October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  The last thing I expected was Marie-Québec dredging up what I thought I had escaped when I left Quebec.

  I was the only one loafing about on the small beach at Puerto Madre, jammed tight with fishing boats. Letting the sand sift between my toes, I began thinking of my old Professor Branlequeue, to whom even on his deathbed Godefroid had refused to tell the tale of Paul Lavoie’s last hours. Chevalier had been anything but a globetrotter. He’d shocked his acquaintances by turning down speaking invitations in Italy and Brazil. He’d never even seen Paris! To those who expressed surprise, he’d reply that he hadn’t left the muddy land of his childhood to end up like a cow in a stall, stuck between an airplane window and a “gravimetrically distinct individual.” I’d never heard him mention a beach. And suddenly, I couldn’t help imagining him with flip-flops, indolently tossing his hat to the wind and running on the wet sand like a madman.

  Truly, he hadn’t been a happy man. Happy, unhappy … so what! But to carry your regrets to the grave … After October ’70, Chevalier had lived solely to shed light on the ugly tricks played by those who had taken his civil liberties from him and thrown him in a cell, all in the name of some cosmetic democracy that’d been confiscated by the state. One day, he claimed, we’d find out that the entire Province of Quebec had been the target of a true military-police coup d’état! And for that reason, he’d never found peace again, not like the one I had found and was basking in right now. A peace that I could attain precisely because I had renounced it all, and he had never given in.

  After all, who was Godefroid? One of the last two men who could still tell the true story of what happened on rue Collins the day Lavoie died. He’d been spending his winter in Carranza, on the Pacific Coast, swept into my path by pure coincidence. All these years he’d simply been another name. And today I’d meet the man behind that name, and I knew why I feared being face to face with him. He’d tell the truth, give us a rude awakening, and defuse our bomb. Yes, belief flourished in shadows, and doubt is the basis of our errant faith. What I feared most of all was nothing less than the bright light of naked truth and the ultimate defeat of our old Octobeerist fantasy. In the end, I feared more than anything finding absolutely no hint of controversy at the sharp edge of our beliefs, of all our “elucubrations.” No plot, no schemes, no conspiracies.

  *

  “The first time I washed up here, in the mid-eighties, Zopilote was nothing more than a pot-smoker’s paradise. A colony of penniless tramps strung out between Puerto Madre and Carranza. When someone came up to you, it was to tell you about the healing power of crystals and pyramids, not to show you his home-cooked pharmacy. But today the narcos have taken over the country and you can see the difference, even here.”

  Marie-Québec and Sam got there before Gode and sat around drinking tepid beer, waiting for him. The old Indian woman was bustling about not far off, a century or so away, cooking tortillas and peeling avocados. After a while, they saw their compatriot crossing the cape that closed off one side of the beach from the other and was walkable only at low tide, and begin coming toward them. He walked stiffly, looking about him, like a man being followed. Despite his relaxed outfit, sunglasses, and unbuttoned shirt, there was something ancient and animal in the way he moved, as if he were aware of dragging a shadow behind him.

  He’d been holding a sodden plastic bag; inside were two freshly caught huachinangos and a rock lobster.

  “But this small beach, here,” Gode continued, “it hasn’t changed at all. You can still hang out here, alone, in the middle of the day, or, if worse comes to worst, share it with a bare-breasted woman,” Gode added, with a quick wink in Marie-Québec’s direction. “And senora Cisneros hasn’t changed a bit, either. Seventeen years ago, she was as young as she is today.”

  “She lives in paradise and doesn’t even know it,” Marie-Québec said, before licking the salt off the back of her hand and tossing back a shot of tequila, the skin on her face creasing like a sheet of paper as she bit into the lime.

  “Imagining that happiness lies in poverty is the pastime of the intellectual,” Samuel calmly said. He looked at Gode. “Consider yourself warned, Marie-Québec is the type who’s always saving the world …”

  “I can respect that,” Gode replied, gazing at the young woman. “I passed through that phase as well.”

