On the damp floor, piles of blond caterpillars. No more pistachios. All that’s left are a few rotten pods in the humidity of the room. More than half the stock had flown off in a fireworks of wings and luminous dust. Raynand doesn’t even try to understand. What would he know about the marvelous process of metamorphosis? How would he ever be able to seize, in flight and on the fly, the brilliant rainbow in which animal and vegetable meet in all their splendor on a bridge of softness and clarity? And so he prefers to distance himself from the shock of this shack. Without saying a word. Nourishing the blissful illusion that he’d been the maker of miracles in the middle of the day.
In traversing the entry gate, he surprises himself by thinking, without really knowing why, about Paulin’s novel — still without a title.
Daughter, bring me a straw chair so I can sit down! The hard rock is hurting my bottom. And I’m tired from standing up for so long. I want to gaze upon the teats of time. The jumble of clouds eaten away by parasites. The moon secretes a sour milk on stubborn eyes. Inflamed gaze from the burns of corrosive stars. My daughter is a child of the islands where a people of sleeping warriors reside. Fever of the past. Coldness of the present. Uncertainty of the future. The chained-up giants fear their own awakening. Phobia of risk. Tired spines. Death is up on its feet. Let’s lay it down in a hammock and rock it to sleep! Combat ruse and not pitiful surrender. My daughter is from Haiti. Island with gaping jaws. What troubling expectation is being incubated at its black breasts? Mountainous island with its marrow sucked dry by foreign lions.
Daughter, bring me a low chair so I can stretch out on the arbor of old stories from back home. The dying wizard cannot take the whole village to the cemetery with him, says the old man with the white beard. The tale is so long that the end won’t come soon enough. Patience is a slow team of oxen in the night. May my eldest daughter serve white rum to the neighbors who come to take part in the exorcism of the castle steeped in a nightmare! Set up the chairs in a circle and leave a place in the center for the best storyteller to animate the wake. He speaks. The chorus responds: if ever the earth should tremble, may the children of tender and pure flesh survive!
Nathalie, my daughter, listen well … Once upon a time there was a giant with unusually long fingers. Fingers that crossed mountains, oceans, continents. Swept away the plains. Stirred up the sea. Rooted around in the soil. Took away the cattle, the provisions, the precious metals. This clever giant thus took over all the useful things that do not belong to him. Seized all goods to be found within ten thousand leagues of his home. And with his powerful fingers he even uprooted the living, grabbing them by the stomach. Insatiable, he drank the blood of all living beings. Inexorably he chewed up the bones of any valiant warriors who dared to protest.
With time, the giant got old, and even more cruel. But the men remained undaunted. They waited. Hoped. Watched. Prepared their revenge. The great trap … One night, while the monster slept, they lit great wood fires. In the mountains. In the islands. Everywhere. The flames rose up to the sky in a pure yellow. Awakening with a start, the giant, whose vision had weakened with age, thought that some new sources of gold, oil, and petroleum had emerged from the earth. Without losing any time, he plunged his long fingers in deeply … Fateful error! He let loose a long and horrible scream. A death wail that shook up all living things. First his fingers, then his arms scorched to the elbows. Given that he was detested in his own home by his subjects, he was finished off quickly. Ferociously. And with the fatty flesh of his body, the overjoyed people made firecrackers and torchlight tattoos. Torches of fraternal reconciliation. Of friendship. Of true love. Which exploded in a hail of stars and fires of joy.
With the change in weather, the drummers and the sambas of the new season sing, and so proclaim a future tale: there will sometime be …
One time, a little girl with a triangular chin, in love with a blue bird …
Ah! Nathalie, my child, your father is so jealous!
Each new day brings with it a truckload of worries. Old wheelbarrow of suffering. More and more, Raynand feels as if he’s been secured to a paralytic’s stretcher. And no longer has control of his legs in the sand-blocked bitterness of dead ends. His arms only know how to carry the hideous box of endless bad luck on the paths of sorrow. How would he ever manage to clear out such stony earth with a strike of the shovel? To hollow out the hard and compact granite with a strike of the pickax? To break apart my convict’s chains? My skull, trapped in a steel girdle, shelters a devastating nightmare. It’s crucial that I unbind the rope of my inner pain. That I exorcise the demon that resides in each one of us. On my interminable path I’ve already crossed too many sickos. Lovers of vice, pedophiles, impostors, mass murderers, con artists, lesbians, adulterers, alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, wanton liars, impenitent criminals — they all crawl out of their lairs. They shuffle around, masks lifted. Deploy their dark banner against a rusty sun. Carry the sacrament under the richly adorned canopy of imperial audacity, arrogance, and impunity.
Absent any revolutionary salvation, there’s only anarchy left capable of striking the most furious blow on the demoniacal fortress. I’m waiting for the savior to come. The avenging Christ will unload his stock of violent poisons into the streams, the rivers, the cisterns. I’ve already begun laughing at all those people who walk around the streets not knowing they’re all going to die, one after the next. They don’t realize that their security is nothing but an illusion, that the whole town could disappear in one day if, in a single punitive act, the lord of anarchy were to unleash his cargo of violent poisons into their drinking water. Let him come, the god of popular vengeance for the redemption and the salvation of the world! Then the restaurants, the bars, the hotels, all kitchens would serve nothing but poisoned dishes. The prostitutes would shoot off the cocks of all the flesh peddlers, magnificent celebration in honor of sex. The hairdressers and the barbers, discovering the violent power of their razor blades, would slit their clients’ throats. Oh, blessed exterminating bombs! The vastness of pain salutes you on the highest pinnacle of the planet. Bloody genuflection in death’s kitchen. Let the flames of terror shine! Let the total revolution explode so that the universe might be cleansed of all its rottenness and all its pestilence!