October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  It was the summer they rode their mountain bikes along an ancient portage route that had been converted into a hiking trail all the way to the Kino River, which ran wide and glacially slow, tinted a brownish-green by the reflection of the birch and white spruce forest that flourished in this part of the world, before joining the Ottawa River farther south. They picnicked on tuna sandwiches, feet up on the plank that served as a handrail for the narrow porch in the hunting camp they found in the tall grass above the clayey riverbank. Blueberries picked nearby. The summer of fresh walleye fillets dipped in Shake’n’Bake and pan-fried on a campfire in the gentle evening twilight. The plaintive calls of loons filling the warm nights, and the illuminated violence of summer storms. The lake alive, like a huge, indigo animal. They moved through its darkly transparent skin, writhing like midnight worms. Above their heads, meteors consumed themselves like matches flaring out in a sea of ink seeded to infinity. The summer they made love rolling on carpets of hawkweed and fireweed. The summer of Perfect Days.

  Just below the 48th parallel, Nihilo, at the wheel of a rented truck with a storage space of sixteen cubic metres that contained most of his worldly goods (a dresser, an old sperm-encrusted mattress, and a TV that worked only when it felt like it), realized that he had crossed a border, literally and figuratively, when he saw a truck painted with a sign that said GAME and showed illustrations of caribou instead of the usual deer and moose.

  He’d rented, with the option to buy, the large house on the shore of Kaganoma. All around it the filigree of black spruce, with their roots clinging so superficially to the soil they would crash to the ground at the slightest wind, and there they would remain until their trunks crumbled underfoot and their tops were methodically nibbled away by the larvae of insects. Shears in hand, he and Marie-Québec attacked the shrubs and long grass, the scrub pines, the scouts sent in by the boreal forest that waited calmly to reconquer the strip of land it had conceded to the chainsaw. The henhouse, the old greenhouse, the posts of the ruined dock sticking up through the reeds by the lakeshore: everything was in disrepair. The lake was a mirrored screen decorated with spruce and birch. They bought chickens and chicken feed and let the poultry wander freely at the edge of the woods. Silence filled with the whine of insects and the twittering of birds rippled in deep, concentric waves all the way to the horizon.

  Marie-Québec’s legs were exposed in her light cotton dresses. Here it was not unusual to get a thin screen of ice on shallow puddles in mid-June, and the next week enjoy ferocious sunlight and the intense, shimmering, Abitibi heat. The summer season was like a race against the clock, in which everything that lived and was driven to reproduction had to move fast. Marie-Québec’s body seemed to soak in sunlight as though it were soft wildflower honey, and Samuel would spread his hands over her perfect breasts like a musician playing a harpsichord.

  I don’t call myself Nihilo for nothing. I’m as skeptical by nature as it’s possible to be, but I’m no champion of rationalism. I consider UFOs, telepathic transmissions, and some form of posthumous survival of the consciousness other than that of the ego to be possible, if not probable. I believe, among other things, that the numerous cases of people returning from the dead can be explained by the persistence, beyond our knowledge, of a certain kind of vital force (call it the soul, if you believe in such a thing). But I stop at believing in little reptilian beings who live at the centre of the Earth and only come out to kidnap and rape motorists. What else? I prefer Nietzsche to Descartes. When faced with some object that is new to me, I have the simple good sense, inherited from my peasant ancestors and refined by my own skepticism, to approach it with an open but critical mind. I do not find a panacea in science, but it is also true that my brain stimulates the production of antibodies and begins to secrete them whenever it hears people talking about Reiki and the Cosmic Network, the turiya, mandalas, the energy of consciousness, reprogrammable kinesiology, the teachings of Ramtha and the magical properties of chocolate, fractal homeopathy, suling flutes and spending two days reharmonizing the angelic vibrations given off by the enigmatic Madame Houannannah (Germaine Trudel to her husband, three children, and neighbours). And if the aura is a common electromagnetic phenomenon that a photographic plate can render visible, as I believe it is, why not, I am not thereby convinced of the necessity to balance it as though it were a set of winter tires.

