October 1970 by Louis Hamelin Read Free Book Online

PURVEYOR . And I thought that’s exactly what Chevalier Branlequeue never was for his family: a purveyor. After all his years of swimming against the tide, by the time the university reeled him back in, in the mid-1970s, on the strength of the overwhelming success of Elucubrations as much as for any degree he might have had, his children had already flown the familial coop and were spreading their wings somewhere else.
    Not far from me, a tomcod suddenly flew out of an open window and landed on a pile of its fellows to be frozen alive on the ice. I walked over, bent down, and picked up the fish between my fingers. It was still wriggling. I looked at it closely, as though acting out a scene: Prince Hamlet with aquatic vertebrate instead of Yorick’s skull. I don’t know why, but I stuffed the fish into my coat pocket. I could feel it beating feebly against my side. It was still alive. I went back to the church, turned into the cemetery while the last cars were leaving the parking lot and driving off along the Chemin du Roy. Not so much as a cat at the graveside. The coffin had been lowered and was awaiting the gravediggers, who couldn’t be far off, probably huddled around a Quebec heater in the shelter of a tool shed.
    When I took the tomcod out of my pocket, it was no longer moving. I knew that Chevalier Branlequeue would approve of my little joke: a dead fish to bear the message You’re next , like in the Mafia.
    The little frostfish hardly made a sound when it hit the coffin lid. I walked back to the church. The bus rented by the Writers’ Union had already left. Everyone was gone. Except for one old poet, sitting on the church steps, a brown paper bag with a bottle in it held tightly between his legs. He was singing “The Lament of the Mauricie.”

RUE SAINT-DENIS
    FROM THE WINDOW OF HIS office on the th ird 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