October 1970 by Louis Hamelin Read Free Book Online Page B

whitewash him. In fact, I think it was the culture minister’s deep tan  . . . ”
    â€œLet’s talk about something else,” Emma said, casting an eye at the muddle in the office, the over-stuffed bookshelves spilling their burden of books, bristling with bookmarks like an old sofa losing its stuffing, the piles of papers, and learned journals that rose from the floor around them.
    â€œHow are you getting on?”
    â€œAll right, I guess. Keeping my head above water,” he said, indicating the office. “A bit of this, a bit of that. As a matter of fact, I’m considering a salary of seventy-five thousand for fantasizing over eighteen-year-old girls while explaining Madame Bovary to them. I can see myself doing that.”
    â€œWhy aren’t you teaching in a CEGEP somewhere?”
    â€œWhenever I have to send in my CV, I go blank. I don’t know why.”
    â€œSo what are you doing?”
    â€œTranslations. Or working in the white slave trade, writing for newspapers. Writer of all trades.”
    They talked about the dearly departed. His rages, his passions, his infatuations. His mania for psychocriticism, picked up in the early eighties while sharing pills of all colours with Gérard Bessette, the author of Semester .
    Eventually they came back to the funeral service. Laughed about the premier’s return to single life. The surrealistic tint of the culture minister’s forehead.
    â€œHe died alone,” Emma declared. “It’s a scandal, what happened there at la Pérade.”
    â€œMaybe. It’s always dangerous to attack the heroic versions of a people’s history. But with Elucubrations , they really didn’t have any choice, they had to celebrate it. They couldn’t just shove it aside. Thanks to Chevalier, Quebec has its national anthem.”
    â€œNo, you’re wrong there. What made him untouchable was that he was imprisoned during the October Crisis. He didn’t actually bear arms, but being arrested is like being issued a passport to seventh patriotic heaven, in certain people’s eyes.”
    â€œYes, that’s as may be, but these nationalist questions aren’t always easy to follow  . . . Good old Chevalier. At least he managed to get the premier out of his bunker!”
    â€œStop. He died in deep intellectual solitude  . . . All these young people he liked to surround himself with, his Socratic side, where did they all go when he lost his health?”
    Sam made no reply. It had been Emma who came up with the name for the group that used to get together at the White Horse after classes, and then later at Lavigueur’s, farther east. One fine afternoon at the beginning of the fall term, she’d run into Branlequeue and his little band on Saint-Denis, coming from a course on Hubert Aquin and the Revolution. “Hey, what’s this, Oktoberfest?”
    â€œBut it’s not even October,” Chevalier called back.
    â€œAh, but with you people it’s always October,” Miss Magy had shot back cryptically.
    And so they’d been baptized the Octobrists, a play on Tolstoy’s Russian Decembrists. Then, on account of the rivers and rivers of beer that flowed in their drinking establishments of choice on rue Ontario, the word “Octobeerists” eventually insinuated itself on the group.
    â€œWhat became of all those people?” Emma asked.
    â€œCEGEP profs. Proofreaders. One’s a stand-up comic. Another’s picking wild mushrooms in the Yukon.”
    â€œWell, not one of them came to the funeral.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œAre you working on anything at the moment?”
    â€œA novel on the go,” he lied. “A kind of thing  . . . ”
    He kept his eyes down as he spoke, drawing squares and oblongs replicating themselves to infinity on a blank page on the desk.
    â€œHe had faith in you, Samuel. I feel it’s my duty to