by Hubert Aquin
But I have better things to do than imagine what H. de Heutz is up to in Geneva while I wait in his chateau at Echandens, pacing the front hall and the predetermined zone of the grand salon; especially because picturing my adversary in another town won’t really prepare me for his suddenly bursting in. I’ve deluded myself enough about his machinations up till now. With him you never know. Consequently, I need to convince myself that H. de Heutz is totally unpredictable; then I’ll be better able to welcome him appropriately than if I spent my time dreamily, running him through the rather faulty grid of my hunches. I will sense only an infinitesimal part of his power. His epiphanies are disconcerting and they invariably catch me unawares. The impression he makes on me neutralizes my ability to counter-attack. Steeped in improbability, H. de Heutz is surrounded by witchcraft and mystery. The holstered gun on his chest is just a formality: his real strength comes from a secret weapon that in the final analysis may be only a counter-feint. The warrior set into the roundel of the Louis XIII buffet has no armour but his beauty, and presenting himself naked to his enemy may be his greatest strength. The relationship between H. de Heutz and me has left me pensive ever since of my own accord I let myself into this fine lair where he lives.
For the time being I won’t allow myself to investigate the two upper floors. Something tells me though that if I were to carry out a scientific search instead of the hasty examination I made when I first came in, I’d come across a whole arsenal of documents, maybe even photos of his wife and his two boys, books on Roman history too, the last shreds of correspondence with unknown women who sign their love letters with just an initial. To tell the truth, though, that’s all I would find. As for the evidence of his counter-revolutionary activities, the plausible testimonies of his collusion with the RCMP, and his secret banking activities in Switzerland – those exhibits I certainly wouldn’t find. I know H. de Heutz too well. With him, every revealing document is probably encoded with the Villerège grid and a counter-code, so that when the two were combined they’d be totally illegible. I wouldn’t find a thing – not the initials of the mounted police or the logo of the CIA or a hint of any records of a bank account where the numerical weapons of our revolution are piling up! On the other hand, it would be pointless, a waste of energy, for me to decode the plan of the Roman fortifications for the battle of Lerida or the inventory of the funerary furniture of the pontifex maximus. Such an exhumation of dates and names would get me nowhere and would only add to the nonsensical impression I get from anything having to do with this man.
My watch has stopped at three-fifteen, though I’m sure it’s much later, even if I judge only by the fading daylight I see through the French doors. Here I am in the heart of Switzerland without a clock! How can I find out what time it is? It’s important because I don’t want to miss my appointment on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Bah, I can just pick up the phone in the hall and ask the operator. Then again, maybe I’d better not. You never know. The phone may be connected to a switchboard God knows where. I’d be sounding the alarm to H. de Heutz’s command centre. You can never be too careful, especially nowadays when the phone system has become a veritable public square.
I don’t know what’s going on inside me. Suddenly I’m soaked in sweat. I have an insane urge to explode, to howl at the wolves and to kick at the panelled walls. An unbearable anguish is gripping me: the time that separates me from my sentence is exhausting and infuriating. All my strength pours from my mouth in a haemorrhage of blasphemy and cries. And why must I suffer such upsets in the face of the preposterous void I’m no longer able to confront? I’m a prisoner here! Yet I slipped into this walled splendour of my own accord: I entered here as a masked killer. Now I’m suddenly afraid that I’ll never get out, that all the doors are closed forever. My own future is a throbbing pain. I’m haunted not by passive melancholy but by rage, a rage that is mad, absolute, sudden, almost without an object! I want to strike out at random, fire a bullet into the naked warrior, and empty the rest of the cylinder into the lower tier of the Louis XIII buffet. It seems to me that such violence would be soothing: any violence, any shot whatsoever, any feat that would lead to an emotional release! To kill! Kill arbitrarily and without hesitation. I’m beside myself. I feel I’ll never be able to leave this place. And while the luminous afternoon is slanting towards the Barre des Écrins, I am confined inside with my funerary furniture. H. de Heutz isn’t here yet, but time is passing! Soon – but when, exactly? – it will be time to join K. I have to keep that appointment, for I don’t have the strength to face the void that awaits me unless I see K again. Suddenly my whole life is faltering on the big hand of a clock, and I don’t even know what time it is! I feel I’ll collapse if I’m not within sight of the Hôtel d’Angleterre at half-past six.