  Taking a pinch of salt and a slice of lime off the plastic saucer, he raised his glass in their direction and knocked back his Cuervo.

  The turkey was clucking about around their table. Then, planting himself before them, he puffed himself out, tripled in volume, displaying his grotesque, crimson, outraged virility.

  “He’s dancing at your table,” Gode commented, pouring himself another tequila.

  Senora Cisneros brought two bowls: a large terracotta one for the guacamole and a smaller, blue, earthenware bowl for the salsa picante. She then returned to the table with more lime quarters. She tut-tutted the turkey away, adding a rude hand gesture for good measure.

  “You know, I never did help her carry her wood,” Marie-Québec said. “And now, instead of helping her out with dinner, I sit here, talking with you two.”

  “She’s been carrying that same pile of wood for a thousand years,” Samuel threw in. “And the last thing she needs is to have to soothe our hypocritical gringo consciences.”

  Salt, tequila, lime.

  “With what I’m paying her to cook the fish,” Gode added, tilting in Marie-Québec’s direction, “she’ll be able to live for a month, easy.”

  They spoke of the Zapatista situation. Gode was somewhat reserved regarding the so-called revolution. He believed they had traded in their guns for cameras once the initial skirmishes had petered out. Then they’d added web sites and the ear of Hollywood intellectuals like Oliver Stone to the mix. Zapatista leaders now travelled surrounded by human shields of Italian pacifists. Their number included journalists, groupies, and sympathizers from civil societies (humanitarian aid workers, union leaders, representatives of popular groups, and outreach officers from a horde of national and international social-progressive parties, not to mention, of course, the usual gaggle of hangers-on) who were all ready to take over the capital by simply stepping off the bus, after having seen the rest of Mexico fall at their feet along their long march, without encountering any opposition, of course. The internationalization of the Chiapas-based movement now seemed inevitable.

  “What are you doing on the beach, guys?” Marie-Québec asked, preparing another shot of tequila. “Don’t you see that the revolution is passing you by?”

  “Sure, the communications revolution,” Nihilo approved. He turned to Gode. “Looks like they’re succeeding at what you were trying to do, back in the day. If you can’t seize power, at least get some good publicity …”

  Gode refused to take the bait.

  “When Marcos arrived in Cuautla, in the State of Morelos,” Gode began, “city officials offered him a painting as a welcoming present. You know what was on it? A portrait of Marcos surrounded by Villa and Zapata. They’re all three squatting with something in their hands …”

  Gode paused for a moment. Salt on wrist. A small glass of tequila.

  “And what did the three of them have in their hands? I’ll tell you … fighting cocks.”

  “So?” Marie-Québec asked.

  “For a fighting cock,” Gode continued, leaning in, “there are only two possible outcomes: victory or death. No such thing as a compromise. And Zapata and Villa were real roosters, and they died. In other words, I wouldn’t want to be in Marcos’s shoes …”

  “Beware of those who survive …” Sam said and, lifting his glass, smiled.

  Gode looked at him in silence for a moment.

  The fish arrived, cooked over a wood fire, and the rock lobster, the choice of the catch reserved by the fisherman for Marie-Québec. Her cheeks were beginning to glow, her voice raised. Gode was already rather drunk. The sun was collapsing over the ocean.

  Sam cited,
from memory, a passage from Chomsky, which came out dizzied and confused. He spoke of something called the anti-neoliberal spearhead and predicted that Zapatista confusion would spread throughout the world.

  “Who gives a fuck about Chomsky,” Gode opined, not turning toward him.

  “Gracias, senora,” Marie-Québec said. “Muchas gracias …”

  “At the tip of the point, over there,” Gode said, “I saw a killer whale, once. I didn’t feel like a big man, with my harpoon gun.”

  “According to Alain Touraine,” Samuel murmured, staring conspiratorially at his fish, “neozapatism is the great paradigm shift that the third millennium needs.”

