Hubert Aquin - Next Episode

The revolution will come the way love came to us one June 24 when, naked and glorious, we annihilated each other on a bed of shadow while a conquered people was learning how to march in step. It will come in the manner of the absolute and repeated event that consumed us, whose plenitude is haunting me tonight. This nameless book is undecided, as I myself have been since the Seven Years War, anarchical too as one must be at the dawn of a revolution. We can’t wish soberly for revolution, we can’t explain it like a syllogism or call it in the way that we proceed in court. The inevitable disorder is already gaining on me, moulding my soul: I am invaded like the field of a battle I prepare for feverishly. It is on us and in us that the great disruption begins; it is in our vulnerable existences and our loving encounters that the first blows are dealt. The anarchy that heralds its approach manifests itself through our ministry; it throws us in prison, broken, unsatisfied, sick. The revolution I call for has wounded me. Before hostilities have begun, my own battle is already over. Prematurely disqualified, evacuated to the interior, out of the line of fire, I’m a wounded soldier; but what a cruel wound, for according to the letter there’s no war yet and that’s what is wounding me. My country is injuring me. Its prolonged failure has flung me to the ground. Wounded and ghostly, I experience behind bars the first tremors of a story that has never been told, that resembles this book only because it too is untold and because I don’t know the names of my brothers who will be killed in battle, any more than I know the titles of the different chapters of my novel. I don’t even know what will become of my characters who are waiting for me in the Coppet woods. I’ve reached the point of wondering if I’ll get to the Hôtel d’Angleterre in time, because that’s the only thing that concerns me now: the time that separates me from our meeting is slipping by.

Melancholy permeates me through all the valves of reading and boredom. Between the second-last sentence and this one, I’ve let four or five national revolutions pass, the same number of empires, of holy alliances and joyous entries. In the same rift I’ve seen a dozen revolutions turn to failure, starting with the revolution of Geneva in 1781, that of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1787, that of the Austrian Netherlands, and of Liège. In less than twenty-four hours I lived from 1776 to 1870, from the Boston Tea Party to the Camp de la Misère on the Meuse near Sedan, seeking nourishment in the harsh water of my memories. Since yesterday, somewhere between H. de Heutz and Toussaint l’Ouverture, I’ve been submerged in the secular water of revolution. I have shuddered at the thousand suicides of Tchernychevski and at the insurrectional romanticism of Mazzini. These elder brothers in despair and outrage are nearly as present in me as the Patriotes, my unknown brothers, who wait for me secretly, impatiently. Will they recognize me?

My brothers-in-war are virtual, as are the unlikely characters who await me further along in this story, who may surprise me, and as I encourage them to do specific deeds, they’ll oblige me to remember them, not wait for them as I’m doing now, fascinated by the area of freedom they move in as if they were inside a prehistory I have to end by writing something that they haven’t done yet, that they’ll do in the exact proportion to which my indifferent invention brings them up to date.

All night long the centuries file past beneath the windows of our love. But I’ve lost you, my love, and this music no longer intoxicates me. I must see you again. Without you, I die. The vast landscape of our love is darkening. I see neither the ravaged pedestal of the High Alps nor the great dead flows of the glaciers. I see nothing: neither the synclinal vault of the lake nor the overturned mass of the Hôtel d’Angleterre nor the Château d’Ouchy nor the crest of the grand hotels of Lausanne nor the invisible chalet I’ve dreamed of buying in Evolène in the high valley of Hérens, nor the vesperal form of the Château de Coppet. Nothing can save me now. My leaded coffin is sinking to the bottom of an uninhabited lake. Decades of failures and pitched battles no longer sustain me, any more than the centuries of my life in love that have been reduced to a few dates on an envelope.

I need you; I need to retrieve the thread of our story and the ellipsis that will take me back to the heat of our two consumed bodies. I don’t know where to pick up. I remember that dialogue with H. de Heutz in the Coppet woods. But so much has happened since then, at such a brisk pace, and I’m so engaged in this jolting process that it’s less urgent for me to recount what happened between Coppet and now than to concentrate on what is happening and what is threatening to happen. Time sweeps me along. This long wait has in no way conditioned me for action. And when there is action, I’m caught off guard, compelled to improvise even though I’d carefully prepared myself for any eventuality. All that I should have guessed when I found myself in the Château d’Echandens, facing H. de Heutz who had me in his sights.

IN FACT, THINGS started to blur at the point in that confused meeting where I was acting, while admitting implicitly that there could be no witnesses to my conversation with H. de Heutz. I got out of the trap, and it didn’t occur to me that, while I was pushing H. de Heutz ahead of me at gunpoint, some other person was very close by, observing me, no doubt delighted to watch me bash down a wide-open door with such bravado. It was during the interval between my confinement and my flight, between the time when I disarmed H. de Heutz and when I stuffed him into the Opel’s trunk, that I stopped being logical. I was behaving like a fugitive who couldn’t be punished while I jumped with both feet into a gaping trap. Moreover, I was displaying a deranged self-confidence. Yes, I should have been careful, because everything happened as it does in the movies with murky ease. The more I think back to those few minutes, the more I wonder how plausible this sequence is. I even wonder if H. de Heutz didn’t politely slow down his reaction time when I went to disarm him simply to help me out. I’m sure he did: he cheated imperceptibly to give me time to get into the victor’s skin, to smoothly abide by the scenario that had been devised to trap me. H. de Heutz didn’t resist my injunction. He curled up in the trunk of the car. Just as I was slamming the lid on his head, he must have given a hint of a contented smile, for I was meekly obeying him and he didn’t even have to state his orders clearly. I had become his medium: unbeknownst to me, H. de Heutz had driven me into a cataleptic state and, from his hermetically sealed position, he continued to guide me into recklessness and rapture. If only I’d had the strength to turn around, I’d have spotted two eyes fixed on me at one of the windows on the north side of the chateau.

It’s possible that the situation I’m in now is making me overstate the degree of premeditation behind the trap H. de Heutz, dear man, had set for me. Let’s admit that he’d anticipated my getaway attempt and that, among other possibilities, I might jump into the little Opel to do it. All right. But how could he have precisely imagined I’d make him get into the trunk of the car I was borrowing from him? He couldn’t foresee what approach I would make, so he was predicting something else: that I’d commandeer the Opel for my getaway! Following the internal logic of this method, after H. de Heutz had rearmed he’d have taken off after me in the other car, which I hadn’t seen but which had to have been in the garage, whose doors were shut. What’s more, H. de Heutz was positive he’d catch up with me: there’s just one road through Echandens and as soon as he saw me drive away in one direction or the other, he had plenty of time to calmly open the garage doors and take out the other car. In any event, I was bound to be driving down his road with a few minutes’ lead at most. A strictly technical problem: I couldn’t escape from him — unless of course in his haste he lost control of his vehicle and smashed his skull against a hundred-year-old tree, which was highly unlikely if you know H. de Heutz.