that’s it, that’s it, that’s it ad infinitum, a fragment of a speech on the economy by Hitler involving currency and inflation, for example, could set off one of his attacks, he’d stop going out, couldn’t even manage to drag himself to the bathroom and urinated into plastic bottles reading the text in question over and over, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, as if he had discovered the Holy Grail, he was writing a biography of the Brothers of Christ, a treatise on their importance in the occult struggle against communism, where he traced the origins of all the secret societies defending the West to the forgotten children of Joseph and the Virgin Mary, the ones who remained in the shadow even though they’re mentioned in the Gospels, also baptized by John the Baptist the Beheaded and I forget what else, his anxious parents wanted him to go to the doctor but that was obviously impossible, because psychiatry and all of psychology were in the hands of the Jews who were trying to corrupt him, to rot his brain, and so on until the dawn of a day like any other, in the springtime, a little while before graduation, on the way to high school Yvan came nose to nose with people putting up posters from I don’t know what party for I forget which election, peaceful-seeming guys in their forties who were decking out a municipal billboard for the purpose, I don’t know why but Yvan saw red, he savagely attacked them, furiously, with the bike chain he always carried in the pocket of his orange-and-black jacket, he lashed one man’s face threw himself onto the second like a baboon tore off one of his ears with his teeth showering him with kicks in the groin, possessed, enraged, relentless, the third man didn’t think twice faced with the surprise of the attack with its extraordinary violence with his companions’ screams of pain with Yvan’s roars he brought the glue-brush down on his skull, a good straight strong blow that split his occiput and got him a huge number of stitches, even today no one can say if that fracture of his skull played a determining role or if his madness was already well advanced but Yvan went to the emergency room at the psychiatric hospital and then to a rest home for uncontrollable lunatics, Yvan schizophrenic paranoic catatonic and violent, incurable despite the tons of medications, electroshocks and various therapies his doctors have tried, Yvan plunged into the dark, when he speaks it’s to recite a paragraph from Mein Kampf or anti-Semitic insults, the yids the yids are trying to assassinate me, during his few minutes of consciousness a week Yvan is terrified, terrified or utterly violent, depending on the treatment that never managed to “stabilize” him, lost in the limbo of resentment and fright — for me the shock was terrible, Yvan had fallen in combat, brought down by a blow of that campaign bludgeon on his skull, I immediately went to see him at the hospital, I talked for a long time with his parents, and soon faced facts, he had a real fracture, a fine furious madness worthy of Ares, which brought tears of sadness to my eyes, I thought I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge you, I’ll avenge Yvan with the staring eyes and the lolling tongue, Yvan the pale chained to a chair and shouting to the death: I saw his mother quietly crying afraid to approach him, afraid to approach her own son whose failing brain was oozing violence hatred and pain, now I’ll avenge you old pal I’ll give you a new life, you’ve gotten a little bit out of the asylum, your name at least, even if it’s with my face on your passport, Francis has slipped into the useless body of Yvan the Terrible for his reincarnation — after Yvan was committed I passed my baccalauréat to go get bored in a private preparatory class where I was supposed to be taught the subtleties of scholarly essays and general knowledge, I was bored stiff, I wanted violence and revenge so much that I went slogging in the army for sixteen months, Yvan would have liked that a lot, the virile songs and the nocturnal sagas, the maneuvers, the training in weapons, tactics, and orientation, until that trip to Egypt on my own to celebrate my discharge and meet Marianne the prudish — my Nazi stories made Stéphanie laugh a lot, especially the episode of Yvan the poor guy felled by a glue brush, still she was a little sorry for me, for having lost all that time, she said, all that ideological time she meant, before yielding to democratic reason, I replied halfway, I only yielded halfway, I’ve never voted in my life, neither did Ezra Pound, I suppose, I have no idea, he too the deranged poet wrote epic-political poems to the glory of the fascist economic model, against usury and usurers, from his house on the outskirts of Genoa the American said terrible things about the leaders of his country with keen hearing who condemned him for high treason in 1943, Pound replied that he didn’t see how the simple fact of talking into a microphone even loudly could constitute treason, he was going to pay for it dearly, locked up in 1945 in a cage in the middle of a military detention camp in Pisa, a cage three meters by three with a canvas roof two meters from the ground, Pound slept on the concrete a surveillance spotlight constantly on, in the humid heat of the Tuscan summer, secluded in this hutch that prefigured the ones in Guantánamo, never leaving it, watched day and night, humiliated, gaunt, Pound ended up cracking and was rushed to the infirmary — he barely escaped the death sentence, probably because the authorities decided that he was in fact crazy and that his case required not the firing squad but psychiatry, Pound the friend of Joyce of Eliot of all the artists poets musicians in Paris and elsewhere was declared an officially deranged enemy of the people and sent back a little while later to civilian life, he hurried to return to Italy scarcely had he stepped off the liner than he greeted the journalists come to meet him with the fascist salute, so that the reporters had the impression, for the space of a second, that they were the ones coming back from afar and Pound, Pound the scrawny bearded man, who had never budged, who had already remained in a phantom country, his arm raised high to the rhythm of the clicking of martial heels and iron boots, the inner country, where there is only oneself, no enemies no treacherous Jews no money no perversions pain or lies, poor Pound it didn’t matter that he knew thousands of obscure Chinese ideograms he lived enclosed, in the company of statues and