My brothers-in-war are virtual, as are the unlikely characters who await me further along in this story, who may surprise me, and as I encourage them to do specific deeds, they’ll oblige me to remember them, not wait for them as I’m doing now, fascinated by the area of freedom they move in as if they were inside a prehistory I have to end by writing something that they haven’t done yet, that they’ll do in the exact proportion to which my indifferent invention brings them up to date.
All night long the centuries file past beneath the windows of our love. But I’ve lost you, my love, and this music no longer intoxicates me. I must see you again. Without you, I die. The vast landscape of our love is darkening. I see neither the ravaged pedestal of the High Alps nor the great dead flows of the glaciers. I see nothing: neither the synclinal vault of the lake nor the overturned mass of the Hôtel d’Angleterre nor the Château d’Ouchy nor the crest of the grand hotels of Lausanne nor the invisible chalet I’ve dreamed of buying in Evolène in the high valley of Hérens, nor the vesperal form of the Château de Coppet. Nothing can save me now. My leaded coffin is sinking to the bottom of an uninhabited lake. Decades of failures and pitched battles no longer sustain me, any more than the centuries of my life in love that have been reduced to a few dates on an envelope.
I need you; I need to retrieve the thread of our story and the ellipsis that will take me back to the heat of our two consumed bodies. I don’t know where to pick up. I remember that dialogue with H. de Heutz in the Coppet woods. But so much has happened since then, at such a brisk pace, and I’m so engaged in this jolting process that it’s less urgent for me to recount what happened between Coppet and now than to concentrate on what is happening and what is threatening to happen. Time sweeps me along. This long wait has in no way conditioned me for action. And when there is action, I’m caught off guard, compelled to improvise even though I’d carefully prepared myself for any eventuality. All that I should have guessed when I found myself in the Château d’Echandens, facing H. de Heutz who had me in his sights.
11
IN FACT, THINGS started to blur at the point in that confused meeting where I was acting, while admitting implicitly that there could be no witnesses to my conversation with H. de Heutz. I got out of the trap, and it didn’t occur to me that, while I was pushing H. de Heutz ahead of me at gunpoint, some other person was very close by, observing me, no doubt delighted to watch me bash down a wide-open door with such bravado. It was during the interval between my confinement and my flight, between the time when I disarmed H. de Heutz and when I stuffed him into the Opel’s trunk, that I stopped being logical. I was behaving like a fugitive who couldn’t be punished while I jumped with both feet into a gaping trap. Moreover, I was displaying a deranged self-confidence. Yes, I should have been careful, because everything happened as it does in the movies with murky ease. The more I think back to those few minutes, the more I wonder how plausible this sequence is. I even wonder if H. de Heutz didn’t politely slow down his reaction time when I went to disarm him simply to help me out. I’m sure he did: he cheated imperceptibly to give me time to get into the victor’s skin, to smoothly abide by the scenario that had been devised to trap me. H. de Heutz didn’t resist my injunction. He curled up in the trunk of the car. Just as I was slamming the lid on his head, he must have given a hint of a contented smile, for I was meekly obeying him and he didn’t even have to state his orders clearly. I had become his medium: unbeknownst to me, H. de Heutz had driven me into a cataleptic state and, from his hermetically sealed position, he continued to guide me into recklessness and rapture. If only I’d had the strength to turn around, I’d have spotted two eyes fixed on me at one of the windows on the north side of the chateau.
It’s possible that the situation I’m in now is making me overstate the degree of premeditation behind the trap H. de Heutz, dear man, had set for me. Let’s admit that he’d anticipated my getaway attempt and that, among other possibilities, I might jump into the little Opel to do it. All right. But how could he have precisely imagined I’d make him get into the trunk of the car I was borrowing from him? He couldn’t foresee what approach I would make, so he was predicting something else: that I’d commandeer the Opel for my getaway! Following the internal logic of this method, after H. de Heutz had rearmed he’d have taken off after me in the other car, which I hadn’t seen but which had to have been in the garage, whose doors were shut. What’s more, H. de Heutz was positive he’d catch up with me: there’s just one road through Echandens and as soon as he saw me drive away in one direction or the other, he had plenty of time to calmly open the garage doors and take out the other car. In any event, I was bound to be driving down his road with a few minutes’ lead at most. A strictly technical problem: I couldn’t escape from him — unless of course in his haste he lost control of his vehicle and smashed his skull against a hundred-year-old tree, which was highly unlikely if you know H. de Heutz.
What happened was that as soon as I departed from H. de Heutz’s plan, he was neutralized and, who knows, maybe even helpless — for a few seconds anyway. Because it would be underestimating him to deny that he’d anticipated everything that might happen, even his own death! Consequently, the other person was already at my back, veiled by the curtains at a window. And that other person had watched me manoeuvre H. de Heutz, following a rather baroque protocol; when he saw me turn onto the road that runs through Echandens to Saint-Prex, he’d had time to pull on his jacket, secure his high-calibre weapon in an embossed leather holster, go to the garage from the inside, take out a big car and, unbeknownst to me, start tailing me, since I hadn’t taken the precaution of glancing inside the garage to check the make of the car. Now, since I knew neither the make of the car that was following me nor the identity of its driver, I didn’t even know if I was being escorted, because of course the other person — H. de Heutz’s friend — took the precautions necessary to avoid attracting my attention, constantly changing his position on the road, his angle of surveillance, and the distance between us. At one point he must have taken the liberty of coming within a hair’s breadth of the Opel and looking me in the eye just like that. The highway to Geneva is wide enough and busy enough to conceal the expert designs of a spy. When he passed, nearly touching me, how could I have known it was him? How can you unmask an enemy when, paradoxically, you’ve implicitly eliminated him and he doesn’t exist?
And so I drove from Echandens to Place Simon-Goulart in Geneva without thinking, even as a suspicious reflex, that throughout this enchanting journey the other person was on the road very close to me, travelling along in my wake — or was I in his? — passing me on the left or right, getting a solid lead over me (while keeping my reflection in his rear-view mirror) or impetuously letting me pass while never losing sight of me. In Geneva I went directly to Place Simon-Goulart, which in the transparency of daylight opens onto an expanse of mountains and eternal snow. Just as I was parking near the Banque Arabe, an innocuous-looking stranger was parking his car near mine, never losing sight of me. It was that other person! He observed me at leisure while I was listing all the reasons why I should clear out of Place Simon-Goulart where my Volvo was waiting. He may even have taken a position behind the great barred window of the Banque Arabe, pretending to fill out a form while keeping an eye on me as I hesitated, gracelessly and awkwardly, not too sure what to do with the Opel and the Volvo — one full, the other empty — while the morning sun illuminated the great belt of peaks and spires, plunging the layered flanks of Mont Maudit into shadow. There was no doubt about it: I’d been duped from start to finish. It had all started in the grand salon of the Château d’Echandens when I was sitting across from H. de Heutz and the three big windows that looked out on the chateau’s elegant grounds and the incantatory space of the great valley, where Lac Léman was lighted up by the first rays of sun which at that moment was at its apogee.