From diary January 1 1987
Quebec City
Last revision
March 2 2008
A friend told me on
the phone that she might go to the Hobbit around ten in the evening. I
arrived at 10:15 and she wasn’t there. I decided to stay in case she
should still be
coming.
As I was drinking
my espresso allongé an older
man came in, who looked more or less like a street person, un clochard. He sat heavily down
at the table behind me, across from a young woman. The woman left
presently, possibly because of him.
The man tapped me
on the shoulder and asked for a light. He looked more or less drunk, his
breath smelled of alcohol. You could see he needed company.
Depending on my
mood I might easily have brushed off this uninvited guest as rudely as
necessary. But as it was I let him talk, I even encouraged him with
occasional replies.
When he was young
he had studied painting, he was a painter. Then he had studied
administration and psychology. Later he went into the Canadian army, for
three years. He was sent to
Korea, the Korean War.
Already an officer, they had sent him there to train soldiers, or so he
claimed.
Later he came to be a
socialist, a communist, and he joined the FLQ, the Front de Libération du Québec.
Korea would have been in the
1950s, and the FLQ in the 1960s, I would guess.
I was
watching him: in spite of no longer being a young man, his body was lean
and tough; and his eyes were intelligent, sensitive, even intense, in
spite of the drinking.
We
were interrupted by the waiter’s arrival. The old man ordered a coffee.
Before even going to prepare it, the waiter asked him for the dollar
twenty-five in advance. He also angrily reprimanded the man for having
butted out a cigarette on the floor, and threatened to kick him out if
he did it again.
The
old man was pained, he looked at the floor. When the waiter was gone,
his eyes narrowed and reddened, tears came, and he cursed quietly but
passionately.
His
parents had died when he was young, he had never married, and now he had
neither friends nor family. He didn’t tell me that until I asked, and
when I did he answered circumspectly.
He
said he hates the English, les
anglais, meaning English Canadians no doubt, but that he couldn’t be
angry with me because I had responded to him with kindness, and because
by my eyes he could see that I respected him.
“I
taught men to fight in Korea, but they were not
asked to think; I taught them to use their bodies. You may have more
instruction than I, and are as intelligent as I am, but you haven’t
lived through hard times, and you are much younger. I know how to go
without food, and I know how to fight – physically, but also to fight
for truth.
I
could teach you; I could teach you because though you have knowledge of
life, you lack experience. In my teaching I would sometimes be hard,
rough, physically demanding. But a student needs three qualities :
intelligence, sensitivity, and physical endurance. You are not
physical.”
I
suppose he was being nostalgic for the days of his prime when he had
taught soldiers to fight in Korea. I declined to accept
his offer by way of silence.
But
of everything he told me it is this I will probably remember the longest
:
“What
a man needs is to be able to sleep soundly. He only needs a smile, even
the smile of a stranger, to take with him, and then he can go home and
sleep.”
I
wondered if that might be the definition of this period of his
life.
Finally we left the cafe together, or rather he walked out
while I was paying, for as I mentioned he had already paid. When I
stepped outside onto rue St-Jean, in the quartier St-Jean Baptiste, the
winter night was very mild, and there was a haze, through which glowed
the amber-coloured streetlights.
I
looked around, the man had somehow already disappeared, though he had
left the cafe only a moment before me.
I
started off in the direction of the old part of the city, le Vieux Québec, but when I’d
gone some fifty paces I turned suddenly around to look. I thought I’d
heard a call but I wasn’t sure.
It
was him at a distance, a tall silhouette on the sidewalk, blurred by the
night and the mist. He raised his arm in farewell, kept it there a few
moments, and I answered in kind. His name was Raymond. He had asked me
not to forget his name, nor his face.