Perhaps I’m stuck here for the whole weekend, truly trapped inside an embellished dungeon cell, unable to escape. I can’t be! I refuse to go on living and suffering such outbursts of fury. I’m afraid. I come up with a thousand reasons to calm down but they don’t comfort me. I’m afraid because I am alone and abandoned. No one comes to me, no one can reach me. Indeed, does anyone even know that I’m in this chateau, armed and with a mandate to kill a man even if I have to wait for him indefinitely? Walls go up around my body, shackles inhibit my movements and grip my heart: I’ve become a revolutionary doomed to sadness and to the useless explosion of childish rage. My destiny, wrapped in a damask cloth and covered with imaginary furniture, is pitilessly closing in on me. It’s horrible to feel destitute in an echoing chateau like this after only a few hours of giddiness, but for how many minutes and centuries yet to come? My strength is gone. And so my entire existence was built on this flimsy base. I’m disintegrating into scattered splinters, shivering at the disastrous passing of time and of my power. I have no resources in this gallery of dreamlike emblems. Nothing ties me any longer to the person who haunts this house. I’m waiting. Ah! I’d sell my soul to know when this waiting will end, to know the precise moment when I can escape from here in a triumphant cloud of dust and get the blue Opel on the road to the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The void that surrounds me seems to emanate from my own shattered existence. The revolution has devoured me. Nothing lives on in me except my expectations and my weariness. Let it come! Let it not leave me alone with myself inside this unfathomable chateau! Yes, let the event fill me once again, let it replace my fatigue … I want to live thunderstruck, with no respite or a single minute of silence! To bring forth the tumult, to fill myself with war and conspiracy, to be consumed in the endless preparations for a battle: that will be my future!
In this space burdened with memories of H. de Heutz, I am prey to a flood of emotion that fills me with terror and takes me back to childhood. Under the assault of this shadowy discharge I cease to be a man. Ancient tears will pour from my eyes. Three days of seclusion in a totemic motel have not drained all the tears from my body. My failures haven’t hardened me. Only the fiery progress of the revolution will beget me anew. Soon, at half-past six, deep in the alpine valley, the revolution will take me to the woman I love. It’s the revolution that united us in a gigantic bed above the natal river, then reunited us after a twelve-month separation in a room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre … Ah, I can’t take any more of this dark museum where I’m only hanging on, a warrior naked and perplexed. With a heavy heart I wait for H. de Heutz. The banking memory cracks and melts into the blackness of tears. Finally, the act so eagerly anticipated seems impossible. Violence has broken me before I’ve had time to commit it. I have no more energy; my own desolation crushes me. I am dying without style, like my brothers at Saint-Eustache. I am a defeated people marching in disorder along the streets that run beneath our bed …
How can I grasp the cold wind that is numbing me, how can I name the ill-defined pain that makes me falter? My love, my own! I’m afraid I won’t get to the end; I’m weakening. You’ll hate me if you learn about my weakness, but here it is all the same, the unavoidable fa
ce of my cowardice! I don’t have the heart for it. The uncertain revolution is debasing me: I’m not the unworthy one, it’s she who is betraying me and abandoning me! Ah, let the event happen, let it generate the chaos that means life to me! Let the event burst, let it give the lie to my cowardice, let it open my eyes! Quickly, for I’m about to succumb to historic fatigue … I stay here, with no enemy or reason, far from the violence of the womb, far from the river’s dazzling shore. I need H. de Heutz. What will happen to me if he doesn’t come? When he’s not facing me, in person, I forget that I want to kill him and I no longer feel a blinding need for our endeavour. This interlude in a chateau will get the better of me in the end. The solitary act becomes clouded with the uncheckable progress of this wasted afternoon. No project resists the implacable dimming of expectation. What time is it? I still don’t know.
