FESTIVAL

THE LITTLE CAMP RESEMBLED A battlefield when he opened his eyes. Zero dead, zero wounded. But two bodies found in a strange state. He scratched his pubic hair; there was a fine crust of dried sperm and vaginal mucus. Candles disposed here and there about the room had totally melted down: solid, liquid, solid again, like his penis.

In the grey light of early dawn, Samuel saw a field mouse exploring the remains of their vegetable fried rice. Laundry had been hung up to dry from the ceiling joists. He raised an arm, let his hand slowly descend and settle onto the delicate fold in the curve formed by Marie-Québec’s side through the insulating material of the sleeping bag.

In the middle of February, in the subpolar night of the great spruce forest, all it had taken the night before was two or three cherry logs to raise the mercury forty degrees inside the cabin and transform it into a sauna. The stove standing guard on the square of sheet metal screwed to the floor knew only two temperatures: too hot and too cold. They had put out their plates, turned over their wine glasses, and taken off their clothes as though they had suddenly caught fire, but their garments weren’t as hot as their skin had been as they searched for and found each other under the blankets. Large animals required large remedies.

“What are you doing?” Marie-Québec asked.

Samuel, in woollen underwear and worn T-shirt, was sipping his first coffee, looking out the window. Through the dirty pane of glass he could make out the tracks of the big cat he’d seen the night before, in the deep snow at the edge of the forest, beside the little lake called Laurendeau on the topo map of the area, and which they had reached by climbing on snowshoes up the stream at the head of the Kaganoma to this minuscule hunt camp. All around them was lynx country. And the camp, according to the ancient laws of forest hospitality, belonged for the moment to whoever heated it up.

Sam shoved another log into the stove and returned to nestle himself against her warm, naked body under the mound of sleeping bags.

How my situation had turned around in a single year. I was living in Marie-Québec’s apartment in Maldoror, a small three-and-a-half situated a copper-bearing stone’s throw from the foundry from which we could hear the clanking of gigantic gears enveloped in white smoke and arsenic dust, and the bellow of glowing furnaces in the night. It was good to have given up the great work, and even better to have abandoned myself to the arms of my rediscovered love. The insurance company hadn’t given me any hassles, the claim had gone through like a letter through the post. The experts, it’s safe to say, had seen nothing but the fire!

So I had a few dollars, enough to invite my girl to a restaurant from time to time and to buy her a few Bloody Marys at the White Wolf, not counting the inevitable rounds of Goldschlager shooters that were de rigueur in the wee hours of the Maldororan night. During the day, I read and edited manuscripts when I wasn’t writing crap for Big Dumont. Fat padded envelopes arrived regularly by special courier. It was in one of them that, the year before, The Traverse: The Story of My Captivity, by John Travers (co-authored with Friedrich Rougeau) had washed up at Lake Kaganoma.

It was the winter of 2000. After Marie-Québec had left, I’d ridden out the Y2K scare in a series of blizzards totalling three metres of snow, two straight weeks of temperatures under minus thirty-five degrees Celsius, including a few days of minus forty, and I still had three solid seasons of my Octobeerist assignment ahead of me before flipping my lid for good.

My enquiries were going nowhere. I’d been able to do nothing with Chevalier’s four “P”s, I was running around in circles, spinning my wheels. Pieces of chicken: Rénald Massicotte, the Baby Barbecue guy, had vanished from the face of the earth. Prosecution: I’d spent a week analyzing the trial records in the courthouse archives and had made notes on a good number of irregularities, but nothing more than that. Pierre: whatever his precise role was in this story, it continued to escape me. Police warrant: the trail leading to the neighbouring house had grown cold because I’d failed to identify, even with the aid of the land registry, whoever had owned it at the time. And after thirty years, all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood seemed to have evaporated.

I was therefore in the process of sweating over the manuscript of The Traverse when I came across this more or less startling bit of information: good old Travers, with his airs of being the perfect Englishman adept at bridge and the raising of poinsettias, had, in the course of his diplomatic career, been brought in to work (against his wishes, he made it clear) with the British Secret Service. A reluctant spy . . .

