My October (25 page)

“But he was part of it, right? Part of the operation. That's what Vien said. His name was in all the papers. They hated him. Is that why we don't see him now?”

She had assembled a little pile of crumbs in front of her. “We do see him, Hugo. I do. I just spent a week—”

He cut her off. “You hate going down there.”

Hannah shook her head. “I don't hate it,” she said. “And I certainly don't hate him.”

She was lying. Treating him like a child and assuming she could still get away with it.

Hugo took a breath. “What did he do to you? Hit you?
Abuse you in some way? You can tell me. I don't need protecting anymore.”

His mother's eyes closed. He wanted to shout and make her look at him. But then she started to speak. Very softly. Her eyes were still closed and her face was slack and expressionless. He leaned toward her, holding his breath. “We used to fight,” she said. “Not physically. It never went beyond words, but the words were pretty awful. For some reason, he saw me as an enemy.” She sighed. “When your dad came into my life, it made things worse.”

So there it was, just as Hugo had imagined. His father was at the heart of it. He was the one who had broken up the family.

“Is he why you stayed?”

Seconds passed. Her eyelids were darker than the rest of her face, the colour of a bruise.

“Maman?” he said, but her eyes stayed closed.

Silence. The story of his mother's life. And of his.

He picked up his plate and brought it to the sink. She'd opened her eyes, but he no longer cared. He turned the faucet on so hard that water splashed onto his shirt front. The plate slipped from his hands and clattered against the stainless steel. He left it there and walked out of the kitchen.

He closed his bedroom door and stood there, breathing hard. He hated his life. He hated his fucking father, hated his depressed rag doll of a mother. The floor creaked in the hallway and Hugo's breath stopped. He strained to hear, but the hallway fell silent. He felt angrier, then, at the stupid hope that he couldn't stop from rising up in him. Damn his mother.
It was time to put away childish things
: a favourite saying of his father's. An image of his father materialized in the semi-darkness. Hugo took an
experimental swing at it and smashed his fist into its nose. The face looked at him, surprised. He swung again, this time at the mouth, with another satisfying impact. On and on he swung, his heart beating wildly, until the face was a pulpy mess.

He collapsed backward on his bed. He'd once loved his father more than anyone in the world, more even than Hannah. His whole life had been one unbroken effort to please him. That was what being a child was about. You didn't question. You spoke like him, you dressed like him, you ate all his favourite foods. Hugo shook his head in disgust. Childhood was over now.

He picked up a book that was lying on the floor. Vallières. His father must have read it too, back in the 1970s. The story he told of his own father was identical to Vallières's. Both men had worked in factories. Both had had their spirits crushed by evil Anglo bosses. Luc Lévesque had made his name on this cliché: a French-Canadian martyr-father had figured in every one of his books. It was like a trademark. Scholars wrote papers about it. This father figure was always long-dead. He hovered above Luc's plots like a ghost, blocking the way as his son tried to define himself in a rapidly changing world. At least, that was what Hugo's literature teacher at Saint-Jean-Baptiste had said two years ago, when they'd studied
Tanneur tanné
.

Hugo had recognized so many things in
Tanneur tanné—
Saint-Henri's streets, its churches and factories, the train tracks, the canal—that it felt more like fact than fiction. He had never met his father's father. Roland Lévesque had died before he was born, but
Tanneur tanné
had resurrected him for Hugo, if only partially, because in the novel his character was a ghost. But for Hugo, the book had been a first step. Hugo's entire class had met his dead grandfather. They knew him as well as Hugo did.

After reading his father's first novel, Hugo embarked on the others, lifting them one after the other from the living room bookshelf reserved for his father's publications and their translations. That was how he came upon a fictionalized version of his second grandfather, Alfred Stern. He materialized in
Les blues de Saint-Ambroise
as the host of a party into which the young Québécois hero had stumbled, invited by the host's beautiful English daughter. Alfred Stern's last name was changed to Klein, which in German meant “small,” but the physical traits were all there. The Westmount home was described in detail, as were the kind of people Hugo's grandfather had invited to his parties, all English, all shaking with fear at the thought that Quebec might become a country one day.
Les blues
was set in January 1977, two months after the separatists had won a victory—their first ever—in a provincial election.