busts of himself, he outlived Eliot Yeats Joyce Hemingway William Carlos Williams Cocteau to end up croaking in Venice at the age of eighty-seven, in Venice the humidity is deadly, me too I very nearly succumbed to the mildewy beauty of the City of the Doges, what am I going to do now, you leave a lot of things by the wayside convictions comrades women objects you cherished you thought you’d keep all your life wedding rings gold chains tattoos you get tired of scars that fade away, as for Vlaho he got used to his new condition he doesn’t moan about Fate he accepts, despite the phantom pain, it seizes him from time to time he told me, in Bosnia we were running in front of the great Serbian winter offensive of 1993 we were running as we had rarely ever run before, turning back from time to time to fire a shot or shoot a rocket nothing very effective we were running watching the villages burning behind us we told ourselves we were going to cover the distance all the way to the sea or the Neretva if it went on like that there was nothing to be done, then the front stabilized by a miracle we found ourselves in the trenches hurriedly digging fortifications burying mines trying to defend a ridgeline the United Nations helicopters roamed around us it was a real temptation to down one but of course that was forbidden, we could only at most take a potshot at the white paint on their tanks, just so they’d hear ding ding ding inside and feel they weren’t welcome, then those guys would go back to Split saying “they shot at me, they shot at me” which earned them glory and prestige over a beer while we were freezing our balls off in the mud, Yvan Deroy the mad might have enlisted with me if they hadn’t committed him, there wasn’t more than one Frenchman in the ranks of the HOS until its dissolution after the attack on Zagreb and the assassination of Kraljevic in Bosnia, Yvan would probably have detested the filth the cold and the ideological confusion, despite everything I felt I had found my cause, Croatia and the Croats, God and country, liberty, beautiful Liberty guiding the people in the painting by Delacroix, she who never appeared before the Serbian tanks with her breasts bare: what we saw arriving in front of the Yugoslav tanks were scruffy, panic-stricken refugees, wounded and crying but never with flag and rifle in hand or face turned to the right, torso so luscious you wanted to bite it, all that is fine for painters and filmmakers, for us it took on a different quality, that of poor shivering guys fighting for a scrap of land a farm a valley a village on fire their families and comrades dead in a great storm a blizzard of flames and fright worthy of Hephaestus the lame, the Scamander afloat with decaying carcasses, mutilated bodies, debris of houses and ruined hamlets, what we had seen in Slavonia stretched out, augmented, resounded endlessly, in a duel of violent acts and savageries on this one or that one, Serb or Croat or Muslim, according to all possible combinations of horror, the Russians and Greeks next to the Serbs Arabs and Turks next to the Muslims Catholic Europeans next to Croats bastions of the West all these lovely people hated each other, Andi had said to me you’ll see, you’ll hate the Serbs and Muslims sooner or later, I was surprised, the Serbs maybe, but the Muslims, and Andi had been right, I had a burning hatred in my chest, instilled there by Eris the indefatigable goddess of Strife, which took a long time to calm down — I never went to Serbia, in the end, despite my hesitations in Thessalonica city of the absent, I headed west, as always, towards the luminous west, in Igoumenitsa I put the car on a ferry headed for Corfu the British, Corfu last stop before Ithaca, without realizing that I would find thousands of Serbs there of course, I didn’t know the twists and turns of Atropos the implacable who had made many fates meet on this little island, fates driven by hatred and war, it’s hard to understand hatred when you haven’t experienced it or when you’ve forgotten the burning violence the rage that lifts your arm against an enemy his wife his child wanting revenge wanting pain for them make them suffer too, destroy their houses disinter their dead with mortar shells plant our semen in their females and our bayonets in their eyes shower them with insults and kicks because I myself had cried when I saw the solitary body of a beheaded kid clutching a toy in a ditch, a grandmother disemboweled with a crucifix, a comrade tortured enucleated grilled in gas like a shriveled-up grasshopper, his eyesockets empty and white, almost gleaming in the carbonized mass of the corpse, images that still today set my heart beating faster, make my fists clench, ten years later, like Andi’s corpse seen lying in his steaming droppings in the middle of the idyllic landscape of a Bosnian valley, there’s nothing to be done these images lose none of their force, how to rid myself of them, how, where to leave them, to whom can I confide them, Vlaho the disabled doesn’t have to carry this weight, he’s happy in peace funny and serene, he left his burden in Bosnia, during an absurd counter-attack to get out of our muddy trenches, we hurtled down the hillside like devils and the shells began to rain down, my helmet fell half over my eyes, Vlaho is just on my right, Andi the furious is in front of course right in front, fleet-footed Andi, I shout to give myself courage, we have to reach the edge of the trees and try to stay there shells are flinging up waves of soft earth grass and metal my ears are whistling I have no way to breathe I run without having time to breathe my lungs blocked I am running solely on adrenaline like a robot on its battery Andrija has reached the first trees he has disappeared under cover I’m almost there, I’m almost there and a huge explosion knocks me down, I’ve collided with a wall of hot air, the breath of a dragon, I’ve gotten a huge hit in my helmet, it rang like a bell, I’m on the ground, stunned, I don’t hurt anywhere, it’s the silence, I can hear only my breathing, my face is splattered with mud, I sit up cross-legged, in the great buzzing, I see Vlaho a few feet away lying on his stomach a second explosion wakes me up, I can hear again I hear the rumble of the shells volleys of shots machine guns I get up and run bent over to Vlaho, I accidentally kick a smoking forearm, a hand sliced off I mechanically pick it up still shocked I go over to the Dalmatian lying on the ground his elbow neatly severed by a huge piece of shrapnel, I call out to him