October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “Florida,” Gode said.

  “Yup. Flowerida. I guess if it were you and the others, it would be Texas.”

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “Nicole told me that Jean-Paul Lafleur has spent hours on the phone to Houston lately. He charges his calls to the hospital where she works. She’d do anything for René, poor little thing.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. But why Texas? It’s a terrible place. The sea’s full of gasoline.”

  “Jean-Paul’s a big boy. Don’t worry. He knows what he’s doing.”

  I didn’t ask: what about us? Because the first thing she told me was that she’d figured out that love was never going to be a priority in my life, never the most important thing for me, as it was for her, because I believed I could change my life, whereas for her, if love wasn’t the most important thing, if it wasn’t what made the difference, the thing that changed life, then she didn’t want to have anything to do with it. We could just be friends.

  I had about as much desire to be her friend as I had to be slapped in the face with a freshly caught codfish. While I was holding out my cheek so that she could peck it with her lips puckered up like an albatross’s asshole, I looked at the tombstone behind her.

  In a way, I wanted to give the world a second chance to give me a second chance. But the cemetery was just a station, not the terminus of my illusions. On Côte-des-Neiges, meat retained a certain dignity. Rotting had its place. And I did not go to the Gaspé in the end. I went to the end of everything, in a field near Manseau.

  It was billed as the Woodstock of Quebec. Three orgiastic days of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix were among the names handed out to journalists by organizers whose professionalism didn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. Gode found himself with his thumb out beside Highway 20 one Friday morning, with nothing in the way of baggage but a small cloth backpack and a woollen blanket on which he’d promised himself he’d lay the first beautiful hippie who’d let herself be attracted by his three-day beard and his status as a saviour of humanity. He wore his heart on his sleeve and a huge wind was blowing between his ears.

  The site was an entire field behind Napoléon’s farm that had been converted into the concert’s campground, a drug den, and an experimental fuckfest. The first thing he saw was a man mounted on a horse heading toward the campground with a woman riding behind him on the saddle. The woman was naked.

  At the edge of the compound, protesters were demonstrating against the price of tickets for the concert: fifteen dollars. The demonstration was barely underway when one of the protesters fell into the ditch and lay there, completely paralyzed. A bad trip. Some longhairs picked him up and carried him to the gate in the swollen fence. There was a medical unit inside. A guard prevented them from going through.

  “Fifteen dollars and you can go in.”

  The words were punctuated by a flash of lightning followed by heavy, cannonlike rumbling, and the black clouds that had been gathering in the sky above Manseau all morning opened like a faucet, dropping a deluge of rain on the scene. The bucolic site surrounding the stage, over which amplifiers rose like sombre megaliths, was instantly changed into a quagmire of apocalyptic proportions.

  Employees whose job had been to fence off the whole sector had taken off the previous night because they hadn’t seen the colour of anyone’s money, and Gode had no trouble getting into the grounds. He watched four young men wade into the mud, as naked as Adam, to erect a bridge of sorts across the muddy stream.

  “Grass, hash, meth, dex,” murmured a young woman quietly, brushing against him as she passed.

  It continued pouring with rain, and several thousand bodies uniformly covered in mud filled the space. You could ogle as many bare breasts as you wanted, most of them ugly, heavy, pendulant. But even the young, firm breasts, seen in this context, went beyond liberation; they became collectivized, and there was something depressing about it. Shortly after seven o’clock, a brief let-up in the cataract was taken advantage of and the first group took the stage. It was a totally unknown band called the Enterprise, and they looked like they were standing on a sacrificial altar in some blood-crazed religion rising above a sea of mud. The first notes elicited general incredulity, then an immense guffaw engulfed (or rather, drowned out) even the boos. No one had ever heard anything so awful. Gode went off to look for a hole in the fence. He couldn’t take any more.

  “I love you,” a kid said to him, sitting cross-legged on the ground, his eyes raised toward the sky.