  “You can’t mess around with those waves.” Gode leaned his head with its glassy eyes even further toward Marie-Québec. “I’ve seen gringos swallowed up under tons of water. Others are just pulled out by the current, and if they’re lucky, some small Mexican kid takes his board and brings them back from the open sea.”

  The sun finally crashed on the other side of the horizon and Gode turned toward Sam, saying:

  “I don’t give a shit about Touraine, either.”

  “Okay.”

  He was thinking of his bottle of mescal hidden over there in the bamboo hut.

  “In Carranza,” continued Gode, “I walked into the kitchen one morning and it was full of ants. The small red ones. There were about three million of them just going back and forth from the mangos and bananas in the fruit basket. Back home, in the north, we’d have bombarded the kitchen as if it were Baghdad. I contacted the guy who takes care of the huts and all that, some typical peasant from around here, with his moustache and muscles as dry as bicycle tires, and I showed him the invasion in my kitchen. He looked me over and said, with the Pope’s own magnanimity: Se van a ir … they’ll leave. I concluded that he simply didn’t feel like working that day and said that to get rid of me. But I came back an hour later and there wasn’t a goddamn ant left. That’s what I think of your Marcos and his conquest of Mexico …”

  He dipped a corn tortilla in the guacamole and looked around for the bottle. The tequila level was going down faster than you could drink it. To the west, the clouds looked like overripe papayas.

  A bit later, Samuel grabbed the bottle, shook it, and examined it. The soldier was all but dead. He poured what was left into Marie-Québec’s glass, then Gode’s. Salt, fire, lime — no quarter.

  A long silence seemed to emanate from the coal box of the burnt sky. Close to the reefs, where brown pelicans feasted on a school of fish, the ocean was boiling. The rock lobster and red mullet were now history. Samuel suggested they have a nightcap — the bottle of mescal.

  Samuel had a theory about Godefroid. These past few weeks, at the Mono Azul, Sam had taken time to study the local migratory fauna, the mix of ex-pats, those who were spending the winter, and simple tourists. A small Québécois colony wintered in the place, within a radius of a hundred metres from the Mono. A lot of single men. The first time you spoke to them, they claimed to have never been better. You almost never saw the wound at first glance. But it always surfaced, with a few beers, a promise of love, a small narcotic transaction, or simply a sympathetic ear. Lost love, professional failure, personal bankruptcy. Divorce. A child who died young. A partner with an incurable disease. A car accident. A cuckolding. Sexual abuse by Uncle Irving. Forgotten at the zoo when they were three years old. And of course, that’s without counting all those attempting to hide an acrimonious firing while writing the Novel of the Century.

  Gode, Nihilo believed, was one of those broken men; he’d killed, or not, and had paid his debt to society. That wasn’t the problem. What was eating him was the demon of the story he wasn’t telling. It was the pact of silence and the corpse in the closet of history. The black hole that surrounded Lavoie’s death. What’s never told has never been lived — the logic of the confessional. And for Gode, this burrowing silence had lasted thirty years now. He’d given a long interview when he left prison and told a story with as many inconsistencies as contradictions, which led to more questions rather than answers. The October Crisis had remained, through the years, the dark side of the moon for Quebeckers. A collective amnesia in the form of a death.

  He was spending his winter in a crumbling cinder-block cell, which was covered with a palm frond roof and was just large enough to hold a bed, a hammock, and a chest of drawers. Mi cabana en México. And then he saw a beautiful young woman, the kind who understands everything, and he needed to confide in someone like the mortise needed the tenon. Someone who was able to hold her own on the subject of Camus and the Bolsheviks.

  And as Sam climbed the ladder, unlocked the lock, and grabbed the bottle in his room, he needed to fight off an image that strayed from darker parts of his mind: she in bed with Gode. Pillow talk.

  Sitting in the kitchen, Gode was looking at the Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Central America.

  “I saw a red-headed parrot not too far from here,” Nihilo mentioned, brandishing the bottle of mescal.

