2
BETWEEN JULY 26, 1960 and August 4, 1792, halfway between two liberations, while I worm my way, coated in a light alloy, into a novel being written in Lausanne, I’m anxiously looking for a man who left the Lausanne Palace after shaking hands with Hamidou Diop. I slipped into the hotel lobby without attracting Hamidou’s attention. Executing a paso doble, I was outside the hotel a fraction of a second later, in time to see a 300SL drive off towards Place Saint-François. Something told me that this fleeting silhouette didn’t pop out of the Senegalese Sahel and that Hamidou is playing a double game. In any case, it’s pointless to ask him to identify the man he was speaking to, or tell him about my own rash suspicions. The handsome African is more cunning than a Chinese. With his unbridled loquacity and his athletic negritude, he masks all too successfully both his wiles and his awe-inspiring intelligence.
During these reflections on my hero’s subtle duplicity, I walked slowly up the rue de Bourg and went inside the movie theatre on Place Benjamin Constant to see Black Orpheus again. Listening to “Felicidade,” I started to cry. I don’t know why that song of happiness spells melancholy to me or why that fragile joy was translated for me into lugubrious chords. So nothing can stop me from calling to my black Eurydice, from searching for her in the never-ending night, shadow among the shadows of a dark carnival, a night darker than a night of saturnalia, a night sweeter than the one we spent together somewhere in her native tropics one June 24. Eurydice, I am descending. I’m here, at last. By writing to you I shall touch you, black shadow, black magic, love. The Benjamin Constant theatre is a free fall for me. This very evening, a few miles from the Hôtel de la Paix, headquarters of the FLN, a few steps from the Montreal Prison, dark headquarters of the FLQ, no sooner do I brush against your blazing body than it’s lost to me; I piece you together again but words fail me. The historic night seems to be secreting the India ink in which I can make out too many fleeting forms that resemble you but aren’t you. At the end of my liquid decadence, I’ll touch the low land, our bed of caresses and convulsions. My love … I feel giddy. In fact I’m afraid of every silhouette, of my neighbours in the theatre, of the stranger who conceals Eurydice’s mulatto profile from me, of the people waiting on the sidewalk when I leave the theatre.
I hurried through this dense crowd and crossed Place Benjamin Constant. And as I walked past the illuminated front of the Hôtel de la Paix, I looked in the other direction at the jagged profile of the Savoy Alps and the mottled expanse of the lake. Eleven-fifteen. I’d wasted my day. Now I had nothing to do, no one to meet, no hope of finding the man Hamidou had shaken hands with in the lobby of the Lausanne Palace. Nonchalantly, I went back to the hotel. I was given the key to my room and a sealed blue paper. I tore it open quickly, and understanding nothing of what was written on it, I stuffed it into my pocket so I wouldn’t attract the elevator boy’s attention. As soon as I was in my room I lay down on the bed and reread the formless jumble of capital letters with no spaces: CINBEUPERFLEUDIARUNCOBESCUBEREBES-CUAZURANOCTIVAGUS. This one-word cryptogram had me perplexed for a few minutes; then I decided to perform an alphabetical statistical analysis, which gave me: E 7 times; U 7; R 5; B, A, and C 4 times; S 3; I 3; O 2; G 2; P, F, L, V, and Z one time only. The blatant predominance of the letter U was mystifying. I know of no language in which that vowel is so predominant. Not even in Portuguese and Romanian, though they’re rife with U’s, does that letter so outweigh the other vowels.
The cryptogram from the Hôtel de la Paix still fascinates me, not only because of its mysterious origin (which has nothing to do with the Bureau, whose figures and even their variants I know by heart), but also because of why the message was sent. As I stumbled over this equation with its multiple unknowns I must solve before I go any further in my story, I have the feeling I’m facing the most impenetrable mystery of all. The more I circle it and target it, the further it moves beyond my grasp, multiplying my own riddle tenfold even as I step up my efforts to grasp it. I simply don’t seem able to decipher the code, and since I can’t translate it into my language, I write it down in the insane hope that by paraphrasing the nameless, I’ll finally give it a name. Yet even though I cover this hieroglyph with words, it gets away from me and I’m left behind on the other shore, surrounded by vagueness and hope. Crowded inside my closed sphere, I descend, compressed, to the bottom of Lac Léman, and I can’t step outside the flowing themes that constitute the thread of the plot. I’ve closed myself inside a constellate system that has imprisoned me in strictly literary terms, so much so that this stylistic sequestration seems to confirm the validity of the symbol I’ve used from the outset: diving. Encased in my funerary barque and my repertoire of images, I have only to continue drowning through words. Descending is my future, diving my sole activity and my profession. I drown. I become Ophelia in the Rhône. My long manuscript tresses mingle with water plants and invariable adverbs while I glide, variable, between the two long jagged shores of the cisalpine river. And so duly coffered inside my metallic concept, certain that I won’t get out but uncertain as to whether I’ll live for a long time, I have just one thing to do: open my eyes, look at this flooded world, pursue the man I’m looking for and kill him.
Kill! What a splendid law, one it’s sometimes good to comply with. For months now I’ve been preparing myself inwardly for killing in cold blood and with maximum precision. On that rainy Sunday morning I was secretly preparing to strike. My heart was beating steadily, my mind was clear, agile, precise as a weapon has to be. The months and months that had gone before had genuinely transformed me. And it was with an acute sense of the gravity of my effort and with reflexes perfectly trained that I was inaugurating this black wedding day. Suddenly, around half-past ten, the break occurred. Arrest, handcuffs, interrogation, disarmament. An unqualified disaster, this trite accident that earned me nothing but a stay in jail is an anti-dialectical event and the flagrant contradiction of the undeclared plan I was going to carry out, weapon in hand, in the purifying euphoria of fanaticism. Killing confers a style on one’s existence. And the prospect of it, when shamefully introduced into everyday life, injects it with the energy it needs to avoid feeble crawling and endless boredom. After my trial and my liberation I can’t imagine my life outside the homicide axis. Already I’m bursting with impatience at the thought of the multiple attack, a pure and shattering act that will restore my appetite for life and establish me as a terrorist in the strictest privacy. And that violence will bring order back to my life, because it seems to me that, for thirty-four years now, I’ve only lived the way that grass lives. If I were to make a quick tally of kisses given, of my powerful emotions, of my nights of wonder, of my luminous days, of the privileged hours and the great discoveries I have yet to make; and if I were to add up over an infinity of perforated postcards the cities I’ve passed through, the hotels where I’ve had a good meal or a night of love, the number of my friends and of the women I’ve betrayed, to what sombre inventory would these irregular operations lead me? The sine curve of real-life experience doesn’t translate the ancient hope. I’ve perverted my life line repeatedly and obtained less happiness through an accumulation of indignities, which has led me to give back less than nothing of it. Before this inborn statistic that suddenly and wearily haunts me, I can imagine nothing better than to continue writing on this sheet of paper and to plunge hopelessly into the ghostly lake that’s flooding into me. To descend word by word into my memory pit, to invent other companions who already perturb me, leading me into a knot of wrong tracks and, finally, to go into exile once and for all outside my botched country.