The scene was intended to be comic, with the
petit gars
from Saint-Henri committing gaffe after social gaffe at the table of his wealthy father-in-law-to-be. But Hugo had not laughed. Alfred Stern came across as a bigot, a cartoon of a man, baiting his daughter's French boyfriend without mercy, and then, when the young man finally rose to the challenge, kicking him shamelessly out of the house.

Hugo opened Vallières at the place at which he'd fallen asleep the night before. “Sometimes,” he read, squinting in the weak light from the overhead, “one imagines that one's past has disappeared leaving no memory, like a cloud that has drifted apart in the sky. But that is an illusion. One has only to be immobilized for a few weeks (in prison, for example) to find one's past again and relive it in its smallest details.” Hugo slammed the book shut and let it fall to the floor. He was in prison too—a kind of
prison—and like Vallières he was rediscovering the past. Only it was not
his
past. It belonged to his father, to Vien, to Jacques Lanctôt.

On the dust jackets of his father's books, Hugo had read the claim that his father was the voice of his generation. Which poor sucker, he wondered, would end up speaking for
his
generation? The generation that had watched hijacked planes fly straight into Manhattan's two tallest towers, and for whom the word
suicide
was, as likely as not, followed by
bomber
. Perhaps his generation would be voiceless, condemned to having older men like his father repeat their own stories, thoughtlessly, mechanically, until they finally rolled over and died.

Vallières was a lousy writer. That was the sad truth of it. His sentences were bloated with slogans and terms meant to shock a reader. Words like
nigger
, for example, and
slave
, applied carelessly and wrongly to the Québécois. Monsieur Vien had also talked about a writer named Frantz Fanon. Fanon wrote about Algeria and its suffering under French colonial rule. The political situation in Quebec in October 1970 was totally different from Algeria, yet Fanon's words had inspired Lanctôt's kidnapping plot.

Hugo pulled off his itchy school shirt, scrunched it into a ball, and hurled it across the room. As he pulled off his pants, he remembered the flyer in his pocket and retrieved it.
Une célébration d'un des nôtres.
Hugo made a face. Then he checked his alarm clock.

Screw reading. He wouldn't pick up Vallières again if someone paid him. It would be interesting to see Lanctôt in action. He didn't have to speak to him or anything. He could watch. Anonymously. Consider it a fact-finding mission.

He pulled on his favourite pair of jeans and a hoodie, and fished an old pair of sneakers from his closet. Then he turned the lights off and positioned his pillows under the duvet to make it appear that he'd gone to sleep. His window had a ledge from which, if you didn't mind heights, you could jump onto the fire escape.

The night was colder than he'd thought. He hit his knee when he landed, so hard that the iron bars hummed. He crouched, holding his breath until the noise and the pain subsided. The living room glowed before him. His mother was on the couch, a book propped on her knees. She was thinner than he had ever seen her. Older-looking too. The hair at her temples was turning grey. She raised her head suddenly, and looked directly at him. She couldn't see him, though, he was pretty certain. She sat up and looked at her reflection in the window. What she saw didn't appear to make her happy. She touched her hair and looked away.

Hugo climbed slowly down the fire escape. Lyse's flat was lit up too, but she had curtains and they were drawn. Through the lacy white material, he made out the silhouette of a form. No, two forms. It was probably Graeme White, the English guy she claimed was just a friend.

The ground-floor flat was completely black. The last few steps weren't steps at all but the rungs of a ladder, from which it was a long drop to the grass. For several seconds, Hugo hung as if on a trapeze, swaying over a black void. He landed hard, then jumped to his feet and ran. By the time he reached the street, he felt almost calm.

The party for Lanctôt was on Saint-Joseph Boulevard, not far from Saint-Laurent. That was on the orange metro line. Half
an hour later, Hugo was jogging up the stairs at the Laurier station. Saint-Joseph Boulevard was a wide, divided street that seemed to lead straight to the mountain, which crouched to the west, crowned with a glittering cross. Hugo walked toward it.

