Antoine pushes away the papers. He has read enough. The terrace of the Fleur d’oranger is nearly deserted now. As he is paying, he wonders if his wife had done the right thing by signing her books with another name. Did “Livingston” have a greater power of attraction than “Tranchemontagne”?
* * *
Early in her career, Alice decides to sign her books with a pseudonym. Antoine’s not enthusiastic, considering the reference to the famous book by Richard Bach too obvious.
“A novel written by a Livingston,” he explains to her, “announces from the start adventures as tumultuous as the raging waves hurtling into the cliffs of Scotland.” Subsequently, she is deliberately vague about her family and keeps readers guessing about her real background. She enjoys letting them imagine a life far off the beaten track. She refuses to put her birthplace on her book covers. Of course everyone in the publishing world knows she was born in Chicoutimi. Alice thinks that a book becomes more popular, especially abroad, if a certain mystery surrounds the author’s life. She boldly claims that she was born in Africa, where her mother presumably followed her father, who was then a chargé d’affaires. Her publisher refuses this biography, considering that it would leave her open to dangerous curiosity. Alice agrees with him, over time and with the success of her books. But she persists in her desire to be a woman hard to track down, preferring a minor lie to the entire, boring truth.
As he leaves the terrace of the Fleur d’oranger, Antoine suddenly remembers that he has not yet replied to his son. It’s been five days since Jonathan left a message on his voice mail. He throws his papers into a municipal trash can and asks himself why he didn’t leave them at the restaurant. Another client could have savoured the juicy gossip about John-John. He goes home and calls Jonathan. His son has some big news and invites him to come for a drink. He’s so insistent that finally his father agrees to drop in that evening.
Jonathan lives in a condo that he’s just bought in Plateau-Mont-Royal. It’s a large, third-floor apartment, newly renovated. From his bedroom window you can see the cross on the mountain. It’s the first home Jonathan has owned. Ever since he left the family house he has shared apartments with friends, rarely staying long in the same place. Antoine has never visited his son or met the people with whom he lived. Alice, in contrast, never stopped seeing him, making sure that he has everything he needs. Antoine knows this but has never brought up the matter with her. If Jonathan were in a difficult situation, his father would find out soon enough. He hadn’t been pleased when his son packed his bags on his eighteenth birthday without the slightest explanation. Since then, he had only seen him at Alice’s funeral. Her death, instead of bringing them closer, had driven them even further apart. They had quickly dealt with the question of inheritance. Jonathan now enjoys a certain financial security. The success of Terre profanée, the TV series he performs in, promises better days thanks to a totally unexpected career as a promising actor. Because a year before his mother’s death, his life had suddenly taken on the appearance of a fairy tale. By chance, he’d found himself in bed with a director, a man both well known and well regarded in the TV and film world. Frédéric Létourneau is responsible for a good dozen important productions: films, TV series, documentaries. He’s into everything. He likes to jot in notebooks scattered ideas that he’ll often rediscover months later. Some become brilliant sketches that will be finalized by experienced scriptwriters. All that’s left to him is to direct them.
The Oka Crisis sensitized Frédéric to the demands of First Nations. His ancestors were invaders and their settler descendants continue to be: in 1989, Oka’s town council decides to transform an old Indigenous cemetery into a golf course. In August 1990, the Mohawks swing into action: roadblocks, barricades. Frédéric awakens to the fact that he is the son of those whites who have destroyed a civilization, a culture, who have usurped a vast territory, relegated their survivors to reserves, driven them into unemployment, alcoholism, suicide. He is surprised that he doesn’t know a single member of a First Nation. He has never had one as a friend, a classmate, a colleague. He has spent time with Pakistanis, Brazilians, Haitians, never with a Kanien’kehá:ka, a Cree, an Innu. Why?
Ten years later he directs Terre profanée, in which we see something rare in Québec, Indigenous characters in a blockbuster series. Inspired by the events in Oka, it moves the conflict to a forested area of Abitibi. Here, it’s not about a cemetery or a golf course. The major issue is the forest. To get their supplies of trees, pulp and paper mills practise clearcutting, which devastates thousands of hectares of forest. Frédéric knows his subject: an Indigenous community, to save its ancestral hunting and fishing territory, blocks the company’s dirt roads and takes up arms. This
