by Hubert Aquin
But what can he be doing now? He’s had more than enough time to get from the grey car to the door but I’ve heard nothing. It’s too late to cross the vestibule again and take a look outside. If he were to catch me, I’d be thrown off balance, having lost the few fractions of a second that secure my advantage and without which I’d be much less certain that my aim was accurate. I have no second choice, ever since I’ve delimited this battlefield after analyzing the structure of the space. What time is it? All at once the air moves! He’s inside, but he hasn’t closed the door. He takes two steps. He still hasn’t shut the door; maybe he’s waiting for the other person. But why is he stopping? The crystalline ring of the telephone reassures me. Nothing has happened between us yet. As long as he’s on the phone, H. de Heutz won’t budge. If the other person doesn’t answer, I’ll make my move.
“Hello, is that you, my love? I’ve just arrived. It’s been an unbelievable day … You can’t imagine; I’ll tell you all about it later. What about you, any news?… You think I can trust him?… No, I’ve never seen him, I’m sure I haven’t. You know, I’d like to meet you and finalize this whole business, do you understand?… This evening then, soon: the time it will take me to get there. Let’s say half-past six on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre … But I absolutely have to see you: it’s urgent. I’m sure you can put off the other one or deal with it in a few minutes … Look: I’ll take a table near the orchestra, in any case he doesn’t know me. When you’re finished with him, you can join me … You have to understand. I can’t take any more, my love. This whole business is turning out very badly for me. I’m afraid; yes, I fear the worst … I absolutely have to see you later on … Look: above all, don’t forget the colour of the paper and the code, do you understand? You’ll find it in Stoffel’s account of the battle of Uxellodunum on page 218 … Now tell me: where are the children?”
THEN, NOTHING. The voice deepens in my memory while the wind from the Vaud blows in my hair and I wander alone around the Château d’Ouchy. Under the dark water of the lake, my near east is flowing towards the Montreal Prison. I linger on the enchanted shore. I look at the tiered streets of Lausanne that we covered from top to bottom one night, strolling from Place de la Riponne to the Quai d’Ouchy, down the paved rue des Escaliers-du-Marché that winds its way along one of the dried-up arms of the Thièle. The city is all lit up now; the other night its lights were doused in the augural dawn that poured from our bed. The Château d’Echandens is obliterated in the dark water as I stroll for the thousandth time along the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Little happened between my departure from H. de Heutz’s chateau and my arrival on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but late for my meeting with K. She’d gone. Now it is growing dark; an orchestra at the end of the terrace attacks the first chords of “Desafinado.” Groups of passersby stand on the sidewalk listening. I should add that the terrace is full to overflowing with customers. Once again I go up to some tables and look at all the faces, but they tell me nothing. K isn’t there, but I go back all the same, you never know, she might return. “Desafinado” makes me face up to the cruel facts: I’ve lost my love! And I don’t even know how to retrace her in Switzerland: perhaps she was due to leave tonight for Berne or Zurich. How can I reach her? I don’t know her cover or that of her office. I stand there in a daze, staring sadly at this carefree crowd and all the lovers whose knees brush under the tables: they have been able to find one another. There are a good many. I can’t help but see a wonderful beauty in them, merely because they’re together, whereas I’ve come here too late to meet the woman I held in my arms yesterday, as day was dawning behind the closed shutters that look out on the orchestra and the whole valley of the Rhône. Yes, it was in the room I’m gazing at now that we loved each other. And it was marvellous! K, naked and warm and lying beside me … Truly, we were beautiful, joined together, reunited at last after so many misunderstandings and wasted months. I’ve loved other women in the past, I’ve thought I loved them, but all my memories have merged in K’s blazing belly.
