I am alone, a prisoner in solitary, sneakily transferred to a nearly forgotten institution. Time has fled and it continues to move away while I am sinking here in a plasma of words. I’m awaiting a trial from which I can expect nothing and a revolution that will restore everything to me … Ah, I can’t wait to run again in the unoccupied vastness of my country, to see you in the flesh, my love, in another way than seeing you disappear into the frail opacity of the paper. Where are you? In Lausanne or in your apartment on Tottenham Court Road?
The endless period of my imprisonment is my undoing. How can I believe in the possibility of escape? A thousand times I’ve tried to get out: there’s nothing to be done. One link is still missing from the sequence of my escape. Actually, a logical conclusion will always be absent from this book. Armed violence is missing from my life and so is our boundless triumph. And I long to add this final chapter to my private history. I’m stifling here in the counter-grid of neurosis while I cover myself with ink and, through the impermeable glass, brush against your legs that keep me prisoner. My damp memories haunt me. Once again I’m walking on the Ouchy wharf between the ghost chateau and the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Failure comes back to me as forcefully as unfinished deeds and inert shreds of the tattered Alps. When I burst out of the Château d’Echandens, I’d already ruined everything.
“… I’ll take a table near the orchestra, anyway he doesn’t know me. You can join me when you’re done with him … 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 …”
The formulas stop in her mouth and fill me with a wave of vague fear. Everything is snarled; the time I can recall is fleeing. Movements are disjointed. As I prepare to leap, I wait endlessly for the proper moment, my finger on the trigger. From one moment to the next, surely I’ll find the word I need to fire at H. de Heutz. All is movement, yet I’m frozen here, waiting just a few seconds before I strike on target.
“… I’m afraid; yes, I fear the worst … I absolutely have to see you later on … Listen: 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?”
At these words, I moved. And rather than continue all the way, I broke my synergetic thrust: something in me gave out, but H. de Heutz became aware of my presence. Two bullets grazed the mouldings on the Henri II credenza, even before I’d recovered enough for a counter-attack. The intermittent gunfire that went on then broke the sacred ritual of my mise-en-scène: our battle was fought in the most shameful disorder. I’m positive I hit H. de Heutz with at least one bullet; but I’ll never know for certain if I killed him. In fact, I’m quite sure I didn’t; indeed, I don’t even know exactly where I wounded him because I dashed to the garage door without turning around. That was when I heard another shot. He probably collapsed to the floor when he was hit and it was from that position that he tried desperately to shoot me. Or had he crouched behind a piece of furniture to protect himself, using that ruse to force me into being discovered? One thing is certain, I drove through the chateau grounds at the wheel of the blue Opel in a spirited finale without even protecting my rear. After failing at everything I wanted to do except my flight, I found myself after a hectic race on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. That was when I realized that not only had I missed H. de Heutz, but by missing him narrowly, I had just missed my appointment and failed at my entire life.
K had gone again and I had no way to contact her. In a quandary because she wasn’t there, I was broken, desperate in a way one’s not allowed to be when one sets out to make a revolution. For a long time I prowled around the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, feeling that I’d spoiled everything. At best, I had wounded H. de Heutz in the shoulder — but at what a price! Here I am, undone as a people, more useless than any of my brothers: I am this wreck of a man who is wandering aimlessly on the shores of Lac Léman. I stretch out on the Abraham page and lie on my stomach to die in the blood of words … I’m trying to find a logical ending for everything that’s happened, but I can’t! I long to be done with it and to place a full stop on my indefinite past.
18
THE BLONDE woman who was hovering around H. de Heutz is pursuing me like a nightmare. I haven’t seen her head-on; at no time have I been able to look at her, so it would be impossible for me to identify her today. Her power over me is as uncertain as it is boundless: I’ll never be able to recognize her. She is totally unknown to me, and if I start imagining (but this doesn’t hold up!) that the man I tried to kill in a lordly chateau in the Canton of Vaud is not H. de Heutz, I’ll never know how wrong I was or why that man treated me as an enemy. No, this assumption leads me to the perfectly unknowable, for I’m no longer in a position to authenticate H. de Heutz …
If K were with me, if we had met on the terrace at half-past six as agreed, if I’d given her a description of the inconceivable man I’d pierced with a bullet — near the heart, I hope! — she would confirm that the individual is indeed the enemy triple agent who could single-handedly make all our banking operations in Switzerland fall through. One thing is certain: K would tell me that it was indeed H. de Heutz whom I’d spent too long waiting for in Echandens. And now I am rotting inside four walls that remind me of neither H. de Heutz’s chateau in the Vaud nor the room where we lived passionately in the Hôtel d’Angleterre.
If I hadn’t exhausted my strength waiting for H. de Heutz, I would have killed him with precision, and once I was back in Lausanne, I’d have offered K a job; I’d have asked her to put me in touch with Pierre, the head of her organization, leading to a profitable union between our two networks. I’d have explained my position clearly to Pierre (whom I’ve never met, as it happens); and there’s no doubt that we’d have come to an agreement about tactics. With his consent, I’d have been in a position to work continually in liaison with K, meaning in Lausanne or Geneva or Karlsruhe, everywhere! We’d have made love at dawn in hotel rooms Byron occupied before he volunteered for the national revolution of Greece …
My tardiness for our meeting was a disaster: from that moment on, my life was shattered. When I came back, all I found was the enigmatic message the desk clerk handed me with the discouraging smile of a bailiff holding out a subpoena. It’s strange: I didn’t even wonder if the blue note was some enemy machination whose only purpose was to hasten my return to Montreal and consequently my capture in a church. At no time did I question the authenticity of the message, and I don’t remember bothering to identify K’s handwriting, so overcome was I. Anyway, who else could have left a sealed message for me at the front desk of the Hôtel d’Angleterre? No one knew that we were supposed to meet on the terrace at half-past six. Absolutely no one. The reference to Hamidou, of course, makes me wonder: K knew him, but how could she know that I knew him too? And then … rather than grow disheartened as I am now, I’d prefer to postpone the analysis of a series of events whose causal logic I lack the power to reconstitute just now. I’ll see it all clearly later on when I’m reunited with the woman I love. In the meantime, I have no right to question myself about anything because by doing so I continue to obey H. de Heutz, who throughout this business has used every imaginable means to make me doubt. I sense that whenever I give in to disenchantment, I am obeying him and making myself conform with the diabolical plan he’s woven against me.