THE FOUR PS

WITH LA VÉRENDRYE PARK DISPLAYING its melancholic golden tamaracks around him, and the fall rocking in from the far side of October, Sam, at the wheel, remembered his last meeting with Chevalier Branlequeue, the previous year, toward the end.

In the mid-1990s, as Branlequeue was sliding quietly toward retirement as professor of creative writing at UQAM, like Tolstoy deserting the conjugal foyer late in his life, he abandoned La Grosse Éleonore and took a tiny apartment on rue Saint-André, in Montreal’s South Central district, a two-minute walk from the university and smack in the middle of the Gay Village. He freely confessed that he aspired to nothing more than to minister to the humblest of the humble and signed on as a volunteer in the care of AIDS victims in their terminal phase. It was unexpected, a late-blooming and a very touching return to the rejection of that homosexuality he’d been carefully keeping under wraps, but which must have continued to exist in a state of pure latency. Desire he’d never had the courage to acknowledge, that he’d let desiccate like a skeleton in the closet of his books, the author of Elucubrations (Didace-Beauchemin Prize, 1970), disowned by wife and children and eyed with growing suspicion by his university brotherhood, as well as by his two true adopted families, literature and politics, he was now going to sublimate himself in a twilight homage to adepts being decimated by AIDS.

His kidneys gave out first. Nihilo, who under Branlequeue’s tutelage had started his master’s in creative writing, visited him during his dialysis. They discussed books almost as though nothing had changed, but Sam watched as Chevalier’s body emptied and refilled with blood and felt like one of those shades who buttonholed Ulysses at the mouth of the Underworld.

Next it was his lungs. The doctors took a huge chunk out of him, but the cancer had metastasized to his liver. These were organs that, once transformed into killers, weren’t known to take their sweet time about it.

“You should have come yesterday,” Chevalier told him with a weak smile. They were in his room in the Palliative Care Unit of Nôtre-Dame Hospital. “You’d have run into someone who would have interested you, even here.”

Samuel, standing beside the bed, had just handed him a paperback of Le Survenant, which he’d bought earlier in The Exchange, on rue Saint-Denis. The beautiful cover on the new French-Canadian Library edition showed a man with his back turned, standing on a point of land, one hand deep in his pocket, collar turned up, a small bag thrown over his shoulder. In front of him flowed a river, and farther off a shore and island, a cluster of trees casting dark blue shadows on the green water. Chevalier had taken a moment to hold the book in his hands and turn its pages, his eyes shining.

Sam was privately shocked by Chevalier’s thinness. His colour was a kind of ash yellow. He’d always spoken, even in class, in soft, luminous tones, but now using his own feeble voice seemed to tire him out. They could hear car horns sounded by drivers on Sherbrooke Street, demonstrating their support for the nurses on strike, who were picketing in front of the old hospital entrance and whose angry signs were held up and shaken in their faces as they passed. From the hospital-room window, they could see the irregular, phallic shape of the obelisk raised in memory of Charles de Gaulle at the edge of Park La Fontaine, the same park in which, thirty years before, mounted police had charged and beaten the crowds assembled along the parade route up Saint-Jean.

“Oh, yes?” Sam asked. “Who was here?”

“Richard Godefroid . . . Do you want to sit down?”

Sam shook his head, as though taking a chair was getting too close to the position held by the man in the bed. He preferred to stay on his feet.

“Godefroid was here?”

“Yes. Why, are you surprised?”

“You publicly called him a liar. I thought he was nursing a grudge against you.”

Chevalier smiled.

“To him, I’m still the old twenty-five-year-old prof who read his work to the class.”

“And . . . what did you two talk about?”

Chevalier’s eyes continued to smile.

“What do you think we talked about?”

“October? The Lavoie Affair? No, I guess not . . .”

“It wasn’t the time to talk about that. But still, he didn’t come here to talk about the weather. I told myself he wouldn’t dare continue to deceive his old mentor on his death bed. So I asked him a question, just one: why did he go to Dallas? Why Texas, one week before the Lavoie kidnapping? But he gave me his old song-and-dance about financing themselves by pretending to have lost some travellers’ cheques . . . ‘Go tell it to the marines,’ I said, and he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders. But do you know what? As he was leaving, standing in the doorway over there, he stopped. He kept his eyes down. He knew it would probably be the last thing he ever said to me. We both knew it. And he said: ‘You were right . . .’ I waited for him to go on, and he said: ‘About my poems . . . They really were crap.’”

So that’s how it ends, Nihilo thought. Alone in a bed that doesn’t belong to you, wearing a skimpy johnny-shirt that’s as thin as paper, with your insides being devoured by your own cells that want to know nothing about you.

