While I was thus airing my opinion about certain practical concerns pertaining to the murder of H. de Heutz, alias Carl von Ryndt, alias François-Marc de Saugy, the road from Coppet to Rolle was giving me a quick look at the far shore of the lake, a veritable archipelago of rocks and fields of black ice. On the other side, immobile France was running towards the mouth of a river as I drove along at a good clip. As soon as the road cleared a little, I pushed it as hard as I could, making the internal revolutions scream. From Rolle to Aubonne, from Aubonne to Renens, I drove like a sensible adult. Then, shortly after leaving Renens en route to Echandens, I spied across the fields the jagged shape of the chateau, half-hidden by a clump of trees: a dark mass, disproportionate with the little village of Echandens huddled around that enigmatic monster. Discreetly, I parked the car on the shoulder; I even turned off the ignition. To tell the truth, I had the jitters. Suddenly, even before I went on stage, I was uncontrollably agitated. It was dread that was keeping me inside the Opel, even if this was a danger zone where any of the locals could identify the little blue car and would be surprised that its owner wasn’t at the wheel. The Trojan horse galloped by night, and I dreamed of realizing the same exploit in daylight under this beautiful sun. Sheer madness! Echandens is smalclass="underline" the whole village would know if a stranger was inside its walls. My scheme bore an odd resemblance to Russian roulette.
I lingered at this spot close to the chateau and even closer to the first houses of the village. An emotion that I couldn’t name, unless it was fear, was keeping me there, so close to the danger, in a somnolent state: that, of course, was more a result of the heat and my fatigue than a symptom of my jitters. I stood there, unable to hurry matters, lacking the blinding certainty that urges one to act. I was sinking into debility as into a comfortable bed without putting up the slightest resistance to this generalized bliss. Thus positioned on the outskirts of a battlefield, I ignored everything except my developing numbness and my drift into a fluid and hypnotic respite. I sat there motionless under a roof overheated by the sun, my gaze lost in this elevated plain that could be a slope of the Jura or of the Pre-Alps. I was no longer determined to stay on this road that turns sharply on its way into Echandens; I could fit my spirit to nothing but the paralysis that was gaining on it.
I’ve stopped moving. To tell the truth, the disturbance no longer affects me: its very impact breaks down into an infinite number of interruptions whose amplitude grows as their frequency increases. Lethargy settles into me solemnly and vigorously in the form of an ecstatic fall. Inside my steel shell I’m as motionless as a Vedic priest; I linger religiously along the way as I approach the stage I’m to appear on. I don’t hesitate, rather I feel as if I’m on my last legs, as if I’ve been injected with a dark cantharis. Nothing more appears on the horizon: neither the Fribourg Alps nor the domes of the Jura nor any hope of getting out of this unscathed. Nothing, not even the surety that in a certain number of days I’ll be able to circulate at will, to stroll aimlessly among crowds of people between the windows of Morgan’s department store and the stores on Peel Street. No, I don’t even know if I’ll be able to lounge around for a few hours or days when I’m in the mood, or do nothing and improvise my idleness, choosing my own procedures and place: to hesitate between Café Martin and the Beaver Club, to linger at the bar of the Holiday Inn between a Cutty Sark and the darkly shadowed eyes of the woman I love. Hesitation itself would be a form of movement. But I’m not stirring, I am gliding, motionless, gorged with memories and uncertainties, through poisonous water. Nothing files past now as on the day of our fête nationale: my windshield still opens onto the same slice of the Vaudois plateau where a chateau is located that I’m not going to. And between it and me I maintain a distance equal to that separating me from our bedroom on that June 24. This evening it’s as hot inside me as in the stifling countryside around Echandens and on the bed strewn with cushions where we ushered in a tragic season. It’s as hot inside me as it was that night when a secret upheaval made the entire town shudder with the convulsions that shook our bodies. Unmoving, I watch my own nothingness pass by; unmoving, I’m like the chateau of Echandens I see now, solid as the snow that buried our first kiss. The reality around and within me is outstripping me: a thousand dazzled crystals stand in for the passing of time. I am stopped in my race. Nothing moves forward except my hypocritical hand across the paper. And from this lingering residuary movement I infer the brain activity that controls it, the embryonic waves that survive imperceptibly during a coma and contradict it since it contains the very principle of its opposite. My cursive handwriting bears witness to a second genesis that, though reduced to zero, is not altogether stopped, simply because my hand doesn’t stop racing. And so my torpor is merely a sudden and transient death. From my hand’s vibratory course, I deduce that a manic river is discharging into my cephalic vein, its tumult displacing my names, all my childhoods, my failures, and whatever is left of my nights of love. This polluted trickle that gushes onto the page transports me utterly into the confusion of a flight. An uncertain Nile seeking its mouth, this driving current writes to me on the sand along the pages that still separate me from the lugubrious delta. Before me stand unprecedented acts: chateaus, women, hours, centuries. Awaiting me, too, are entire chapters on guerrilla tactics in the heart of Montreal and the record, suicide by suicide, of our unwilling revolution.
Stopped here along a cantonal road in the serene and sunlit countryside, facing my various futures, covered with shame and the past definite but stirred once more, even if only by a wave of unawareness, I decide by unilateral revolutionary decree to put an end to the ataraxia that has kept me pinned to the front seat of the little blue Opel all this time. And if I still can’t make out what route to take in the future, except perhaps in the image offered to me by this road as it turns towards the village of Echandens and the chateau, I realize that I just have to start moving again, follow the handwritten curves, and reinvent my story. Indeed there’s nothing now to prevent me from having already crossed the village without seeing a soul, parking the car in the garage, going inside the chateau of Echandens and positioning myself at a window in this delightful period prison (since I’m here in any case), after crossing the village without seeing a soul and putting the car in the garage. I’ve also checked out the property, Mauser in hand, to make sure there was no procurator hidden in one of the chateau’s many rooms. It’s completely deserted; and during this visit, a hasty one it’s true, I’ve unearthed no mysterious object: no radio transmitter, hidden microphone, or intercom system. On my way down the cut-stone staircase, I took the precaution of opening the inside door that goes from the vestibule to the garage. It’s my emergency exit in a way. To escape with a flourish, I can simply go through that narrow doorway, work the handle that lifts the garage door, hop into the little blue Opel, and turn the key I’ve judiciously left in the ignition.