Back home, carrying his paper loot under his arm, he reminds himself that he’s on vacation and should be taking advantage of it. Since early summer, he has been feeling the need to repeat to himself that time is something he ought to take advantage of. In his pretty house in Outremont, time lingers around the furniture, paintings, photos like a melancholy tune.
He opens the papers, skims them rapidly. The tragedy of the Piper Saratoga and its illustrious occupants is still in the headlines. As if God had blessed the media, a heaven-sent tragedy lands on them every summer to fill the blankness of vacations, occupy it with sensational headlines and pictures. Not long ago, remember, there was the providential death of Lady Di. As he is turning the pages a photo suddenly draws his attention: a Buddhist monk, in the lotus position, being burned alive amid tall flames. It’s a famous image, dating from 1963, of an act of protest against the war in Vietnam. Antoine is intrigued: a reproduction of that photo was found in Félix Maltais’s car. That was all. No letter. No explanations.
Félix Maltais, 45, apparently wanted to imitate the monk Thích Quảng Đức with his suicidal act. An act to sensitize the world to the degeneration of the forests.
If you want to save the trees, why commit suicide surrounded by spruces and not TV cameras? Antoine can’t help finding Félix’s act somewhat naive. A shot in the dark. He wonders, though, if his friend stayed imperturbable in the flames. If he’d breathed his last breath with his face convulsed in pain. If by leaving as a farewell letter the photo of the protesting monk he’d been sending him a sign after so many years.
The phone rings, interrupting his questioning. A journalist wants to meet him. She intends to write a feature on his wife, Alice Livingston. Her last novel is to be published posthumously in the fall. Does he have any comments on his wife’s final work? Antoine hesitates before agreeing to her request. He has never liked the totally predictable plots, with a drop of suspense, that Alice generally churned out without too much stress every couple of years. Her books were anticipated by a readership won over in advance. Reviewers praised them mechanically with a purring of adjectives. She appeared on TV, ultimate accolade for a writer. But this whole circus never drove Antoine to think of his wife’s novels as literature. To him, Alice placed on the market supposedly cultural products. He conceded, of course, that she had qualities the absence of which he deplored in himself: rigour, discipline, determination, optimism. He admired her. She was happy, he thought, because she was perfectly in tune with the shallow and pointless world she lived in. On the day when she was getting ready to receive a prize, dazzling in a dress purchased for the occasion, hadn’t Alice told him that her writing was building the world of tomorrow? He had asked her how.
“Just read my novels carefully. Between the lines there is space and time. That’s where everything happens. That’s where the world is bursting out, emerging from the present.”
Antoine hadn’t wanted to antagonize her on this day when she would be receiving a prize. He had held back a laugh. Did his wife really believe what she was saying? Was she intoxicated to that point? But when he entered the reception hall on the arm of his celebrated wife, he could not prevent a quiver of pride from misting up the mirror of his thinking.
In the end he agreed to meet the journalist the next day. She would come to his house. As he hung up he blamed himself for agreeing. He has nothing to say about the novel that had monopolized his wife’s final months. He would pocket her royalties, at least he’ll be able to say that.
Antoine heard about the monk Thích Quảng Đức for the first time in 1971, when he started college. On the first day a student arrives late for class; he’d lost his way in the corridors. It’s Félix Maltais. He asks Antoine if he can borrow his notes. Why him and not someone else? Does he really look like a serious student meticulously taking down every word that falls from the professor’s sacrosanct mouth? That’s not the image Antoine has of himself, with his outrageously long hair. That day he has on a military overcoat from an army surplus store. He has even dared to keep it on during class, though it’s not cold. The last days of summer outside the windows are casting a vibrant and joyous light not in the least conducive to taking notes about Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics, and the intriguing distinctions between signified and signifier.
The next day, Antoine finds himself face-to-face with Félix just as he’s coming out of the Tabagie 500. This is a mythic place in Chicoutimi. They sell magazines, tabloids, slander sheets like Allô Police and Photo Police. At the very back, there’s a counter with a row of red stools fastened to columns. Most of the customers prolong their coffee by chain-smoking, turning the greasy pages of a magazine, or ordering a club sandwich, finishing their feast with a slice of apple pie weighed down by a gigantic scoop of ice cream. What attracts Antoine in particular stands at the front door: a revolving rack of books. He likes to make it turn around, feigning a sudden interest in one title or another. Nonchalantly, he takes a book, runs his hand over it, opens it, flips through it briefly, and buries it in his army coat
