© Éditions du Boréal Montréal, Canada, 2010
English translation copyright © 2013 by Wayne Grady
First published as La constellation du lynx in 2010 by Les Éditions du Boréal
First published in English in 2013 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hamelin, Louis, 1959–
[Constellation du Lynx. English]
October 1970 : a novel / Louis Hamelin ; translated by Wayne Grady.
Translation of: La constellation du Lynx.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-103-6 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77089-410-5 (html)
I. Grady, Wayne, translator II. Title. II. Title: Constellation du Lynx. English.
PS8565.A487C6613 2013 C843’.54 C2013-903732-2
C2013-903733-0
Cover design: Marijke Friesen
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities.
For Marie-Hélène
For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard.
JOYCE, ULYSSES
Agents continually infiltrate to work on other side and
discredit by excess of zeal; more accurately, agents rarely
know which side they are working on.
BURROUGHS, THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS,
VOL. 1: 1945–1959
THE TERRORISTS
REBELLION CELL
Lancelot
Corbeau
Justin Francoeur
Élise Francoeur
François Langlais, alias Pierre Chevrier (le Chevreuil)
Nick Mansell
Chevalier Cell
Jean-Paul Lafleur
René Lafleur
Richard Godefroid
Benoit Desrosiers
Foreign Delegation
Francis Braffort (Paris)
Luc Goupil (London)
Raymond Brossard, alias Zadig (Algiers)
Daniel Prince, alias Madwar (Algiers)
THE LITERARIES
Chevalier Branlequeue, editor, poet, literature professor
Samuel Nihilo, literary journalist
Marie-Québec Brisebois, actress
Frédéric Falardeau, researcher
AND THE REST
General Jean-B. Bédard, commanding officer, Royal 22nd
Marie-France Bellechasse, student
Bobby, CATS (Combined AntiTerrorist Squad) agent
Raoul Bonnard, cabaret performer
Maître Mario Brien, lawyer for the terrorists
Jacques “Coco” Cardinal, militant separatist
Madame Corps, Coco’s ex-wife
Marcel Duquet, militant separatist
Mr. Grosleau, Crown prosecutor
Dick Kimball, Quiet American
Colonel Robert Lapierre, political adviser, grey eminence, etc.
Paul Lavoie, hostage
Claude Leclerc, police captain
Jean-Claude Marcel, MP from the back country, friend of Paul Lavoie
Miles “Machinegun” Martinek, detective-sergeant, emergency squad (Quebec Provincial Police)
Gilbert Massicotte, detective-lieutenant, CATS
Rénald Massicotte, Baby Barbecue chicken delivery man
Bernard Saint-Laurent, FLQ sympathizer
Giuseppe Scarpino, businessman
Luigi Temperio, businessman
John Travers, hostage
Albert Vézina, premier of Quebec
CHRONOLOGY
October 5, 1970: Kidnapping of John Travers, British trade commissioner, by the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ).
October 10: Kidnapping of the Quebec government’s Number Two.
October 15: Mobile forces of the Canadian Army intervene in Quebec.
October 16: Proclamation of the War Measures Act by the federal government of Canada; suspension of civil liberties; nearly 500 citizens detained without being charged …
October 17: Number Two’s body found in the trunk of a car.
ONE
A QUESTION
OF CHICKENS
L’AVENIR (QUEBEC),
SUMMER 1975
MY NAME IS MARCEL DUQUET and I am going to die in about five minutes. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the crows look like nuns’ veils blown open by the wind, and I like the rumbling sound the tractor makes, the way it fills my ears as another row of hay falls before the harvester. I am forty-two years old, I have a round bald spot on the top of my head, which is so hot I feel like a prisoner who’s been scalped by Indians and hung by my feet over a bed of coals until my brain starts boiling. The red scarf tied around my tonsure is brighter than the paint on the Massey-Ferguson; it must be a visible splash against the maples and the blue sky when I make the turn at the bottom of the field.
Now that I’m on the uphill run, I can see him walking toward me through the cut hay. It’s Coco. And it’s like my heart stops beating. Then it starts again: thoughts, the saliva in my mouth, the family of crows. In a way, I already know what he wants. I look around, nothing but the field bordered by the split-rail fence, the aspens and pines, the sugar bush, above them the thick blue arc of sky, the invisible river at the end of the land. And here, Coco Cardinal trudging across the field, face completely red, glistening with sweat, fat, hunched over, hands paddling the air, winded.
I get down from the tractor, leaving the motor running, and walk toward Cardinal, who has stopped a short distance from me. He’s waiting until I reach him. Squinting into the sun, the light too harsh. As I close the distance, I wipe rivulets of burning sweat from my eyelids and forehead. I stop three feet from where he’s standing. I swallow. I manage a smile.
“Hey, Coco. Been a while …”
He shrugs. He’s sweating like a pig, his summer shirt completely unbuttoned and soaked under the armpits. His upper lip glistens, as though his lungs were trying to get out through his nose. His ant-red eyes want to unglue themselves from his face. Before he opens his mouth to speak, a black fist grips my insides.
