October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  An interrogation room the size of a ship’s cabin.

  Two plainclothes police officers seated behind a table.

  Another form to fill out.

  First name. Last name. Occupation.

  “Poet.”

  “That’s all? Poet?”

  “Yes. I used to be a publisher, but you have taken everything that made me one. Poet is something that you can never take from me.”

  Poet, wrote the policeman.

  Father’s name. Mother’s maiden name. Place of birth.

  “Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade.”

  The officer who was taking an inventory of the large envelope containing his personal affects looked up.

  “La Pérade? … That place where they catch the little fish?”

  “Where they catch the little fish,” Chevalier agreed. “Like here.”

  “You’re a real laugh. Do you know where John Travers is?”

  “No.”

  “Paul Lavoie?”

  “No, officer, I don’t.”

  “Tell me about the Chevalier Cell.”

  “I know nothing about it.”

  “Why do you think they chose that name?”

  “Because of Chevalier de Lorimier, the rebel leader who was hanged in Pied-du-Courant in 1839. Along with Hamelin, Hindelang, and a few others …”

  “Good.”

  “I had a dream last night,” Branlequeue told them. “A classic professor’s dream: I was walking down a corridor looking for the room where I was supposed to give my course, but I was lost. The class was about to start, my students were waiting, I was almost running, and in the end I arrived in front of a door. I went into the classroom, and when I looked at the windows they had bars on them …”

  The two police officers looked at each other.

  “Let’s move on and talk about your political affiliations, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Nothing to hide. I’ve been affiliated with the PSD, the RIN, and the PQ. At the moment, I am affiliated only with poor Chevalier …”

  “Do you approve of violence?”

  “No. Because you know as well as I do that violence serves only your cause.”

  “Your comrades on the mezzanine, what do they think about it?”

  …

  “Are they for terrorism?”

  “It’s not right, what you’re asking of me. At least you have the excuse that you’re doing your jobs.”

  “If you’d like us to proceed some other way, then tell us how.”

  “You could start by asking me to sign a paper stating that you recognize that you have seized my manuscript. I would like to see the colour of the second part of my Elucubrations. And then, my son’s stamp collection …”

  “Stamp collection?”

  “Yes. Someone took my son’s stamp collection. If I think about that too much, I’m going to want to break someone’s jaw.”

  “If we return your papers and your stamps, will you tell us who is for the FLQ in your range?”

  “No.”

  “You’d get out of here faster.”

  “I imagine I would.”

  “Do you know why you’ve been arrested?”

  “Because I entertain socialist ideas and am in favour of Quebec independence.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Because I have opinions. I sometimes even go so far as to express them …”

  “Ah, so you do understand. And what is your opinion of the FLQ?”

  “The government is getting excited for nothing, if you want my opinion.”

  “Do you know any members of the FLQ?”

  “No.”

  “Are you the leader of the FLQ?”

  “No.”

  “Tell us about the Chevalier Cell.”

  “Never heard of it. Before October 10, that is.”

  “According to information we received, you are one of its leaders …”

  “I want to see a lawyer.”

  “One of the ones who writes pamphlets …”

  “No.”

  “A form of moral authority.”

  “No.”

  “An opinion leader. You’ve said so yourself.”

  “No!”

  “You are the philosophical leader of the movement. The ideologue …”

  “Not true.”

  “The Chevalier Cell’s spiritual father. The thinker who hides behind …”

  “No. You must have a sycophant somewhere who is leading you up the garden path.”

  “A what?”

  “An informer.”

  “What was that word you used?”

  “Garden.”

  “No, the other word … Sicko-something.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Fine. You can stretch this out as long as you want, we’re in no hurry.”

  Toward the end of the afternoon they were allowed to walk up and down the long corridor that separated the lower cells, which was about thirty metres by four. Picnic tables had been set up. Thirty minutes’ recreation. A chance to put faces to all the voices that had been shouting during the afternoon. They were let out in groups of twelve.

  The detainees talked about starting a hunger strike the next day. Among them were three Vietnamese and one Greek.

  “Why a hunger strike?” asked Chevalier. “You don’t like baloney?”

  They looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “I was making a joke,” he said. “But seriously, I don’t quite see the link between Vietnam and Quebec liberation …”

  The Vietnamese who replied held a Ph.D.

  “There may be more rapport than you think, sir. We, too, are patriots, opposed to American intervention in our country.”

  “I’d like to agree with you, but here it’s not the United States …”

  The Vietnamese contented himself with a smile.

  “Feels like home,” said the Greek.

  Three years previously he’d fled the colonels’ regime and embraced the cause of Quebec independence. He worked as a journalist, and somewhere in the three sacks of documents taken from his home were letters from his uprooted father among the olive trees of the Peloponnese. The Cyrillic alphabet had drawn the interest of the searchers; suspecting that the letters were written in code, they’d seized the lot.

  Farther down the corridor a small group gathered in front of the cell occupied by none other than Maître Brien, the curly-headed D’Artagnan of the Courts. Forty-eight hours earlier he’d still been the official negotiator and flamboyant rouser of crowds before national television cameras. He had been thrown into the brig like a common criminal.

