Nothing but sleepless nights and insomnia have dilated our pupils — from the last drop of rainfall to the first picked fruit! Heavy stride, magical caverns on the wings of ballistic engines. Miserable and perilous acceleration of History by an angel of light. A scout who heads up the caravan. Avant-garde that calls for revolution. A dramatic sneeze that decongests the blocked nostrils of time. For I take all revolutions to be the sneezes of History.
At school, I’d come across this word — History — wide as life itself, stormy as the sea. I was told so much about it that I got lost in a maze, having added so many crazy ingredients that I’d ended up with an indigestible and complex sort of bouillabaisse. Repulsive cat soup. Movement of a mobile whose path traces a closed curve. Journey of a celestial body in its orbit. Rotation around an axis. Abrupt and violent change of direction. While I knew full well that life was in fact open — irregularly — onto the branches of a rising spiral. To the point of vertigo. And that, ultimately, old bodies, worn-out hearts, and weary legs all end up part of a new universe, engorged with energy.
More and more teachers and books passed before my eyes, talking to me of revolutions! The miracle of Christianity. Demographic surges. Economic booms. New ventures in psychoanalysis. Surrealist quests. Marvels of modern science. Barriers broken down. Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Einstein, James Joyce, Apollinaire, Lenin (whom I loved from the very first encounter) were presented to me either as madmen, visionaries, or as embittered and bloodthirsty characters. And during the twentieth century all political movements sought, or so it seemed at least, the revolt of the masses. Whereas on the sidelines of all demagogic orchestration the truth still seems inaccessible and ambiguous.
However, in a little corner of my life, at the very core of my being, the image of something I experienced long ago has always remained fresh. A seemingly banal event. But one that I carry in me like a drop of light. This image is first to appear, emerging from its hiding place, as soon as I hear anyone speak of revolution. It’s in January 1946. I’m nine years old. Standing under the little gallery of my house one Monday morning, I see an enormous agitated crowd of mainly young people coming up Docteur Aubry Street. Frightened, I clutch the porch rail. At the bend of Tiremasse Street, one of the protesters kneels suddenly, his face aflame, his arms flung open. And cries out over and over: Down with Lescot! Down with misery! Excited, my mother begins to scream the same words. I ask her what they mean. She tells me that this is the revolution.
Ever since, whenever I hear or pronounce this word, before putting together its fundamental elements, the very first image that comes to my mind is that of a frenzied crowd and a man, arms flung wide, screaming out his suffering against one of the Lescots of this world.
Raynand climbs up Monseigneur Guilloux Hill, the one leading up to the sanatorium. Tired, he has trouble dragging along his own disoriented body. He’d been left in a state of complete exhaustion after that unjust and horrific three-month incarceration. His head, swimming with calculations, weighs too heavy on his shoulders. Why keep looking, when life poses questions with no ready answers? Solutions are all out of reach. Since yesterday, I’ve been wearing myself out in vain looking for ten dollars to save my dying mother. Tuberculosis. Pulmonary hemorrhage. She’d been spitting up blood. Resign myself? How can I visit her at the sanatorium? Without bringing her anything? And the thing is, she’s there because of me, poor old woman. She caught this illness while I was out of the country. Her spirit broke when she found out about my troubles in that foreign land.
Can one ever know the toll bitterness takes on the life spirit that surges through the networks of an interior architecture we’re so proud of? The blood that courses through our veins. I still don’t understand. It’s clear I’ll never understand anything. I’ve always been told: do this, don’t do that. At home, old uncle Raoul doled out, left and right, advice I found so rational that it never occurred to me to question it even once. Old uncle Raoul died one rainy night, a skinny dog and a bottle of tafia on either side of him. Drowning in debt. Abandoned by his wife, Nellie. Buried as a pauper in a mass grave. He ended up alone in his own skin. Turns out he’d never understood much about anything either.
At school, the teacher theorized, and terrorized — screaming about the usefulness of the sciences until our eardrums just about burst. My boy, think about it: the straight line, parallel lines, symmetry, right angles, etc. It was just so marvelous, that shortest distance between two points. Today, all the lines are broken. The roads are blocked by brambles and barbed wire. The object is beyond the center. None of the images I see are real. All the mirrors are distorted. There’s only a mocking, farcical caricature spouting unintelligible phrases against a gray sky. The mobile and incandescent arc of life presents such different angles to each vision, each minute. The sun doesn’t have its image in the hearth; it burns and we sweat, at the mercy of steep roads that lead nowhere. Other than to the most hideous suffering. To failure. The horrifying solitude of a sanatorium devoid of any treatment for disease.
With tiny steps, Raynand climbs toward the entry stairs to the hospital, his head encircled by a huge iron ring. Fever burns his brain. He’s always had a fever. His first contact with the world was a burning, devouring malarial fever. He’d had to miss a week at Saint-Martial Middle School, where he’d been enrolled in basic classes in the children’s section. Upon his return, still recovering, and unable to express himself in French, a ridiculous smile and idiotic facial expression were his only response to dear Sister Félicienne, who’d wanted a note explaining his absence — a note that his illiterate mother wouldn’t even have been able to write. That was so long ago. Yet that scene stayed fresh in his memory. There, too, he hadn’t understood. And his little classmates had all laughed at him.
His mother relied on him at the time, she who didn’t know — and couldn’t know — what life had in store for her … She who didn’t know that her son was crippled in both legs. Crippled by the struggle for existence, ever since his bitter childhood, he’d been good at hiding his crutches and his wooden legs. In fact, had he ever had anything worthwhile inside him? He’d only ever made the poor woman suffer, she who naïvely thought that putting her child in the Seminary, an institution of classical education run by Spiritain missionaries, would guarantee his success. It’s the first step that counts, she thought. But the road is long, perilous, strewn with emaciated skeletons. A pile of skulls, femurs, clavicles, pelvises, digits, severed little bones. Hideously ugly cadavers. Travelers fallen in the middle of the mournful night before their pale eyes were able even to make out the lights of a distant dawn. So many had fallen. They had faith in the future. They had goodwill. They’d fallen in the midst of struggling. For my part, I didn’t worry about it. I was more of a faithful servant of evil. Playing hooky … Coins slipped out from under the damask rug … The mahogany furniture I marred on purpose … The classic books I resold on Cathedral Place so I could buy cigarettes and alcohol. The money for school fees I spent on sweets … Truly, Mama had no idea that I didn’t give a damn about catechism, sacred history, arithmetic, French grammar, all of it peppered with holy communions and fastidious prayer. And what has she gotten for it, my mother? What’s left for her? A life sacrificed for absolutely nothing. A candle that goes out for lack of oxygen and a liter of blood. Nothing more … not even ten dollars for the necessary serum. Nothing for her but the inevitable annihilation.