October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  (My reply was a suite of more or less intelligible proposals; then Uncle paid for the cognac, a bottle of Rémy Martin that landed on the table; excuse me, but he was someone, anyway.)

  “How are your parents doing, Jean-Claude?”

  “They still own a little grocery-convenience store in the east end.”

  “Yes. They have an alcohol permit, I believe, do they not?”

  “Yes, they do …”

  “Good. I hope they know that it’s a great responsibility, and that it could be taken away from them at any time. Selling alcohol to minors, it’s a huge problem. We have to make examples sometimes. Say hello to them for me. What about lottery tickets?”

  “They don’t sell those …”

  “Perhaps you should tell them to apply for a Loto-Québec licence. It pays very well …”

  “Yeah, but my father’s against gambling.”

  “But not your mother, I sense. You’ll tell them it’s the future. And that if it would help, it would give me great pleasure to put in a small word on behalf of the dear old parents of the honourable member from Vautrin. Problems with the application form, with a clerk somewhere … In hard times, it’s better to talk to the Uncle.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  (What would you have said in my place? Yes, Colonel … Yes, Colonel … Yes, Colonel …)

  RUE COLLINS, OCTOBER 19,

  1970, EARLY MORNING

  DETECTIVE-SERGEANT MILES MARTINEK, GARGANTUA INCARNATE, hands deep in the pockets of his parka, was conversing with a small group of reporters in front of the house. The living-room window had been blown out by an explosion. A Canadian Army bomb-squad truck was parked a little farther down. The street was closed off. A group of curious neighbours and onlookers were chatting with each other not too far from the house. A few of them were recounting their stories to a couple of policemen, who were taking notes.

  Martinek was a popular man among the beat cops. His reputation for ferocity and his total lack of compunction, which he dutifully applied to upholding order and the law of the fittest, made him something of a legend. “According to the first testimonies collected from the neighbours,” he was saying, “it seems that the neighbouring house, the one you see there — 150 Collins — was also occupied by a few FLQers known to the police. But they fell off the map about a month ago. However, Saturday night around six, not long after the poor guy’s death, the neighbours saw a car with a hitched trailer — others say a van — parked right in front of the house, and then a man filling the trailer with something and driving off.”

  Sergeant Machinegun Martinek put an immediate end to the questions that the reporters began rattling off.

  “That’s all we know for now. You’ll have to excuse me.”

  He walked away from the journalists toward a man standing a bit off to one side. He was somewhere in his fifties, with a nose like an eagle’s beak. He’d just made his appearance, alone, wearing a trench coat over his shoulders and a tweed cap on his head. Moving away from the crowd, the newcomer walked to the garage door and waited for the sergeant to join him. He stood with his back straight, almost stiff, without wasting any time.

  “Colonel Lapierre,” Miles murmured.

  “Sergeant Martinek … I’m here under orders of the prime minister.”

  A nod and nothing more from Martinek, as if to say “Of course.” He brought himself almost to attention. The Colonel’s eyes went past him to contemplate the raided house behind the sergeant’s broad shoulders.

  “Who went in there?”

  “Just me and the Army guys …”

  The Colonel scanned the sergeant with a solitary, imperious gaze. “You didn’t touch anything now, did you?”

  “No, not me. But the explosives they set off,” he said, pointing in the direction of the bomb squad’s truck, “made quite a goddamned mess.”

  “Good. Find any documents in there?”

  “Tons. Drafts of communiqués, from what I could tell, mostly that, actually.”

  “Okay. Tell Doctor Vale he can pick them up after I’ve had a chance to go over them.”

  The sergeant nodded, all casual complicity, as Colonel Lapierre gave a brusque nod toward the house. “You’ll show me around?”

  Ice in his eyes, and with straight-backed confidence: Martinek was impressed. His own star faded before this man. He settled for a shake of the head.

  “Those vultures, I don’t want to see them,” Uncle Bob grunted, pointing at the journalists milling about in front of the house. “Did anyone take any pictures?”

  “Only of the front of the house,” the detective calmly replied. “Don’t worry, they haven’t got permission to go inside yet. I’ll give them the tour later on.”