I vaguely knew the book’s co-author, Friedrich Rougeau. Just before my Abitibian period, I’d had a few beers with him in a bar in Montreal. I checked in the UNEQ directory, but he wasn’t in it, and so I called our publisher. Super Big Dumont’s pleasant executive assistant gave me Rougeau’s cellphone number and I called him.

“In your conversations, Travers admitted that he’d worked for MI6?” I asked Rougeau. “Just like that?”

“No, not exactly,” came my colleague’s voice from several hundred kilometres south. “It wasn’t MI6, it was MI5 . . .”

He was fly-fishing under the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, but the connection was perfectly clear. As if he were right in front of me, his voice rising after his second pint. He told me he was using an imitation Daredevil, heavy as a cast-iron frypan, and a twenty-pound test line, big enough to haul in a sturgeon. Once, he said, he’d hooked onto a supermarket shopping cart.

While casting and reeling in his big red-and-white in the leaden waters of the St. Lawrence, Rougeau gave me an account of his dealings with Travers, including certain details that, at the time, he’d decided not to put in the book. He’d been in the Public Records Office in London, between two interviews with Travers, consulting a box of archives newly released into the public domain, when a telegram stuck into the mass of papers attracted his attention. Dated November 1970, it had come from the British Embassy in Ottawa and was addressed to the Foreign Office: In reference to the police inquiry directed to the finding of Travers, we ask to verify information confirming that he has worked for the Secret Service under the name of Frost.

The response, in the form of a second telegram, was attached to the request by a paperclip: Impossible to confirm.

During their next encounter, Friedrich asked him outright why he had hidden this story. And Travers had explained that MI5 had pressed him into service one single time, a simple matter of trapping a Soviet diplomat suspected of trying to recruit double agents. The manœuvre failed, and the James-Bondian career of Travers, it seemed, was equally short-lived. I laughed.

“And the first time a husband is caught in the act, what does he say?”

“He says it’s the first time . . .”

“Yes, the first and only. Even if in reality it’s the seventy-ninth time.”

“Travers wasn’t a spy, Sam.”

“Of course he wasn’t. You asked him and he said he wasn’t.”

“They used him for bait. You only have to look at the list of his overseas postings: New Zealand, Malaysia, India, Canada . . . Not exactly hot spots in the Cold War!”

Poor Friedrich, I thought. His naïveté bothered me, you’d think he was doing it on purpose.

“Yeah, you’re right, Rougeau: cushy postings in the commercial centres of the Empire. The good old Commonwealth.”

“Do you want me to put you in touch with him?”

“Who, Travers?” I thought about it for two seconds. “Yeah.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then I heard a sharp, strident sound.

“Sam? I’ve just snagged something big . . .”

“What? Hey! Friedrich . . . ?”

“I can’t talk to you any . . . Oh boy! You should see this . . . bent in two . . . kinongé . . . I’ll send you his. . . .”

“Friedrich?”

“ . . . ail address . . .”

The connection was cut off.

I e-mailed Travers. I introduced myself as the editor of his book, written in collaboration with Friedrich Rougeau. I needed to clarify one or two points with him. I hoped to reel him in. I played it very softly to avoid frightening him off. I e-mailed him a few harmless questions, then I waited.

Spring arrived. On my land, rabbits became fluffy patchworks of brown and white. At the beginning of May, there were only a few patches of snow under the low-lying boughs of the evergreens. I worked, read, thought, wrote sometimes, looked out the window a lot. Went for walks in the woods. Once or twice a week, I came out of my cave and went looking for a drinking spot worthy of the name. As I was not an aficionado of country music, karaoke, or cocaine snorted through a brown bill helpfully rolled up by a little local mafiotard, I invariably ended up near the foundry, at the White Wolf.

