However, accompanied by the angel of suicide, I would make a majestic bid for immortality. But the sea in which I try to drown myself freezes up. Blind mirror that reflects my ugliness back to me. The blade I pass across my throat doesn’t cut. Becomes a bow that extracts nothing more from me — sexless violin — than a parody of sound. The stiletto, with which I’d pierce my heart, breaks against my chest of dead stone. All firearms jam as soon as they’re turned on me. I’m courting eternity by way of suicide. I attain the sainted purity of the devil. I’d like to throw myself off the top of some edifice. Be crushed against the hard ground. Star-shaped bloody splashes. But I’m as light as a feather. Swallow a dose of arsenic — my stomach rejects it. Hang myself — all the ropes are already rotting away. Slash my arteries — my blood coagulates. Throw myself under the wheels of a train — the spiral of its speed whisks me away.
So goes Raynand, a locomotive of despair, life nipping at his heels. Death doesn’t leave us free to choose it. To hold it tight. To wed oneself to it. The thing is, it only knows how to give traitorous kisses. Suicide, sacred tabernacle, proves difficult to access for the conscious being. All flight, impossible. Only the trials of intolerable days and nights. Purgatory, in which total atonement bleaches one’s bones.
And Raynand, tired of walking endlessly and without any objective, becomes an incessantly speaking mouth. The suffering flesh becomes word through my voice. I sniff out the yapping of dogs perched atop the peak of a flaming bonfire. Castrated soldiers carry rusty rifles. No transit for the merry-go-round. Paradise lost. Man lies crippled in a space under surveillance, where anarchic violence reigns. Counterfeit freedom. The barycenter shifts epileptically with every second. Scalp the leprous skin and cauterize the wound with vitriol. At the midday tribunal, Saint Nicholas judges the criminals, the murderers, and the masters of power waiting at the construction site of evil. A generation of epileptics gushes out. No more muzzles! No more straitjackets! No more!..
Raynand walks. Talks. He doesn’t only talk from his mouth. His entire body traces the triumphant space of the forbidden word. Ostracism or communion in the suffocation of the word. He walks. When he arrives at Paulin’s house, the latter is busy writing a chapter of his novel.
— Still no title, Paulin?
— The title is a fiery scab that I leave for the cover. For the skin of my work.
— You know, Paulin, I’ve been at the end of my rope for a long time. Over and over I’m brought to consider the gratuitousness of my little drama, the uselessness of my existence. If I were a writer like you, if I were working on a novel, I’d make it so that each printed page inspired the taking up of arms. The sad thing is that since my childhood I’ve been living as if pursued by a pack of rabid dogs. In a locked enclosure. Without any openings in the fence. A recluse, I wonder if my life has done nothing but ferment decay, vermin, and rotting carcasses from one end to the other. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I amount to nothing more than the suppurations of some malodorous fate.
— Raynand, you’re heading backward. You’re caught up in yourself. And you seem to be saying: look how I’m suffering. Raynand, never attract the compassion of others. Despise the pity of others.
— Paulin, what do you know of my troubles? What do you know about my problems and the drama of waiting for someone to throw me a rope?
— But, Raynand, everyone has problems. I have them, too. I’ve long been living out the tribulations of my childhood. Have I ever told you the story?
— Go ahead, I’m listening.
— Yes, we all have our problems. I often imagine the conversation that could take place between myself and Death. Between Death, in its macabre attire, and me, dying in my bed. Between Death, with its cursed mouth, and the dying man I already am.
Dying Man: I haven’t even finished my day and here you are calling for me. All these unfinished tasks and aborted dreams I’ll leave behind me!
Death: Don’t worry yourself over such small things. It’s time for you to rest. After so many years on stage. Life is a theater in the round where the actors remain standing. For the entire time. Since the curtain never lowers, it’s quite a responsibility I’ve taken on — making exhausted actors lie down.
Dying Man: No. I’m far from exhausted. I’ve still got plenty of lines on the tip of my tongue. Let me get in a few more tirades. And then I’ll retire my role.
Death: Alas! It’s far too late for that. What have you done with your life, from your birth to this day … pitiful mortal?
Dying Man: I’ve been looking for myself.
Death: Did you find yourself?
Dying Man: Life slipped through my fingers. I was never able to get ahold of it.
Death: Because you only ever thought of yourself. Because others didn’t exist for you. Say! What happened to your friends? Your parents?
Dying Man: My parents are dead.
Death: I know.
Dying Man: My defunct mother, a naïve peasant impregnated by my defunct father. A rich industrialist. Possessed by the demon of eroticism. Violently subjugated by sexual passion. A misogynist of the worst order, he always said, in true macho style, that all women are females. He got into the pants of half a dozen every day.
Death: Sad record!
Dying Man: That was his battlefield. His field of honor. His personal war. His sickness. His favorite game — until that fatal heart attack. He died of it one night. Having left this earth voluptuously in a final burst of sperm.
Death: Glory be to him, that valiant cavalier of horizontal confrontations!
Dying Man: Well before his death, he’d stopped taking care of me. I grew up quickly. Torn between the pity I felt for my mother and the hatred I felt for everyone else around me. The taste for solitude took root in me.
Death: But solitude is no more than an escape. Vain flight. Often an impasse.
Dying Man: Yet I never gave up the fight. To get out of the impasse was the challenge I’d given to myself.
Death: You were too attached to your unhappy past. Did you ever break the infernal circle of the “I” in order to enter into the luminous round that is the “we?” Did you for even one day try to break through the triangle of limitation? Did you really acknowledge your weaknesses? What have you done with your life?
Dying Man: My whole life I’ve owned up to both my strengths and my weaknesses. I’ve never claimed to be an angel. Nor a saint either. I was born in the dust of an uncertain dawn. Obstacles, unexpectedness, spontaneity, pain, bursts of sorrow and joy fill my travel journal from my long journey to unknown lands.
Death: You never knew the itinerary. You didn’t even make an effort to figure out the point of the journey.
Dying Man: I tried. Looked. Stumbled. The journey is peopled with nightmares. Each time I glimpse the light, a wave of mist rises up. A thick fog immediately covers my eyelids. And then, fearing exile on the edge of this darkness, I run tirelessly into closed doors. Barely does a bit of light begin to flutter than the breath of evil snuffs out all hope at its roots.