by Hubert Aquin
BETWEEN JULY 26, 1960 and August 4, 1792, halfway between two liberations, while I worm my way, coated in a light alloy, into a novel being written in Lausanne, I’m anxiously looking for a man who left the Lausanne Palace after shaking hands with Hamidou Diop. I slipped into the hotel lobby without attracting Hamidou’s attention. Executing a paso doble, I was outside the hotel a fraction of a second later, in time to see a 300SL drive off towards Place Saint-François. Something told me that this fleeting silhouette didn’t pop out of the Senegalese Sahel and that Hamidou is playing a double game. In any case, it’s pointless to ask him to identify the man he was speaking to, or tell him about my own rash suspicions. The handsome African is more cunning than a Chinese. With his unbridled loquacity and his athletic negritude, he masks all too successfully both his wiles and his awe-inspiring intelligence.
During these reflections on my hero’s subtle duplicity, I walked slowly up the rue de Bourg and went inside the movie theatre on Place Benjamin Constant to see Black Orpheus again. Listening to “Felicidade,” I started to cry. I don’t know why that song of happiness spells melancholy to me or why that fragile joy was translated for me into lugubrious chords. So nothing can stop me from calling to my black Eurydice, from searching for her in the never-ending night, shadow among the shadows of a dark carnival, a night darker than a night of saturnalia, a night sweeter than the one we spent together somewhere in her native tropics one June 24. Eurydice, I am descending. I’m here, at last. By writing to you I shall touch you, black shadow, black magic, love. The Benjamin Constant theatre is a free fall for me. This very evening, a few miles from the Hôtel de la Paix, headquarters of the FLN, a few steps from the Montreal Prison, dark headquarters of the FLQ, no sooner do I brush against your blazing body than it’s lost to me; I piece you together again but words fail me. The historic night seems to be secreting the India ink in which I can make out too many fleeting forms that resemble you but aren’t you. At the end of my liquid decadence, I’ll touch the low land, our bed of caresses and convulsions. My love … I feel giddy. In fact I’m afraid of every silhouette, of my neighbours in the theatre, of the stranger who conceals Eurydice’s mulatto profile from me, of the people waiting on the sidewalk when I leave the theatre.
I hurried through this dense crowd and crossed Place Benjamin Constant. And as I walked past the illuminated front of the Hôtel de la Paix, I looked in the other direction at the jagged profile of the Savoy Alps and the mottled expanse of the lake. Eleven-fifteen. I’d wasted my day. Now I had nothing to do, no one to meet, no hope of finding the man Hamidou had shaken hands with in the lobby of the Lausanne Palace. Nonchalantly, I went back to the hotel. I was given the key to my room and a sealed blue paper. I tore it open quickly, and understanding nothing of what was written on it, I stuffed it into my pocket so I wouldn’t attract the elevator boy’s attention. As soon as I was in my room I lay down on the bed and reread the formless jumble of capital letters with no spaces: CINBEUPERFLEUDIARUNCOBESCUBEREBES-CUAZURANOCTIVAGUS. This one-word cryptogram had me perplexed for a few minutes; then I decided to perform an alphabetical statistical analysis, which gave me: E 7 times; U 7; R 5; B, A, and C 4 times; S 3; I 3; O 2; G 2; P, F, L, V, and Z one time only. The blatant predominance of the letter U was mystifying. I know of no language in which that vowel is so predominant. Not even in Portuguese and Romanian, though they’re rife with U’s, does that letter so outweigh the other vowels.