  Marie-Québec was different. She was the universal believer. She kept her generous heart wide open twenty-four hours a day as a safe haven for any stray superstition or theory that came along. The existence of a paranormal reality was dogma in her eyes, and her mind functioned like an assembly line: in went the raw material of some foolish notion or other, and out the other end came gospel.

  Her conviction that the house in Kaganoma was haunted grew the longer we stayed in it, and gradually it came between us.

  In the morning, I would look for her wherever the house or the yard received the most sun. It wasn’t unusual to find her curled up in a ray of sunlight, purring like a kitten. She was like one of those grass snakes that, in the spring, before the sun has sufficiently warmed the ground and raised the temperature of their blood, allow themselves to be picked up without showing the least alarm. The quality of her sleep was almost that of a coma. The night was a vast nothingness from which she had to return every time she opened her eyes.

  That morning, I brought her her café au lait and found her sitting on the new steps of the henhouse: two flats, one on top of the other, on top of four cement blocks. Nature surrounded us like a freshly waxed parquet floor in the new light. A few metres away, Noune was stalking, centimetre by centimetre, ears back, crouched up as though auditioning for the part of a lion ready to defend herself to the death in a Hemingway novel, a rabbit busily eating its breakfast of corn that we’d scattered for the chickens.

  “I was awakened again …” Marie-Québec announced.

  “It’s a big house. It’s bound to creak a bit …”

  I turned and glanced back at the house: square as the muzzle of a sperm whale whose tail formed the plateau that looked out over a perfectly calm Lake Kaganoma. And I said:

  “Tonight, I’d like you to wake me up … when it happens.”

  But that night nothing happened. In the morning, though, Marie-Québec was still in her Wiccan mood. She wasn’t the only one who had had a bad night. When I went out to collect the eggs for breakfast, I found the hens still in their coop, looking frazzled, their feathers ruffled, rolling their little black eyes wildly in the deep, odoriferous darkness of the shed. They seemed terrified.

  Later that day, I was shuffling my papers about listlessly in the humid heat of my office when I heard my name being called through the open window. Marie-Québec, a book in her hand, was standing at the forest edge in a small peach-coloured summer dress and a large straw hat. She was signalling for me to join her. The afternoon was quiet, the lake as still as oil. I ran downstairs and out to her.

  When I reached the part of the yard where she was standing and saw, twenty metres farther off, the animal she’d been watching, it took off down the laneway. I ran after the fleeing animal, past Marie-Québec down to the fork in the road, where I looked around, breathing lightly, and saw it, sitting on the roadside as if waiting for me.

  It had a strange head, with brushlike muttonchops, and massive, muscular paws, almost as big as its body. Its shoulders were higher and more powerful than its hindquarters. Its summer coat was molting, a yellowish beige colour showing through the grey. It was the second time in my life that I’d seen a lynx.

  The small wild animal stayed where it was, immobile at the edge of the trees. A sense of antiquity emanated from it. It showed not the slightest hint of fear. In its eyes, which never left me, I could read nothing but an intense and yet tranquil curiosity. And something that resembled infinite patience.

  *

  At the beginning of the 1980s, when the exiles returned and the others were released from prison, the trajectories
of the former October kidnappers diverged considerably. Those who hadn’t sought and found forgetfulness were for the most part recycled into perfect representatives of the left, ready to resume their parts in the speculative bubbles of the Reagan years, the shenanigans of Québec Inc., and the government subsidies to Canadian-style socialism. They sat comfortably on the ruins of the collective dream, keeping their speech politically cool, their goal nothing more than a decent retirement plan. Some of them even managed to live lives that could, at least in part, be called public.

  Far from past ideological torments, a single trait continued to link them together after all those years: the silence surrounding the death of Lavoie. Explanations had been demanded but never given. Incredibly, the pact of silence sealed in that pit at Saint-Marc by three desperate men still held thirty years later.

