Hubert Aquin - Next Episode

Time passes and I take forever to cross the Col des Mosses. Each turn surprises me in third gear when I should have already started to gear down; each sentence disconcerts me. I burn words, stages, memories, and I keep freeing myself from the tracery of this interpolated night. The event that’s already too far ahead of me will unfold shortly, in a few minutes, when I arrive at the trough of the valley and the essential level of my double life. This winding road that flies past in my high-beams suddenly slows down before I get to Château d’Oex. The asphalt ribbon that weaves between Les Mosses and Le Tornettaz brings me here, close to the Cartierville bridge and the Montreal Prison, less than a fifteen-minute drive from my legal domicile and my private life. All the curves I passionately embrace and the valleys I escort bring me inevitably into this stifling pen populated by ghosts. I want out of here. I’m afraid of getting used to this shrunken space; I’m afraid that greedily drinking in the impossible will change me, and that when I’m set free I won’t be able to walk on my own two feet. I’m afraid of waking up degenerated, stripped of identity, annihilated. Someone who isn’t me, with eyes wild and brain purged of any antecedent, will walk through the gate on the day of my liberation. My pain is too exhausting to let me experience, to try to designate the slightest relief. That, no doubt, is why, whenever I gather momentum in this choppy narrative, I immediately forget why I’ve been pursuing it. I can’t help thinking that my written race in the shadow of Les Mosses and Le Tornettaz is a futile one, when I remind myself that I’m a prisoner here in an unassailable cage. I spend my time encoding passwords, as if I were eventually going to escape! I streamline my sentences so they’ll take flight sooner! I send my proxy by Volvo into the Col des Mosses, help him reach the upper level of the pass without a hitch, and send him racing down the other side of the mountain at hair-raising velocity, thinking that the higher speed will have an effect on me and let me avoid a spiral fall into an unmoving ditch. Everything breaks free here except me. Words slip by, and time, the Alpine landscape, and the Vaudois villages, while I, I shudder in my immanence and perform a dance of possession inside a prescribed circle.

At Château d’Oex, the clock in the steeple shows half-past eight when, after an hour of investigation between the offices of the Union Fribourgeoise de Crédit and the villa of the Pastors of the National Church, I set off again along the same road but in the opposite direction, looking not for the president of the Banque Commerciale Saharienne but for a Belgian citizen fascinated by Roman history and with a mandate to make trouble for us. The 300SL had vanished somewhere between Montreux and the Pastors of the National Church. According to official sources, Scipio Africanus was travelling in a blue Opel — more appropriate for a university professor. My information came from Pastor Nussbaumer, himself a specialist in the historiography of the Sonderbund. After identifying myself as a specialist in the Punic wars, I questioned him subtly. As God is my witness, I was quite surprised to learn through this subterfuge about the presence in Switzerland of a colleague who knew Scipio Africanus like the back of his hand. My conversation with Pastor Nussbaumer boosted my morale and put me in great shape for climbing the darkened wall of the Mosses in one go, which I did with a briskness and precision that could have qualified me for the Rallye des Alpes. Once I’d reached the highest point of the pass, I didn’t give myself a moment’s respite: I floored the gas pedal along the only straight part of the road and, at the end, stepped on the brake before gearing down to take on the first of a long series of turns. From parabola through ellipse and double S-curve, I get to the Sepey and then all the way to the Rhône in the vicinity of Aigle. In nineteen minutes and twelve seconds — timing unofficial but accurate — I travelled the distance between Les Charmilles, where I’d seen the Reverend Nussbaumer, and the cog-railway station just outside Aigle. I was proud, and rightly so, of my schuss performance and of the way my Volvo hugged the road.

Enthusiastically and with sensational style, I travelled the last leg between me and the famous Professor H. de Heutz. From Aigle to the Château de Chillon I drove like a maniac and then, after a bottleneck outside Montreux-Vevey, I set off again for the gates of the beloved city of Lausanne, driving through it blindly. Around ten o’clock I slowed down: I was finally in Geneva. Taking the road to Lausanne had brought me to the Quai des Bergues and I drove along it, breaking every one of this Calvinist country’s traffic laws. Then, after crossing the Rhône at the very spot where the Helvetians would have crossed if they hadn’t been wiped out by Caesar, I went down several streets and arrived, fresh as a daisy, at the door of the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande. My Swiss-made watch showed twelve minutes past ten.

“Excuse me, Madame, is this where Professor de Heutz is lecturing …?”

“You’re too late, Monsieur. Surely you don’t think at this hour of the night …”

“Do you know where he might be, by any chance? I’m a colleague …”

“Geneva’s a big city. You can always try, but where? I suggest you get in touch with Monsieur Bullinger, our president. He often drops by the Café du Globe after our lectures …”

A few minutes later I was parked diagonally on the Quai du Général-Guisan near the Globe. I was amazed to realize that the lecture on “Caesar and the Helvetians,” which I’d promised myself to attend when I was drinking a beer in Vevey, had been given in my absence by the man I’d been pursuing from one canton to the next.

The Globe terrace was still all lit up and crowded. Inside, I could make out the silhouettes of other customers and waiters. Before going into action, I pretended for a while that I was just hanging around and looked in jewellers’ windows till I spotted a blue Opel parked across from the café. From a seat on the terrace, I could keep an eye on the car; then, after its owner had gone inside, I’d still have time to get to my Volvo, parked a little further away, and chase the Opel. Once I was sitting over a Feldschlossen with a thick head of foam, I reviewed the situation. Pastor Nussbaumer knew that I wanted to meet H. de Heutz, as did the receptionist at the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande: both had every reason to believe that I was also a colleague and friend of H. de Heutz. (In case I made a mess of things, my Volvo would head for Italy and I’d go back to playing a Canadian Press correspondent in Switzerland, domiciled at 18 boulevard James-Fazy, Geneva.) Furthermore, the Belgian historian has nothing to do with the banker Carl von Ryndt, whose disappearance would surely be of no concern to Pastor Nussbaumer or to the honourable members of the Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande or even to the waiter who’d brought me my beer. Of course the bellhop at the Rochers de Naye in Montreux knew that a man corresponding vaguely to my anthropometric record was looking for a man named von Ryndt and was getting ready to travel from Montreux to Château d’Oex to meet him. But that bellhop, who was as discreet as a banker, would only be able to assert that I hadn’t found my man at Château d’Oex because, in any event, I’d stopped looking for von Ryndt at Château d’Oex and had begun, after metamorphosing into a Romanist, to look for one H. de Heutz, acknowledged expert on Scipio Africanus and Caesar’s wars. On the terrace of the Café du Globe, three customers were airing their scholarly opinions about Balzac in pure native Genevan accents.