RUE SAINT-DENIS

FROM THE WINDOW OF HIS office on the third floor of the Judith-Jasmin Building at the University of Quebec at Montréal (UQAM), Chevalier had enjoyed an unobstructed view of one of the densest concentrations of drinking spots in the city. On traditional English university campuses, usually self-contained enclaves in the verdant countryside, there would be a single pub, justly thought of as a scene of depravity, and that opened only at night. Students spent a few sordid hours in them relieving themselves of accumulated pressures, drinking themselves stupid, trying to pick up anything with a pulse, throwing up in toilets, falling asleep under a table for an hour or two, then getting up for a final hit on whoever looked fuckable and/or to get into a brawl, then go home to sleep it off.

Relatively speaking, with its urban campus in the Latin Quarter, UQAM was a modest, transatlantic imitation of the Sorbonne: barely a few strides separated the future bachelor of arts in the grip of a brilliant but boring course from a sidewalk café in which intellectually stimulating company sipped pints of beer. A perennial temptation, for students, as well as profs, which may explain why the two organs that had laid Professor Branlequeue low had been his liver and one of his kidneys. He had made a lot of demands on them, Samuel told himself, standing at the window looking down with disinterest at a drug dealer manning his post at the subway exit at the corner of de Maisonneuve and Saint-Denis.

He went back and sat down behind Branlequeue’s desk. He took in, for a moment, the familiar disarray. At the foot of the paper Everest piled on it, or leaning against it, perched the professor’s talismans. A wolf. A postcard from Percé. A hairy, eighteen-centimetre gorilla wearing green shorts with tri-coloured stripes and a pair of red boxing gloves. A key for who knew what. A card from a small hotel in Paris’s Eighth District. A roadrunner feather. A chain of paperclips (32 mm, number 1) approximately fifteen feet long, folded into a pile, patiently assembled while a succession of students covering a large spectrum of intellectual possibilities sat across from him, droning away bravely about new theories concerning the Barthesian concept of textual bliss. And a chequebook with two rubber rectangles pasted to a piece of cardboard for a cover, a bit of bric-a-brac that Chevalier used to flog the same old chestnut every time the waiter at the Frère Jacques presented him with a bill: “Hold on, I’ve got my rubber cheques right here . . .”

On the back of a departmental directive announcing a new policy concerning student spelling mistakes, Chevalier had written, in his perky hand: Zero taller ants.

Energetic knocking on the door — he had left it half-open to conform with the spirit of ORAL, which Branlequeue had dubbed: Omni Regulations Anti-Libido — made him quickly look up.

Emma, who had seen the last of her forties, was wearing knee-high boots, breeches, a white blouse with flared sleeves and a neckline low enough to show a bit of dark lace, and a red vest that would have been more at home under a circus tent. A necklace weighing at least two kilos was rubbing the skin of her neck raw. This riding-to-hounds look rarely failed to draw a comment around the office, at union meetings, at the front of a class, at the cinema, the opera, and the cafeteria. Emma Magy had been six in 1956 when she crossed the Austro-Hungarian border at night on her father’s shoulders. She was fond of saying that the Soviets had been stopped in Poland by the Catholic Church, in Czechoslovakia by the intellectuals, in Romania by poverty, in Yugoslavia by Tito, and in Hungary by the people’s joie de vivre.

Shortly after Samuel earned his master’s, in the late 1980s, the Literature Department underwent a veritable theatre of back-stabbing. In the space of two or three years, the top echelon of professors, veterans from the Collège Sainte-Marie, survivors of the series of heroic strikes that took place throughout the seventies, were decimated as surely as old Bolsheviks during the Stalinist purges. Not all of them had been let go, but none of them lasted long. It was as though they had disappeared under the table, victims of one vice or another: alcohol, cigarettes, boys, garlic butter, poker. It was a kind of poetic justice that they had perished by the same swords that had been their principal sources of pleasure for most of their lives. The most erudite of them had even died of brain cancer. The silent survivors moved in the corridors like damned souls, kept alive by lithium and antidepressants.

And now, Chevalier . . . But the woman who had just come through the door with a raucous, Valkyrie-like “Hi!” that echoed from one end of the corridor to the other was different. None of the excesses inventoried in the King James Bible and Sister Beatrice’s Manual of Corporeal Hygiene seemed to have done her any harm.

With an imperious gesture she signalled Sam to remain seated, then broke into Homeric laughter while managing to be extremely feminine.

“Hey, there, sweetie pie. We wondered who was going to be sent to clean up this mess . . .”

“No kidding.”

He invited her to set her muscular thighs on a chair. They had to clear a path through the stacks of books and mountains of paper that covered every flat surface of the office, as though they were cutting a trail through a forest.