  “Good. Well, let’s go …”

  They walked through the door, stopping in the entrance to the kitchen with a start of surprise. The place was in shambles: chicken takeout boxes here and there, garbage bags left sitting about, cupboards yawning open, and the floor covered with greasy papers, takeout menus, and spilt liquids.

  Seemingly, the military bomb squad, expecting to find booby traps, had used small explosive charges to open every single door.

  Uncle Bob let his eyes wander to the ceiling. He could see freshly cracked plaster from which a couple of nails poked out, right along a beam. The Colonel thought to himself that the bomb-squad guys sure didn’t cut corners.

  He walked though the kitchen, stepping over the debris, Martinek at his heels, and stopped before the desk on which the phone sat. A seven-digit number was etched in the gyproc, followed by the letters BB.

  “What’s that, Martinek?”

  “A restaurant, I think. Baby Barbecue.”

  The Colonel bent down to pick up a telephone lying on the floor in a sorry state. It had been opened up, eviscerated. Wires hung like veins from a carcass. Uncle Bob held it up with an amused look on his face.

  “Didn’t leave much to chance, did they, Martinek?”

  “No … Colonel,” Machinegun heard himself reply.

  MEXCALICO

  ROOSTERS HAD BEEN CROWING UP in the village since well before dawn.

  Marie-Québec lifted her eyes from her book. This was no doubt the best time of day: freshly squeezed oranges, the joyful whistling of coffee boiling in its Italian contraption on the gas stove. Once out of bed, she accepted the glass of pulpy juice, allowed a smile to flirt with her lips for a moment, and stepped onto the patio to lounge on the sun-warmed stone bench while he put new coffee on the burner, turned on the heat under the pot of frijoles left over from the night before, and began cutting the onion, pepper, and tomatoes to prepare Mexican-style eggs. Whenever he bought eggs wholesale at the tienda, right at the village’s entrance, they were still warm from the chicken sitting on them, and from time to time he would find a downy feather bonded to an egg’s surface by a molecule of excrement. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam watched his girlfriend spread out and unfold like one of those Japanese things you drop in a pot of water and watch bloom. That was Marie-Québec in a nutshell: the soul of an iguana in the body of a Huron princess. An hour later, she had gotten her fill of sunlight and came in to eat.

  Before Zopilote, she never smiled like that, right out of bed.

  On the beach down the hill, the waves stretched out on the sand with dull crashes like the sound of crumbling buildings.

  They’d gone almost directly — a week between buying the tickets over the Internet and sitting in one of Air Transat’s lumbering beasts as it dragged itself away from one of Mirabel airport’s semi-deserted airstrips — from an overheated cabin on tiny Lake Laurendeau to the humid 32 degrees of this tropical sky sullied by the exudations of life forms as diverse as single-celled algae to great flocks of birds. The heat rose like bitumen smoke off the tarmac at the airport in Acapulco.

  They’d jumped in a car and driven straight south to Puerto Escondido, where they’d spent the day watching surf bums wait for the perfect wave, before leaving for the Yucata
n. In Tulum, they rented a sort of cement blockhaus, which, for two days, made them feel like they were living in a garage. The overflow of Cancun tourists ended up dribbling down the eastern coast of the peninsula all the way to Belize in regular waves of rented Jeeps driven by khaki-clad Americans, with their cowboy hats and their T-shirts the size of large jibs. They looked at taco ovens as if they were operated by Doctor Strangelove, about to blow up any minute, and they always seemed to be a moment away from donning latex gloves before picking up the local ham. They saw tankers passing on a dirty, turquoise sea.

  They drove right through Chiapas. From the roof of their hotel in San Cristobal, they heard soldiers practising their cannon fire in the mountains. Then off again, on weaving roads, sliding on the side of precipices on every turn. They hurtled down the other side of the sierra to the Gulf of Tehuantepec, their car now rolling between open-air garbage dumps smoking under the sun and tiny anonymous haciendas with crumbling walls covered with political slogans. Spans of shrubs festooned with ragged plastic bags glinted in the grubby light.

  Sometimes from this broken landscape a deserted beach would suddenly sparkle into existence: murky foaming waves crashing in, golden mist, the green backdrop of mountains, the naked flesh of sand running off as far as the eye could see.