  Sitting in the stifling heat of the room that served as his office, Samuel was going over the file he’d painstakingly put together over the preceding months — he felt that he hadn’t discovered anything but the tip of the iceberg of a story. Somewhere, under the thousands of tonnes of ice and language that constituted the iceberg, lay the body of a man in a perfect state of preservation: Paul Lavoie, victim of an improvised revolutionary justice whose corpse obstinately refused to die.

  But the dozen men and women who’d formed the avant-garde of the Quebec revolutionary movement never did manage to reinvent their lives.

  Jean-Paul Lafleur became a journalist, cinematographer, documentary maker, etc. He wrote a regular column for Bélier, the journal of the hard left. His brother René worked in renovations. He’d had the bright idea of setting himself up at the end of Lac-Carré as a contractor specializing in patching up old cottages for next to nothing. This was just before the company Intrawest moved in and, by placing a good bit of money in the right pockets, transmogrified Mont Tremblant into a gigantic, model Swiss village made of marzipan.

  Richard Godefroid talked about films that were never filmed and formed his own production company: Lynx Sightings, whose films seemed destined, in most cases, to end up committing daily suicide on Télé-Québec. Apparently, he didn’t have enough money to hire someone to answer the telephone.

  Ben Desrosiers bred horses, or maybe organic raspberries, somewhere in the Gaspé region. Go figure.

  Lancelot taught communications at UQAM, where rumour had it that he bedded one female student after another and hosted a program on garbage-radio in Quebec City. He had children in both cities.

  Élise Francœur became a political writer and a feminist. Sam had no idea how she made a living. Her ex-husband, Justin, worked in advertising and had been given the famous “Good Genius” account, where Balzac is shown in rags, Hugo is shown starving in a commune, and Chateaubriand is standing in awe before Niagara Falls, all of them supposedly demonstrating who the creditors were, who owned the greasy spoon, who was the tour guide, who carried the symbolically plasticized Good Company card, and who received low interest rates with extendable margins.

  The famous English member of the FLQ, Nick Mansell, made a fortune in electronics and lived in a $500,000 mansion on the side of Mount Royal.

  Maurice Corbo, known as Le Corbeau, the Crow, was living out his dream in a hotel in Costa Rica next to Manuel-Antonio National Park.

  And François Langlais, according to unconfirmed sources, was working as an attendant in a residential hospital or retirement home on the South Shore. According to others, he owned an extended-care facility near Joliette.

  Sam Nihilo had already written to Jean-Paul Lafleur (care of Bélier) and to Élise Francœur (he’d found her name in the list of members of the Quebec Writers’ Union). He hadn’t received even a notice that his letters had been received. And the telephone in the offices of Lynx Sightings was never answered.

  He then tried to trace Justin Francœur through his advertising agency. Two days later, he had him on the line.

  “There’s no way I’m going to talk about this on the phone,” Francœur said right off the bat. A natural precaution whichever way you look at it, for someone who’s had his telephone tapped. “If you came to Montreal,” he added, “we could go for a beer …”

  In his dream, a loon was eating his liver while he was chained to the bottom of his canoe, fighting it off and trying to scream but nothing coming out, only silence, was, in the cold light of dawn, Marie-Québec’s elbow in his ribs. He opened his eyes. A white-throated bunting sang out its pure, solitary note, a strange nakedness and a living affirmation in the grey morning light.

  “Someone came in through the window,” said Marie-Québec.

  “What’s that?”

  “I heard the sound of breaking glass, downstairs.”

  “What?”

  “Someone’s broken in.”

  “No, you were just dreaming again.”

  “I’ve been awake for the past hour. Why don’t you ever believe me?”

  This time the shotgun was in the bottom of the cupboard.

  He did a tour of the windows. Nothing unusual. Standing in the panorama of the bay window in the living room, he paused a moment to watch the balsam fir and birch trees slowly separate themselves from the earth’s brown shadow and attach themselves to the surface of the lake.