The cryptogram from the Hôtel de la Paix still fascinates me, not only because of its mysterious origin (which has nothing to do with the Bureau, whose figures and even their variants I know by heart), but also because of why the message was sent. As I stumbled over this equation with its multiple unknowns I must solve before I go any further in my story, I have the feeling I’m facing the most impenetrable mystery of all. The more I circle it and target it, the further it moves beyond my grasp, multiplying my own riddle tenfold even as I step up my efforts to grasp it. I simply don’t seem able to decipher the code, and since I can’t translate it into my language, I write it down in the insane hope that by paraphrasing the nameless, I’ll finally give it a name. Yet even though I cover this hieroglyph with words, it gets away from me and I’m left behind on the other shore, surrounded by vagueness and hope. Crowded inside my closed sphere, I descend, compressed, to the bottom of Lac Léman, and I can’t step outside the flowing themes that constitute the thread of the plot. I’ve closed myself inside a constellate system that has imprisoned me in strictly literary terms, so much so that this stylistic sequestration seems to confirm the validity of the symbol I’ve used from the outset: diving. Encased in my funerary barque and my repertoire of images, I have only to continue drowning through words. Descending is my future, diving my sole activity and my profession. I drown. I become Ophelia in the Rhône. My long manuscript tresses mingle with water plants and invariable adverbs while I glide, variable, between the two long jagged shores of the cisalpine river. And so duly coffered inside my metallic concept, certain that I won’t get out but uncertain as to whether I’ll live for a long time, I have just one thing to do: open my eyes, look at this flooded world, pursue the man I’m looking for and kill him.
Kill! What a splendid law, one it’s sometimes good to comply with. For months now I’ve been preparing myself inwardly for killing in cold blood and with maximum precision. On that rainy Sunday morning I was secretly preparing to strike. My heart was beating steadily, my mind was clear, agile, precise as a weapon has to be. The months and months that had gone before had genuinely transformed me. And it was with an acute sense of the gravity of my effort and with reflexes perfectly trained that I was inaugurating this black wedding day. Suddenly, around half-past ten, the break occurred. Arrest, handcuffs, interrogation, disarmament. An unqualified disaster, this trite accident that earned me nothing but a stay in jail is an anti-dialectical event and the flagrant contradiction of the undeclared plan I was going to carry out, weapon in hand, in the purifying euphoria of fanaticism. Killing confers a style on one’s existence. And the prospect of it, when shamefully introduced into everyday life, injects it with the energy it needs to avoid feeble crawling and endless boredom. After my trial and my liberation I can’t imagine my life outside the homicide axis. Already I’m bursting with impatience at the thought of the multiple attack, a pure and shattering act that will restore my appetite for life and establish me as a terrorist in the strictest privacy. And that violence will bring order back to my life, because it seems to me that, for thirty-four years now, I’ve only lived the way that grass lives. If I were to make a quick tally of kisses given, of my powerful emotions, of my nights of wonder, of my luminous days, of the privileged hours and the great discoveries I have yet to make; and if I were to add up over an infinity of perforated postcards the cities I’ve passed through, the hotels where I’ve had a good meal or a night of love, the number of my friends and of the women I’ve betrayed, to what sombre inventory would these irregular operations lead me? The sine curve of real-life experience doesn’t translate the ancient hope. I’ve perverted my life line repeatedly and obtained less happiness through an accumulation of indignities, which has led me to give back less than nothing of it. Before this inborn statistic that suddenly and wearily haunts me, I can imagine nothing better than to continue writing on this sheet of paper and to plunge hopelessly into the ghostly lake that’s flooding into me. To descend word by word into my memory pit, to invent other companions who already perturb me, leading me into a knot of wrong tracks and, finally, to go into exile once and for all outside my botched country.