ONE ITEM IS missing from the murderous protocol that will take me back to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre: the body of H. de Heutz. Without it, I’m stranded in his chateau, which is anguish. Everything has to happen in this space cluttered with furniture, which I continue to explore. The door will open: the click of the lock will be my warning. Without knowing it, H. de Heutz will step onto our battlefield in this narrow zone that separates the place I’ll fire from and the threshold of the front door.
And what if H. de Heutz doesn’t come back? And what if the revolution never comes to overwhelm our lives? What would become of us then? And what would we have to tell each other at half-past six this evening on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre?
I wonder if I did the right thing in leaving for the Coppet woods first when I had H. de Heutz in front of me. It would have been wiser to go directly towards the middle of the wooded space. Then he wouldn’t have been tempted to escape: one move by him and I’d have fired. And afterwards I’d have been able to flee through the woods as far as the promontory, race down the path that brought me to this little square, then take the Grande-Rue to the Auberge des Émigrés, where I’ll have treated myself to an excellent lunch with white wines from Vaud and the Valais; even to celebrate my victory, I’d surely have prolonged the meal with two or three glasses of Williamine from the hills of Hérémence, very near to Evolène and the Valais chalet I dream of buying one day as a place to shelter our love. Clearly I was wrong to run away at the appearance of the blonde woman coming to the aid of H. de Heutz, who followed me throughout my journey from Echandens to Geneva and from Place Simon-Goulart to this small road that turns sharply after the Coppet chateau. There’s no doubt about it: I lost the initiative at that moment and that was when the time I’d gained earlier began to turn against me. The coordinates of the plot are tangled. I’ve dropped the thread of my story, and here I am in the middle of a chapter I don’t know how to finish.
Outside, the season is waning. In just one afternoon the whole summer is leaving, turning majestically towards the west. The sadness of the departing season mingles with my equivocation and weakens me. It’s not just the summer months that are racing towards the Grandes-Jorasses, but my own youth and our story that began one spring on the road from Acton Vale to Richmond, on our way to that secret rendezvous, when the declining sunlight brushed with a tragic glow the last vestiges of the snow that had fallen gently, when you and I fell into the first bed where we loved each other. The story of our country’s revolution is entangled with our desperate embraces and our nights of love. The first sparks of the FLQ united our lives. Together everywhere, naked but secretly united with our brothers in the revolution and in silence, it was amid the odour of gunpowder that we learned the exalted movements of the pleasures of the flesh and the terminal cry. A vast rifle range, our country’s snow-covered soil recounts our love to us. The impure names of our cities repeat the boundless conquest I learned once again when I conquered you, my love, with my imperfect, frenzied caresses and the games of death. Your native land gave birth to me, the revolutionary: upon your lyrical expanse I lie down and live. Deep in the darkness of your belly I strike, fainting with joy, and I find the warm and wounded land of our national invention. My love, you are my native soil I scoop up by the handful, dark elusive soil I make fertile, where I fight to the death, prideful inventor of an endless guerrilla war. On this Eastern Townships road between Acton Vale and Richmond, near Durham-sud and wherever we two have travelled – to Saint-Zotique-de-Kotska, to Les Éboulements, to Rimouski, to Sherbrooke, to La Malbaie for three days and three nights, to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Denis – never have we ceased preparing for the war of our liberation, joining our liberated intimacy to the terrible secret of our shattered nation, uniting armed violence with the violence of the hours we’ve spent loving each other. Entwined, dazzled, in a tormented country, we’ve tumbled, united inside a single kiss, from one end to the other of our snowy bed. From town to town we’ve sought not escape, but the absolute brotherhood of the revolution. Nor was it solitude that fed our passion, but the notion of a river of brothers marching nearby and preparing awkwardly for battle. The sound of their footsteps hammered at our passion and their sorrow made our bodies swell. While my fingers were creasing your dress, we listened to their manifold breathing. Our love, unfurling, traces the black calendar of the revolution that I’m anticipating madly, that I’m calling by your name! Our love is preparing for an insurrection, our nights of kisses and delirium are so many dazzling stages in the events to come. Even as we succumb to the spasm of the night, our brothers are struck down by the same sacrilegious event that joins our bodies in a lyrical synthesis.