“Well, if it ain’t Marcel. They let you out of prison, eh? I hope they rammed a broomstick up your ass first.”
He finds this funny. He giggles. I take another look around, the standing hay is stronger than I am. No one else in sight. My heart pounds in my chest but I hardly hear it. I can barely move. But, as I said, I manage to smile.
“I survived, as you see …”
He sneezes once, twice, again and again, his face twitching uncontrollably. Still doing coke, I see. As he sneezes he also seems to be thinking. I wonder if I should take advantage of it, get the jump on him, grab him by the throat and finish him off some way or other. But I l
et the opportunity pass.
“There’s people say you talk too much. That since you got out you turned into a real chatterbox …”
I try to swallow; nothing. He spits on the ground.
“A goddamned stool pigeon!”
He’s not using his normal voice. I try to gesture in protest, but my arm feels like it weighs a ton. With him it’s the opposite: he moves his arm with the lightning speed of a cobra and suddenly there’s a gun at the end of it. I feel the metal rim against my forehead, sucking everything out. My brain melts like a block of ice, useless, nothing else.
“And the other thing, you asshole, is that you stole my wife …”
I try to say no, but all I can do is shake my head, not so much because of the cold metal against my skin, although it’s still there. Everything happening to me seems very far away, far from my head, which keeps falling, gently spreading out into the round darkness that pushes back at me harder and deeper, at the centre of my forehead, on my skin beaten by the sun. There’s excitement in his heavy, menacing voice.
“On your knees, Duquet! Now! On your knees in front of me! I’m not gonna say it again …”
I let myself fall and it’s like an act of deliverance, I start to say I’m sorry, I want to say it, my eyes raised through a valley of tears, to the muzzle that bores its hole into the silence, this blind full stop in the field, this pitch of forgotten light, of sun, earth, hot. The standing hay and the hay cut down by the reaper. Bewilderment.
The skull makes a cracking sound, like a coconut under the tractor’s rear wheel, followed by a sickening squelch and the grinding of bones and other pulpy bits. Cardinal puts the engine back in neutral, his breath coming in great gasps, and, like an idiot, clutches his legs. A violent spasm has gripped them, thrown them into an interminable shaking fit. With every limb trembling, he forces his left foot down on the brake pedal.
When he’s finished, he jumps to the ground and steps away from the tractor, turns back for a final look feeling almost calm, although his legs are as rubbery as they are after sex. Now he peers critically at the composition of his canvas. He closes his eyes, rubs the lids, opens them again, and takes another look.
He nods. Job well done. Takes a deep breath. Removes a plastic bag from his shirt pocket and, with a length of straw, knocks back a noisy snort of its contents. Then he turns his back on the scene and, for a moment, takes in the panorama of cultivated fields, woodlots, barns painted shades of red from strawberry to dried blood, the glinting silos that stretch from where he is standing to the horizon. Behind him, the tractor is still running. A final glance. There’s no way he can hang around. He decides to get back to the side road via the neighbouring field by following a line of elms and hawthorns and wild apples that can’t be seen from the main road. He reaches the cedar fence, climbs it, balances precariously on the knotty top rail, which is the colour of Appalachian granite sculpted by a century of weather, and remembers an expression, rib fence, what split-rail fences are called in the Baie-des-Chaleurs region. Maritime language.
And Coco loves boats.
VILLEBOIS, NORTH OF
THE 49TH PARALLEL,
WINTER 1951
THE CABIN IS MADE OF round logs chinked with dried sphagnum moss. Its dark grey walls stand out against the white snow, and the air around it is filled with the smell of woodsmoke, pine resin, and rancid animal fat. The chimney is a length of sheet metal, a plume of ethereal, grimy whiteness hanging from it.
Caribou antlers are nailed above the door. On the walls, beaver skins, fur side out, stretched in frames made of birch saplings. It’s one of Godefroid’s earliest memories.
The lake. The trapper’s cabin.
This is country where dogs become wolves when they get loose.
Where barges come down the river midstream, furniture belonging to families from the old parishes lashed to their decks under tarpaulins. The Turgeon River’s as wide as eight boulevards, broken up by rapids that can make a vessel shake like an old jalopy on a washboarded dirt road. Two hundred kilometres farther on it joins the Harricana, whose waters flow north to the sloped basin of Hudson Bay, where the last handful of land grants were given out, well north of the railway. Amid dark forests that exhaust the sky and sap the horizon.
It was country that had been seen only by the master fur traders, from their canoes as they passed through, and by the scattered tribes of the taiga nations who wandered there in search of the last of the beaver lodges. In the days of walking and paddling the Muskuchii hills, the vast swamps where the snow geese swim. No one would settle farther north than this.
Godefroid’s father was a labourer, unemployed, a hired hand who’d filled out a questionnaire with the Ministry of Lands and Forests, received eight hundred bucks, a pat on the back, and a parcel of land in this burnt-out bushland somewhere north of Abitibi.
When did he crack? When did he turn into this silent, sullen, beaten man? It was his wife who saved the family by taking a job as a teacher in the village: seven hundred dollars a year, a roof over their heads, and twenty cords of firewood.
