Between a certain July 26 and the Amazonian night of August 4, somewhere between the Montreal Prison and my point of fall, I decline silently, under house arrest and beneath the wing of Viennese psychiatry; my morale is low and I concede the obvious: that this breakdown is my way of existing. For years I’ve lived flattened with fury. I’ve accustomed my friends to an intolerable voltage, to a waste of sparks and short circuits. To spit fire, to cheat death, to be resurrected a hundred times, to run a mile in less than four minutes, to introduce a flame-thrower into the dialectic and suicidal behaviour into politics — that’s how I’ve established my style. I have struck my currency amid the image of a flabby übermensch. A pirate set free in a misty pond, covered by a Colt 38 and injected with intoxicating syringes, I’m a prisoner, a terrorist, an anarchist, and an undeniably washed-up revolutionary! With my gun at my hip, always ready for a lightning shot at ghosts, never pulling my punches and with a heavy heart, I’m the hero, the former addict! National leader of an unknown people! I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its fractured reflection and its suicidal incarnation. Since the age of fifteen I’ve always wanted a fine suicide: under the snow-covered ice of Lac du Diable, in the northern waters of the St. Lawrence estuary, in a room at the Windsor Hotel with a woman I loved, in the car that was crushed last winter, in the little bottle of Beta-Chlor 500 mg, in the bed of the Totem, in the ravines of the Grande-Casse and the Tower of Aï, in my cell number CG19, in the words I learned at school, in my throat choked with emotion, in my ungrasped jugular gushing blood! To commit suicide everywhere, with no respite — that is my mission. Within myself, explosive and depressed, an entire nation grovels historically and recounts its lost childhood in bursts of stammered words and scriptural raving, and then, under the dark shock of lucidity, suddenly begins to weep at the enormity of the disaster, at the nearly sublime scope of its failure. There comes a time, after two centuries of conquest and thirty-four years of confusional sorrow, when one no longer has the strength to go beyond the appalling vision. Shut away inside the Institute walls and outfitted with the file of a terrorist who suffers ghostly maniacal phases, I give in to the vertiginous act of writing my memoirs and I start writing up the precise and meticulous proceedings of an unending suicide. There comes a time when fatigue erodes even unassailable plans and the novel one has begun unsystematically to write is diluted in equanitrate. The wages of the broken warrior are depression. The wages of our national depression are my own failure; it’s my childhood on an ice floe, it’s also the years of hibernation in Paris and the fall I took while skiing at the Totem into four sets of arms. The wages of my ethnic neurosis are the impact of the monocoque and the sheets of steel launched against an unshakable ton of obstacles. From now on I’m exempt from acting coherently and released once and for all from making a success of my life. If I wanted to I could end my days in the muffled torpor of an anhistoric institute, sit indefinitely before ten windows that display unequal portions of a conquered land and await the final judgement when, given the psychiatric evaluation and the extenuating circumstances, surely I’ll be acquitted.
And so provided with a legal file and its psychiatric appendix, I can dedicate myself to writing page after page of abolished words laid out in accordance with harmonies that are always pleasant to experience, even though if worse came to worse that could seem like work. But this carefully dosed effort is neither harmful nor contra-indicated, as long as the periods of writing are brief, of course, and followed by periods of rest. Nothing stops the politically depressed from conferring an aesthetic colouring on this verbal secretion; nothing prevents him from transferring to this improvised work the meaning that his own existence lacks, that is absent from his country’s future. Yet there’s something desperate about this investment of spare funds. It’s terrible and I can’t hide it from myself any longer: I am desperate. No one had told me that in becoming a patriot I’d be cast into adversity like this or that because I wanted freedom, I’d find myself locked up. How many seconds of dread, how many centuries of impotence must I live before I merit the final embrace of a white sheet? Nothing leads me to believe that a new and wonderful life will replace this one. Condemned to the dark, I hit the walls of a dungeon cell that finally, after thirty-four years of lies, I inhabit fully and in all humiliation. I am a prisoner of my madness, locked up inside my probationary helplessness, crouching over a piece of paper as white as a sheet with which one hangs oneself.
3
BETWEEN CUBA’S July 26 and the lyric night of August 4, between Place de la Riponne and the pizzeria on Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville in Lausanne, I met a blonde woman whose majestic stride I recognized at once. The happiness I felt just then echoes in me still as I sit at a table in this pizzeria — meeting-place for the masons of Tessin — and give in to the sadness that’s been numbing me progressively ever since I left my hotel, where all I did was spend some unproductive minutes after I’d gone to the Benjamin Constant movie theatre. In this pizzeria I ran aground.
And when the jukebox gave off the first chords of “Desafinado” for the third time, I’d had all the nostalgia I could take. To the rhythm of Afro-Brazilian guitars I got up and paid my bill. And here I am again in that earlier night, constricted once more in the vise of the rue des Escaliers-du-Marché, which I climb as if this slope could offset my inner fall. It’s a few steps from Place de la Riponne and it was while I was making my way there that I spotted K’s leonine mane. I speeded up and was soon beside her, very close to her face, which was turned away. I was afraid my sudden approach would frighten her and so, acting quickly to avert a misunderstanding, I spoke her name with an inflection I was sure she’d recognize. And it was then that the wonderful event, our reunion, occurred, as the two of us were approaching the grand esplanade of Place de la Riponne. We’d turned left after the dark colonnade of the university and the blinding happiness of our reunion. I don’t remember what route we followed next or what dark streets we strolled, K and I, before stopping for a moment on the great bridge just above the Gazette de Lausanne facing the dark mass of the cantonal government building that hid Lac Léman and the spectre of the Alps. Twelve months of separation, of misunderstandings and censorship, were ended magically by this coincidence: a few words relearned, the light touch of our bodies, their new expectations. Twelve months of lost love and lassitude were eradicated by the bliss of this unexpected encounter and our fierce love; we were carried away again towards the upper valley of the Nile, drifting voluptuously between Montreal and Toronto, between Queen Mary Road and the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery, from our lyric rooms at the Polytechnical Institute to our fleeting encounters in Pointe-Claire, some time between a violent July 26 and a funereal August 4, twofold anniversary of a twofold revolution: one that began dangerously and the other, secret, that arose from our kisses and our sacrileges.