  They’d ended up in Zopilote.

  Their rented cabana was located on the hills overlooking the sea, next to the village. A palm-frond ceiling, wooden rooms with bamboo walls. They reached it by climbing a ladder and shared the kitchen and bathroom with Marco, an Italian Zapatista sympathizer perpetually stoned on Mary Jane and cannabis resin, who spoke four languages but hadn’t said more than three words since they’d gotten there.

  Sam pressed the oranges, made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table with his pocket French-Spanish dictionary, a map of Mexico, and his overripe copy of La Jornada. He practised the tongue of Cervantes while following subcommandant Marco’s Zapatista caravan through the country. The October Crisis was behind him, far behind him.

  Marie-Québec was working on the play she planned to direct in Maldoror the following autumn: Happy Endings, the story of the return flight from Acapulco on an Air Transat charter of a gang of boozed-up Quebeckers with their souvenir sombreros. Once the plane lands, all the passengers start applauding. The spectators are supposed to do the same. And the curtain falls.

  After breakfast, Marie-Québec would go off with her books and papers, a bottle of water, some fruit. She would take the weaving path that followed the curve of the cliff until she reached an isolated beach, midway between Zopilote and the next village. Mexicans called it Playa del Amor, the beach of love. In the dry, spindly forest, her rustling scared off jays with crests as long as pencils, motmots with their red eyes and thick beaks, and a few green parakeets. Lizards bolted as she came near them on the already scorching ground. In the trees around her hung fruit of which she did not know the name.

  An old Indian peasant woman had her shack near the end of the trail. She lived there with her chickens, an enormous turkey, and a boar at the end of a piece of rope. Marie-Québec greeted the old woman as she passed, hola, removed her sandals, walked on the sand, and rolled out her mat. Waves exploded against the rocks. Farther off, soaring pelicans in single file skimmed the frothing crests of waves. And high up, far above her head, those long black birds Sam called magnificent frigate birds were letting themselves float on the thermals. Vultures floated down and perched on cacti on the cliff side, and spread their wings in the shimmering heat.

  A young Mexican boy walked by, holding an orange. She smiled. He slowly made his way up the beach. Sometimes she’d be the only one there for hours. Later, the old woman walked by above the beach, burdened with an enormous load of wood. Bent forward to keep her balance, she made her way through the sand with the grace of a giant sea turtle filled with eggs.

  Marie-Québec thought about getting up to help her. But the fact was, she stayed on her parrot-patterned towel, among her open books.

  When he finished his Spanish lesson, or became bored with idling his day away, Sam would walk down to the village and hang out on the beach. On one end of it was the fiefdom of the retired hippies of Shalâlah, where old burnouts-cum-estate agents had meetings with God, or at least one of His subsidiaries. Every morning, as he jogged barefoot in the sand, he could admire a wonderful specimen of the California goodwife, facing the ocean in the lotus position wearing Eden-like attire and wrinkled by half a century of excessive isolation. She sat there with her eyes closed, breasts low, palms open, invoking in a soft voice the Egyptian princess of a previous incarnation while, in this reality, her merino-wool-sweater-wearing poodle shat in the sand beside her, and a bunch of piglets, a little farther off, were burrowing their snouts in its previous day’s offerings.

  The Québécois bar was located just before the cliffs that closed off the other side of the beach. It reminded him of the old joke: What do two Quebeckers do when they meet in a foreign country? They open a bar.

  The Mono Azul, it was called. The palapa that sheltered the bar from the sun opened onto a fine sand beach. The owner knew everything there was to know about Abitibi, Maldoror, Cadillac, Val-d’Or, and the Kaganoma. At one point, he’d worked as a brush cutter in the northwest of the province.

  It’s a small world. And so he wasn’t really surprised when, one night, Marie-Québec told him about her conversation with a former FLQ member called Richard, over at the Mono that afternoon. But he kept silent all the same.

  At first she hadn’t realized whom she was speaking to. The man was reticent, although he liked to talk, and it was over a few hours that she finally got him to tell his story.

  “Richard who?”

  All she knew was that he was called Richard.

