How can I grasp the cold wind that is numbing me, how can I name the ill-defined pain that makes me falter? My love, my own! I’m afraid I won’t get to the end; I’m weakening. You’ll hate me if you learn about my weakness, but here it is all the same, the unavoidable face of my cowardice! I don’t have the heart for it. The uncertain revolution is debasing me: I’m not the unworthy one, it’s she who is betraying me and abandoning me! Ah, let the event happen, let it generate the chaos that means life to me! Let the event burst, let it give the lie to my cowardice, let it open my eyes! Quickly, for I’m about to succumb to historic fatigue … I stay here, with no enemy or reason, far from the violence of the womb, far from the river’s dazzling shore. I need H. de Heutz. What will happen to me if he doesn’t come? When he’s not facing me, in person, I forget that I want to kill him and I no longer feel a blinding need for our endeavour. This interlude in a chateau will get the better of me in the end. The solitary act becomes clouded with the uncheckable progress of this wasted afternoon. No project resists the implacable dimming of expectation. What time is it? I still don’t know.
14
ONE ITEM IS missing from the murderous protocol that will take me back to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre: the body of H. de Heutz. Without it, I’m stranded in his chateau, which is anguish. Everything has to happen in this space cluttered with furniture, which I continue to explore. The door will open: the click of the lock will be my warning. Without knowing it, H. de Heutz will step onto our battlefield in this narrow zone that separates the place I’ll fire from and the threshold of the front door.
And what if H. de Heutz doesn’t come back? And what if the revolution never comes to overwhelm our lives? What would become of us then? And what would we have to tell each other at half-past six this evening on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre?
I wonder if I did the right thing in leaving for the Coppet woods first when I had H. de Heutz in front of me. It would have been wiser to go directly towards the middle of the wooded space. Then he wouldn’t have been tempted to escape: one move by him and I’d have fired. And afterwards I’d have been able to flee through the woods as far as the promontory, race down the path that brought me to this little square, then take the Grande-Rue to the Auberge des Émigrés, where I’ll have treated myself to an excellent lunch with white wines from Vaud and the Valais; even to celebrate my victory, I’d surely have prolonged the meal with two or three glasses of Williamine from the hills of Hérémence, very near to Evolène and the Valais chalet I dream of buying one day as a place to shelter our love. Clearly I was wrong to run away at the appearance of the blonde woman coming to the aid of H. de Heutz, who followed me throughout my journey from Echandens to Geneva and from Place Simon-Goulart to this small road that turns sharply after the Coppet chateau. There’s no doubt about it: I lost the initiative at that moment and that was when the time I’d gained earlier began to turn against me. The coordinates of the plot are tangled. I’ve dropped the thread of my story, and here I am in the middle of a chapter I don’t know how to finish.
Outside, the season is waning. In just one afternoon the whole summer is leaving, turning majestically towards the west. The sadness of the departing season mingles with my equivocation and weakens me. It’s not just the summer months that are racing towards the Grandes-Jorasses, but my own youth and our story that began one spring on the road from Acton Vale to Richmond, on our way to that secret rendezvous, when the declining sunlight brushed with a tragic glow the last vestiges of the snow that had fallen gently, when you and I fell into the first bed where we loved each other. The story of our country’s revolution is entangled with our desperate embraces and our nights of love. The first sparks of the FLQ united our lives. Together everywhere, naked but secretly united with our brothers in the revolution and in silence, it was amid the odour of gunpowder that we learned the exalted movements of the pleasures of the flesh and the terminal cry. A vast rifle range, our country’s snow-covered soil recounts our love to us. The impure names of our cities repeat the boundless conquest I learned once again when I conquered you, my love, with my imperfect, frenzied caresses and the games of death. Your native land gave birth to me, the revolutionary: upon your lyrical expanse I lie down and live. Deep in the darkness of your belly I strike, fainting with joy, and I find the warm and wounded land of our national invention. My love, you are my native soil I scoop up by the handful, dark elusive soil I make fertile, where I fight to the death, prideful inventor of an endless guerrilla war. On this Eastern Townships road between Acton Vale and Richmond, near Durham-sud and wherever we two have travelled — to Saint-Zotique-de-Kotska, to Les Éboulements, to Rimouski, to Sherbrooke, to La Malbaie for three days and three nights, to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Denis — never have we ceased preparing for the war of our liberation, joining our liberated intimacy to the terrible secret of our shattered nation, uniting armed violence with the violence of the hours we’ve spent loving each other. Entwined, dazzled, in a tormented country, we’ve tumbled, united inside a single kiss, from one end to the other of our snowy bed. From town to town we’ve sought not escape, but the absolute brotherhood of the revolution. Nor was it solitude that fed our passion, but the notion of a river of brothers marching nearby and preparing awkwardly for battle. The sound of their footsteps hammered at our passion and their sorrow made our bodies swell. While my fingers were creasing your dress, we listened to their manifold breathing. Our love, unfurling, traces the black calendar of the revolution that I’m anticipating madly, that I’m calling by your name! Our love is preparing for an insurrection, our nights of kisses and delirium are so many dazzling stages in the events to come. Even as we succumb to the spasm of the night, our brothers are struck down by the same sacrilegious event that joins our bodies in a lyrical synthesis.
15
WHILE THE SUN is slanting towards my deadline and the light in the valley is dwindling, I’m exhausted in the midst of the empty furniture and silence. I feel care-worn, almost inclined to petulance, for I’m far from the rolling countryside of Durham-sud and the twists and turns of the Saint-François River. I’m an exile from the Nation and my life. I travel through the vast museum of my clandestine existence, far from the declaration of independence of Lower Canada and of the fertile plain that stretches between Saint-Charles and Saint-Ours, far, too far from highway 22 where we drove by night in the driving rain. From where I am I do not hear the bouzoukis on Prince Arthur Street or the West Indian band from Pointe-Claire. Nor do I see the snow that still falls on our childhood, in the same way that it shrouds eternally the Aiguilles Rouges and the dark Dents du Midi.