And, in Chevalier’s case, abandoned by everyone but a handful of the faithful: students, minor writers, more or less unknown poets, a few profs, all of them very much alive and caught up in their own activities: full schedules, necessary vices, amorous trysts, tennis matches, weekends up north, conferences at the University of Ithaca on textual genetics in the works of Joyce, articles to write about the time Hubert Aquin spent in the library in Buffalo. So much to do, so many pretexts for spending less and less time in the Palliative Care Unit of Nôtre-Dame Hospital, their hearts shorn of pity and affection. Chevalier’s bedside table was notably less encumbered than the ideological benches of the nation. Illness was approaching like a high-speed train, and the tunnel was opening up before him all too quickly.

Toward the end, he continued to write his famous letters to editors, poking at the clay feet of our statues, discrediting our great heroes. His feverish missives were aimed at everything from the huge cars driven by the bigwigs of the left-right nationalist movement, to the private jet flown by the Kid-caïds in Québec Inc. He’d never been good at the art of making friends, but in these latter years Chevalier perfected, often to the point of no return, the ability to turn his back on the world. And when reproached for shitting in his own nest, he replied that he didn’t have a nest, he had a goal.

If he’d been content to rest on his laurels for his work in the prisons that October, even though it meant making his patriotic skin crawl every fifteen years — the years of the referendums on sovereignty — he probably would still have had some visitors. And even without accepting the epic (which is to say, heroic) version of the October Crisis, in which the terrorists were collected and recycled as productive and enlightened members of society, just like the cops and their political masters, and limiting himself to denouncing the duplicity of the federal government and the wheeling and dealing of the War Measures Act over a pint of local beer or a glass of Chardonnay, as most of his colleagues did. But Chevalier needed more than that. He couldn’t stop trying to understand what had really happened.

It occurred to me to wonder if La Grosse Éléonore didn’t see him the same way that Marie-Québec had regarded me, those last few months in Kaganoma. Not like a fool, exactly, at least not yet, but as someone who was in the process of crossing to the other side, passing through a border that was supposed to be kept reassuringly clear and watertight, like the line that separates the world of reality from that of the novel. In fact, it’s not so much a border as a grey area between multiple possibilities. Above it lies a parallel universe, a world in which every step forward is simultaneously a step back, where the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa and Hitler and the little extraterrestrials found at Roswell in 1947 are all alive and hanging around the same cloning factory in an extinct volcanic crater on an island in the South Pacific.

Chevalier’s problem had become mine: we both lived in an age of so many plot-seers and conspiracy theorists that any Machiavellian notion we might entertain was automatically reduced to a permanent caricature of itself, discrediting any sustained attempt to reflect a little on the theme of political manipulation. The incessant communicational bombardment of the Web had erased the last permanent markers for distinguishing between the ridiculous and the serious.

Chevalier would die before reaching his Promised Land, but in any case his tribe had dispersed and no one had the slightest confidence that the Promised Land even existed.

“Have you had any news from your confrère, Falardeau?” came the nasal voice from the bed.

Sam replied that he hadn’t seen Falardeau for a long time, but he’d heard that Fred was living in a bedroom community on the South Shore and worked as a researcher for a television station. He’d seen his name in the credits for L’Enquêteux, the new documentary series on Télé-Québec. Sam wondered what Fred’s reaction would be to seeing Chevalier in this condition, nothing but skin and bones under the thin johnny-shirt.

Chevalier smiled at him.

“You were my two best . . .”

His old professor took his hand. Sam gave it to him but refrained from shaking it, as though his existed outside himself. The sick man feebly held his left hand as he spoke. Nihilo suddenly found the situation ridiculous. Then he found ridiculous his finding anything ridiculous concerning this dying man. He tightened his grip, enclosing Branlequeue’s hand firmly in his own.

“Sometimes, Sam, it seems to me that the light of fact comes to us from a long way off, like light from dead stars. And that we are swimming in a sea of arbitrariness when we call on facts to give us a plausible explanation. . . . Maybe the explanations we’re looking for can never be anything but approximations, mere outlines that we fill in with meaning, like constellations: we draw dogs and huntsmen and dippers on places where there is nothing but eternal ice and extinct suns.”

Samuel took his hand more firmly in his own. There was a pause, and then Chevalier went on:

“We know from the coroner’s inquest that someone in the Lafleur cell made three calls to a firm in Houston, James Engineering, during the summer of 1970. It was confirmed that that enterprise had offices in Laval from February 1970 to March the following year, apparently without having landed a single contract. But there the trail ends. Disappears in petrol smoke somewhere on the gulf coast of Mexico. The CIA is like God in the Old Testament. Either you believe in Him or you don’t. But if you do, it’s everywhere . . . But Texas is too far, too violent, for me. Which means we have no choice: we have to go back to rue Collins.”

“Yes.”

Chevalier took a sheet of paper from his bedside table. He had scribbled some notes on it.

“What’s this?”

“My theory of the four Ps. Let me explain . . .”

“What are the four Ps?”

