoured to be among the demonstrators, as was Aragon, and, of course, Elsa. The union and Communist leaders had signed the Grenelle Agreement with the government, but their members were refusing to vote in the factories, and the country’s equilibrium was hanging by a thread. De Gaulle was finished. Power seemed to be up for grabs, at the business end of a rifle, ideally one with a flower in the barrel. If you could believe the rumours, groups of citizens were arming themselves and forming militias, waiting only for the order to switch to the offensive and liberate the Sorbonne and the Odéon. But de Gaulle had not had his last word. The French were cattle, and the Old Camel still had a trick or two up his sleeve. Under complete secrecy, he had himself helicoptered to the general headquarters of the French occupational forces in Germany, where he met with General Massu. Later, it was revealed that he’d envisaged a reconquest of France, starting with Alsace, to prevent the ripe fruit of power from falling into the Communist hands. He’d even considered borrowing combat helicopters from the Americans.

  The next day, I took the subway to l’Étoile so I wouldn’t have to say later that I’d been to Paris without seeing the Arc de Triomphe. I’d really had it up to here with everything, and I was flying home. Put it down to home sickness. I wanted to be in my own house. But first I would walk down the Champs-Élysées. And as I walked, I heard a noise crescendoing ahead of me, in the distance.

  Traffic had stopped. Motorcycles roared past bearing policemen, there was a nervousness in the air, a wind charged with electricity whistled down the most beautiful avenue in the world, and, like an idiot, I continued walking down the middle of the street toward Place de la Concorde, because the cars had all disappeared. I was walking into the teeth of the parade! In one moment, flowing into Place de la Concorde and completely filling the vast avenue, pouring in from every direction, a million French citizens, from veterans in wheelchairs to young hippies in miniskirts, they formed a compact mass several kilometres long and moving toward the Arc de Triomphe. And there I was, stuck in the middle of them. I froze. The crowd was coming toward me like a tsunami. I waited until it was thirty metres from me before moving out of the way, and it was then that I saw him, arm in arm with the Gaullist big shots who’d begun the walk, singing “Allons enfants de la patrie …” at the top of his lungs. Malraux.