Hubert Aquin - Next Episode

NEXT DAY. Sadness strikes me, as violent and sudden as a lone wave breaking, crashing down on me like a tsunami. Just moments before the commotion I was taking a pleasant trip through my memory, recalling the villages we’d driven through in the Eastern Townships between Acton Vale and Tingwick, which is now called Chénier. Suddenly I’d been struck down, carried away with the trees and my memories at the speed of that cruel wave, swept along in the decanted vomit of our national history, devastated by gloom. The fragile edifice I’d patiently erected to help me face up to hours of seclusion has developed cracks in all its girders, twisting and engulfing me as it is crushed. The only thing that’s left for me in this world is to notate my elementary fall. Sorrow sullies me: I pump it in, I swallow it through all my pores, I’m filled with it like a drowned man. Is it obvious that I am aging by myself, that neither the sun nor the pleasures of the flesh now gild my skin? No amorous expectation fills my body; I have no obsessions. I take a few steps down the corridor of my closed submersible; I look through the periscope. I no longer see Cuba’s profile foundering above me, or the proud jagged summit of the Grand Combin, or the dreamy silhouette of Byron, or that of my love who waits for me tonight at half-past six on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre.

Though I draw the tangled thread of my lifeline on this paper, it does not bring back the bed strewn with coloured cushions where we loved each other one June 24, while somewhere beneath our tumult an entire people, gathered together, seemed to be celebrating the irresistible descent of the blood in our veins. You were beautiful, my love. How proud I am of your beauty! How it rewards me! What triumph there was in us that night! What violent and sweet foretaste of the national revolution was unfolding on that narrow bed awash in colours and our two bodies naked, blazing, united in their rhythmic madness. Again tonight my lips hold the damp taste of your boundless kisses. On your bed of chalky sand and on your slippery Alps I descend posthaste, I spread like ground water, I seep in everywhere; an absolute terrorist, I enter all the pores of your spoken lake: I burst, spilling over above the line of your lips, and I flee, oh how I flee, as rapidly as lightning at sea, I flee at the speed of the breaking waves! I topple you, my love, onto this bed suspended above a fête nationale … To think that at this moment I am writing out the minutes of the time we spent outside that insurrectional bed, away from our overwhelming spasm and the dazzling explosion of our desire! I write to fill the time I’m wasting here, that’s ruining me, leaving on my face the furrowed traces of its endless alluvium and the indelible proof that I’ve been eradicated. I write to stave off sorrow and to feel it. Hopelessly I write a long love letter — but when will you read it and when will we be together again and then again? What are you doing at this moment, my love? Where are you travelling outside the walls? Are you moving away from your house, from our memories? Do you sometimes enter the erogenous zone of our fête nationale? Do you sometimes kiss me in that stirring chamber crowded with a million disarmed brothers? Do you rediscover the taste of my mouth in the same way that I return obsessively to our kiss and the very fracas of our embrace? Do you think about me? Do you still know my name? Do you hear me deep inside you when your dreaming evocation of our caresses brings a shudder to your sleeping body? Do you look for me in your bed, along your gleaming thighs? Look, I lie full length on you, like the mighty river I flow into your great valley. Endlessly, I draw nearer to you …

Words learned, words silenced, our bodies naked at the national solstice, our bodies struck down as they emerged from a caress and the last snow of winter slowed our fall, everything around me is shaken in a crisis of depreciation, as though we were approaching a global conflict. The storm that rages in the financial section strikes my very heart: morbid inflation makes me swell, overflow. I’m afraid, terribly afraid. What will happen to me? I’ve felt helpless ever since Bakunin’s death in a common prison in Berne, awash in debt and forgotten. Revolution, where are you? Are you sinking in flames in the middle of Lac Léman, absurd sun that sheds no light on the depths where I’m making my way, incognito?… Between July 26 and my inflationary night, I keep inventing the arms of the woman I love and celebrating through the weary repetition of my prose the prophetic anniversary of our revolution. I keep coming back to this torrid room. Beneath our mingled bodies a muffled sound came to us from the joyful city: a constant gasping, unendurable punctuation transmitted all the way to our maquis. And I remember the disorder we inflicted on everything around us; I remember the brightness of the sky, the darkness inside our flying cabin. It was hot, very hot, on that June 24. It seemed to us, my love, that something was about to begin that night, that our torchlit parade would set fire to the colonial night, fill with dawn the great valley of the conquest where we’d seen the light of day, where on this summer night we’d reinvented love and, in the tremors and the tricks of pleasure, conceived a dazzling event that is loath to come into being. But tonight I am depopulated: my streets are empty, desolate. All these joyous people are abandoning me. The important persons I yearned for are breaking away from the future. The plot is being resolved at the same time that my sentence is dislocated without any fuss.

I won’t accept that what was being made ready on that particular June 24 won’t come about. An apocryphal sacrament joins us inextricably to the revolution. The project we’ve started we shall finish. To the very end I’ll be the person I began to be with you, in you. These things happen. Wait for me.

I FLOOR THE gas pedal. There’s a quiet place I know near the Château de Coppet. I can get there in a few minutes. I’ve already wasted too much time. As soon as I’ve finished with my passenger, I’ll leave the Opel near the Coppet station and take the omnibus-train to Geneva where I’ll get my Volvo back; this time, I’ll take the expressway so I’ll be on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre at half-past six to join K. Better yet, I’ll take the train to Lausanne, I’ll get a taxi at the station, and I’ll be at the Hôtel d’Angleterre three or four minutes later. I’ll abandon the Volvo immediately and gladly and report the incident to the Bureau, a mere formality. After all, I’m not going to travel around in a car that’s already been identified. Here I am at Coppet, ravenously hungry (it’s already past twelve-thirty), but I’ll eat when it’s over. I’m anxious to be done with H. de Heutz and all the rest. Before I board the train that will take me to Lausanne, I’m sure I’ll have a few minutes to munch a croûte zurichoise at the station restaurant, washed down with white wine from the Valais. While I wait and as I make my way through Coppet en route to the Château, I concentrate on the problem of von Ryndt-de Heutz. The minute the trunk is open, I’ll bring him out at gunpoint and haul him into the forest. It won’t be hard to find the clearing where I picnicked with K one beautiful Sunday afternoon. Here is Necker’s chateau already, with its worn-out romanticism and its princely iron gate. Now I just have to turn left. Yes, that’s it. I stay in second gear. All around me there’s nothing and no one. I’m perplexed. This bit of road doesn’t lead to the little forest, at least I don’t think it does. I stop the car, letting the engine idle. I decide to go on. I advance a few hundred feet: already the broader landscape looks familiar. Yes, I’m here. I advance cautiously, nearly at a walk; if I take anyone by surprise I can always claim I’m a tourist exploring the area around the chateau. All that’s missing is an edition of Benjamin Constant’s diary. I know where I am now. The edge of the forest. Will I have trouble finding the entrance we used in the parchment-green Renault we’d rented for nine days? I still can hear the melody of “Desafinado.” It’s following me, a lyrical germ of my state of mind and of my desire to escape by hiding in this woods near the Château de Coppet, and in the piece of writing that is taking me back to Switzerland and helping me get over my hunger while I drive my passenger into the forest, brushing against the branches of the Jurassic pines that fill this woods where other exiles have ventured before me.