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DAY THREE

COMBAT JOURNAL

… slowly awake to the clangour of my body … I’m a brass band conducted by … by the Little Square below my window … my entire body is trumpet and thrum and fife and flute…. blares me. Now I recognize that it is the Petite Place that is the band, and I the conductor … my body the conductor. Or is my body being conducted? Listen with care — no, my first response was right: I am the band, and the square conducts me. My cock tells me that…. I waken more — am properly awake, because I hear with ears as well as cock … sounds funnels direct in instead of steeping me.

Sit up … into the decisive sense of physical accretion — I’ve grown a cubit. My whole being distended. Savour this increment. A sudden coming of age. My God — of course — Yvon! No wonder my body is back now. My whole being shimmers. I want to sing again … my gut is a mouth organ. Nature calls — honour it … and am sudden bereft of my extension.

At 1 p.m. still expecting Luc at the hotel for our noon engagement … curse his lateness. I could have sortied out to La Grande Place — La Place d’Armes — am ready for it … opened to it now. Maudits Frangluches … they have no sense of time (but a wonderful sense of timing!) — and I sit in the lobby awaiting him … flogging myself with the delay. Watching the old hens at the front desk, going through the motions of running the hotel. And then watch more closely … no — they’re not running it … they’re running with it, responding to it — they are a mirror of the inner rhythm of the hotel … responding like live-wired marionettes as the hotel runs around them. Their bodies dance the comings-and-goings…. Mouthing their own mime of the events that swirl us. How does a place like this operate? Now the black-haired maman bobs and twitches with an extra flibbertigibbetery and Luc is all around me bobolarking too and when I finally net him down we have already crossed la Petite Place, past Nelson’s Monument and down Notre Dame Street to Le Petit Havre, a block towards La Place d’Armes. Barely in the restaurant and Luc pirouettes with indefatigable grace at the second table … kissing the hands of two demoiselles … “de la Galerie Ste-Geneviève … rue St. Paul …” while I am engaged in evading the glance of two Anglo-Canadian acquaintances of TV-days at the table beyond. “You must visit their gallery….”

“Bien entendu” — I acquiesce, still evading, and in the act caught by the corner of my eye on his young brunette both of us unwilling but instantly invaded by our glance…. And introductions done and a luncheon engagement made for the sake of my Novel, with the brunette, we ensconce ourselves in the next dining room, unobserved — seated across the compulsory French Canadian red-checked tablecloth. I await his first move. It doesn’t come. Luc arrived in orbit, he remains in orbit, and while I patiently attend his play on the chess-board tablecloth afront me he is all over me….

“Comment vas-tu?” — he is hovering in front of my nose now, having negotiated every nook of my well-vested corporation. “Comment vas-tu, Hugh?” His eyes pilfer mine with their solidity and unwitting I am aflight in our crazy dance now…. Aflight because I instinctively know that his “Comment vas-tu?” really means “Who are you … who are you now, Hugh? … it has been four years since I’ve seen us … who are you, who are we … let us be these now, right now … who, who, who, WHO?” With this, all my whats are filed, and for five hours we are launched in lunchtide … lunch à la française, en française. Eating, laughing, gesticulating, talking, alive in French. And I am all my French Canadianité again … c’est ma Francité. Now I take on, chameleon, all those additional forgotten attributes that are mine by right as a Canadian de langue française.

Luc — “… wonderful you are back with us … you will stay now?”

Me — “I had to come back … I couldn’t stand it any more.”

Luc — “stand what….”

Me — “us — my own people … English Canada … Toronto…. I was finally fired … I triggered my own firing squad.”

Luc — “bravo!”

Somewhere in the midst of this conversation that is the converse of a dialogue … that is more truly duet … we pinion lunch. Luc pinions lunch….

“Madamoiselle … qu’est-ce que vous nous suggerez alors…?” And the eyes of the blond French waitress are aflight with us and somewhere in the third orbit we find calves brains with capers, a carafe of white wine, crême caramel (!) … black coffee, one armagnac, one calvados and one Marc de Bourgogne, each (violin-cello, cello, and bass-viol).

Across from me Luc is stationary a moment as his eyes fix me: “Maintenant tu vas commencer vivre alors … ici.”

“Yes — I must start to live … I’ve just been born….” His eyes are my smile for me. I note for the first time that he has glasses and that the left lens is held in place by scotch tape. Bless him. And behind the scotch tape, those innumerable eyes of Luc, on me into mine, pervading us with unnamed joy. Luc — poet, cinéaste, Separatist … French Canadian!

“Yes, I am doing a novel … on La Place d’Armes….” And I try to explain again, for my own benefit what it is that I am doing, objectively … “I have come to sight La Place, for others … I never really saw it during my four years here. I always took it for granted … knew it was wonderful but never why … never probed my belief that….

“Attendez une seconde … M’mselle — votre vin … il est légèrement maderisé vous savez … essayons le rouge alors.” She is back moments later with a carafe of red — and we are refurbished.

Me — “I love it here … in the Vieux Quartier … I am at home…. It fulfils something in me … completely … demands a plenitude of response from me … forces me to flower (I could never say that in English you know … people would laugh!) I want to communicate that in the novel.”

“Je vois bien … eh, mon vieux — et ta femme?”

“She knows I must do this … that I must come alive before it is too late … I could not do it if she did not have faith in me, and I in her … if that went, then it wouldn’t be worth doing. It is a question of live or death … tu sais….”

“C’est évident! Mais combien des vôtres comprennent cela?”

“My wife — nearly. And one childhood friend who has been implicated in my life since I was twelve … and Jack Richards, because I pave a way for him now…. And Eric Newman — you know him from CBC.”

“Et ta famille … ton frère aîné? Peter?”

“No — he mustn’t understand what I am doing … or he is ruined. He is intelligent….”

“Mais sa sensibilité?”