as I was, I also felt extravagantly free, inordinately powerful – invincible! Driving into Geneva, I went automatically to Place Simon-Goulart. At once I spotted the egg-like shape of my Volvo. I found a place to park the Opel near the Banque Arabe. In the euphoria of my escape I’d forgotten to think, but now I was suddenly aware of danger. No sooner had I parked than I decided to clear out. First of all, Place Simon-Goulart is not a place where you can easily kill a man in the trunk of a car without rousing suspicion. And some of H. de Heutz’s friends might drop by, wait for me to pick up my Volvo, and nab me. I’d been careless.
For some time now I’ve been awash in melancholy. Fleeting images are all around me, flying in my mental jungle like anopheles. I’m in pain. Hours and hours have been added to the time when I’ll kill H. de Heutz. And a cloistered life marks with despair the words imprinted on my broken memory. This republican ennui is cruelly draining me of my revolutionary zeal. Though I don’t want to glorify the happiness I’ve lost, I secretly praise it and confer plenipotentiary attributes on what is not happening to me. I see myself again sitting on the gallery of our rented villa. We were drinking a wine from Johannesburg at the high altitude, facing the Chamossaire; across the valley the great Alps stretched out towards the south. What terrifies me is that I’m no longer suspended in the majestic void; I am here, slipping into the variable densities of my defeat. The passing hours are burying me in despair. I feel so far removed from my former life and from those mornings in Leysin when I would walk in the pure air 1,800 metres above sorrow and failure, well beyond the surface of Lac Léman where, for days now, I’ve been descending, asphyxiated, into an imaginary current that runs past the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre where I am dying of love. Sensitive only to the movement of the water that pushes mealong dazzling shores and makes me glide beneath the base of the Alps, I let it carry me. My past is disembowelled by the hypocritical pressure of the verb. I am dying, drugged, in a false-bottomed lake while I spy through translucent portholes a gelatinous and protozoan mass that exhausts me and resembles me.
In a few days of summer, during that interval between two dwindling shores and two days of revolution, between the flaming island and the frenzied night of August 4, after two centuries of melancholy and thirty-four years of helplessness I am becoming depersonalized. Time is fleeting as I write, everything is becoming a little more rooted, and here I am, dear love, reduced to my final dust. Total mineralization. Motionless, I attain a volcanic stasis. With this historic dust I surround my eyes and eyebrows; I make myself a mask. I write to you.
Writing is a great expression of love. Writing used to mean writing to you; but now that I’ve lost you I still mass words together, mechanically, because in my heart of hearts I hope that my intellectual wanderings, which I reserve for born debaters, will make their way to you. Then my book of ideas will be simply the cryptic continuation of a night of love with you, my absolute partner to whom I can write in secret by addressing myself to a readership that will never be anything more than the multiplication of your eyes. Writing to you, I address the world. Love is the cycle of the word. I write to you infinitely, endlessly inventing the canticle I read in your eyes; through my words I place my lips on the blazing flesh of my country and I love you, desperately, as on the day of our first communion.
N EXT 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
For some time now I’ve been awash in melancholy. Fleeting images are all around me, flying in my mental jungle like anopheles. I’m in pain. Hours and hours have been added to the time when I’ll kill H. de Heutz. And a cloistered life marks with despair the words imprinted on my broken memory. This republican ennui is cruelly draining me of my revolutionary zeal. Though I don’t want to glorify the happiness I’ve lost, I secretly praise it and confer plenipotentiary attributes on what is not happening to me. I see myself again sitting on the gallery of our rented villa. We were drinking a wine from Johannesburg at the high altitude, facing the Chamossaire; across the valley the great Alps stretched out towards the south. What terrifies me is that I’m no longer suspended in the majestic void; I am here, slipping into the variable densities of my defeat. The passing hours are burying me in despair. I feel so far removed from my former life and from those mornings in Leysin when I would walk in the pure air 1,800 metres above sorrow and failure, well beyond the surface of Lac Léman where, for days now, I’ve been descending, asphyxiated, into an imaginary current that runs past the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre where I am dying of love. Sensitive only to the movement of the water that pushes mealong dazzling shores and makes me glide beneath the base of the Alps, I let it carry me. My past is disembowelled by the hypocritical pressure of the verb. I am dying, drugged, in a false-bottomed lake while I spy through translucent portholes a gelatinous and protozoan mass that exhausts me and resembles me.
In a few days of summer, during that interval between two dwindling shores and two days of revolution, between the flaming island and the frenzied night of August 4, after two centuries of melancholy and thirty-four years of helplessness I am becoming depersonalized. Time is fleeting as I write, everything is becoming a little more rooted, and here I am, dear love, reduced to my final dust. Total mineralization. Motionless, I attain a volcanic stasis. With this historic dust I surround my eyes and eyebrows; I make myself a mask. I write to you.
Writing is a great expression of love. Writing used to mean writing to you; but now that I’ve lost you I still mass words together, mechanically, because in my heart of hearts I hope that my intellectual wanderings, which I reserve for born debaters, will make their way to you. Then my book of ideas will be simply the cryptic continuation of a night of love with you, my absolute partner to whom I can write in secret by addressing myself to a readership that will never be anything more than the multiplication of your eyes. Writing to you, I address the world. Love is the cycle of the word. I write to you infinitely, endlessly inventing the canticle I read in your eyes; through my words I place my lips on the blazing flesh of my country and I love you, desperately, as on the day of our first communion.
N EXT 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
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