The women of Maldoror knew that I was a bachelor, but they weren’t beating a path to my door. One large woman came up to me and opened a bag of Brazilian coffee under my nose and told me she’d bought it especially “for tomorrow morning,” smiling in a way that insinuated that the odour of the coffee was a kind of preliminary sampling of much more pheromonal sensations to follow, all the while running her fingers through my hair. Most of the time I jumped like a fox disturbed during his afternoon nap. The chicken house was open, but I remained out in the middle of the field.

Marie-Québec had kept her job as a waitress at the White Wolf, was still carrying out projects at the theatre, was always reading for parts, always had a role to prepare for, a text to memorize, ideas for productions, grants to apply for. And stage scenery, and the placement of ads in the programs, not to mention posters and the actors’ diction. She was seeing to everything.

Sometimes we would exchange a few words over the bar. I would see her talking with men who sometimes left with her. One or twice, my nose in my beer, I would feel the tips of her breasts brushing my back through our clothing as she squeezed between the tables with her tray. She was always somewhere under my skin.

The summer sped by in a great flaming of wildflowers. Another October painted itself on the canvas, the forest full of an electric tension generated by the crisscrossing paths of hunters and their prey.

October was the month of the big hunt, and also that of the Festival of Solidarity. Just before Hallowe’en, artists from around Quebec and every other corner of the planet converged here, the Nugget of the Northwest. On the last night, the gala was the occasion for the awarding of the Armand d’Or Prize to the winners in different categories (cinema, song lyrics, religion, municipal politics, sport, literature) at the Loblaw’s Happy Times Theatre. The trophy consisted of a raised fist holding a mini-barbell, one of the weights of which was a globe and the other a brave heart. It had been named in honour of sculptor and teacher Armand Vaillancourt, who was in his mid-seventies and had made at least forty of the things. The previous autumn, Sting had been part of the jury and had arrived by private jet accompanied by the great Amazonian chief Raoni. Over the years, Rogoberta Menchú, Paul Piché, Jane Fonda, Desmond Tutu, Jean Béliveau, Jimmy Carter, and the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats had been seen in Maldoror. Another, whose name I won’t mention, was rumoured to have exhausted the resources of the town’s escort services all by himself. This year, it was announced that Bono and his pink glasses would be in Maldoror. Held in a chalet with seigneurial allures for the nouveau riche that the singer had rented (along with the lake and forty-eight kilometres of shoreline) in Sainte-Bénite, a satellite village connected to Maldoror although separated from it by a distance of some fifty kilometres, the prime minister of Canada had even replied that he would happily attend, wagging his tail like a little puppy dog. The town couldn’t have been more abuzz.

In the early darkness of a glacially cold night at the end of October, I stood in front of a wooden barricade surrounding the site on which Maldoror’s fourth Tim Hortons (one for every nine thousand citizens) would soon be built, hands in my pockets, reading the following poster:

THINK ABOUT QUEBEC

(POPULAR FRONT CINEMA AND INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM)

A PRESENTATION BY

MR. JEAN-PAUL LAFLEUR

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2000

TIME: 7:00 P.M.

PLACE: CEGEP DE MALDOROR

ROOM A-5630

150 BOULEVARD MONSEIGNEUR-HAMELIN

The talk was presented as fringe event of the Festival of Solidarity, and I knew that a handful of leftist militants were going to be in attendance. The weather was calling for snow. A dry cold brought in by a traitorous north wind was pushing the last dead leaves on the sidewalk ahead of me as I made my way to the CEGEP, my coat pulled up around my neck.

Physically, Lafleur, almost sixty, was still an imposing enough figure. Short grey beard, carefully trimmed. Woollen sweater over a white, open-necked shirt. I arrived in the middle of his talk and slipped quietly into the room and sat in the last row of seats. Jean-Paul was talking about the filmmaker Pierre Perrault, then he played a copy of his own documentary, The Wrong Card, about depopulation in the resource regions, and urban sprawl, two phenomena he saw as being interdependent. I listened to the heavy, bearish, militant voice coming out from between his whiskers.

There were some forty people in the room. I waited for the beginning of the question period and then raised my hand. Then I lowered it. Then raised it again. He was answering another question. Then he turned his head and saw me.

