were with him as well.
Unable to tear himself away from the television, Antoine follows all the coverage, zaps, looks at the same item ten times over. As he is on vacation, he can spend all his time living the event live. The CNN reporters encourage him to do it by showing non-stop the same images, the same archival photos that mark the milestones in John-John’s exemplary life. The prince of America is one of those who are crowned with a tragic destiny, as if beauty, wealth, glory, when fused in one individual, emerged directly from the thigh of fate.
After a few days, Antoine has spent all his capital of sympathy for the victims and their families and friends. Zapping from one network to another, he compares the different ways of covering the event. This outrageous media coverage of death exposes the pathological state in which society maintains its members. The vulture in this story is also him, especially him, sitting comfortably, his hand lengthened by a TV remote. Sweating bullets, fused with the leather of his armchair, he is revelling in the bad luck of others. He is in this state of accepted intellectual sloth when he learns that after a five-day search, the Piper Saratoga has been found, and learns in the same news bulletin of the suicide of Félix Maltais.
His death also makes the news.
Félix, whom he hasn’t thought about for a good thirty years. He has immolated himself on a tiny island, scarcely a few trees. A rock, in fact. He set fire to the island. Waited for the flames to devour the spruce trees and, along with them, his body. The fire was extinguished on its own, leaving a ring of grey ash in the middle of a blue lake.
They had once been very close. Life came between them. Antoine forgot him. Nothing simpler than to delete from our lives people who have mattered deeply to us. The news drags him out of his televisual lethargy. He pulls on his sandals, goes out to buy the papers. Walking rapidly, he has the impression that he is sowing the thoughts taking shape within him.
Ever since the JFK Junior episode, along with the local and national papers he has been buying some American ones. He thinks it’s ridiculous to join in that binge of paper and ink where ads and stupidity chew up more and more space every day. He assigns himself the role of scavenger in this American tragedy that, after all, is none of his business. Why be so upset at the death of John-John? He’s behaving like a character in a novel by his wife.
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.
Chapter 2
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 with no one the wiser. After that he moves to the magazine section. He’ll leaf through a few psychology and sociology periodicals which he manages to spot among the Paris Match and fashion and sports mags. Then he moves to the counter where cigarettes and chocolate bars are sold. The small bit of change in his pockets often forces him to buy cigarettes singly. At times, he leaves Tabagie 500 with two or three Caramilk, Aero, or Caravan chocolate bars, his favourites, hidden in his pockets.
That Friday, he arbitrarily stole Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
