October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  His progress was interrupted by the feel of a cold object pressed against his sternum between two buttons of his pyjama top. He looked down and saw the barrel of a machine gun and, holding the machine gun, a police constable leaning lightly on the gun’s stock, pressing the barrel into his rib cage and pushing him back against the wall.

  “What are you—?”

  “You’re under arrest. Hands on your head, please, sir.”

  Branlequeue half-raised his hands and held them immobilized in the air.

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “We don’t need one. Not anymore. I told you to put your hands on your head.”

  He obeyed. Somewhere deep down inside, he felt no surprise as he heard the order, with a mute understanding but filled with defiance: at last the mask has been removed. Éléonore appeared at their bedroom door and was greeted by a machine gun aimed in her direction.

  “Holy Mother of God!”

  In the kitchen, detectives were using their feet to sift through the contents of the garbage pail they’d overturned. One of them, examining the contents of a container of flour from the cupboard, emptied it on the floor and was immediately enveloped in a white cloud that made him sneeze, then sniff. Then he did the same thing with the container of first-class Colombian cocoa. Another had taken a brick of ice cream from the freezer and was looking at it suspiciously. After a close inspection, he stabbed it several times with a butter knife to make sure there were no sticks of dynamite hidden inside it.

  “They’re insane,” Éléonore decided aloud, in an amazed, almost calm voice.

  Held against a wall in their night clothes, an automatic weapon trained on them, Éléonore and her husband saw their three children being herded down the stairs by men carrying machine guns. They were in a line, their eyes still swollen with sleep. Pacifique was holding his Winnie-the-Pooh bear against his chest. The clock on the wall read ten minutes to six a.m.

  The children were lined up against the wall beside them. The family together at last. The oldest, Martial, put his fist to his mouth and yawned, prodigiously interested in what was going on around him.

  “Dad, what do they want?”

  “I don’t know, son. I’ll ask them.”

  He turned toward their guard:

  “Officer, I’m not asking for myself, you understand, but I do think you owe an explanation to my son, who is right here.”

  The guard was young, fresh-faced, with a thin moustache that made him look like a twelve-year-old nervously aiming a gun. He was fighting this appearance of weakness by holding himself as rigid as a fence post and systematically avoiding meeting the eyes of his prisoners. When Chevalier questioned him, he blushed like a schoolgirl.

  “Officer?” Chevalier tried again with the same ultra-polite tone. “My older boy here would like it if you could answer his question.”

  The young cop adjusted his cap, his eyes fixed on the wall in front of him. He succeeded in keeping his trap shut.

  A considerable noise was coming from the Placard, Chevalier’s office. The police were bringing out garbage bags full of material. Everything: typewriter, masses of papers, magazines, books, manuscripts, files, illustrations, pamphlets, address books. One of the detectives stopped in front of the telephone table, took the phone book, and stuffed it in his green bag and kept on going, sack over his shoulder. Chevalier watched him leave.

  “Are you being paid by the pound?”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  But Chevalier was beginning to have an idea. The idea was strong enough to allow him to stare down the uniformed whippersnapper who was holding his family captive and who, without a word, got out of his way.

  Advancing like an automaton, Branlequeue crossed the room, still as blind as a bat without his glasses, and stopped at the door to his office. He could hear what was going on inside clearly: two officers throwing things with a vaguely disgusted air into a pile of papers about a metre high, then shoving it in huge armloads into black plastic bags. One of them was a member of the antiterrorist squad, Detective Lieutenant Gilbert Massicotte, of the Montreal police. He looked up and saw Chevalier.

  “What’s up?” he asked in a fairly good imitation of the comedian Ti-Zoune Guimond, complete with gestures.

  Chevalier swallowed.

  “Er … that’s the manuscript of the second volume of Elucubrations you’re tossing about …” He stopped, unable to go on.

  Massicotte looked down at the pile of paper. He looked like someone had just stopped him from pulling up a weed in order to give him its scientific name.

