A June night, age nineteen.

It is warm and cool on the Plains. The heat soaked up by the earth that day hovers in the grass just above the ground; the night air carries smells of the river below, grey and silent, scents that speak of whales, eels and starfish.

We run, out of breath, not watching where we step. There is nowhere to go, just the sky overhead. Cap Diamant nearby, with roots of the trees clinging to the cliffs, afraid of tumbling into the abyss. There is something foreign yet familiar about having you by my side. For years, you have been passing through my life; like a comet, disappearing as quickly as you come.

(Was it before or after the Plains? A different year? We were sitting on the ramparts facing the river, watching night fade to dawn. Everything was powder grey: the steeples, the domes and the slim towers of the Petit Séminaire behind us, the Château Frontenac perched on the rock like the woman bending over a well on the bank before us.

We didn’t say anything. Try as I might, I can’t remember any of our conversations. Our intimacy was beyond words – we were no fools. Ghosts of the Carignan-Salières Regiment marched along the cobbles of the rue des Remparts, bayonets in hand. They were going to throw their bones in the river.

My heart had been broken. And you, who did you love? Boys or girls? Or just books and chess? An extraordinary age of discovery, where everything happens for the first time. This is true of men, women and countries. Others talk about you as one would talk about a figure or a character: sorcerer, angel, ogre. Their perspectives obscure as much as they illuminate. A series of eclipses. You are the sort of person who can be invented.

What I know: you like silence. Your gestures have a quietness that gives your movements the appearance of ritual, simple and solemn. Your pale fingers hovering over the bishop on a chessboard, rolling tobacco into a slim cigarette, stroking a cat whose eyes are half closed. Some people know how to find water, or gold; you know how to find calm. There is always something around you that feels like a drowsiness – a slow waking.)

I don’t know what you see in me. It may be that I distract you. Or you don’t understand me and that pleases you; you like what eludes you. I’ve been told that I run fast, but this evening I fly.

We run together, and suddenly I am overcome by a dizzy spell. The night swallows me; I’m going to fall and rather than trying to steady myself, I stick out my foot so that you fall with me. Together we tumble into the grass, a spill that lasts a thousand years.

We lie side by side in the middle of the dark battlefield. You have a throaty laugh, and I have long wondered whether it was mocking or joyful. This evening, it is a gentle cascade rising up to the sky.

Did you kiss me? I don’t remember. My lips taste like tobacco and vodka served ice cold in a big, clear glass. Your chest rises and falls as you try to catch your breath. My head in the hollow of your shoulder rises and falls in time. On the other bank, a thousand lights shine from the refinery, a twinkling castle, deserted and golden, turrets breathing fire. The stars in the sky are like grains of sand on the edge of a dark sea. The earth under our backs is warm, having soaked up the blood of Wolfe and Montcalm, their men and their horses.

I don’t remember getting up. I am still lying there, by your side, on the bank of the great river, between the dead and the stars. I am still running. I am still falling.

Photograph © National Film Board of Canada, Wolfe and Montcalm, dirigé par Allan Wargon, 1957

To read this text in French, please visit granta.com/le-champ-de-bataille/