He didn't have to go far. He spotted the place almost immediately, alerted by the crowd of people crammed into the front yard. Like many of the houses in this part of the city, it had a porch and a little patch of grass. Some of the houses had bushes and flowers, but the garden here was bare.

Hugo slowed his pace. He didn't like crowds. And in this one everybody seemed to be talking at once, laughing and blowing smoke from cigarettes at the pale slice of moon. Hugo was bound to stand out in this gathering. He was way younger than everyone else. And because of his height, they would think he was even younger. A woman unlatched the gate for him, smiling tenderly, the way a mother might. He had a sudden urge to run, but the woman was watching him, so he had no choice but to keep going. People blocked his path. They were everywhere, spilling out of the house onto the porch, hanging over the wooden railing, waving their hands, discussing things. Inside was even worse. There was no air at all. The hallway, which was lightless, led to a bright main room, which turned out to be two rooms. A black man was standing at a podium reading something about Port-au-Prince and making people laugh. Every seat in the place was taken.

Hugo could hardly breathe. He tried to retrace his steps, but people were pushing in from behind him now, blocking his exit. Everywhere he looked, more people kept appearing, elbowing their way forward. The black man closed his book and people started clapping. Then a man in the front row stood up to shake
his hand. Hugo stared. He was shorter than in the newspaper photos. Fatter. And his eyes darted. Beside him was another person Hugo recognized, holding his hands above his head and hooting and clapping. His father. And next to his father was the woman Hugo had seen at the metro station. Vien was sitting one row behind them, grinning like a loon.

Jacques Lanctôt stepped up to the podium. “A difficult act to follow,” he said, shaking his head with false regret. He looked up at the packed room as the last of the applause frittered away. “Unless,
bien sûr
, your name is Luc Lévesque.”

The room erupted again. People weren't just clapping now, they were whistling and stamping their feet. Lanctôt waited until they calmed down. “It's an honour to have this esteemed
auteur
with us. The voice of our people. I cannot tell you what pleasure it gives me.” He held out his hands, his gaze briefly direct, his eyes shining. “Come up here, Luc.”

His father rose to his feet. Before going to the stage, however, he bent over the woman and kissed her on the mouth. In public. In front of all these people.

His father's mouth now wore a trace of her lipstick. He looked like a stupid clown. Hugo felt ill. He hoped the Kraft Dinner he'd wolfed down an hour earlier would not come back up. He tried to move toward the hall, but the crowd behind him was like a wall, solid and insistent like the Montreal metro at rush hour. He didn't stand a chance.

At the podium, Jacques Lanctôt had put an arm around his father. Lanctôt was grinning, pressing against him as if they were long lost brothers. He gave a speech about the
p'tit gars de Saint-Henri
and how Luc Lévesque had possessed the guts and the genius to set his stories locally, with characters culled from his
own
petite vie
. Writers like Luc, he said, significantly dropping his father's last name, gave the people of Quebec a voice with which to address the world.

The room erupted into cheers.

Somehow Hugo pushed his way into the hall. People were staring at him. Some of them swore as well, but to get back out that door he was willing to face their displeasure. He was convinced that he would vomit. His mouth was full of water. It was all he could do to keep upright. But the minute he was out, his panic fell magically away. The nausea was replaced by euphoria. He felt as if he'd scaled a mountain, crossed enemy lines. He'd made it.

The smokers were still in the yard, although the woman who had opened the gate for him was nowhere to be seen. What a relief. He unlatched the gate and slipped out onto the sidewalk, not bothering to close it. And then he took off, sprinting down the wide boulevard, knees and elbows pumping, his boy's body blazing like a shooting star through the night. Only when the downward arrow of the Montreal metro came into sight did his feet slow. He'd done it. He'd broken free. And nothing in this pitiful, two-faced excuse for a world would ever force him to return.

19

H
annah awoke with the panicky sensation that someone was kneeling on her chest, pressing the air out of her. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and squinted at the clock on Luc's bedside table. It was a couple of minutes past four. Three hours to go till sunrise.