She said she was surprised not to have seen him at the funeral.

“I was there. Last row, just like in kindergarten . . .”

“Not just there,” she said, winking. “That’s where you sat in my classes, too.”

“I don’t know what was worse, the protestations of posthumous friendship from his colleagues, who avoided him like the plague all these years because of his supposed ‘chronic conspirationism’ the well-oiled public-relations blitz coming from the propagandists in the premier’s office, or the family’s pious attempts to whitewash him. In fact, I think it was the culture minister’s deep tan . . .”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Emma said, casting an eye at the muddle in the office, the over-stuffed bookshelves spilling their burden of books, bristling with bookmarks like an old sofa losing its stuffing, the piles of papers, and learned journals that rose from the floor around them.

“How are you getting on?”

“All right, I guess. Keeping my head above water,” he said, indicating the office. “A bit of this, a bit of that. As a matter of fact, I’m considering a salary of seventy-five thousand for fantasizing over eighteen-year-old girls while explaining Madame Bovary to them. I can see myself doing that.”

“Why aren’t you teaching in a CEGEP somewhere?”

“Whenever I have to send in my CV, I go blank. I don’t know why.”

“So what are you doing?”

“Translations. Or working in the white slave trade, writing for newspapers. Writer of all trades.”

They talked about the dearly departed. His rages, his passions, his infatuations. His mania for psychocriticism, picked up in the early eighties while sharing pills of all colours with Gérard Bessette, the author of Semester.

Eventually they came back to the funeral service. Laughed about the premier’s return to single life. The surrealistic tint of the culture minister’s forehead.

“He died alone,” Emma declared. “It’s a scandal, what happened there at la Pérade.”

“Maybe. It’s always dangerous to attack the heroic versions of a people’s history. But with Elucubrations, they really didn’t have any choice, they had to celebrate it. They couldn’t just shove it aside. Thanks to Chevalier, Quebec has its national anthem.”

“No, you’re wrong there. What made him untouchable was that he was imprisoned during the October Crisis. He didn’t actually bear arms, but being arrested is like being issued a passport to seventh patriotic heaven, in certain people’s eyes.”

“Yes, that’s as may be, but these nationalist questions aren’t always easy to follow . . . Good old Chevalier. At least he managed to get the premier out of his bunker!”

“Stop. He died in deep intellectual solitude . . . All these young people he liked to surround himself with, his Socratic side, where did they all go when he lost his health?”

Sam made no reply. It had been Emma who came up with the name for the group that used to get together at the White Horse after classes, and then later at Lavigueur’s, farther east. One fine afternoon at the beginning of the fall term, she’d run into Branlequeue and his little band on Saint-Denis, coming from a course on Hubert Aquin and the Revolution. “Hey, what’s this, Oktoberfest?”

“But it’s not even October,” Chevalier called back.

“Ah, but with you people it’s always October,” Miss Magy had shot back cryptically.

And so they’d been baptized the Octobrists, a play on Tolstoy’s Russian Decembrists. Then, on account of the rivers and rivers of beer that flowed in their drinking establishments of choice on rue Ontario, the word “Octobeerists” eventually insinuated itself on the group.

“What became of all those people?” Emma asked.

“CEGEP profs. Proofreaders. One’s a stand-up comic. Another’s picking wild mushrooms in the Yukon.”

“Well, not one of them came to the funeral.”

“I know.”

“Are you working on anything at the moment?”

“A novel on the go,” he lied. “A kind of thing . . .”

He kept his eyes down as he spoke, drawing squares and oblongs replicating themselves to infinity on a blank page on the desk.

“He had faith in you, Samuel. I feel it’s my duty to tell you that, now that he’s not here any more. He saw you going far . . .”

“I write little squibs. I send reviews to newspapers. I run around after freelance assignments.”

“What I’m saying is that he counted on you a great deal. He told me so. Chevalier . . . saw something in you.”

“Chevalier was always seeing something, Emma. Maybe he was a visionary. But maybe not. Maybe he was just mistaken. All those years . . . There was never any plot. And the second part of Elucubrations is lost, and that’s a damned shame.”

“Too many keys and not enough locks, was how he summed up the Lavoie Affair. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now. I can still see his big gleaming eyes, his sad old face, and the amused and sorry look on it when he said to me: ‘You know, Emma, in all this I find myself confronted by people who are a lot stronger than I am.’”

“He said that?”

“He was never able to follow the path to the end. It was his biggest regret, and he took it with him to the grave. I wanted you to know that . . .”

Embarrassed, Sam turned to look out the window. With a sudden, diminishing clatter, a pigeon detached itself from the sill.