  Down below, on the stage, the Enterprise had been replaced by the boys from the group Révolution Français, and soon their slightly nasal voices could be heard singing their hit song: “Québécois / We are québécois …”

  Back near the stream, Gode watched the same four naked guys still going back and forth with branches and lengths of wood and rotten planks, any debris they could lay their hands on, to shore up their retaining wall, which was now at the head of a sizable lake of dirty water. Gode’s lips moved along with the music despite himself … “Quebec’ll know what to do / If they don’t let us through …”

  Rumour had it that the musicians invited to the festival hadn’t yet been paid or even organized, and that some of them were still holed up in their hotel rooms in Montreal, waiting to be given some direction, or even a means of transportation, and also that most of the big names that hadn’t actually turned down the invitations had never been contacted.

  Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, giving up on ever being paid, the security personnel deserted their posts and left the festival site.

  When I opened my eyes again, it was daylight, and I was tangled up in my blanket on the edge of the ditch. I seemed to be lying on what little bit of grass there was, and it was as soaked as I was, even through my blanket. A little way off from me I saw one of those small country houses: cedar shake walls, gabled roof. As soon as I saw it, I knew that was where I had wanted to be all my life. What was I doing here, sleeping like a dog on the edge of a churned-up field when I would have given anything to be in the kitchen of that country house with a country woman serving me a plate of country eggs and bacon and beans and a cup of strong coffee.

  I took a few steps toward it, my shoulders wrapped in the blanket, and came across a strange procession. There must have been thirty hippies, but mixed in with them were one fat motorcycle cop in helmet and boots, the whole works; a festival organizer with his shiny badge pinned to his chest; and a television crew shooting everything as they went. The four youths walking in front were carrying a body as stiff as a cadaver at minus 40 Celsius, mouth open, eyes rolled back, gripped in convulsions of terror or ecstasy or both, who knew? His hands were in a weird position, fingers spread out and bent, as though he were trying to repel something and grab it at the same time. I knew that scene. The hair on his nude body formed the shape of a cross in the middle of his chest. He had long sideburns, black hair, and a thick, dense beard streaking down from his face. He looked like a religious figure. But it wasn’t to the earth that they were consecrating the poor devil. More likely they were taking him to the crazy farm. Where had I seen that guy before?

  And then I remembered. The photo of Che Guevara that had been published after his execution in Bolivia. The dead Che. This kid’s features had the same expression, a bit ape-like, a bit thunderstruck by grace.

  I continued on my way. Farther down, I came upon a guy holding a sign that said: ACID, $1.50.

  In the area where the muddy stream had been there was now a muddy swamp. And what was going on in the field around it looked like a wrestling match in Jell-O organized by the Ideal SuperBeach at the campground in Saint-Profond. I felt like I was watching a bunch of pink suckling pigs wallowing in a huge swill of peace and love. Despite the organizers’ pleas, the provincial police, which had three hundred officers stationed in the next village, had apparently refused to ensure safety on the site after t
he defection of the security guards. Drugs openly for sale, public nudity. Maybe somebody upstairs thought that letting all these youths spend their energy on foolishness wasn’t such a bad idea; keep an eye on them, sure, but let them work off steam. At least when they’re high as kites and fucking like minks, they’re not making bombs! And it was pretty much working. In three days, the police had had to investigate only one attempted murder (with a knife), and the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl by a gang of boys of about the same age.

  It was also said that the Minister of Health had come to check out the grounds in a helicopter to make a personal assessment of “the drug phenomenon in today’s youth culture.” And no doubt to take a good look at some naked young flesh without having to risk being seen in a strip bar. Because skin was a big deal. You’d think no one in Quebec had ever seen a tit before, or a pair of thighs, or pubic hair.