Between a certain July 26 and the Amazonian night of August 4, somewhere between the Montreal Prison and my point of fall, I decline silently, under house arrest and beneath the wing of Viennese psychiatry; my morale is low and I concede the obvious: that this breakdown is my way of existing. For years I’ve lived flattened with fury. I’ve accustomed my friends to an intolerable voltage, to a waste of sparks and short circuits. To spit
fire, to cheat death, to be resurrected a hundred times, to run a mile in less than four minutes, to introduce a flame-thrower into the dialectic and suicidal behaviour into politics – that’s how I’ve established my style. I have struck my currency amid the image of a flabby übermensch. A pirate set free in a misty pond, covered by a Colt 38 and injected with intoxicating syringes, I’m a prisoner, a terrorist, an anarchist, and an undeniably washed-up revolutionary! With my gun at my hip, always ready for a lightning shot at ghosts, never pulling my punches and with a heavy heart, I’m the hero, the former addict! National leader of an unknown people! I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its fractured reflection and its suicidal incarnation. Since the age of fifteen I’ve always wanted a fine suicide: under the snow-covered ice of Lac du Diable, in the northern waters of the St. Lawrence estuary, in a room at the Windsor Hotel with a woman I loved, in the car that was crushed last winter, in the little bottle of Beta-Chlor 500 mg, in the bed of the Totem, in the ravines of the Grande-Casse and the Tower of Aï, in my cell number CG19, in the words I learned at school, in my throat choked with emotion, in my ungrasped jugular gushing blood! To commit suicide everywhere, with no respite – that is my mission. Within myself, explosive and depressed, an entire nation grovels historically and recounts its lost childhood in bursts of stammered words and scriptural raving, and then, under the dark shock of lucidity, suddenly begins to weep at the enormity of the disaster, at the nearly sublime scope of its failure. There comes a time, after two centuries of conquest and thirty-four years of confusional sorrow, when one no longer has the strength to go beyond the appalling vision. Shut away inside the Institute walls and outfitted with the file of a terrorist who suffers ghostly maniacal phases, I give in to the vertiginous act of writing my memoirs and I start writing up the precise and meticulous proceedings of an unending suicide. There comes a time when fatigue erodes even unassailable plans and the novel one has begun unsystematically to write is diluted in equanitrate. The wages of the broken warrior are depression. The wages of our national depression are my own failure; it’s my childhood on an ice floe, it’s also the years of hibernation in Paris and the fall I took while skiing at the Totem into four sets of arms. The wages of my ethnic neurosis are the impact of the monocoque and the sheets of steel launched against an unshakable ton of obstacles. From now on I’m exempt from acting coherently and released once and for all from making a success of my life. If I wanted to I could end my days in the muffled torpor of an anhistoric institute, sit indefinitely before ten windows that display unequal portions of a conquered land and await the final judgement when, given the psychiatric evaluation and the extenuating circumstances, surely I’ll be acquitted.
And so provided with a legal file and its psychiatric appendix, I can dedicate myself to writing page after page of abolished words laid out in accordance with harmonies that are always pleasant to experience, even though if worse came to worse that could seem like work. But this carefully dosed effort is neither harmful nor contra-indicated, as long as the periods of writing are brief, of course, and followed by periods of rest. Nothing stops the politically depressed from conferring an aesthetic colouring on this verbal secretion; nothing prevents him from transferring to this improvised work the meaning that his own existence lacks, that is absent from his country’s future. Yet there’s something desperate about this investment of spare funds. It’s terrible and I can’t hide it from myself any longer: I am desperate. No one had told me that in becoming a patriot I’d be cast into adversity like this or that because I wanted freedom, I’d find myself locked up. How many seconds of dread, how many centuries of impotence must I live before I merit the final embrace of a white sheet? Nothing leads me to believe that a new and wonderful life will replace this one. Condemned to the dark, I hit the walls of a dungeon cell that finally, after thirty-four years of lies, I inhabit fully and in all humiliation. I am a prisoner of my madness, locked up inside my probationary helplessness, crouching over a piece of paper as white as a sheet with which one hangs oneself.
BETWEEN CUBA’S July 26 and the lyric night of August 4, between Place de la Riponne and the pizzeria on Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville in Lausanne, I met a blonde woman whose majestic stride I recognized at once. The happiness I felt just then echoes in me still as I sit at a table in this pizzeria – meeting-place for the masons of Tessin – and give in to the sadness that’s been numbing me progressively ever since I left my hotel, where all I did was spend some unproductive minutes after I’d gone to the Benjamin Constant movie theatre. In this pizzeria I ran aground.