“Do you know a company in Houston called James Engineering?” I asked him.

Jean-Paul remained silent for exactly five seconds.

“No.”

Then he turned his head and saw another raised hand, and nodded encouragingly to the person under it.

I insisted. I interrupted him. He carried on answering the other question without bothering with me. He spoke louder. I spoke louder. The audience got involved.

* * *

After being thrown out of room A-5630, naturally, Nihilo turned up at the White Wolf, where Marie-Québec was on duty, as she liked to say. He found her in conversation with the only client in the place and immediately had the impression that he’d seen the guy before somewhere. It was the dead hour, between five and eight, before the stampede arrived for the rest of the night.

Sam ordered a Marteau and heard the guy beside him say:

“You want a little sickle with that?”

“Samuel,” said his ex, stiffening a little, “this is Friedrich.”

“Right. We’ve already met.”

“How did it go with Travers?” Rougeau asked politely.

He was a remarkable fellow. At the invitation of the festival, he’d come to Maldo to screen his documentary (the festival was showing only documentaries) entitled Chicken or No Chicken, We’re Off! It was about the raising of poultry and the factory-farmed chicken industry. Friedrich, like a fat cat, announced that Sam’s Marteau was on him, and he bought another round of drinks. Nihilo stared into his glass in silence, then said:

“Your friend Travers never gave me a thing . . .”

“Not true, Sam.”

“What? What do you mean, not true?”

“I spoke to him just last week . . .”

“And?”

“And he told me he remembered your e-mail clearly and that he’d answered all your questions.”

“He said that? Really?”

“Yes. Good old John. He goes for his walk with Molly every day, on the cliffs of Galway where he’s enjoying a peaceful and, if you ask me, well-earned retirement.”

“Who’s Molly?”

“His sausage hound.”

“Okay, listen: Travers never even answered my e-mail. After a week, I sent it again. Same result . . .”

“Sam, that’s not possible.”

“Are you telling me that I live so far out in the boonies that even e-mails get lost on their way to me?”

“I’ve no doubt that you live a little cut off from the world,” Rougeau said with a fluttering of his eyelashes in Marie-Québec’s direction.

“Travers lied to you. He’s hiding something.”

“Yes, Sam, you’re right. His kinship with the little green man in Roswell, no doubt. Bring him another Marteau, my love . . .”

Sam didn’t like Rougeau’s tone when addressing Marie-Québec. It was hardly subtle. When the glass landed in front of him, he placed both hands flat on the bar, made of B.C. fir, and looked from one to the other.

“You think I’m getting completely hammered, is that it?”

From the glance he cast at Marie-Québec, Sam could see that even she, totally dedicated irrationalist Marie-Québec, was wondering about him. It wasn’t a good feeling.

Shortly after nine, Marie-Québec cashed out and came to sit at the bar, where she allowed Friedrich Rougeau to buy her a double Bloody Mary. Chicken or No Chicken, We’re Off! was in the running for Best Engagé Documentary, and the word was that a fair wind was blowing its way. Samuel thought the wind in question was more like a country breeze blowing over a well-manured field, and characterized the film, which he hadn’t seen, as dribblings from some egg incubator. He’d decided to keep to himself and so moved down to the end of the bar to continue drinking on his own.

One by one, people began to arrive and take over the premises, and he soon found himself adrift in the crowd, pressed up against Michel Chartrand beside the pool table, a Chartrand still in his red-and-black checkered shirt and stinking of the straight gin he was quaffing from a beer glass. Chartrand began haranguing him on the subject of water, saying that the water from the eskers in Abitibi was the best drinking water in the universe and that the esker at Kaganoma was the Napa Valley of potable water, but that a huge transnational company, a giant of the agrifood industry that in truth was a goddamned subsidiary of Pepsi-Cola, had its sights on this formidable natural filter and was planning to build an ultramodern bottling megafactory in the woods around here somewhere. Samuel, unable to get a word in edgewise, watched Chartrand’s mouth open and close six inches from his nose, all the words coming out of it smelling of straight gin and echoing in his head, and before long he had reduced them to four: oh such good water, such good water, and then to two: good water, good water, bonne eau, Bono.