  Gode pointed at the parakeet page.

  “I’ve seen some of these … as well as those.”

  “White-fronted amazons! Red-fronted conures! Where?”

  “Near Huatulco. I was with a friend, he’s absolutely crazy about birds … He came with his telescope and his list of species he wanted to see. If you want to go over there, we can.”

  His laborious elocution was interrupted by Marie-Québec, slightly pale, emerging from the white cement cube that sheltered the bathroom.

  “If you want … to …”

  “The conures.”

  “Yup, that’s it.”

  “In Abitibi,” Marie-Québec explained, ”Sam would argue with the hunters, since he, Master Sam, could distinguish three species of partridge.”

  Gode shot a look at Nihilo.

  “She told me you’d been to Kaganoma.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of the things you and I have in common. The other is Chevalier Branlequeue …”

  Gode closed the bird book.

  “That mescal isn’t going to drink itself, is it?”

  It was almost dark. They walked on the beach, bare feet in the wet sand, the sea glowing from single-cell algae, passing the bottle around. In a leaking, blood-red light, the silhouette of a backlit fisherman holding his net, seemingly frozen like a heron facing the crashing waves. Far above their heads, the marine breeze dragged birds toward earth.

  The three of them walked on the beach, almost without a sound, passing the bottle back and forth.

  Before reaching the Mono, Sam turned toward the hieratic silhouette of the bait fisherman, water up to his chest, net brandished in both hands. He saw him cast his net as if trying to lasso the waves, then disappear, buried under a mountain of foam. He emerged on the other side of the wave and, fighting against backwash, returned to land, pulling the net tied with a rope to his wrist behind him. When he finally reached ground, he raised the net and it was filled with fish.

  Orange tongues and tufts of smoke leapt up from a pyramid of wood some four feet high between the Mono and the sea. The amps spat out the greatest hits from the seventies, and the fire attracted a bunch of people. Lying on the sand, wild dogs with flea-ridden flanks like washboards snarled at the shadows. Someone came to speak with Gode, and the bottle of mescal, passed from hand to hand, disappeared. Sam found the bar and paid for a few rounds of tequila for Gode and Marie-Québec. She occupied the stool between the two men, softly shimmying to the rhythm of the music.

  Sam wanted to talk to Gode about The Just.

  “Don’t start with him,” Marie-Québec told the former FLQer.

  “Why?”

  “You won’t be able to shut him up.”

  “S’okay. The night’s still young.”

  She heard them talking. Her body followed the music.

  “We’ve got all night,” he repeated. “But I thought you were the expert on The Just …”

  “I’m an expert in nothing. Excep
t maybe the sun. Or a drop of water on an inch of skin. How many bellybuttons can you fill with the sea? That’s my specialty.”

  Sam jumped to his feet and announced that he was going to go swimming. Gode turned his head a little to look at him, but all he could see was a small print dress suspended on two breasts large as a hand and as firm as mangos that swayed above her stool to the rhythm of the Mamas and the Papas.

  Sam barely staggered as he strayed from the bar. He stopped at the fire for a moment, then walked away from the halo and continued to march toward the sea, in the dark.

  Gode swallowed his tequila and followed it with a sip of beer, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He felt incredible. Marie-Québec lifted her glass.

  “To our projects.”

  “Do you know how old I am?”

  “Over fifty. I hope you weren’t keeping it a secret. You’re part of history.”

  “Exactly. Over fifty. Too old to tell lies, even for a good cause.”

  “And what is it, your cause?”

  “You.”

  “Okay. And the lie?”

  “I’m a director. I should have added a bankrupt movie producer. But to get into the good graces of an actress, it isn’t the best line …”

  “So your Lynx Productions, it’s done?”

  “Finished, dead, kaput. Now you can stop talking to me …”

  They ordered more tequila. Their pesos were vanishing.

  “Your boyfriend, I don’t know if you know, but I can see him coming a mile off.”