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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, you, 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 …”

V
ERY 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.

There was something terrifying about the silence inside: suddenly the mystery of this dark enchanting forest grabbed me by the throat. My footsteps rang out all around. I went to the transept, spotting no one in this deserted church and hearing nothing but the multiplied echo of my own procession. A shuddering purity filled this sacred place. I was a few seconds ahead of M, and while I waited, I sat very close to the secondary apse, lost in contemplation and prayer. I was careful not to open my newspaper in an excess of enthusiasm, though I longed to see if there was anything about the preliminary investigations. When M showed up, coming towards me from the altar (God knows how!), I repressed a surge of emotion. Everything happened so quickly. There was a sound on my right: the door of a confessional opened. I caught sight of a properly dressed man who came hurrying towards me. Then another individual seemed to loom out of the transept crossing. He too was respectable looking. M and I had time to exchange a desperate look but not a single word. They led us to the porch. We went out by way of the staircase on rue Saint-Sulpice, our wrists shackled. An unmarked car was waiting; we piled into the back, following the police orders. I know the rest: an informal event that had gone on not being fulfilled for three months’ time, an uninterrupted series of stains and humiliations that take me into the death-like density of writing.

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.