Death: So you give up, having neither the courage nor the patience to handle impossibility during difficult times. What would you do if I left and didn’t take you? How would you choose to live the newest scenes of this great drama?
Dying Man: I wouldn’t hesitate. I would still choose to be a man. And not a saint. I would be reborn with the same weaknesses. I would make the same mistakes that led to me remaining a man — that is, a being who seeks himself in the cries of blood in the darkness.
Eyes wild, and inspired by Paulin’s feverishly related imaginary dialogue, Raynand presses him further:
— Paulin, I think that’s all you need to put in your work. Write a novel drawn from the fodder of your own life. And that just might end up being worth something. Because it will be the lived history of a man. Sending out a luminous band into the night while waiting to discover the very heart of the day. Moving from the differential to the integral. That’s the miracle you could achieve in using the most central facts of your own life.
— You’ve got that absolutely right, Raynand. In the tracing of the spiral, I’ve written pages that recall somehow the journal of a traveler who’s set off to follow a series of overlapping and fleeting paths.
— How so? Tell me what you mean.
— These pages, despite their autobiographical nature, distinguish themselves from a private journal. They’re not burdened by any chronology. They’re more like a tangled film. The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life. In these pages, the essential for me was to give free rein to my imagination as it rides memories that, paradoxically, belong at once to the past, the present, and even prolong my life into a formless future. Spiralist writing mixes up time and space. It’s an aesthetic approach that emerges from both relativity and quantum theory.
— This sounds like a promising experience — one that I’d like to follow closely. Would you allow me to read a few pages?
— I have no objection to that. I’ll give them to you right now, if you’d like. You can read them this evening, at your place. These pages are poetic, written in the style of the Total Genre. The Spiralist genre, which embraces at once the novel, poetry, the folktale, theater … In an impressive liaison. The whole thing harmonized in a single architectural ensemble. In order to reconcile art and life.
— Okay, you can give me a few pages. I’ll read them tonight.
Paulin gets up from his worktable. He opens the right-hand drawer of a pine desk and takes out a stack of marked-up papers to give to Raynand.
Back in his modest room, Raynand readies himself to read the pages Paulin has written. Ten o’clock. The night is calm. So he’ll be able to read without being disturbed. Savoring the first lines, he lights a cigarette. As he reads, fragments of thoughts and images emerge. Form arabesques. Then disappear. With certain passages, an entire inner world opens up. A world that’s nearly ungraspable. Pure cry. Poetic vision. Will-o’-the-wisps of a fermenting brain. Is the point to try and capture some glimmer? One would have to use a new writing technique, then — one capable of following the uneven and intermittent unfolding of the inner panorama. And of capturing the concentric ideas, the parallel or divergent beams, the vanishing waves. A sort of quest within the subconscious that would call for the sheet of paper to be split into two columns: on the left, the writer’s text; on the right, in the form of annotations, the resonances provoked in the reader. Or better still, the left page would be used for the bursts of writing of a fictional nature. And the right page would be for the whirling of the interior monologue and the subtext.
How and when am I going to die? Moment of contact with the hereafter. Crime doesn’t take the weekend off. It takes a lot more effort to come back from a bad dream than to get tangled up in sleep. Forgetting. Branch by branch. Stone by stone. Flesh bitten by the knife. Strike of fangs. Spurting of fresh blood. Liquefaction happens incessantly. I become an accomplice to the wind that separates out the dirt and the poisonous fillings.
It is urgent that we capture the escaped python. Allow it to slip — alive — around our neck. Unstoppably talkative, my soul radiates the stripes of time on the paleness of the autumn landscape.
Friendship loses water from the torn basket, which retains only the brackish mud. Where have they all gone, the friends I loved so dearly?
The wind is better than I am at finding the feeble spark that will keep reddening independent of the scattered ashes.
Again, I make the mechanical gesture that reanimates my heart: a semblance of living.
The pure ones have never seen the sun set; they know nothing of the darkness or the veiled trickery of fog.
Who will dig out the center of marooning words? I’m talking about sugar granulated like the sex organs of a half-deflowered maiden. And I’d bet that there’s no woman sweeter than the one you mount at dawn.
Have we captured the receiver of stolen goods from armed robberies? I hear the rumbling of drums all over the world. The devilment of Carnival rope launchers. Display of vampire wings. America spits red into the Mississippi. Let the valiant Negroes hold on to the password!
Near the terrace, I gesture to the girls carrying water, who instantaneously become paralyzed, blind, and mute. The calabashes are broken; I remain beside myself with thirst. Ah! Cactus-armed women, why do you turn me into a wandering ghost? Kill my fervor, suppress my hunger before you leave. The sun tilted toward the sea lays down my fleeting shadow. What bloody kiss will be able to freeze my lipless lover’s heart?
It’s always despicable that sand and water betray the secret fragility of love.
I appeal to torrential loves … plaintive washerwomen of the most squalid roadways!
Paper river mouth you sad suitcase stamp dead rock tobacco voice face agreement demand madness denial homeland fatigue love leaving work break misery rage race or flight ah! polyvalent life words men things stuffed with meaning! It’s in you that I’ve searched for myself for so long and am still searching.
The small van, a Peugeot 404, cream colored, full to bursting, tears up the highway to Delmas. Among the passengers, Raynand and Paulin. Seated in the last row, they talk without stopping. The vehicle’s speed seems to rip up the bushes, the electric poles, the pedestrians, the sidewalks. At the wheel of the car, Titon spiritedly executes his job as driver. He has to make the Port-au-Prince to Pétionville round-trip as quickly as possible. Finish off the day with a profit. Speed is the rule of the day. Accelerate. Win the race against time that flies and flies away. Go. Come back. Charge down the road. Speed. Drive. Devour the kilometers.
A passenger worries about the speed. You’re going much too fast, she says.
Titon is a good driver. He knows his job. He’s a real champion, responds Raynand.
A driver after my own heart! Faster than the wind! The open road beckons him to pounce. Faster than the wind! adds Paulin.
They attract the disapproving glances of the other passengers.
He who goes slowly arrives surely, replies an older man who hadn’t said anything up to that point.
Ironic, euphoric, Paulin and Raynand flatter Titon’s pride. They laud his agility in having just missed a mule crossing the road. Then, with an explosion of bawdy joy that shocks their neighbors, they take up and repeat: