In a few days of summer, during that interval between two dwindling shores and two days of revolution, between the flaming island and the frenzied night of August 4, after two centuries of melancholy and thirty-four years of helplessness I am becoming depersonalized. Time is fleeting as I write, everything is becoming a little more rooted, and here I am, dear love, reduced to my final dust. Total mineralization. Motionless, I attain a volcanic stasis. With this historic dust I surround my eyes and eyebrows; I make myself a mask. I write to you.
Writing is a great expression of love. Writing used to mean writing to you; but now that I’ve lost you I still mass words together, mechanically, because in my heart of hearts I hope that my intellectual wanderings, which I reserve for born debaters, will make their way to you. Then my book of ideas will be simply the cryptic continuation of a night of love with you, my absolute partner to whom I can write in secret by addressing myself to a readership that will never be anything more than the multiplication of your eyes. Writing to you, I address the world. Love is the cycle of the word. I write to you infinitely, endlessly inventing the canticle I read in your eyes; through my words I place my lips on the blazing flesh of my country and I love you, desperately, as on the day of our first communion.
8
NEXT DAY. Sadness strikes me, as violent and sudden as a lone wave breaking, crashing down on me like a tsunami. Just moments before the commotion I was taking a pleasant trip through my memory, recalling the villages we’d driven through in the Eastern Townships between Acton Vale and Tingwick, which is now called Chénier. Suddenly I’d been struck down, carried away with the trees and my memories at the speed of that cruel wave, swept along in the decanted vomit of our national history, devastated by gloom. The fragile edifice I’d patiently erected to help me face up to hours of seclusion has developed cracks in all its girders, twisting and engulfing me as it is crushed. The only thing that’s left for me in this world is to notate my elementary fall. Sorrow sullies me: I pump it in, I swallow it through all my pores, I’m filled with it like a drowned man. Is it obvious that I am aging by myself, that neither the sun nor the pleasures of the flesh now gild my skin? No amorous expectation fills my body; I have no obsessions. I take a few steps down the corridor of my closed submersible; I look through the periscope. I no longer see Cuba’s profile foundering above me, or the proud jagged summit of the Grand Combin, or the dreamy silhouette of Byron, or that of my love who waits for me tonight at half-past six on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre.
Though I draw the tangled thread of my lifeline on this paper, it does not bring back the bed strewn with coloured cushions where we loved each other one June 24, while somewhere beneath our tumult an entire people, gathered together, seemed to be celebrating the irresistible descent of the blood in our veins. You were beautiful, my love. How proud I am of your beauty! How it rewards me! What triumph there was in us that night! What violent and sweet foretaste of the national revolution was unfolding on that narrow bed awash in colours and our two bodies naked, blazing, united in their rhythmic madness. Again tonight my lips hold the damp taste of your boundless kisses. On your bed of chalky sand and on your slippery Alps I descend posthaste, I spread like ground water, I seep in everywhere; an absolute terrorist, I enter all the pores of your spoken lake: I burst, spilling over above the line of your lips, and I flee, oh how I flee, as rapidly as lightning at sea, I flee at the speed of the breaking waves! I topple you, my love, onto this bed suspended above a fête nationale … To think that at this moment I am writing out the minutes of the time we spent outside that insurrectional bed, away from our overwhelming spasm and the dazzling explosion of our desire! I write to fill the time I’m wasting here, that’s ruining me, leaving on my face the furrowed traces of its endless alluvium and the indelible proof that I’ve been eradicated. I write to stave off sorrow and to feel it. Hopelessly I write a long love letter — but when will you read it and when will we be together again and then again? What are you doing at this moment, my love? Where are you travelling outside the walls? Are you moving away from your house, from our memories? Do you sometimes enter the erogenous zone of our fête nationale? Do you sometimes kiss me in that stirring chamber crowded with a million disarmed brothers? Do you rediscover the taste of my mouth in the same way that I return obsessively to our kiss and the very fracas of our embrace? Do you think about me? Do you still know my name? Do you hear me deep inside you when your dreaming evocation of our caresses brings a shudder to your sleeping body? Do you look for me in your bed, along your gleaming thighs? Look, I lie full length on you, like the mighty river I flow into your great valley. Endlessly, I draw nearer to you …
Words learned, words silenced, our bodies naked at the national solstice, our bodies struck down as they emerged from a caress and the last snow of winter slowed our fall, everything around me is shaken in a crisis of depreciation, as though we were approaching a global conflict. The storm that rages in the financial section strikes my very heart: morbid inflation makes me swell, overflow. I’m afraid, terribly afraid. What will happen to me? I’ve felt helpless ever since Bakunin’s death in a common prison in Berne, awash in debt and forgotten. Revolution, where are you? Are you sinking in flames in the middle of Lac Léman, absurd sun that sheds no light on the depths where I’m making my way, incognito?… Between July 26 and my inflationary night, I keep inventing the arms of the woman I love and celebrating through the weary repetition of my prose the prophetic anniversary of our revolution. I keep coming back to this torrid room. Beneath our mingled bodies a muffled sound came to us from the joyful city: a constant gasping, unendurable punctuation transmitted all the way to our maquis. And I remember the disorder we inflicted on everything around us; I remember the brightness of the sky, the darkness inside our flying cabin. It was hot, very hot, on that June 24. It seemed to us, my love, that something was about to begin that night, that our torchlit parade would set fire to the colonial night, fill with dawn the great valley of the conquest where we’d seen the light of day, where on this summer night we’d reinvented love and, in the tremors and the tricks of pleasure, conceived a dazzling event that is loath to come into being. But tonight I am depopulated: my streets are empty, desolate. All these joyous people are abandoning me. The important persons I yearned for are breaking away from the future. The plot is being resolved at the same time that my sentence is dislocated without any fuss.