And when the jukebox gave off the first chords of “Desafinado” for the third time, I’d had all the nostalgia I could take. To the rhythm of Afro-Brazilian guitars I got up and paid my bill. And here I am again in that earlier night, constricted once more in the vise of the rue des Escaliers-du-Marché, which I climb as if this slope could offset my inner fall. It’s a few steps from Place de la Riponne and it was while I was making my way there that I spotted K’s leonine mane. I speeded up and was soon beside her, very close to her face, which was turned away. I was afraid my sudden approach would frighten her and so, acting quickly to avert a misunderstanding, I spoke her name with an inflection I was sure she’d recognize. And it was then that the wonderful event, our reunion, occurred, as the two of us were approaching the grand esplanade of Place de la Riponne. We’d turned left after the dark colonnade of the university and the blinding happiness of our reunion. I don’t remember what route we followed next or what dark streets we strolled, K and I, before stopping for a moment on the great bridge just above the Gazette de Lausanne facing the dark mass of the cantonal government building that hid Lac Léman and the spectre of the Alps. Twelve months of separation, of misunderstandings and censorship, were ended magically by this coincidence: a few words relearned, the light touch of our bodies, their new expectations. Twelve months of lost love and lassitude were eradicated by the bliss of this unexpected encounter and our fierce love; we were carried away again towards the upper valley of the Nile, drifting voluptuously between Montreal and Toronto, between Queen Mary Road and the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery, from our lyric rooms at the Polytechnical Institute to our fleeting encounters in Pointe-Claire, some time between a violent July 26 and a funereal August 4, twofold anniversary of a twofold revolution: one that began dangerously and the other, secret, that arose from our kisses and our sacrileges.
Our life could be summed up by some sad and voluptuous oaths exchanged one rainy evening in a car parked near the barracks on Île Sainte-Hélène. Before I met you I was writing an endless poem. Then one day I shuddered, knowing you were naked under your clothes; you talked but I only remember your mouth. You talked as you waited, while I simply waited. We were standing, your hair was tangled with an etching of Venice by Clarence Gagnon. That was how I saw Venice, over your shoulder, drowned in your brown eyes while I held you close. I don’t need to go to Venice to know that the city resembles your head thrown back against the living-room wall while I held you. Your languor led me to our forbidden embrace, your great dark eyes to your damp hands that searched for my truth. Who are you if not the ultimate woman who sways to the rhythms of desire and my veiled caresses? The seeds of our revolutionary plans were sown in our apostatized pleasure. And now, on a midsummer night, somewhere between old Lausanne and its medieval port, on the median line that separates two days and two bodies, we rediscover our old reason for living and wishing for death a thousand times rather than face up to the cruel separation whose sudden end flooded us with joy.
We walked till late that night, till the entire Rhône valley was filled with sun, and little by little the old port of Ouchy rang out with the sound of motors and work, and the waiters set out the chairs on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre where, during a single night in the beautiful summer of 1816, Byron wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon.” We had breakfast at a table on the hotel terrace, silent beside the liquid mirror still veiled by a hazy breath.
After a twelve-month separation, after twelve times measuring the impossibility of living one more month, after a night spent walking from Place de la Riponne to the ancient lake, at the first hour of dawn we went up to a room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre, perhaps the one where Byron sang of Bonnivard, who had once foundered in a cell in the Château de Chillon. K and I, drenched in the same flood of sorrow, lay down naked between cool sheets, annihilated voluptuously by one another in the timely splendour of our poem and the dawn. Again tonight I’m shattered by our blinding embrace, by the incantatory shock of our two bodies, and now, at the end of this blazing dawn, I’m alone on a blank page where I no longer breathe the warm breath of a fair-haired stranger, where I no longer feel her weight that attracts me according to a Copernican system, where I no longer see her amber skin or her tireless lips or her sylvan eyes, where I don’t hear the pure song of her pleasure. Alone now in my paginated bed, I ache as I remember that lost time now regained, spent naked in the secret profusion of the pleasures of the flesh.
The swaying rhythms of “Desafinado,” which burst unexpectedly from the Multivox, raise me up to the level of the bitter lake where I rediscovered the dawn of your body in one overwhelming embrace. They take me to your membranous shore where it would have been better to die because I’m dying now. The weather that morning was fine, it marked the exalted union of two days and our two bodies. Yes, it was absolute dawn, between a July 26 that evaporated above the lake and the immanent night of the revolution. The burden of words inside me doesn’t stop the clear stream of time past from cascading into the lake. Past time now passes again, even more quickly than it did that morning in our room at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, with its view of the vanished glacier of Galenstock which descended one day to the very spot on the hotel terrace where K and I sat at dawn. Vanished glacier, vanished love, fleeting interglacial dawn, a kiss that has fled to the far shore, far from the misty window of my bathyscaphe that dives beneath the window where Byron wept in his stanzas to Bonnivard and I in the golden tresses of the woman I love.