There are almost a hundred thousand of them according to the radio reporters. The cops are on edge, because gatherings like this are outlawed in Montreal, ever since the City Council banned them two months ago, having decided there were too many of them and that, while freedom of expression is just fine in principle, it ought not to be abused because then it disturbs everyone.
I sip on a beer and wait, warm and comfy, for the Saint Suspicius battalion to come into view. I’m eager to see what the flock looks like when it charges the barricades. La Marquise and her followers have designed a handsome red banner to clearly show the whole world that even the children of the bourgeoisie believe the language of the French Canadians is worth protecting. After all, it’s the one they know best. Stretched between two poles, the banner is one metre by ten, with No To Institutionalized Assimilation written on it in large, square, white letters and, underneath, the name of the college. Studying in an ivory tower doesn’t mean we’re insensitive to the lot of the masses swarming at our feet.
Then there’s the fact that the people, well, they’re ours, not the Anglos’. Hence we might as well help them survive so we can make use of them once we get out of school.
While waiting, I smoke cigarettes. They say it’s bad for your health, but as far as I know most things are. Even life kills me. Which makes perfect sense, since everyone knows what happens at the end, of life, that is.
In any case, who can pretend to know what life is? Life – that’s life. If you listen to the Suspicians, there’s nothing more to it. Life – that’s life: a bald, fatheaded, blaring tautology. What is life? Life is a tautology. Tawtaw-luhdjimeans “life” in Southern Javanese. It’s when you can’t explain something that you resort to a tautology. Better to hold your tongue and not try to understand, like the Suspicians, than to spout a lot of crap in a foreign language.
I hear the hubbub of the crowd yelling the first slogans behind the roar of the motorcycle cops cruising fifty metres ahead of the demonstrators. I crane my neck and in the distance I can see the huge throng that fills the whole width of the street and stretches back to the vanishing point. There, in the front ranks, are the honchos of the national committee, including the bearded tweed jacket who enlisted the next generation of the ruling class. My heart is pounding. I feel I should do something with all this beautiful energy that may very well go to waste. When they’re through marching, all these numskulls, what will have changed?
They’re very close now. The bar employees have stepped up to the windows to see. For once, the press has told the truth: there really are a lot of people. They stream past endlessly, holding placards, shouting cheerfully in unison: Qué-bec-fran-çais! Qué-bec-fran-çais!
In the clamour and the surge of signs, I finally discern the flock’s banner, smartly spread out between two poles each held up by Allie Buy and Julie Horn, who are proud to play the part of flag-bearers. Beneath the standard, with a megaphone in her hand, snug and warm in her mink-collared pea jacket, La Marquise is doing her best to chant, “No-to-in-sti-tu-tion-al-ized-as-sim-i-lation.” The others take it up together, but it doesn’t sound like anything.
All at once I find myself pretty wimpish to be here doing nothing when just a slight effort on my part would be enough for all this useless agitation to really advance the cause. And it doesn’t matter much whether it’s this cause or another. A cause is first a cause before it becomes a good or bad one. The fools parading down there honestly believe these little group fitness walks repeated every week for the past month are going to make the powers-that-be change their minds. They’re very naive, and, what’s more, they have no sense of tragedy. Marches have never overthrown a government, except maybe the Long March, but, unlike Mao, I don’t have the patience to march for years. I tell myself that if I had a bit more courage, I could make their stupid little march-a-thons mean something.
I can see it from here: parked on the other side of the street, an old Renault 10 all of a sudden rises in the air, as if lifted by some supernatural force, before disappearing in a cloud of flames and smoke, as a tremendous explosion blows out the windows all around, including the one I’m sitting at. There’s glass and fire everywhere. Panic strikes. In the street, slogans give way to screams, and everybody is rushing in every direction. Evidently some people have been killed, others injured. Just imagine the consequences. The Anglos would be accused. Wrongly, of course, because it would be me. A total mess, I tell you. After all, as Marx said, you can’t make revolution without sending a little shit flying. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, right?
The entire procession has already gone by for some time. By now they must all have arrived at La Fontaine Park, where they’re being harangued by three or four lofty minds not in too great a hurry to make the revolution. As for me, I keep drinking, because of the vision I had which made me realize that the important thing isn’t so much a matter of planting bombs as knowing where to have them planted and by whom.
Basically, they’re not too bright, the little bums who’ve been playing at being terrorists for the past while by gleefully blowing up mailboxes and Anglos. OK, it’s true, they’ve disturbed the powers-that-be, though even that’s a moot point since it gives them a good reason to be repressive. But, above all, it’s the majority, which is French, that’s pleased and silently thinks: “Good for them, those dirty English creeps, they’ve been jerking us around for so long.” Whereas if their bombs were to kick French butts… I’d never realized before just how easy it would be to wreak havoc.
1. Better prudent than strong. (Sag. VI: 1)
2. Comité Québec français du séminaire du Saint-Suspicius (CQFSSS).
3. For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Rom. 7: 19)
Chapter Four
Vung Tau, 69-70
Knights slew for love, we slay for money.
Inscription on a Zippo lighter,
Unknown G.I.
They want to christen the lounge. It’s La Marquise’s idea, of course. Who else! An honest-to-goodness professional little organizer, she is. Everyone’s cheery counsellor, the den mother of our little Camp Shitty-Ha-ha on the mountain. She sprung the idea just like that, sitting among the flock gathered in the dining hall at noon to chew on its alfalfa. Any excuse to do something.
“Why not find a nice, original name for our lounge? After all, we do spend quite a bit of time there. It would make it more fun, more intimate, cozier. Anything without a name appalls me!”
They all agreed. So a contest was launched to find an original name for the lounge. Whoever comes up with the best name will win fifty dollars. A tidy sum!
I suggested “The Lounge” as a name for the lounge. I won’t win, that’s for sure. A lounge doesn’t need a name. Ultimately, neither do people. Once again, there’ll be those who claim what I’m saying makes no sense. I know, I don’t make sense. I even assume that I make no sense at all. But a man is a man and nothing else. Not my “little Julie” or my “little Larry.” Take the Spaniards: they say hombre when they speak to you. For Black Americans, it’s man. Not “Mister” or anything like that. They say hombre and man, and it reverberates when they say it, it rings loud and heavy. Men are men, nothing else. As for the Gentlemen of Saint Suspicius, they insist on being called Mister. Most likely because they’re not all that sure of being men.
Has anyone ever held a contest to find a name for misfortune? Or filth? Or vice? What would you call it? You’d call it vice. You’d call