IX
aside from murdering my neighbor strangling him maybe like Lowry and his wife there’s nothing to do just remain silent close your eyes open them search for sleep December 8th today at this instant in Rome on the Piazza d’Espagna the Holy Father is making his speech he keeps kicking the bucket this pope maybe he’s immortal as well as infallible that would crown it all, all of a sudden a man refuses to die, he does not pass away like his brothers, he survives, despite it all he hangs on, bedridden, trembling, senile but he hangs on, he reaches his hundredth birthday, then his 110th, then his 120th, everyone takes bets on his demise but no, he reaches 130 years and one fine day people realize he’s not going to die, he’ll remain suspended between life and death stuck there with his Parkinson’s, his Alzheimer’s, mummified but alive, alive, for ever and ever and this discovery saddens his potential successors so much that they of course decide to poison him, the eleven o’clock broth for the cumbersome old man, no luck, just like the first Christian martyrs he survives the poisoning, he loses his sight but his heart is still beating, from time to time he whispers some words into his visitors’ ears, in Latin, thousands of pilgrims stand in line to catch a glimpse of him, his hair is sold strand by strand like so many pieces of eternity, one of the last eternal locks of the blessed man who keeps dying, just as the end of the world keeps arriving, imputrescible locks like the corpses of those saints who never decompose and then in the end they’re forgotten in a corner of the palace, with servants all of whom they outlive, little by little dust covers them over they disappear from memory, from the present they’re a tableau vivant a bust a statue to which not much importance is granted — I can’t complain about the Holy See though I owe my new life to it, money in exchange for the briefcase, to that papal nuncio in Damascus who introduced me to the curial secretary concerned in my affair, in secret of course, Damascus city of dust almost as much as Cairo, city of dust and whisperings, of fear and police informers, where they bury you alive in a grey prison in the middle of the desert, Syrian oubliettes are deep, you don’t often climb back up out of them, how many Syrians or Lebanese are still missing in action, caught at a roadblock or arrested at home no one knows what’s become of them, if they’re still rotting at the bottom of a dungeon or if they were shot down with a bullet in the head in Mezzeh or Palmyra, hanged a stone’s throw from the ruins of Queen Zenobia’s city the Temple of Ba’al and legendary tombs, beneath the palm trees you sometimes see an open truck full of guys with shaved heads, everyone turns his eyes away then so as not to see them, they’re detainees being transferred from Damascus or Homs, they’ll be thrown into Tadmor prison for eternity: looking at them brings bad luck, like looking at men condemned to death, the prison is a few kilometers away from the palm grove at the entrance to the endless stone steppe, I went to see it out of curiosity, at a respectable distance, an old French barracks, they say, surrounded by a grey wall and barbed wire, no daylight no walkway no air or sky, the prisoners spend most of their time blindfolded, I thought about Rabia, one of our sources at the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the son of a good family who loved money too much fancy convertibles drugs and danger, he disappeared one fine morning and his contact told us airily