  She saw him again the next day, a chance encounter at the Playa del Amor.

  “He’s spending the winter here. In a neighbouring village, in fact: Carranza. Zopilote is a bit too touristy for his taste, and he thinks there are too many Quebeckers already in Carranza. He goes deep-sea diving and it costs him almost nothing to live. He fishes his dinner using some sort of harpoon gun. A couple of days ago he saw some dolphins.”

  “Lucky bastard. And what does he do?”

  “Nothing right now, but … he’s got a film company.”

  “Ah, it’s Richard Godefroid.”

  “Yes. He told me his name. I forgot to tell you …”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re a much better sniffer-out of FLQ guys than I am.”

  ‘He and I might work together.”

  “You can’t do that, Marie. I’m the Octobeerist around here. At least, I used to be …”

  “He’s looking for someone to adapt The Just into a movie. In Quebec French. It’d be set in the seventies, with FLQ guys instead of Russian nihilists. He wants it to be a Governor General who gets blown up.”

  “Sweet. And he offered you the leading role, of course.”

  “Can you imagine anyone else as Dora, huh? He invited us to supper tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “He says he’ll ask the Indian woman, the one on the beach, to cook some fish for us. He’ll supply the fish. Huachinangos, or maybe rock lobster, depends on what he catches. I told him about you. What’s with your sulking?”

  In order to find what I was looking for, I had to stop searching. Gode was reappearing in my life like the corpse of a drowning victim, buried under the ocean’s current, spit back out onto hard, dry land.

  The minibus to La Cuenca — the major town, a bit inland — was bursting at the seams. Raw leather sandals, sneakers, and finely shined shoes straddled one another like horny toads. Travellers wearing khaki shorts and Oaxacan locals, in communion with each other’s sweat, both human and animal — a turkey and three iguanas, legs shackled, destined for the market. Luggage affixed to the roof by straps made for an unstable tower. At one point, a tourist’s backpack flew off and fell on the road behind us. Alerted by screams and a generous dose of han
d-slapping on the sides of the truck, the driver stopped. With no one behind us, a young boy jumped off the bus and ran to pick up the lost luggage. Running back to the collectivo with a smile on his face and the bag in his hands, you’d think he’d just invented a new game. I looked around; everyone was smiling, mothers, workers, farmers, students in their knee socks and uniforms, but also the gringos, as if it were some sort of joke, the best one yet. The tourist got his backpack and patted it in a general good mood. If we’d been in Quebec, we’d all be calling for a board of inquiry to identify the guilty party.

  How do you make a man talk? Without ripping his nails out, I mean. I was pondering this question, staring at the bottles of alcohol in a grocery store in La Cuenca, weighing each one, looking at the labels. White wine would usually have been the right choice, but finding ice at Playa del Amor was a risky bet at the best of times. A refrigerator was absolute madness. I turned to the tequilas. Following the slow descent of a reddish larva to the bottom of a bottle of mescal, the sensual dance of the worm to the movement of the liquid inside. Might as well drink formaldehyde. I ended up going for a Cuervo, the large bottle. I felt like I was standing before an armoury’s gun rack, comparing calibres. Just before leaving, I changed my mind and got the mescal, as well.

  Between La Cuenca and Zopilote, at the point where the road reaches the coast, lay the small fishing port of Puerto Madre. Under a lonely parasol, I sipped a Nescafé and watched fishermen line up their catch on the sides of their boats, then begin their knife work, throwing entrails up in the air to a bunch of squawking birds from which, from time to time, a frigate bird would dive to catch a sliver of intestines.

  Life could be simple. I had the proof, right here before my eyes. Life biting into life. Life is life. My copy of La Jornada on the table, my French-Spanish dictionary, my notebook filled with new words, definitions, conjugations, declensions, exceptions, my instant coffee, black and sweet, two squeezed oranges in a tall glass next to it, fruit flies, light, the taste of the first beer toward the end of the afternoon, the spiralling of the magnificent frigate birds on the ascending thermals near the coast. Reading Carlos Monsivais’s column day after day, following the triumphant advance of subcommandants Marcos and his Zapatour toward the Mexican basin. Daydreaming over the colour illustrations in my bird book.