I stand near the terrace, my back to the Savoyard Alps that are displaced in the shadows, and I know that I’ve lost the woman I love. I have lived to meet her and I’m now dying pointlessly of love. Where are you, my love? Why did we separate after the incandescent dawn that burst from our embrace? Why, on the shore of the deferred lake, did we reinvent this revolution that broke us and then reunited us, that seems impossible to me this evening while I stand watch in this haunted crowd and the orchestra plays “Desafinado”? The underground revolution is breaking us once again in the depths of our exile here on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre that I love and where I live to infinity, like the poet who died at Missolonghi. You are so beautiful, my love, truly more beautiful than any of the women I stare at now, methodically. Your beauty bursts with power and joy. Your naked body tells me again that I was born for real life and that when I love, I desire frantically. Your blonde hair is like the dark river that flows at my back and surrounds me. I love you the way you appeared to me the other night when I was walking towards Place de la Riponne, complete and invincible, and I love you when you’re tumultuous, when you cry out our pleasure. I love you draped in black or scarlet, dressed in saffron, veiled in white, clad in words and transfigured by the dark shock of our two bodies. The wind from the Vaud that delicately tangles your blonde hair brings me the perfume of your flesh, but where are you? Does this secret wind come from the lake or from the hot plain of Echandens I’ve just come from, but too late? Ah, now that I’ve lost you, I’m delirious. I feel that I’m brushing against your damp flesh, that I’m drunk with your secret odour. I remember a long-distance call I made from the Lord Simcoe in Toronto, and in this funereal room where I’m a prisoner of nausea and terror, I feel threatened once again. Something has broken: the interruption has just occurred and I don’t know how to talk to you. I want to tell you: come, follow me, we’ll live together, but I have forty-eight dollars in my wallet, not even enough to buy you a one-way plane ticket to Toronto. Events overcome us, shattering me into a thousand pieces. I’m stammering in this bed at the Lord Simcoe. Toronto is sinking into Adriatic amnesia. You slip away and no one told me that one day in Lausanne … How many months will pass before I’m with you again, my love? To what city that I don’t yet know will the uncertain future exile us? The next time — but after how much renewed anguish, how many wasted nights? — perhaps I’ll meet you on Rashid Avenue in Babylon, or in the land of dear Hamidou (whom I’ve lost track of) in the Dakar medina, or under mosquito netting in the Hotel N’Gor; in Algiers perhaps, or in Carthage near Bourguiba’s presidential palace … Or perhaps I shall never meet you again.
I stand motionless in the midst of this wild crowd that awaits our dazzling appearance at the window of our room. But you’re not here … This evening I begin my life without you. Ever since I’ve known that I’ve lost you, I’ve been aging at a terrifying speed. My youth has taken flight with you: centuries and centuries are carved into my inert body. People are looking at me, no doubt because of the sudden erosion that’s stamped on my face, and maybe too because I’m crying. Our story is ending in me badly. It’s dark. Everything dies if I’ve lost you, my love. I walk through this happy crowd that exasperates me. It’s not you who abandoned me, it’s life. Surely it’s not you, is it? One can’t see anything on the lake: the absolute night shelters me and settles in between us irrevocably.
I am walking in this foreign country, a man who has just lost you after finding you again by chance, joyfully, on a street in Lausanne and in a romantic bed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. In the distance I hear the chords of “Desafinado” as I move away from the terrace of the Angleterre without even turning around. I no longer have a country, I’ve been forgotten. The torn Alps whose dark crenellations I can glimpse across the lake no longer bewitch me. The things we loved together have no meaning any more, not even life. Even the war, alas, since I’ve lost contact with your sovereign flesh, you, my only country! Starting now, I am living a glacial night. I own nothing except a gun that’s become ridiculous and some memories that are rendering me harmless. Where are you, my love? Trees swollen with darkness stand around the Château d’Ouchy and along the wharf where we two strolled at nightfall. That was last night. In the distance I can make out the confused sound of discordant music and a laughing crowd. I did not kill H. de Heutz. In fact I wonder what overwhelming coincidence made him want to go to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre at half-past six, to meet a woman — the blonde, perhaps? — he talked to on the phone. But he’ll never keep that appointment. Unless he turns up late, like me. Because if I’ve lodged a bullet in his shoulder, he may have found a way to have it tended to, then get into the grey car with the Zurich plates and, driving with one hand, arrive in Ouchy. Perhaps at this very moment he’s pulling up at the noisy terrace I’ve just left.
That speculation disturbs me. I retrace my steps. If he’s there, I want to see him, but even more I want to see the unknown blonde woman he arranged to meet on the phone just before our exchange of gunfire. I quicken my pace. No doubt I’m returning in vain because the blonde woman got tired of waiting for H. de Heutz. She has gone. And so H. de Heutz too will be alone and won’t know what to do. The terrace is as lively as ever; passersby stop to listen to music that has no meaning for me. I go back to the Hôtel d’Angleterre once again with the unfounded hope of finding K, who may have come back to the terrace too in desperation, hoping my absence was merely a delay. Lovers stroll nonchalantly, arm in arm, along the lakeshore, projecting their own emotion onto the unfathomable landscape that fills me with desolation. I’m here on the sidewalk, on the same side as the hotels that look out on the lake. I go up to the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, my heart pounding. I push aside the people who block my view. I look at all the faces. I scrutinize the back of the terrace. Just next to the orchestra I spy a blonde head. Who is it? Her face is hidden. She’s talking to a man, but he’s not H. de Heutz. I scan the overpopulated quadrilateraclass="underline" every blonde woman attracts my attention, but none of them is you! It’s as if Lausanne only gives birth to blondes. I’ve never seen so many. But clearly, K isn’t here. I hope in vain; I die a thousand deaths whenever I spot a blonde head. Ah, I’ve always lived as I am living at this moment — at the outer limit of the intolerable … Tonight, all these blonde heads cause me pain because you’re not there and I’m looking for you desperately. I realize that it’s a waste of time: there’s no sign whatsoever of my earlier life on the enchanted terrace of this hotel. It’s as if I’d never come here with K, as if I’m surrendering to a fine hallucination, and the Hôtel d’Angleterre exists only in my devastated brain, like the Vaudois chateau where I spent my life waiting for a certain banker who’s interested in Caesar’s African wars and who abandoned his two sons in Liège so that he could rob all the banks in Switzerland! I rave in silence, surrounded by the din of this terrace crowded with people observing me as if I were an intruder. I decide to go to the hotel office. It’s hard to navigate through the tables, I keep stumbling and bumping into people.