My brain, a nest of serpents tangled up in themselves. Around me, a swarm of angry bees. I sleep like a woodcutter dreaming of a tree with cut-off fingers. If I wake up, it is only to find boredom lying at the foot of my bed.
Hoping to save the one man capable of escaping the terrible fear, I crossed marshes, rising rivers, virgin forests, desolate savannas, moonless deserts. I ran for an entire night. At dawn, there was only me — headless and heartless cadaver of a madman, lying in a big wheelbarrow full of filth.
I’m tired of trying to hold on to that tilted shadow laid across my path. May the verticality of noon block out the day with an arrow of fire above my skull! The sun ever fixed at its zenith. Only then will my hideous shadow disappear under my vagabond’s soles.
The storm has been brewing. My liquefied brains are trickling out of my eyes and my nostrils.
What do you see coming in the distance, daughter?
Broken jaws. A hideous stream of rotten teeth. A horrifying procession of zombies.
The sorcerer told me I should be glad that I have been dead for such a long time. Those of you who are alive have nothing to fear from me. The red wine I drink is only my blood, flowing from my broken heart. I am drunk on my own blood.
Raynand sinks further and further into solitude. He no longer tries to see Paulin. He avoids him, in fact. He wants to avoid all contact with his friends. With anything that can remind him of what he has already seen. Already lived. Formidable and painful plunge into peace and silence. Impossible prolonging of a life whose inevitable conclusion would be a dangerous leap into a bottomless abyss. Into the ether of madness. Not once in his exasperated flight has he managed to come even close to the sort of peace he seeks. He only reaches the midpoint of that select space. That formless land where one’s diluted conscience coagulates in a gelatinous mass. Anesthetic. On the contrary, his senses become that much sharper. In a lucid delirium. With prodigious precision, his eyes, nostrils, ears capture images, smells, sounds emerging from everywhere. His heart, having become a ball of fire, radiates intense flashes to immeasurable cosmic distances. Burning wounds and dazzling speed. He suffers. His whole body aches. Henceforth, he becomes familiar with stardust and spectral rays. He participates in the rotation of all the nebulae and all the galaxies.
The worst thing is that all the sensations accumulated from his surroundings assault him with sharp cracks of the whip. Insufferably stinging and bloody. The very environment of the earth heightens his suffering. He feels the beating pulse of the planet. The distended heart of the oceans. He detects the nausea of the volcanoes. The tormented circulation of earthquakes. The faraway fallout of energy raining down. The silent frequency of clusters of light. The flaccid progression of subterranean waters. The spiral unleashing of marine swells. The sharp scraping of the wind. The painful coughing fits of cyclones. The perfumes of the stars, mixed indistinguishably with the smells of plants, make his head spin. Permanent dizziness. His voice, a range of registers, filters the lifeless music of the moon, the piercing song of the comets, the singing exercises of the sun.
Global perception of space and time. His present, no longer reduced to the imperceptible thread of escape, widens into a gigantic luminous band at the limitless borders of the past and the present. Often Raynand strolls along the Colomb Docks. He observes the launching of flaming arrows into the flat zinc of the sea. He seeks out the knives of the wind, closely packed blades skimming the waves. His body, buzzing hive bristling with antennas, picks up thousands of waves. I feel them coming, he says to himself. Bitten by teeth filed down to sharp points. The spinal marrow informs the immense infantry of the nervous system. Rallying the troops. The devastating rise of the river of death. Sudden alarm of the ganglions as they detect the movement of enemy troops. The past and the future blend together. Men stumbling around in the depths of caverns. Pyramids are built in blood. New kings break the gold crowns placed on the cracked skulls of their unfaithful mistresses. The tanks cut the hamstrings of impotent warriors. The temples, the churches, the palaces — they don’t even finish crafting the arches of their vaults before crushing them into piles of dusty bricks. All that remains is a few cracked columns to signal that the hand of man has passed through. Sailboats parody the journey of seagulls. Exodus! The earth rolls in an endless widowhood. Nothing but erased generations, obliterated glories! Pitiful little pontoon that will have served, once upon a time, as stopover on the journey of the light, Earth is left breathless and panting with pain.
Raynand, seized by dizziness, stops walking. Seated facing the sea, back against a pillar near the wharf, his gaze bursts forth toward the gaping dome of infinity. He soon falls asleep.
He awakens exhausted. Paralyzed underneath the powdery layers of an opaque night. He gets up. Gropes his way along in the dark. Stumbles. Bumps his foot several times against invisible iron bars. He can’t make out a thing. Walled up in a hermetically sealed steel hull. He does not know how long his internment will last. Everything he sees is fuzzy. It’s daylight, but thick smoke clouds all the streets. Tangled mass of ropes and guts. A trap woven all around everything by some giant spider. Veiled, the sun no longer shines; it’s an eye reddened by viscous tears. A dirty plasma for the living, thinks Raynand. Might this be some kind of bad omen? I must go see Paulin … Speak to him … Hurry.
This can’t be possible! It seems as if all the women I pass in the street are pregnant. But it’s true. Even the female animals. What could have happened in the space of one night? All these women visibly pregnant! Bellies nine months big. Ready to give birth. Can they all have become — in the space of one night — a bunch of dangerous conspirators hiding explosives in their guts? Nuclear bombs — who knows? Look at them walking, their eyes haggard. Blind women, carriers of bombs! They’d better not get hit by some speeding car. If their stomachs were to burst!
Raynand walks with a long, brisk stride. His heart, a cauldron of blood, beats violently in his panting throat. His stomach, his own stomach, swells as well and pushes irrepressibly against his leather belt. A bitter smell roasts his nasal passages. He’s thirsty. He walks more quickly. He encounters a pregnant woman who looks oddly like Solange.
— Solange!
— What do you want from me?
— Are you pregnant?
— You know full well this is your doing.
— Of what do you so unjustly accuse me?
— It’s your cursed seed I carry. Don’t pretend not to know.
— But I haven’t seen you since our breakup. A year ago. How could this be possible?
— The same way you impregnated all the women of the island, by spraying them with your salty sperm.
— Solange, you’ve got to be kidding me. What are you talking about?
— About the fact that you knocked me up, Raynand.
— Solange, you’re lying. I can’t have children. I’m sterile. Encrusted with tumors, nothing works anymore. You know that. And what’s more, my doctor castrated me and placed two oval stones in the place of my testicles.
Solange doesn’t respond. She turns her back to him, revealing an ulcerated sore on the nape of her neck. Startled, Raynand turns away, his lips pinched in disgust. He gets out of there hurriedly, his temples suddenly clenched between the brass disks of an explosive pair of cymbals. He catches himself running in a street he can’t identify, and stops short at a crossroads blocked by a mound of small, naked bodies. Swarming. Covered with bruises. Viscous. Dumbfounded, he refuses to believe his eyes. A sticky pile of newborn children. Strange mass grave blocking the way along a radius of thirty feet. Some are already dead. Throats cut. Strangled by nylon stockings twisted around their necks. Other cry. Squirm. Let loose screams that drive into his ears like so many corks. Into his head. Raynand sees no way out. He has goosebumps. With a start, he goes back the way he came. Starts running again. This isn’t possible, he murmurs imperceptibly. I’ve got to go see Paulin this very minute. His novel … I’ve found the title for his novel … The title, a fiery scab on the skin of his book!