Chevalier read:

Pieces of chicken

Prosecutions

Pierre

Police warrants

“There’s something funny about the guys who delivered the chicken,” he said, looking up at Sam. “Something doesn’t add up about those deliveries . . . I followed the trials closely. I went to Jean-Paul’s and his brother’s, I was even a witness at Richard Godefroid’s. Have I ever told you about Captain Claude Leclerc?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He was the head of QPP’s homicide squad. Not long after Gode’s trial was over, I heard through the grapevine that Leclerc had given up his commission. From what I understood, he slammed the door but didn’t let it make any noise. I wanted to talk to him, but he never returned any of my phone calls . . .

“Then, at René’s trial, the lawyer Brien saved his client’s ass, and do you know how? By systematically stuffing the jury’s head with two main points: one, the Crown had not succeeded in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that René Lafleur had been to 140 rue Collins during the week in question; and two, François Langlais, alias Pierre Chevrier, probably went to that address while Paul Lavoie was still being held hostage there . . .”

“What?”

“Which brings us to the third P: Pierre.”

Sam gave a faint but happy smile at seeing his old professor waving his sheet of paper as he spoke, whipping the air with it. Beware, you enemies of the truth! He was just getting warmed up. His final course . . .

“Listen to this: a police officer told me that the night before the departure of the Rebellion Cell to Cuba, the Montreal police had traced the ownership of the kidnappers’ car to a certain Pierre Chevrier, and from there connected it to François Langlais and the FLQ. But officially, it wasn’t until a whole week later that the law enforcement agency identified ‘a mysterious Pierre Chevrier.’ Alias Pierre Guité. Alias Pierre Bousquet. The man changed identities more often than he changed shirts. Have you learned anything new about this guy?”

“Nothing that you don’t already know, Chevalier. You gave me an assignment, but I’m sorry, I deserve to get a big fat zero . . .”

“It’s the final exam that counts, Sam.”

“Tell me about the final P.”

“Ah, the police warrant. In his famous interview in Temps-Presse, Gode said that while the members of the cell were holding Paul Lavoie, the police obtained a warrant to search the house right next door to theirs. Desrosiers told the coroner the same thing, and so I’m inclined to believe it. But when the police finally discovered their hideout, after the cell had abandoned it, no one said a word about having searched the house next door. Nobody said: ‘Goddamnit, five days ago we were this close.’ . . . It was as though the search had never taken place.”

“Yeah. According to Gode, the police rousted some long-haired hippies next door.”

“Do you think it’s an avenue worth exploring?”

“Maybe.”

A nurse came in the door without warning. She was a kind of sympathetic shrew. If she would rather have been down in the street soliciting motorists with union slogans, she hid it well.

Samuel let go of the patient’s hand and, once again, felt silly.

Chevalier murmured his own version of a song by Charlebois: “If I had the essential services of an angel / I would go to Quebec . . .”

“He’s going to have to get hisself some rest . . .” the nurse said as she arranged the pillows behind Chevalier’s back. She spoke with a strong English accent.

“Himself,” Nihilo corrected under his breath.

“We can go on talking,” the sick man said, arching his back under the nurse’s hands. “Georgina’s as silent as the tomb,” he added, grimacing.

“And he runs on like a leaky facet,” the nurse shot back.

“You mean faucet.”

“I promised Georgina I wouldn’t cross the picket line when I leave here . . . I think I’ll be leaving by another exit, though, don’t you, Georgina?”

“Would you please stop talking . . .”

The nurse began refilling the intravenous bag that was dripping solution into Chevalier’s arm.

“So what do you think, was there a kind of pact of silence?” Samuel asked Chevalier, now suddenly eager to end the conversation. “They were covering for a comrade . . . ?”

“They could well have been. But we still don’t know the answer to the most interesting question: Who was Pierre Chevrier working for?”

“You should read the nice book that your friend brung you,” said Georgina.

“I would, nurse, but with all these drugs you pump into me, I’d be lucky to finish a single sentence . . . When I think that I promised myself I’d read Remembrance of Things Past again before I died: For a long time I used to squeeze my head early, as the constipated man said. He-he-he.”

Chevalier regarded Samuel from the cottony depths of a strong dose of morphine.

“Don’t forget . . . the four Ps.”

“Paper-pasta-potatoes-pain,” the nurse recited.

Sam smiled, his chest tightening.

“Take this sheet of paper,” Chevalier said. “Take it . . .”

He took it. Chevalier was a voice, a whisper.

Nurse Georgina helped Branlequeue lie back. She had the same physique as Chevalier’s wife. And, to ease his final moments, an English accent to rub it in.

After passing Mont-Laurier, Sam Nihilo’s Mazda or Colt or Corolla was surrounded by the archaic chain of the oldest mountains on Earth. Two weeks before, they’d given him a magical display of colour. But now all the leaves had fallen.