  “The book is almost finished,” Chevalier added in a thin voice.

  “I know who you are,” Lieutenant Massicotte shot at him. “You’ve won some kind of prize. I’m a writer, too, did you know that? But I hate Quebec literature. Jean-Étier Blet’s right, there’s nothing here that comes anywhere close to the Meditations of Martine, er, I mean …”

  “Lamartine, yes,” Chevalier nodded, forcing himself to remain calm and telling himself that the police aren’t always the animals they appear to be, but they usually are. “And Hugo,” he added, “who wrote his Contemplations, and Rimbaud with his Illuminations … and me. All I’m asking, sir, is that you stop this thievery and leave my Elucubrations alone, all right?”

  “You do your job, and let us do ours,” said the detective lieutenant philosophically.

  An officer came and gently but firmly took the writer by the sleeve of his pyjamas and escorted him back into the hall. There, Chevalier’s attention turned to a policeman who, arms full, was coming down the stairs from the second floor and the two children’s bedrooms. The author of Elucubrations ignored the weapon trained on him and went to the bottom of the stairs.

  “What are you carting off this time?”

  “Evidence,” muttered the officer, looking down at the teetering pile of school notebooks and binders and trying to stabilize them with his chin.

  “No, wait a minute,” said Chevalier. “That’s my son’s stamp collection.”

  “We’ll let the experts tell us what it is, if you don’t mind, sir. This is all going straight to the lab. ’Scuse me, if I can just get past …”

  Chevalier stepped aside, this time truly overwhelmed by what was happening.

  A corpulent inspector carrying a raincoat and hat was suddenly standing in front of him.

  “You. You’re coming with us.”

  “No, sir, I’m not. Unless you have a warrant, I’m not budging from my house …”

  The policeman gave him his best smile. It was full of well-brushed but nicotine-stained teeth, and his breath stank like a sewer.

  “We don’t need a warrant. We’re done with warrants. There’s a special law that was just voted in in Ottawa.”

  PROVINCE OF QUEBEC (CANADA),

  OCTOBER 16, 1970

  One week earlier, the Canadian Military had been placed on alert. Under cover of routine exercises, troops had been moved to Camp Bouchard, north of Montreal. On October 12, units from the 2nd Combat Division, stationed in Petawawa, Ontario, were sent to Ottawa, ostensibly to guard public buildings in the capital. On the 15th, two Hercules troop transports were readied to fly from the air force base at Namao, near Edmonton. Originally planned for the 14th, then put back twenty-four hours while the Quebec Minister of Justice came up with reasons for the transfer of soldiers and political allies, the invasion was ready to begin.

  At noon, the solicitor general of Quebec, who had more or less fallen apart at the seams after the kidnapping of his colleague, signed the famous official letter conferring legal status to the military occupation. General Bédard’s successor as the head of Mobile Forces was warned by a telephone call to his headquarters in Saint-Hubert. The reading of the intervention request was accomplished, as the law required. Then an airplane left Quebec with the missive and flew toward Ottawa. Five minutes later, like clockwork, the new chief of the Armed Forces unleashed Operation Touchdown.

  Four Hercules airc
raft lifted off in the space of half an hour from the Ancienne-Lorette airport near Quebec City, each carrying three hundred soldiers in full battle fatigues. Others left from Namao, heading toward Montreal. Helicopters left the base at Saint-Hubert to go to Camp Bouchard, where they picked up infantry belonging to the second battalion of the 22nd Regiment, then returned to fly over the city at low altitude.

  At the same time, a military convoy of four hundred vehicles left the base at Valcartier, north of the capital, and spread out toward the main cities. In Montreal, soldiers appeared in front of city hall and the courthouse. In sections of the city where the upper crust lived, more soldiers guarded the residences of political figures and other public citizens.