  While recrossing the kitchen to get to the stairs, something caught his eye and he stopped. He approached the north-facing window and examined a tiny, downy feather stuck to the window glass by a few splotches of blood. He looked down and saw a still form lying at the base of the wall.

  “It was a grouse,” he told her. “It flew into the kitchen window. It couldn’t have chosen a better place if it was trying to land in the stew pot.”

  It felt good to be getting back into the warm bed.

  “What about the window?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the window. It took the hit.”

  “But I heard glass breaking.”

  Another time she maintained that she’d heard a man crying somewhere in the house during the night.

  And while Nihilo that night cleaned the suicidal grouse in order to cook its fillets sautéed in butter and olive oil and mix it with penne noodles alla puttanesca, she told him the following story while sipping a glass of Cahors:

  “Yesterday, when you went into town to run some errands, I went out to pick blueberries.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Just around here, not very far. Along the roadside … I had just passed the old greenhouse and was ready to turn into the woods when I felt I was being … watched.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I turned around. And …”

  “And what? Tell me.”

  “Someone was there … standing in your office window. I could see him clearly. It was a man. He followed me with his eyes.”

  Samuel looked at the carcass he was holding in his hands. He’d been planning to make soup stock with it.

  “So, the house is haunted … Is that what you believe?”

  “Yes. Why are you laughing?”

  Samuel thought about their house, cast up like a shipwreck on the shore of several hundred square kilometres of savage forest. And in it, the two of them, trapped in their obligatory prison.

  “Because if I didn’t, I’d be afraid.”

  On paper, it was perfect: back-to-the-land, life of the pioneer, simple, self-sufficient, neo-hippie philosophy. Composting. Free-range chickens. Catch a fish for supper. His lady kneeling in her peasant skirt in the middle of the sandlot-sized herb garden. But eventually you discover that the only thing Nature is able to grow here are carrots two centimetres long and a few lettuces surrounded by more fencewire than a Jewish colony on the West Bank, which in any case proves useless because there is always a newly weaned baby rabbit that can slip through the wire and eat everything in the garden down to ground level. And to the idyllic image of your lady in straw hat and peasant skirt you have to add netting hiding her face about as sexy as a hijab, to prevent the hordes of blackflies, mosquitoes, de
erflies, horseflies, and any other kind of flies from picking her up and carrying her off.

  As far as the neighbours were concerned — that mixture of villagers, retirees who’d converted their summer cottages into year-round residences, and suburbanites shunted out to the extremes of Maldoror by the centrifugal force of urban sprawl — Sam and Marie-Québec were artists, and people didn’t generally ask what they did for a living for fear of upsetting them: a freelance writer doing contractual piecework and working on “a serious book,” and his actor partner. Marie-Québec had decided to stage a production of Chekhov in the Loblaw’s Happy Times Theatre, and to direct it herself. She also took on other projects: picked up an old Westfalia camper van from somewhere, for example, and founded Four-Wheel Theatre, an itinerant troupe of actors whose mission was to bring Camus, Shakespeare, Lise Vaillancourt, and Daniel Danis to villages surrounded by forest and ugly, mono-industrial agglomerations on the fringes of the 49th parallel, to show the idle youth of the North that there were other things to do in the summer than making suicide pacts.

  One day, going in to Maldoror to buy supplies, Sam saw a seagull sitting squat in the middle of the road. The roadway had been cut into the red sandstone between two lines of Jack pines studded with patches of white birch. Although the lake was only a few hundred metres below, a gull was still an unusual sight in such a spot, where the usual congregants were pine grosbeaks and spruce grouse. The gull was trailing one of its wings, which had been torn half off. Sam took his foot off the gas to assess the damage, but he knew from experience that there was nothing to be done for the creature except to deliver the coup de grâce, which the bird in any case seemed to be asking for, to judge from the way it offered Sam its bravest profile. And so he pressed on the gas pedal and drove over it. A loud POOF! from under the vehicle and, in his rear-view mirror, a pile of crumpled and more or less flattened white feathers was the only evidence of death that Nihilo needed.