Félix’s eyes fill with tears.
“What’s most moving is his face. Not a sign of pain, eyes peacefully closed, no tension in the lips. The whole left side of his face, though, has been eaten by the flames. He remains composed. He was sixty-six or seventy-three years old, I never knew which exactly. And d’you know what I found out a while ago? Some Americans have also set themselves on fire to make American troops leave Vietnam. It’s just happened near here. Without the photo of Thích Quảng Đức, none of that would have happened.”
“What? The war in Vietnam wouldn’t have happened without that photo? Gimme a break!”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Then I expressed myself badly. Basically, if that photo fascinates me, it’s not for what it reveals but for what it hides: the heart.”
“A heart is meat. And meat burns.”
“Not Thích Quảng Đức’s. I told you: it was found intact among his carbonized remains.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Of course not.”
“Have you seen it, even in a photo?”
“No, but I believe it. Which is enough for me.”
Their inflamed conversation seals their new friendship. They feel as if they’ve known each other forever. Leaving Le Top they head for the college where Félix lives in the student residence. Lost in the twists and turns of their discussion, which they seem to want to keep going until dawn, they find themselves roaming in the Chicoutimi cemetery which lines the college buildings. Leaning against a tombstone, Antoine gazes at the nearly full moon. Its halo exposes the blue-shaded depths of the sky. With his hands in his jacket pockets, Félix looks cold. In September it may seem like a summer’s day, but after nightfall it’s not unusual for the ground to freeze. Antoine rolls a cigarette with Drum tobacco. He always has a package in the inside pocket of his army coat. He feels good. A strange euphoria fills him. The cold doesn’t bother him. Autumn is his favourite season. He can’t understand people who behave as if they are living in a waiting room made of black ice, wind gusts, and icy squalls. During ten months of the year they stare at the summer door, a very small one, and wait anxiously for it to fall half-open. As soon as a pale ray of light slips out of it, they rush with shrieks of joy to force it open. Then their waiting is over and, hysterical now, they walk out the door that they’ve just pulled off its hinges. But they’re back in the waiting room only weeks later, and with a sour look, they stare again, each in their corner, at the summer door, double-locked for long months once more.
That disproportionate enthusiasm for summer irritates Antoine. Even spring seems to him like an act of aggression. Bulbs, seeds, anything that stirs restlessly under the barely thawed ground bursts through the earth with such violence that it seems to him that he is picking up the smell of anger all around him. What is green is in a hurry to come into bud and prove that in Québec, summer really and truly does exist. And once autumn arrives, though nature swaggers with her wildflowers, the glittering yellow of her birches, the magnificent purple-red of her maples, very soon she will find herself stripped bare in the sad shadow of the black spruce planted like soldiers at attention in the mute and solemn snow.
When he flicks his cigarette butt into the emptiness of night, Antoine realizes that Félix has disappeared. He calls him, looks for him. Finds him kneeling on a grave, a rosary in his hands. Praying. Antoine holds back a laugh. Félix looks like a cartoon figure in this setting like a horror film, which sows doubt in Antoine: is he playing a trick, or is he praying for real?
“What’re you doing?”
“Praying for my cousin, Anaïs.”
The monument is obviously recent, modest. It is crowned with a vase in which flowers are breathing the moist night air.
“She died in May. Along with her whole family.”
“You’re making that up.”
Félix, gesturing broadly, clears some space in front of him, as if he were revealing the stage of a show that’s about to begin. Antoine then notices the nearby tombstones: all the inscriptions note that the people died in 1971. On a monument larger than the others are written in gilt letters the names of Martha and Pierre Bouchard. On four smaller stones, the names of Rénald Bouchard, Maryse Bouchard, Jules Bouchard, and Anaïs Bouchard; it is in front of the latter that Félix, his expression grave, is kneeling. Antoine tries to think of what to say. He’s certainly not going to offer condolences. The place is ideal for such a demonstration, but he has no talent for the formulas that are supposed to express the tearful sharing of sincere feelings.
“What happened?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“A highway accident?”
“No.”
“Surely they weren’t murdered?”
“Antoine, think.”
“An epidemic.”
“In the Saguenay?”
“Why not?”
“Think: what happened last May?”
“Saint-Jean-Vianney!”
Why had he not realized earlier that these graves belonged to a family that had perished during the landslide in Saint-Jean-Vianney? News of the disaster had travelled around the globe. On the night of May 4, 1971, part of Saint-Jean-Vianney was struck off the map: a tremendous landslide carried in its wake houses, streets, streetlamps, cars, and inhabitants. At dawn, emergency workers couldn’t believe their eyes: the spring sun was lighting up a crater thirty metres deep and some two kilometres long. People told of hearing