  Incapable of not performing before a crowd, he was telling his captive audience that according to information in his possession, information he had received in confidence, the police had discovered and surrounded the two hideouts where the hostages were being held. They were coordinating their efforts for a final assault, and it was now simply a matter of time.

  “Are you very certain of that, sir?”

  “Absolutely positive, my dear friend. I have it from an honest businessman who has connections in the Cabinet. Well, Chevalier. How’s it going?”

  The rigours of the bars helped, their raised fists were more celebratory than expected. The others made a semicircle around them.

  “Maître Brien, explain something to me … You know who the kidnappers are, yes, no?”

  “My dear sir, my lips are sealed over the bulwark of my teeth, which themselves are barred with double locks.”

  “Yes, but you couldn’t negotiate in the name of someone you have never met. Therefore, you know who the perpetrators are. And the police strongly think the same of me. My question: why aren’t they grilling you?”

  “Ah, Chevalier. They know me … They know perfectly well that I’ll never betray a professional confidence like that. No point in their even trying.”

  “Do you mean to say that they can respect your professional practice and yet still throw you in prison?”

&nbs
p; “That’s it, yes.”

  “So your secret is more sacred than our civil rights. This is not necessarily good news.”

  Mortified, the lawyer shrugged his shoulders then picked up the thread of his story. Watching him sketch the air with his cigarette, one might almost forget that he was behind bars, speaking to co-detainees, and not in a smoky press room, putting on a show for the camera and the same old pack of reporters spiked with microphones, flashbulbs, and notebooks.

  “Listen, I don’t give a shit about Travers. He’s a goddamned Englishman! He’ll come out of this with not so much as a hair out of place, wait and see. No, it’s Lavoie I’m worried about …”

  Branlequeue turned and continued his walk. Farther down, he stopped before the overflowing flesh of Coco Cardinal, enthroned like a pasha on the toilet in his tiny mousetrap of a cell, his pants down around his ankles.

  “Well, if it ain’t the Tommycod King,” muttered Chevalier.

  Coco’s face, adorned with two eyes like black butter, a lip split down to his chin, three broken or missing teeth, and a goose egg on his left temple, split into a large, nauseating smile. Chevalier shivered with distaste, as though he were looking into the eyes of a shark or the mouth of a stingray. Cold horror rose from deep within him.

  He wanted to distance himself as fast as he could, but he heard himself being called.

  “Hey, poet!”

  Chevalier turned and looked away as the Fat Cop, apparently impervious to any notion of modesty, wiped his huge backside with evil delectation.

  “They didn’t go out with crowbars, those guys at the Vegas, eh?” Chevalier said when Coco had finished.

  “When I get out of here I’m going back there with a can of gasoline,” Cardinal announced, pulling up his pants and walking over to the bars.

  Chevalier resisted the urge to run off down the hall.

  “Something I still don’t understand, Coco, is how you’ve made a living since you were in the police.”

  “I fuck. The system.”

  “Credit cards?”

  “Among other things.”

  “And is that what pays for the sailboat on the Île aux Fesses?”

  Coco’s eyes, rimmed by huge black circles like those of a raccoon, narrowed and remained fixed on Chevalier, though Coco continued to smile.

  “But that isn’t why they put you in here, is it, Coco? Credit cards have nothing to do with this business …”

  “No. I’m here because I’m a patriot, a real one … Not like you.”

  Chevalier then committed the error of turning his head for a fraction of a second. By the time he sensed the danger, it was too late. Coco reached out and grabbed Chevalier by the collar and pulled him against the bars of his cell. He held him there while methodically punching his face with his other hand.

  “Oh, nice shiner!” said the canteen man.

  He was pushing his little cart between the rows of cells. Chevalier had filled out his order form that afternoon: he wanted a pen, paper, chewing gum, and tobacco.

  Chevalier smiled painfully.

  “Lucky for me you’ve also rounded up a couple of doctors,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll take some of your aspirins, if you have any.”

  The canteen man scrupulously examined the order form.

  “The question isn’t whether or not I have them. It’s whether or not you’ve ordered them.”

  “Ah, never mind! Paper, ballpoint, cigarettes. I don’t need anything else.”

  Chevalier was beginning to believe that he’d never see the second part of Elucubrations again. He knew only that this iceberg of words, with its death and mammoth metaphors, would one day be considered the mythic tip of his writings. During the years he had worked on his great book, he was ceaselessly caught between the need to earn a living, the reality of having a family to support, and the need to steal more time from his other obligations and ministries. He had known radicals, some of whom had actually advanced to action, who had been arrested and imprisoned. He had sometimes thought of prison as a safe harbour, situated outside of time, an oasis of enforced peace in the midst of the normal harassments of ordinary existence. The privation of liberty seemed a lesser evil, a minimal concession in exchange for the formidable removal of social responsibility, necessary to the work of genius. Why weren’t more universal literary masterpieces written in prisons? he wondered. Free bed, board, and laundry, and time stretching ahead as far as the eye could see. To write and avoid going crazy … And above all, above all, to have absolutely nothing else to do. Wasn’t that the ideal situation? The recluse any ambitious creator dreamed of?