The news spread about the room like a trained flea: Bono? Bono was coming? His bodyguards were securing the place?

Nihilo, using his elbows to good effect, managed to get to the door in time to see Marie-Québec leaving just ahead of him with Rougeau. He ran up the street after them. An icy wind swept the snow that was now falling across the sky, ululating gusts unfurling from the north through the infernal circumlocutions of the foundry and reducing the halo of the street lamps to fading fireflies.

And it was like in the dream that Sam had had: Marie-Québec moving away from him, not turning, never a glance in his direction, except that there was no white sand in the immediate vicinity, and instead of Branlequeue as the wading bird, it was Rougeau Nihilo ran up against, the marabou, who said to him:

“Fuck off, you little conspiracy-theorist shit!”

I woke up in my own bed. I vaguely remembered an evanescent avalanche blowing against my windshield, stop signs that sprung up out of nowhere in my headlights like haggard, muffled ghosts. Then I became aware of another presence in the room and opened my eyes.

The ghost was sitting at the foot of my bed.

“The house is burning,” he said.

And just as he finished speaking, the smoke detector in the stairwell went off.

Sitting up in bed, I tried to think. It felt as though someone was squeezing my head in a vise.

“The old Anishnabe Indians that I meet around here,” Lavoie said, “you know what they tell me? That in their language ‘Kaganoma’ means ‘place of words.’ Don’t you think that’s funny? No, well, in your place, I probably wouldn’t either . . .”

“What are you doing?”

The spectre pulled the pillow out from under my back. He showed me his right palm and his wounded and heavily bandaged left wrist.

“I can’t take your hand. I hope you understand . . .”

He turned, raised the pillow, and held it against his chest and face, then threw himself head-first at the window, passing soundlessly through it and disappearing on the other side into the blinding whiteness of fresh snow that covered the countryside. Then I smelled smoke, and heard, finally, the crackling and snapping of flames in the stairway. The smoke detector started drilling into my cranium.

“No . . .”

I charged into my office and began hauling out bankers’ boxes and chucking them out the window, like ballast thrown overboard so that my house would go up in flames. Folders flew out one after another, the whole history in separate pieces, the puzzle of all these words and all these names that corresponded to lives, some of which had been lived in the vast unknown of the real: General Bédard, Uncle Bob, Madame Corps, Zadig and Madwar, Chevreuil, Gode, Lancelot, la Bellechasse, Maître Brien, Corbeau, Machinegun Martinek, the chicken delivery guy, the Fat Cop . . .

Even Chevalier Branlequeue. Goodbye and good sailing!

Finally I grabbed my laptop and threw it into the snow, five metres down.

When I left the office, the stairwell was already breathing red flames and pumping them up to the second floor, and the heat was cooking my right shoulder. I went back into the bedroom, threw a housecoat over my shoulders and, seeing the terrified cat, chased it under the bed and went after it into a nest of dust bunnies. I threw it out the window, following after it through the broken glass, to land in a stand of young saplings that settled me gently to the ground on boughs cushioned with fresh snow.

On my road above the house, I met firemen wearing gas masks and fireproof suits that made them look as though they were going off to wage chemical warfare against Saddam Hussein. Three huge, fluorescent-yellow trucks were coming up the road with difficulty between the rows of spruce. Someone tossed a blanket over my shoulders and it slid down onto the ground without my lifting a finger to stop it. A female police officer spoke to me and couldn’t seem to make head or tail of my explanations. It wasn’t complicated, in any case. I looked for the cat, it was there, somewhere in the snowy whiteness. And Paul Lavoie, have you seen him? The cabinet minister assassinated in 1970? If you did, you weren’t even born yet.

To continue along the road as though I had somewhere important to get to but hard to make sense of was probably a mistake. I didn’t turn around when she called out something that sounded like: Freeze!, which was funny, given the temperature and what I was wearing. I started to tell her that maybe she’d seen too many cop shows on television, and then I just gave up.

