October 1970 by Louis Hamelin Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œHey, there, sweetie pie. We wondered who was going to be sent to clean up this mess  . . . ”
    â€œNo 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.
    â€œI was there. Last row, just like in kindergarten  . . . ”
    â€œNot just there,” she said, winking. “That’s where you sat in my classes, too.”
    â€œI 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