  Soon, nearly six hundred soldiers equipped with field materiel had been deployed in the streets of the French-Canadian metropolis. On rue Parthenais, Quebec Provincial Police headquarters were cordoned off by military troops ready for warfare, weapons at the ready. Behind the cordon, in the parking lot converted into a de facto aerodrome, a continuous coming and going of helicopters was kept up.

  Seen from the street, the Parthenais Prison, as it was called from then on, formed a vertiginous, coal-black rectangle that seemed poised to crush the surrounding workers’ quarter. The Division of Civil Emergency Situations, under the command of the Mobile Forces of the Canadian Army, created the year before, had for the past several days been quartered there to ensure the logistics of Touchdown. Theoretically under orders from the civil authority, the Canadian Forces, on the morning of the 16th, had the situation well in hand.

  Less than two hours before, the Governor General of Canada had affixed his seal to an old law that, foreseeing the immediate suspension of civil liberties and rights, had been quickly resuscitated by the prime minister’s clique and voted on in the middle of the night. The Governor General’s proclamation said:

  Be it now known that, on and with the knowledge of our Privy Counsel for Canada, We proclaim and declare by virtue of this Our present proclamation that a state of apprehended insurrection exists and has existed since October 15.

  The ink on the Royal Proclamation hadn’t even dried when the three principal police forces in Quebec were thrown into action.

  *

  Youths, the elderly, sitting shoulder to shoulder along the wall, passed cigarettes to one another. One of them closed his eyes — he was perched on one of two exposed toilets stuck in the floor, pants rolled down to his knees. He had not chosen the best morning to be nabbed by the police.

  “Over here, Chevalier!”

  “He knows a lot of people in here.”

  His political family. Union leaders, doctors, professors, workers, militants, members of popular fronts, poets, journalists, taxi drivers, candidates for municipal office, adolescents, defrocked priests.

  Tons of documents had been seized.

  “They took my Felix Leclerc albums,” said a bemused Doctor Charron, warmly shaking Chevalier’s hand.

  “Me, too,” another chimed in. “They took a book on Cubist painting! Cubist equals Cuba, I suppose. Something to think about …”1

  The police list also consisted of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Fanon, several books whose titles included the word “China,” posters of Che Guevara, Quebec flags, decorative swords, and hunting rifles.

  They moved aside to make room for Chevalier. They wanted him to tell them his story. During the preceding hours, most of these men had gone through an ordeal identical to his: escorted by two agents through the garage of the Parthenais building, brought before a long table where four civilians were seated. Next they were taken to the seventh floor, forced to empty their pockets, the contents of which were then slipped into an envelope with their name written on the front, searched from head to toe, brought into a large room secured by bars and containing six prisoners and no chairs, two toilets, one sink. Then they were taken to be weighed, measured, made to press their fingers on an ink pad and have their fingerprints taken on four different-coloured sheets of paper, photographed face-on and in profile, escorted down a corridor and then through an airlock consisting of two grilled doors, activated by an officious guard protected behind a glass wall. They were guided down an aisle bordered by two ranges of cells; those on the left were pierced by only one window while those on the right were grilled. Conducted to a door marked S26 at the end of a corridor, on the right, ordered to cross the threshold of this door by the police officer accompanying them, locked in a large room in which there were already some forty people, lying on the floor or sitting with their backs to the wall, eyes raised to the newcomer.

  No one had had any breakfast. One of the men, a young actor, suddenly produced a McIntosh apple that had somehow made it through the search without being taken away, and regarded it for a moment as if he were going to talk to it, like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull, before biting into it. No one said a word. No sound but the grumbling of a few stomachs here and there. They could hear the actor’s teeth cutting through the apple’s peel and crushing the pulp, making the acidic juice of October run down his chin. Just as he was about to take a second bite, he raised his head and, without a word, passed the apple to the man sitting beside him. This man bit into the apple and passed it to his neighbour. By the time it got to Chevalier, there was a little more than half of it left. Chevalier wasn’t hungry, but nothing in the world would have kept him from biting into that apple.