I stand near the terrace, my back to the Savoyard Alps that are displaced in the shadows, and I know that I’ve lost the woman I love. I have lived to meet her and I’m now dying pointlessly of love. Where are you, my love? Why did we separate after the incandescent dawn that burst from our embrace? Why, on the shore of the deferred lake, did we reinvent this revolution that broke us and then reunited us, that seems impossible to me this evening while I stand watch in this haunted crowd and the orchestra plays “Desafinado”? The underground revolution is breaking us once again in the depths of our exile here on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre that I love and where I live to infinity, like the poet who died at Missolonghi. You are so beautiful, my love, truly more beautiful than any of the women I stare at now, methodically. Your beauty bursts with power and joy. Your naked body tells me again that I was born for real life and that when I love, I desire frantically. Your blonde hair is like the dark river that flows at my back and surrounds me. I love you the way you appeared to me the other night when I was walking towards Place de la Riponne, complete and invincible, and I love you when you’re tumultuous, when you cry out our pleasure. I love you draped in black or scarlet, dressed in saffron, veiled in white, clad in words and transfigured by the dark shock of our two bodies. The wind from the Vaud that delicately tangles your blonde hair brings me the perfume of your flesh, but where are you? Does this secret wind come from the lake or from the hot plain of Echandens I’ve just come from, but too late? Ah, now that I’ve lost you, I’m delirious. I feel that I’m brushing against your damp flesh, that I’m drunk with your secret odour. I remember a long-distance call I made from the Lord Simcoe in Toronto, and in this funereal room where I’m a prisoner of nausea and terror, I feel threatened once again. Something has broken: the interruption has just occurred and I don’t know how to talk to you. I want to tell you: come, follow me, we’ll live together, but I have forty-eight dollars in my wallet, not even enough to buy you a one-way plane ticket to Toronto. Events overcome us, shattering me into a thousand pieces. I’m stammering in this bed at the Lord Simcoe. Toronto is sinking into Adriatic amnesia. You slip away and no one told me that one day in Lausanne … How many months will pass before I’m with you again, my love? To what city that I don’t yet know will the uncertain future exile us? The next time – but after how much renewed anguish, how many wasted nights? – perhaps I’ll meet you on Rashid Avenue in Babylon, or in the land of dear Hamidou (whom I’ve lost track of) in the Dakar medina, or under mosquito netting in the Hotel N’Gor; in Algiers perhaps, or in Carthage near Bourguiba’s presidential palace … Or perhaps I shall never meet you again.
I stand motionless in the midst of this wild crowd that awaits our dazzling appearance at the window of our room. But you’re not here … This evening I begin my life without you. Ever since I’ve known that I’ve lost you, I’ve been aging at a terrifying speed. My youth has taken flight with you: centuries and centuries are carved into my inert body. People are looking at me, no doubt because of the sudden erosion that’s stamped on my face, and maybe too because I’m crying. Our story is ending in me badly. It’s dark. Everything dies if I’ve lost you, my love. I walk through this happy crowd that exasperates me. It’s not you who abandoned me, it’s life. Surely it’s not you, is it? One can’t see anything on the lake: the absolute night shelters me and settles in between us irrevocably.
I am walking in this foreign country, a man who has just lost you after finding you again by chance, joyfully, on a street in Lausanne and in a romantic bed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. In the distance I hear the chords of “Desafinado” as I move away from the terrace of the Angleterre without even turning around. I no longer have a country, I’ve been forgotten. The torn Alps whose dark crenellations I can glimpse across the lake no longer bewitch me. The things we loved together have no meaning any more, not even life. Even the war, alas, since I’ve lost contact with your sovereign flesh, y
ou, my only country! Starting now, I am living a glacial night. I own nothing except a gun that’s become ridiculous and some memories that are rendering me harmless. Where are you, my love? Trees swollen with darkness stand around the Château d’Ouchy and along the wharf where we two strolled at nightfall. That was last night. In the distance I can make out the confused sound of discordant music and a laughing crowd. I did not kill H. de Heutz. In fact I wonder what overwhelming coincidence made him want to go to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre at half-past six, to meet a woman – the blonde, perhaps? – he talked to on the phone. But he’ll never keep that appointment. Unless he turns up late, like me. Because if I’ve lodged a bullet in his shoulder, he may have found a way to have it tended to, then get into the grey car with the Zurich plates and, driving with one hand, arrive in Ouchy. Perhaps at this very moment he’s pulling up at the noisy terrace I’ve just left.
