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Palace after shaking hands with Hamidou Diop. I slipped into the hotel lobby without attracting Hamidou’s attention. Executing a
paso doble
, I was outside the hotel a fraction of a second later, in time to see a 300 SL drive off towards Place Saint-François. Something told me that this fleeting silhouette didn’t pop out of the Senegalese Sahel and that Hamidou is playing a double game. In any case, it’s pointless to ask him to identify the man he was speaking to, or tell him about my own rash suspicions. The handsome African is more cunning than a Chinese. With his unbridled loquacity and his athletic negritude, he masks all too successfully both his wiles and his awe-inspiring intelligence.
    During these reflections on my hero’s subtle duplicity, I walked slowly up the rue de Bourg and went inside the movie theatre on Place Benjamin Constant to see
Black Orpheus
again. Listening to “Felicidade,” I started to cry. I don’t know why that song of happiness spells melancholy to me or why that fragile joy was translated for me into lugubrious chords. So nothing can stop me from calling to my black Eurydice,from searching for her in the never-ending night, shadow among the shadows of a dark carnival, a night darker than a night of saturnalia, a night sweeter than the one we spent together somewhere in her native tropics one June 24. Eurydice, I am descending. I’m here, at last. By writing to you I shall touch you, black shadow, black magic, love. The Benjamin Constant theatre is a free fall for me. This very evening, a few miles from the Hôtel de la Paix, headquarters of the FLN , a few steps from the Montreal Prison, dark headquarters of the FLQ , no sooner do I brush against your blazing body than it’s lost to me; I piece you together again but words fail me. The historic night seems to be secreting the India ink in which I can make out too many fleeting forms that resemble you but aren’t you. At the end of my liquid decadence, I’ll touch the low land, our bed of caresses and convulsions. My love … I feel giddy. In fact I’m afraid of every silhouette, of my neighbours in the theatre, of the stranger who conceals Eurydice’s mulatto profile from me, of the people waiting on the sidewalk when I leave the theatre.
    I hurried through this dense crowd and crossed Place Benjamin Constant. And as I walked past the illuminated front of the Hôtel de la Paix, I looked in the other direction at the jagged profile of the Savoy Alps and the mottled expanse of the lake. Eleven-fifteen. I’d wasted my day. Now I had nothing to do, no one to meet, no hope of finding the man Hamidou had shaken hands with in the lobby of the Lausanne Palace. Nonchalantly, I went back to the hotel. I was given the key to my room and a sealed blue paper. I tore it open quickly, and understanding nothing of what was written on it, I stuffed it into my pocket so I wouldn’t attract the elevator boy’s attention. As soon as I was in my room I lay down on the bed and reread the formless jumble of capital letters with no spaces: CINBEUPERFLEUDIARUNCOBESCUBEREBES-CUAZURANOCTIVAGUS . This one-word cryptogram had me perplexed for a few minutes; then I decided to perform analphabetical statistical analysis, which gave me: E 7 times; U 7; R 5; B, A, and C 4 times; S 3; I 3; O 2; G 2; P, F, L, V, and Z one time only. The blatant predominance of the letter U was mystifying. I know of no language in which that vowel is so predominant. Not even in Portuguese and Romanian, though they’re rife with U’s, does that letter so outweigh the other vowels.
    The cryptogram from the Hôtel de la Paix still fascinates me, not only because of its mysterious origin (which has nothing to do with the Bureau, whose figures and even their variants I know by heart), but also because of why the message was sent. As I stumbled over this equation with its multiple unknowns I must solve before I go any further in my story, I have the feeling I’m facing the most