But this is not the last word. In any event I must keep myself invulnerable to doubt and stand firm in the name of what is sacred, for within me I carry the germ of revolution. I am its impure tabernacle. I am an ark of the covenant and of despair, alas, for I have lost everything! I feel that I myself am finished; but everything inside me is not. My story is interrupted because I don’t know the first word of the next episode. But all will be resolved and end on a high note. I trust blindly, even though I know nothing about the next chapter, absolutely nothing, only that it’s waiting for me and will sweep me away in a whirlwind. All the words of the sequel will grab me by the throat; the ancient serenity of our language will be shattered by the shock of my story. Yes, the unchanging nature of the subject of my account will suffer the impious terror; revolutionary letters will be painted by rifles all down the length of pages. Since Cuba’s July 26, I have been dying in sterilized sheets while the foothills of the Alps surrounding our kisses fade away in me a little more every day. One certainty comes to me, though, of what’s to come. Already I have a premonition of the unbearable tremors of the next episode. I tremble at what I haven’t written. Unsure of everything, at least I know that when I finally rise up against this incomplete régime and from my prison bed, I won’t have enough time left to lose my way again in my story, or to link the series of events into a logical structure. Already it will be very late, and I won’t waste my energy waiting for the propitious moment or the favourable instant. Then it will be time to fire at point-blank range — in the back if possible. The time to kill will have arrived, as well as that — an even more pressing deadline — for organizing the destruction according to the ancient doctrines of discord and the canons of nameless guerrilla warfare! Parliamentary struggles must be replaced by warfare to the death. After two centuries of agony, we’ll make dissolute violence burst out, an unbroken series of attacks and shock waves, spelling out in black a project of total love …
No, I won’t finish this unpublished book: the final chapter is missing and I won’t even have time to write it when the events occur. When that day comes, I won’t have to make up the minutes of lost time. The pages will write themselves in gunshots: the words will whistle above our heads, the sentences will shatter in the air …
When the battles are done, the revolution will continue to unfold; only then perhaps will I find the time to bring this book to a final stop and to kill H. de Heutz once and for all. The event will occur as I predicted. H. de Heutz will go back to the funereal chateau where I lost my youth. But this time I’ll be well prepared for his reappearance. I’ll watch and wait for him. When the iron-grey 300SL with Zurich plates makes its appearance, it will strike me as obvious, it will send me into action. First, I’ll tiptoe across the distance between daylight and the Henri II credenza while I trip the safety on the revolver. And as soon as I feel the bolt move in the lock, H. de Heutz will come on stage and, unbeknownst to him, move into my range. I’ll shoot him before he even gets to the telephone; he’ll die blinded by the knowledge that he has been trapped. I shall bend over his body to see the precise time on his watch and, as I do so, I’ll realize I have time to get from Echandens to Ouchy. And that’s how I shall arrive at my conclusion. Yes, I’ll emerge victorious from my intrigue, calmly killing H. de Heutz to rush to you, my love, and close my tale in grand style. Everything will end in the secret splendour of your belly, populated by slippery Alps and eternal snow. Yes, that is the conclusion to the story: because everything has an end, I shall go to meet the woman who’s still waiting for me on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. That’s what I’ll say in the final sentence of my novel. And, a few lines later, I shall write in capital letters the words:
THE END
Afterword BY JEAN-LOUIS MAJOR
Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon of March 15, 1977, Hubert Aquin was found lying on the road beside his car, a red 1976 two-door Ford Granada, in the park surrounding Villa Maria, a private school in the middle-class neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce near his home in western Montreal. He had shot himself in the head. Blood and brain tissue were splattered as far as the large elm trees standing more than twenty-five feet away, but his dark-blue suit with matching light-blue shirt, silk vest, and tie remained undisturbed and immaculate. He was forty-seven years old.
Neither the manner nor the circumstances of Aquin’s death, nor even, for that matter, the fact of his death, has anything to do with the novel you have just read or anything else he ever wrote, except those few short letters he left unmailed and unstamped as was his habit, advising friends of his previously and elaborately discussed decision to commit suicide. The manner and circumstances of his death, however, have much to do with Hubert Aquin as literary icon, and thus with the manner in which everything he wrote is now regarded and, sometimes, read.
When he committed suicide, Aquin became the exemplary literary figure for the post — Quiet Revolution and post — Parti Québécois — election period. He thus replaced Paul-Émile Borduas, the intellectual godfather of the Quiet Revolution, who had lost his job as a teacher at the École du Meuble in 1948 for writing Refus global, a pamphlet of incendiary rhetoric, and died in Paris in 1960 at the age of fifty-five.
Conditions for admission to the pantheon of martyrs of Quebec literature are not clearly defined: membership varies according to prevailing ideological currents. Conservative moods have long favoured Octave Crémazie, the nineteenth-century poet who died in exile in France to avoid going to prison after his Quebec City bookstore went into bankruptcy. Liberal times attribute a more exalted status to Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, the fiery journalist and anticlerical polemicist who, in 1875, had to follow the same route as Crémazie after resorting to a number of falsifications to avoid bankruptcy. According to others, this group should include essayist and novelist François Hertel, who moved to France in 1949 after leaving the Jesuit order, but it now seems Hertel has been eclipsed by poet, novelist, and literary critic Louis Dantin, another former cleric, who fled to Boston, where he became a typographer at Harvard University Press at the beginning of the twentieth century.
For some time in the forties and fifties, and even well into the sixties, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau seemed to meet all the requirements to be considered a literary martyr. He published a single collection of poems in 1937, and died at the age of thirty-one in 1943, after living in seclusion in the family manoir since the age of twenty-two. Despite having published so little, Saint-Denys Garneau’s image suffered from the fact that he had died of a heart attack, notwithstanding the efforts of some of his admirers to present his death as a suicide or, even better, a collective murder. On the other hand, poet, playwright, and cosignatory of Refus global Claude Gauvreau, who was long associated with Paul-Émile Borduas and in fact became the self-proclaimed leader of the Automatist movement when Borduas left Montreal for New York and, later, Paris, seems to meet all the essential conditions for membership: he committed suicide in 1971 after having been interned in various mental institutions. In Gauvreau’s case, the difficulty arises from the fact that he wrote abundantly, if somewhat obscurely.