That speculation disturbs me. I retrace my steps. If he’s there, I want to see him, but even more I want to see the unknown blonde woman he arranged to meet on the phone just before our exchange of gunfire. I quicken my pace. No doubt I’m returning in vain because the blonde woman got tired of waiting for H. de Heutz. She has gone. And so H. de Heutz too will be alone and won’t know what to do. The terrace is as lively as ever; passersby stop to listen to music that has no meaning for me. I go back to the Hôtel d’Angleterre once again with the unfounded hope of finding K, who may have come back to the terrace too in desperation, hoping my absence was merely a delay. Lovers stroll nonchalantly, arm in arm, along the lakeshore, projecting their own emotion onto the unfathomable landscape that fills me with desolation. I’m here on the sidewalk, on the same side as the hotels that look out on the lake. I go up to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, my heart pounding. I push aside the people who block my view. I look at all the faces. I scrutinize the back of the terrace. Just next to the orchestra I spy a blonde head. Who is it? Her face is hidden. She’s talking to a man, but he’s not H. de Heutz. I scan the overpopulated quadrilateral: every blonde woman attracts my attention, but none of them is you! It’s as if Lausanne only gives birth to blondes. I’ve never seen so many. But clearly, K isn’t here. I hope in vain; I die a thousand deaths whenever I spot a blonde head. Ah, I’ve always lived as I am living at this moment – at the outer limit of the intolerable … Tonight, all these blonde heads cause me pain because you’re not there and I’m looking for you desperately. I realize that it’s a waste of time: there’s no sign whatsoever of my earlier life on the enchanted terrace of this hotel. It’s as if I’d never come here with K, as if I’m surrendering to a fine hallucination, and the Hôtel d’Angleterre exists only in my devastated brain, like the Vaudois chateau where I spent my life waiting for a certain banker who’s interested in Caesar’s African wars and who abandoned his two sons in Liège so that he could rob all the banks in Switzerland! I rave in silence, surrounded by the din of this terrace crowded with people observing me as if I were an intruder. I decide to go to the hotel office. It’s hard to navigate through the tables, I keep stumbling and bumping into people.
The desk clerk recognizes me right away and favours me with a big grin.
“Here, Monsieur (and he remembers my name), there’s a message. The lady asked me to give it to you; she said you’d be dropping by.”
The clerk holds out a sealed blue envelope with no address.
“If you’d like a room for tonight, I can offer you one with a view of the lake, the same one you had yesterday. It’s free again.”
“No, thank you …”
“Goodbye, Monsieur …”
With trembling hands I open the blue envelope while I’m still in the lobby. I recognize K’s beautiful handwriting and I read her latest message: “The boss had an unexpected visitor this afternoon. Something incredible, I’ll tell you about it later. Bank transactions suddenly disrupted. I leave for the north tonight; the boss is going to visit friends on the Côte d’Azur. No matter how your approach to the bank president works out, I imagine you’ll go back to Montreal to see to our interests there. Come back. K.” As a postscript, she has added two lines: “Hamidou D. sends his regards. It’s a small world …”
VERY LITTLE time passed between my solitary stroll along the shore of Lac Léman and my arrest in Montreal in the middle of summer. After I read K’s message, everything came in a rush in disorderly succession: my departure from Lausanne, the firing of the four Rolls-Royce engines of the Swissair DC-8, the flight that looped over the range of the Jura, the endless celestial nothingness and then passing through federal customs at the Dorval airport. All things considered, nothing happened between my departure and my forced landing, nothing except the time it takes to move from one city to another in a high-speed jet. In Montreal I first went to 267 Sherbrooke Street West. There I found several open-necked Hathaway shirts, some books scattered here and there, and a keen sense that I had come home. Meanwhile, K was somewhere in the Hanseatic mist of Antwerp or Bremen, not with me; I’d become once more a lonely man deprived of love. I checked the newspapers; I found nothing about our “interests.” From a phone booth I tried to reach my contact: the operator (recorded) told