The dogs went crazy. Tied up in the snow in front of the trapper’s cabin, they howled like banshees.
While Godefroid’s mother taught a classroom full of lunkheads, his father went to visit the trapper in his cabin by the lake, taking a bottle of Seagram’s with him, to listen to the old man’s tricks of the trade. The X of sticks placed under the snare so the rabbit would leap into the noose. When you shoot at roosting partridges, shoot the lowest one first so it doesn’t scare off the others when it falls.
This country where wolves run to the end of the forest and the dogs go crazy.
The trapper has to kick them out of the way to clear a path to the door for the father, his young son at his heels.
“What’s wrong with the dogs today, Bill?”
Bill sniggers. His teeth are the colour of tobacco. He looks at the boy, then at the father, then at the boy again, then says:
“Come here. I’ll show you something …”
Inside, steel traps hang by their chains from nails driven into the beams. A stretched otter hide, gleaming, sumptuous. The heavy smell of hanging meat, putrefying guts, sweat, damp, dirt, singed wool, wet fur, tobacco smoke, cold tea, and woodsmoke.
And piss. And something else, sweeter, more insidious, something men smell a mile away: fear.
Outside, the dogs go on barking themselves to death.
Slowly, the trapper turns to the back of the cabin. The two others, father and son, follow his gaze. As they passed through the door, they’d been aware of a warm, dark presence, and now they see the animal. Its sphinx-like face framed by sideburns worthy of a Dickensian banker, ears crowned with pointed tufts of fur. And its eyes, like two huge, amber lakes, swallowing them up.
The lynx sits on its haunches in the dark, a dog collar cinched around one paw and attached to a chain affixed to one of the cabin posts. Alert to any hint of movement, it fixes the three humans with an intense, devouring glare.
Mouth gaping, the father turns to the trapper, who keeps his eyes fixed on those of the big cat.
“You want him?” Bill asks after a moment has passed.
“Are you nuts?”
The woodsman reaches out, seizes a bottle of brandy from a plank that serves as a sideboard, removes the cork and takes a long swig. He offers the bottle to the father, who passes. Then he looks at the boy, grins at him, a stub-toothed rictus.
“It tastes like piss,” he says.
The boy looks away without saying anything. He watches the lynx.
“He doesn’t want to be my friend,” says Bill.
“Who doesn’t?” asks the father.
“Him,” Bill replies, nodding at the lynx.
Another swig of brandy. Outside, the huskies bark, bark, bark themselves to death.
Still thirsty, the trapper takes another drink, then passes the bottle to Godefroid’s father, who takes it without saying a word this time. Then Bill gets up a
nd rummages in a trunk in the corner, traps, knives, everyday junk. He comes up with a pair of gloves, long protective gauntlets that go up to his elbows, made of some thick stuff, some kind of padded material, and he takes his time putting them on. They look like welder’s gloves.
When he approaches the lynx, the animal shrinks to the floor and backs up without taking his eyes from the farthest corner. He reaches the end of his chain and curls into himself, ears flattened, eyes filled with murderous terror. Showing no fear, the man crouches before the animal. The entire cabin fills with a long, drawn-out hissing sound, backed by a deep, plaintive rumbling from the cat’s chest. Its eyes widen, its face distorted by extraordinary tension as man and beast stare at each other without moving. Then the man moves quickly, grabbing the animal by the neck with both hands and lifting it slowly off the ground. The huge round paws, claws extended, scratch ineffectually at the man’s gloves. He stands holding the lynx at arm’s length, then tightens his grip on its throat. They hear a round of rumbling as two killers, united, execute a sort of dance together, a dance without movement. In the eternity that follows, in the cabin’s half-light, the father and son watch mesmerized as the lynx’s body goes from struggle to spasm, the fixed grimace, the evolution of death traced on its enigmatic face right up to the final tremor that rattles the animal’s entire being.
His legs turn to rubber, the trapper falls to his knees, completely spent, and, after setting the animal down on the dirt floor, stretches out beside it. They hear his heavy breathing as he takes off his gloves and gently lifts an enormous paw, makes the fingers move under their fur, articulates the still-warm muscles as if the animal were a puppet, then, with an incredibly tender gesture, lets his hands stray for a moment into the long, silken fur.
SAM, AUTUMN 2000
THAT MORNING, AFTER FALLING BACK to sleep, Sam dreams of Marie-Québec. He was in the big house on Lake Kaganoma, deep in the forest fifty kilometres from Maldoror. They were on a white-sand beach somewhere, he could feel the pounding of the sea, and Marie-Québec walked in front of him, her back to him. She was moving away, not looking around but aware of his presence, moving away, her walk, almost formal, hardly swaying her hips, more from discretion than modesty, as though she were ashamed of her ass, which she was. As though her ass’s fleshy abundance didn’t exist in this world, which it did, and so she walked as though she wanted to tuck it between her legs, the way one tucks one’s head between one’s shoulders. That was how she went through life, too, the way she was passing through his dream, like a minor character who crosses a stage without realizing that she was playing a key role.
October 1970 Page 1