  With the pad of paper in front of him on the metal sheet that served as a table, pen poised between thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stared with feverish intensity and a slightly astonished air into the void of the empty page. It was like staring into his empty life in a prison cell, and he knew it. Nothing came, absolutely nothing.

  The next day, LAM255 woke to the sound of funereal music coming from the radio. He knew immediately what it meant.

  Through the slow, serene weft of Handel’s Largo, he could hear the hoarse shouts of two chess players separated by three cells.

  “Little Albert on G4 takes Mountie on F3!”

  Laughter mingled with one or two pleasantries. The bishops were called Vézinas because, like the premier of Quebec, they moved only on the bias. A Little Albert was a pawn. An Ottawa was a rook. The king and queen were called PET and Beth.

  Chevalier Branlequeue sat in a corner of his cell, his back to the bars.

  “Garneau …”

  “Yes, Chevalier?”

  “Lavoie’s dead.”

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  “They killed him. Why else would the radio be playing Handel?”

  That afternoon, Chevalier tried to write something once more. Still nothing came. It was as though they had won.

  *

  1 This anecdote was told so often, and by so many different people, all of them owners, if they can be believed, of the specialized work in question, that we must consider it apocryphal.

  GHOSTS

  THIS IS THE STORY OF a guy (me) who wakes up in a big house full of nooks and crannies stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of a boreal forest, at four o’clock in the morning. Lake Kaganoma. It’s winter, it’s 40 below, and Marie-Québec is gone for good. Her empty space in the cold bed mutilates my side, yanks out my Adam’s rib. And as if that weren’t enough, he is back. I can hear him thrashing around downstairs, in the kitchen.

  Naked as a dew worm, draped in invisible sweat that raised goosebumps in the cold air of the bedroom, I got up and fetched the shotgun from the closet in my office. Slid a couple of Imperial shells into the barrel (buckshot, or Poly-Kor long-range specials). Then, creeping on lynx paws, I went downstairs.

  He was sitting at the table. His hands were badly sliced up and the marks on his neck where he’d been strangled were clearly visible. Blue in the face, ribbons of dried blood under his nostrils and in his ears. I recognized the sweater he was wearing as the one Mrs. Lafleur described at the coroner’s inquest, knitted by her own hands for her husband, and which the kidnappers had slipped on their wounded hostage after having taken off the shirt that was soaked in fresh blood. He was breathing noisily. I sighed.

  “You know, I’ve always known it was you who was the ghost of Kaganoma …”

  “Take me to a hospital …”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not in my power. And I can’t fix you up, either.”

  I leaned the shotgun against the wall and pulled a chair up to the table. He seemed as if he wanted to talk. But first, I went over and stoked the embers in the airtight woodstove, then put on my old Mackinaw with the red and black checks that was hanging on a hook by the door.

  “I know why you’re here, Lavoie,” I said to the ghost when I sat down. “You’re stuck in purgatory. And history’s purgatory isn’t like God’s. It’s names that lan
guish there, not souls. And while you wait to join the heroes and martyrs in the local pantheon, or maybe go back below with the traitors to their country and the dirty rotten souls damned for eternity, you are forced to use the old tried-and-true methods for making us mortals remember you. You send your terrestrial appearance to visit me, I find myself in my kitchen talking to a fake ectoplasm. You could say I’m your last hope …”

  He nodded gravely.

  I got up and grabbed the bottle of d’Auge Calvados that was sitting on the counter. I poured both of us three fingers in glasses decorated with images of playing cards, and handed him his. Jack of Spades.

  “Take it. It’ll put some colour in your cheeks …”

  With his sliced-up hand, he took the glass I’d offered him and tossed back the alcohol, and I did the same. The Calvados tasted of old orchard, lightning-struck wood, and apples fallen onto yellowed grass and dead leaves pecked at by partridges. October.

  I refilled the glasses.

  “At the moment, I’m trying to track down the elusive Chevreuil, the famous Pierre. A single certitude about him and I’ll be saved. And you can help me, I think, Lavoie …”

  A low groan.

  “Take me to the hospital …”

  I filled the glasses a third time and raised mine in a toast:

  “To your health, Mr. Minister.”

  His only response was a deep sigh, then he tossed back his Calvados like it was a cup of chamomile tea.

  “You see, I need to know if Pierre Chevrier, alias Le Chevreuil, went to 140 rue Collins while you were being held there. I know you can’t tell me. That I have to discover the truth by my own means. And you, you’re here to remind me of my duty to history and to stop me from killing myself. But let me tell you something: those who are moving heaven and earth to erase you from the land of the living, and who have covered their tracks well, aren’t exactly the two of spades. You have been sacrificed, Lavoie, but for what? What is certain is that Quebec has abandoned you. That your own political family has let you down, and that Canada has taken a pass on you. And if it’s true that you were, as some have said, sacrificed to the strategic interests of the Atlantic Alliance, then the West has also hung you out to dry. And so, rather than raise their little finger and send a bunch of hired killers in to rescue you, your friends in the Scarpino family said: thumb’s down. Everyone washed their hands of you.”