That was how I left Kaganoma Lake, strapped to a stretcher, with 50,000 volts in my chest.

* * *

Sam plunged the blackened camping kettle into the deep snow, tamped it down with his bare hand, thinking that they’d probably never get used to this strange thing, snow. And with another sweeping gesture, as though scooping a fish into a hand-held net, he returned to the cabin and placed the kettle on the woodstove.

Around the head of the lake, where the spruce and Jack pines had never known a saw, the countryside resembled what the first trappers must have seen as they hacked a portage route with their axes after ascending the Ottawa River, and the Kinojévis met them as they broke out of the woods on their snowshoes: an infinite expanse of intense white, fringed by a dark circle of evergreens weighed down by piles of sculptured snow under a sickly sun. Caw, caw, a coal-black crow passed by in a deep blue sky.

While waiting for the snow to melt, he sat at the old pink Formica table and flipped through the cabin’s guest book: a simple notebook with a stiff cover left for the use of visitors on the trail:

It’s beautiful, but the trees aren’t very big. And no trace of the great moose in these swamps. Frankly, if you’re looking for big game, it’s much better in the Ngorongoro crater, where at least there were some gnus (www.ngorongoro.com), or even in the Canadian Rockies, with all their wapitis that seem to be posing for photographs.

The bugs were a real pain (we mean the insect kind, obviously, ha ha ha) . . .

They were probably from France.

When he was being held for observation in the hospital after being tasered (according to the local police report, Officer Kathy Drolet had zapped him with all those volts and secured him to the stretcher to protect him from himself when he put himself at risk of serious exposure) and they asked him if he wanted someone to be notified, Marie-Québec’s name was the only one that came to the tip of his tongue. She dropped everything. And instead of bringing flowers, she showed up with Three Yellow Roses, the collection of stories by Raymond Carver. It was the kind of thing one doesn’t forget.

After his night of observation, Sam went to live with her, in her three-and-a-half beside the foundry, where they spent three days in bed, making love, eating pizza, and watching the ten o’clock news and uncut movies on the Télé-Québec channel.

Remembering all this, he began to feel himself getting hard again. He took off his T-shirt and shorts and got back into bed.

“Mmmmh.” She opened her eyes. “Why don’t we just stay here?”

“You mean . . .”

“Tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.”

“And what would we live on?”

“Porcupines. And beaver stew, essentially. When I was small, I went with my father on his trapline and it was me who had to finish off the ones who were wounded. Say yes, Sam . . .”

“But it isn’t our cabin . . .”

“No, but no one uses it except for two weeks a year, during the hunting season. It’s ours for the rest of the time. Fifty weeks a year. And for the two other weeks . . .”

“We could go to Mexico.”

Marie-Québec looked at him. Wide awake, now.

“Are you serious? About Mexico, I mean?”

“More serious than that. We could spend the winter down there.”

“Using what for money?”

“Big Dumont owes me a cheque.”

The water in the kettle began whistling gently.

“No automatic coffee maker,” Sam declared.

“No. No desk lamp, vacuum cleaner, Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, laser printers, or toasters.”

“No neighbours playing music in their kitchen. No telemarketers. No problems with the shower head.”

The air in the cabin was redolent of warmth, steam, wet wool, wood smoke, sex, and the Nicaraguan coffee they’d ground the night before.

Marie-Québec was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her eye on Sam’s erection, the nipples on her small breasts jutting up into the smoky air like rifle targets.

He took her in his arms, picked her up, and she guided him inside her, they fused their two bodies together, he held her thighs in his hands and she, thus impaled, wrapped her arms around his neck, and he turned around and headed to the door.

“Sam, what are you . . . No!”

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

“Stop!”

When he opened the door, the thick warmth of the cabin met the wall of cold air. A low of minus twenty Celsius, in which their interlaced, tropical bodies began instantly to steam. All this naked whiteness. They disappeared into the field of light and the silent cry of a spruce grouse.