WHILE THE SUN is slanting towards my deadline and the light in the valley is dwindling, I’m exhausted in the midst of the empty furniture and silence. I feel care-worn, almost inclined to petulance, for I’m far from the rolling countryside of Durham-sud and the twists and turns of the Saint-François River. I’m an exile from the Nation and my life. I travel through the vast museum of my clandestine existence, far from the declaration of independence of Lower Canada and of the fertile plain that stretches between Saint-Charles and Saint-Ours, far, too far from highway 22 where we drove by night in the driving rain. From where I am I do not hear the bouzoukis on Prince Arthur Street or the West Indian band from Pointe-Claire. Nor do I see the snow that still falls on our childhood, in the same way that it shrouds eternally the Aiguilles Rouges and the dark Dents du Midi.
The duel to the death between two lacquer warriors has suddenly taken on the tawny shade of fear. The surface they cover is strewn with funereal highlights. Ferragus’s double lives here. This artfully engraved furniture, these caskets carved or covered with marquetry, and “The Death of General Wolfe,” all suggest the fearsome identity of the master of the premises. The man who lives in the tomblike splendour of this home, who knows the code of the ex libris in the History of Caesar and the riddle in which I wrap myself – that man gets away from me time and again. The author of this cryptogram of false meetings and ambiguities is looking for me even harder than I’ve been pursuing him. A murky obsession draws me into its transience. While he seeks me out, I slip my weapon inside his armour: I uncover his bare flank and his smooth warrior’s skin. It is his very skin I touch with my feverish fingers when I brush the Genoese velvet that clothes the indecent texture of his real presence, revealed to me by the veiled surface of the naked warrior. According to some new measurements, our encounter, so often avoided, is making progress. The more he eludes me, the more I approach him. And if the plain on which we’re moving seems to grow bigger between the Arve and the Sarine, the site for our next meeting is concentrated between the Henri II credenza and the Dutch door, a veritable battlefield lined on the south by the big Italian armoire and the lacquer chest of drawers, and on the north by the picture rail that runs along the vestibule from the front door to the dropped ceiling at the open door that leads to the garage through which I’ll leave. Since last night I’ve been pursuing H. de Heutz. I finally feel that I’m about to face him again. I stay here in his officer’s chair at the very centre of his ex
istence; secretly I’ve become part of him, joining myself indistinctly to the warriors who cover his furniture and to General Wolfe who is dying across from the city of Quebec.
He’s here! The muffled humming of a car, the crunch of gravel in the entrance – it’s him! From my surveillance point behind the peep-hole, I can make out the rear end of a grey car with a Zurich plate. In fact, I’ve arrived too late to see the car drive onto the chateau grounds, but never mind. This is not the time to start questioning everything. I swing into action; I cross the vestibule to get back to my point of attack. I squeeze the butt of the revolver in my belt. And now I am leaning against the cold wall of the chateau, my shoulder level with a bunch of grapes carved in high relief on the credenza which hides me completely. Soon H. de Heutz will open the Dutch door. On my right I see the garage door that will give me instant access to the instrument of my escape. The time has come. No sound yet to indicate that H. de Heutz is at the porch. I hear absolutely nothing, and I’m not indifferent to that. I should have put my ear against the keyhole: then I could have heard what was going on outside; perhaps I’d have even been able to tilt the upper half of the door to hear clearly the premonitory sounds of the enemy bursting into the range of my weapon. But I’ve stopped moving. My fingertips are icy from the frantic throbbing of blood in my temples. Not a single movement or sound, not even that of my own breathing. All is silence. Expectation keeps me shuddering and upright. Very slowly I take the 45 from its improvised holster. Moving precisely, I bring it up to my chest, the barrel pointed at the antique wooden grapes. I release the safety and now I just have to wait a few more seconds. I have no intention of trying to stay hidden to fire at H. de Heutz, for my position behind the credenza doesn’t guarantee effectiveness. I’ll spring from my hiding place and take advantage of his surprise to solidify my attack position, steadying my armed hand with my outstretched left fist held perfectly parallel to my shooting arm. Ultimately, I’ll have to concentrate on my aim, think of nothing but my target, and not worry about fending off a counter-strike that H. de Heutz won’t have time for.