me repeatedly that the number I had called was not in service. Very well. Now what? Thinking it over, to readjust more quickly, I walked endlessly. Of course I could risk proceeding irregularly since I couldn’t reach my contact by phone. Why not take the risk? After all, I’d have to establish a relationship with a member of the network. I decided to speak to M by phone. Just then I was ambling along Pine Avenue past the Mayfair Hospital: I went down the Drummond Street staircase, then stopped at the Piccadilly for a King’s Ransom. After that I made my way to the phone booths across from the Québecair office in the hotel lobby and dialled M’s number. We exchanged some remarks that would be disconcerting to the RCMP wiretappers but were meaningful to us: through this hypercoded language I learned that our network had been short-circuited by the anti-terrorist squad, that several agents had been detained in the Montreal Prison for nearly three weeks now, and that, as might have been expected, the money collected by our tax specialists was now part of the central government’s consolidated budget. A disaster, in conclusion, which M had miraculously escaped. Upset by these ambiguous revelations, I downed another King’s Ransom at the Piccadilly bar. The next day I cleared out my savings account at the Toronto-Dominion Bank, 500 Saint-Jacques Street West. I pocketed a hundred and twenty-three dollars in all, enough to live on for eight days, with no luxuries. From the outside phone booth across from Nesbitt Thompson, I called M again as arranged. We agreed to meet on the stroke of noon in the lateral nave of Notre-Dame basilica near the tomb of Jean-Jacques Ollier; of course we didn’t mention the illustrious abbé’s name or utter that of the old church whose presbytery stands next to the Montreal Stock Exchange.
It was precisely eleven when I stepped out of the glass booth. And as I had an hour to kill, I strolled down rue Saint-François-Xavier to Craig Street and went into Mendelson’s. I love that place; when I go inside, I always have a hunch that I’m going to turn up General Colborne’s pocket watch or the revolver with which Papineau would have been well advised to kill himself. On my left as I came in was the collection of swords and sabres, including a Turkish scimitar I’d have liked to hang above my bed. But I knew from experience that their knives are generally overpriced; for that matter, I know the clerk and he’s intractable: no bargains to be got from him. I went to look at their helmets; I was particularly struck by a Henri II armet, a dilapidated object with a very impressive curve. They were asking forty dollars; I could have bargained a little and got it for less. It still would be an extravagance though, in view of what I had in my pocket. Besides, what would I do with this helmet? Next to it there was a full set of armour: gauntlet, couter and armband. It was sixteenth century, rather hard to identify but a fantastic model. The disjointed arms in black iron had something tragic about them and resembled a hero’s amputated limb. If it were on the wall of
the apartment, I’d be unable to look at it without shuddering. To escape the clerk’s enthusiasm, I went back to the front of the store where a showcase held an amazing number of pocket watches and other timepieces. I’ve always been fascinated by old pocket watches: I like their two-part gold cases covered with arabesques and the engraved initials of their former owners. I looked at a few just to kill some time. Finally, I noticed a pocket watch, its gold dull but elegantly engraved with the monogram of some anonymous dead man. My mind was made up: I took out a ten-dollar bill. But the clerk reminded me that I’d have to add the cost of the chain, making twelve dollars and seventy-five cents in all. Oh well, it wasn’t exorbitant; and I really did want a pocket watch to measure lost time. The case, made in England, contained a Swiss movement which turned with eternal steadiness. I moved the hands to the correct time: precisely eleven-forty-five. My time had come.
I went back onto Craig Street, then climbed the steep hill up Saint-Urbain in the direction of Place d’Armes and crossed it diagonally. Before I entered the church, I bought a newspaper. As usual, I was careful to retrace my steps, zigzagging a little to thwart anyone who might be following me. I entered the Aldred building at 707, then left at once through the door on Notre-Dame. I ran across the street, and after a few athletic strides I was inside the dark church.