  In the middle of the afternoon, they were stood up against the wall and each given a baloney sandwich, a cup of some hot liquid that might have been tea or perhaps coffee, and three biscuits.

  Called out into the corridor with two or three others. Placed under guard by a police officer. Taken into an elevator with a barred door locked with a key. Caged. Taken to a waiting room, also barred. Then into another waiting room. Called. Reweighed. Remeasured. Searched again. Questioned. Father, mother. Place of birth. Political affiliations.

  “Independent.”

  “You mean separatist …”

  “No. Independent.”

  Ordered to undress and deposit his clothes on a table. Forced to wait, standing naked while they examined his underwear and the insides of his shoes. Allowed to dress again. Taken to another room equipped with aluminum benches. Joined there by other detainees. Back into the elevator. Brought down to the second floor. Given plastic utensils and a blanket folded around two sheets, a pillowcase, and a towel. Taken to cell number LAM25. LAM for Left Aisle, Mezzanine.

  The loud, clanking door shut behind him. His new lodgings measured six feet by eight feet by seven feet high. Room for three paces. Containing a steel bed frame, a mattress, a metal dresser, a table fixed to the wall, a bench, a second table acting as a kitchen table, a porcelain toilet with no seat, a sink. And a mirror made from some kind of shiny metal, for obvious security reasons.

  The detainee cells were situated on the top floors of the Parthenais building. Chevalier, unlike those occupying the lower cells, could see down through three ranges of barred cells. There was a thick layer of pigeon shit on the sill of a window reinforced on the outside by metal plates. His point of view gave him access to a thin slice of the faubourg à m’lasse, the former dockworkers’ district. The two-storeyed buildings with wooden lintels, de Lorimier Park where Jackie Robinson had once played baseball for the Dodgers and Los Angeles farm teams. A church. A tavern. Small world.

  At six in the morning the lights came on abruptly and the canteen came alive with a great clatter of utensils. Chevalier remembered where he was. At each end of the corridor, loudspeakers began emitting a torrent of rubbish from two popular radio stations, a different station playing from each speaker, which rivalled the stupidity of banging your head against the walls. The volume was turned up full blast. Outside it was still dark.

  The previous night they’d been allowed the right to dine on more baloney sandwiches washed down with black coffee and the same three biscuits.

  Just as the seven o’clock news was about to come on, the s
peakers went silent. No question of giving them access to the slightest information from the outside, there must be nothing that made sense. Only ordinary prisoners had television.

  They communicated with one another by shouting at the tops of their lungs above the radio. That morning, Chevalier Branlequeue, the poet Michel Garneau in the next cell, and a few others were able to hold an improvised meeting that was more or less dominated by the historian Louis Villeneuve.

  After having reflected on the situation, Villeneuve had at first hypothetically agreed with the proclamation of the War Measures Act by the federal government. He expressed himself in elegant, learned terms even if he did have to shout to be heard.

  “I do not see,” he yelled, “what else it could have done. This law has been implemented twice before in the twentieth century, and each time in Quebec, to deal with troubles raised by the Conscription Crisis in 1917, and again in 1944. It must be admitted that the lack of enthusiasm felt by young French-Canadians at the prospect of going overseas to be eviscerated for the King of England represented a source of disappointment, even for those with a good loyalist conscience. It was implemented to deal with the lazy ones who clearly did not understand anything about strategic imperatives in defence of the British Empire. From Victoria, British Columbia, to the Orange bastion of Southern Ontario, and including the walled Rhodesian enclave of Westmount and the Town of Mount Royal, they were nothing but disgusting frogs sleeping on their field of battle… .

  “This War Measures Act, understand me well, signifies the suspension of civil liberties as recognized in the Constitution. In principle, we could be kept in this place incommunicado, without even the right to know what we’re being accused of. And for as long as the authorities deem necessary. No lawyers. No visits. No telephone calls. No mail. No rights. Nothing.”

  The sound of distant unlocked doors being opened.

  The corridor.

  The elevator with its guard protected by bars.