PEACE

MARIE-FRANCE WAS WAITING FOR HIM at the entrance to the cemetery at the corner of Côte-des-Neiges and Decelles. She’d moved into the area in July, into an apartment between the Café Campus and St. Joseph’s Oratory, on Queen-Mary Road across from the wax museum.

She was beautiful, radiant in her light summer dress. He noted that she offered him her cheek rather than her lips to kiss, that she was holding herself back as though she were waiting for an explanation. She’d started her law course in September.

They walked among tombstones and epitaphs with the names and numbers under which lay Ryans, Gurskys, Burnsides, Handkes, Thatchers, Tavarones, Yanacopouloses, Szaabos, Mors, Eglis, Apostolskas . . . with here and there among them a few French-Canadian surnames whose roots had long ago entwined with those of their neighbours.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Godefroid announced. “I’ve quit the gang.”

She’d been paying him so little mind that now she looked at him carefully, standing in the middle of the path.

“Quit?”

“Operation Deliverance. I’m out of it.”

“I’m having a hard time believing you.”

“Maybe, but it’s the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth.”

If Marie-France had been cruel, she would have taken the time to savour her lover’s humiliation. But fundamentally she was not a cruel person.

“I’m deeply moved, Gode.”

“Well . . .”

“What are you going to do?”

“I thought of . . . maybe going back to the Gaspé. Hitchhike. Camp. But not to Percé! I want to put all that behind me . . .”

She didn’t help him out. She watched him tie himself up in knots with an almost innocent enjoyment. She was honestly interested in what he had to say, but her concern was hidden behind her broad smile, which also held a trace of commiseration.

“What about you?” he finally asked her.

“Me? Florida . . . I’m leaving on a forty-eight-footer for Key West next week. For the whole month of August.”

“To . . .”

“A nice couple in their fifties. Someone I don’t know. With a friend of theirs. I answered an ad in a travel magazine. We’re going to do the Caribbean, take our time. I’ll learn my knots.”

“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 the 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.”