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“… 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.

T
HE 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.

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 300
SL
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

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.

The paradigm for these mythic figures remains the poet Émile Nelligan, who, at the age of eighteen, was locked up in an insane asylum where he remained for forty-two years, without ever writing another line of verse, until his death in 1941. In the 1980s, Nelligan was the subject of a biography that was at least ten times the size of his collected poems; he was even the subject of an opera written by playwright Michel Tremblay and composer André Gagnon. Nelligan’s poems may have gone out of print, but his biography is now available in paperback.

That is more or less the company Hubert Aquin joined in the collective imagination immediately upon his death. What is exceptional about Aquin’s situation is that he had already attained an equivalent status upon publishing his first novel,
Prochain épisode
, in 1965. That he became a mythic figure at such an early date is due to a unique convergence of circumstances, social, political, and personal, as well as literary. This latter aspect, however, would normally be the least of considerations: one of the advantages of literary martyrdom is to give non-readers the opportunity of knowing all there is to know about a writer without having to change their own privileged status.