  Around noon on Saturday, the sun came out. The music improved. I sipped a can of beer and looked around, smiling at everyone and no one. “Ouiii,” the band was singing, “Québec sait faire …” At the fence, the complainers had ended up winning their case. The controls were lifted, entry was free, and everyone in the world had crashed the party. Word had got around. Tourists began showing up. The Saturday family outing was there: mom, dad, the kids, and especially the uncles and aunts. In short, everyone came to gawk at the naked hippies … Some of them even brought ice cream and folding lawn chairs. In a photograph that appeared in La Presse, one group was seen setting up beside a kid who was shooting Methedrine into his arm. Around two in the afternoon, when I saw a naked and completely out of it girl take shelter in the swamp, chased by a hundred people who didn’t want to miss out on any of the fun, as though she wasn’t a poor simple kid caught up in a complex system but more like a gorilla in the Granby Zoo, I decided I’d seen enough.

  I left. With my lonesome-cowboy blanket over my shoulder, my thumb out beside Highway 20, “Québécois, Québécois …” still ringing in my ears, but this time it was giving me a headache.

  The driver who picked me up wanted me to tell him all about it, but I didn’t want to talk. He’d heard on the radio that the mob had been behind the whole festival thing from the start. I shrugged.

  “Nothing is ever going to change in Quebec …”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Bah. No reason.”

  I asked him to let me off at the exit to the 95, the end of boulevard de Montarville. Then I called a taxi from a restaurant not far from there.

  I sat in the cab for a while, not saying anything. The driver waited, watching me in his rear-view mirror.

  “Where to, buddy?”

  “Rue Collins.”

  BABY

  EARLY IN 1971, WITH NO fanfare, with a simple orderin-council from the municipality of Saint-Hubert, rue Collins was renamed rue Braffort. The pretext, it seemed, had something to do with the influx of curiosity-seekers who spent their Sunday afternoon drives taking a look at the house in which the vice-premier of Quebec had been assassinated. Apparently Braffort was the name of a farmer in the area. By an absolutely stupefying coincidence, however, a few weeks after the toponymic adjustment, it was also the name of a member of the FLQ who was shot three times in the head with a .22 calibre pistol in a suburb of Paris.

  Sam got off the 10 and, leaving the river behind him, turned onto the frightful urban horror called boulevard Taschereau. Then he took the 112 east to La Savane Road, passing the exits to the airport, hangars, and fields, passing rue Nelson, finally turning onto rue Braffort.

  The Lavoie Affair, he was thinking, was rooted, like the JFK Affair, in one of those subconscious layers of conspiracy thinking that refused to recognize coincidence, and in which the inevitable, mysterious plot thickened and thickened until the final narrative sucked in facts, links, relationships of cause and effect, partial and total accident, and kneaded the dough into a single, dark but brilliant ball, the yeast for which was provided by an intellectual virtuosity cultivated to the point of paranoid omniscience.

  On one level, the name change had had its desired effect: the former rue Collins had definitely ceased to be a tourist attraction. Two parallel and isolated streets surrounded by vacant fields, Nelson and Braffort were the stump ends of a suburban hodgepodge of summer cottages converted into bungalows and low-end split-levels rubbing shoulders with down-at-heel mobile homes. At the field bordering the airport, Braffort ended in a pile of gravel and a pair of concrete blocks, beyond which it was reduced to two muddy ruts heading northwest, which eventually disappeared into a woodlot of aspens surrounded by ploughed fields.

  But if the purpose of the name change was to discourage the curious from coming and sticking their noses into things, as Sam Nihilo and his friend, Fred Falardeau, were doing now, then the city councillors had apparently missed their target.

  Samuel was a bit early, but he hadn’t been there five minutes before he saw Fred’s sedan approaching along la Savane. The next minute, his old drinking buddy from university had joined him on the exact spot where the Chevrolet containing the body of Paul Lavoie had been found nearly thirty years before. They hadn’t seen each other in years. They shook hands on the grounds of the former Wander Aviation, in the shadow of Hangar Number 12.

  Within minutes, Fred, a thigh hiked on the front fender of his car, began gesticulating, his tone becoming imperial without his being aware of it, his index finger pointing to the scene that they had dredged up from the depths of their memories. A pale October sun shone down on their heads.

  “Two things, Sam. In the famous interview in Temps-Presse, Richard Godefroid supposedly placed the body in the trunk and got rid of the car at the end of rue Collins. As you can see, that clearly didn’t happen: when they got to the end of rue Collins, they turned right and drove a good two hundred metres toward the military base. Why didn’t they go in the other direction? At the other end of rue Collins, they would have been in fields and woods and completely out of sight, the perfect spot to abandon an old car with an incriminating package in the trunk. Coming this way, taking the risk of being met by a military patrol, doesn’t make any sense.”

  Fred punctuated his words by slapping the hood of his car with the flat of his hand.

  “Second. Godefroid explained their little ‘promenade’ of two hundred metres with an absurd lie: he said they put the car in drive and let it roll by itself onto base property. The problem with that is that it doesn’t explain how it was eventually found inside a fenced-in parking lot. Or why the car keys were gone when the first journalist arrived on the scene … Are you following me?”

  “Fred, not only am I following you, but your powers of synthesis are impressing me as much as they ever did!”

  Fred patted his stomach.

  “I’m a bit hungry. You know what we should do?”

  “No, what?”

  “Go get us some chicken.”

  And where else would they go but to Baby Barbecue on boulevard Taschereau, in Longueuil? And order half-thawed fries with some kind of thin brown gravy on them, and the inevitable coleslaw soaked in dressing, all of it washed down with a good Pepsi.

  What had Fred been up to? He was writing, of course. How could someone like him not be a writer? But with one mouth to feed already and another Falardeau offspring on the way, he needed to find something to get the pot boiling. A few months earlier, he’d begun looking into the Braffort business for L’Enquêteux, the premier TV show on Télé-Québec. The unresolved murder in Paris of Francis Braffort, a few months after the October Crisis, was generally attributed to a settling of accounts within the FLQ. Braffort had been the brains behind the terrorist movement, and often its main mouthpiece. And so, in an unexpected way, Fred’s path had once again crossed that of the two Algerians, Zadig and Madwar.

  “Do you remember that article in the Montreal Sun?”

  “I do. It was the Rosetta stone of the Octobeerists.”

  “Chevalier gave each of us an assignment: he asked you to
follow the Chevrier trail while I dug into the business of the two fedayeen.”

  “Yeah. And we couldn’t have known it at the time, but that was the last meeting of the Octos!”

  “Did you ever get anywhere with the famous Pierre Chevrier? Tell me something about him …”

  Samuel scrunched his brows and looked at his friend. Physically, Fred was still the almost identical twin of James Joyce, which meant that getting total, undefended openness or even an unguarded smile from him was as remote as integrity and lack of appetite would be in a suburban mayor. Sam hadn’t thought their old unacknowledged rivalry would come back so quickly. Fred, good old Fred, was hiding a tiny sliver of a smile behind his chicken thigh that was too innocent for his liking.

  Sam returned his smile.

  “You go first. Tell me about Zadig and Madwar …”

  Wincing, Fred acknowledged Sam’s cautious ruse.

  “Ah, the same old Sam. Look at us. You’d think we were a couple of spies in a thriller movie. It’s the same old game, isn’t it: use the little you know like bait to tease out a bigger piece of the puzzle. Okay, let’s go. I’ll give you Madwar and Zadig, you give me Pierre. You’re getting two for the price of one, though, you dog.”

  “Agreed that we’re a long way from Joyce. We’re a long way from Hubert Aquin.”

  “No, we aren’t. We’re engaged in an exercise of invention and fabrication, intrigue and history. Even exceptionally creative people launch their little fictions into the world. The difference is that when it works, nobody calls what we do a bestseller. They call it history.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About disinformation as a fine art. At a certain level, what you find are not two sides shooting at each other, but a war between two texts. I’m talking about the dispatch that leaves a foreign information service’s office, arrives by telex at a press agency, and appears in your morning newspaper the next day, and gradually works its way up to becoming the official version. In the Braffort Affair, the settling of accounts within the FLQ was the cover story. I know as many people who believe that he was eliminated by the secret service as are convinced that an FLQ commando raid was responsible. It’s the tied match that sits well with the information community. So much so that the trail is entirely covered up …”