felt that nothing in this world could last to the very end, and that nothing could be perfected. The ferocity of objects exhausted itself in the world. It was thus that there arose in me the idea of the imperfection of any manifestations in this world, be they even supernatural.
In an interior dialogue which, I think, never came to an end, I sometimes defied the malefic powers around me, just as sometimes I would ignobly adulate them. I practised certain strange rituals, but not without purpose. If, on leaving the house and walking along various roads, I always used to retrace my steps, I did so in order not to describe in my passage a circle in which houses and trees would have remained enclosed. In this respect, my walk would resemble a thread and if, once unravelled, I had not gathered it back up, along the same path, the objects caught in the knot of my steps would have forever remained deeply and irremediably bound to me. If during a rain shower I avoided touching the cobbles in the way of the streams of water I did so in order not to add anything to the action of the water and in order not to intervene in the exercise of its elementary powers.
Fire purifies all. I always used to keep a box of matches in my pocket. When I was very sad, I would light a match and pass my hands through the flame, first one, then the other.
In all these things there was a kind of melancholy at existing and a kind of torment arranged banally within the limits of my life as a child.
In time the crises vanished of themselves, but not without leaving behind their powerful memory in me forever.
When I embarked upon adolescence I no longer had crises, but the crepuscular state that preceded them and the profound sense of the world’s pointlessness, which followed upon them, somehow became my natural state.
The pointlessness filled the cavities of the world like a liquid that would have spread in all directions. And the sky above me, the eternally prim, absurd and indefinite sky, took on the colour proper to despair.
In this pointlessness that surrounded me and under that eternally cursed sky I still walk even today.
Point of Balance, Oil on Canvas, 2008
Clara
For my crises a physician was consulted, and he uttered an odd word: “paludism”; I was most amazed that my disquietudes, so intrinsic and so secret, could have a name, and a name so bizarre at that. The doctor prescribed me quinine: another subject of wonderment. It was impossible for me to understand how my sickly spaces might be cured, they with the quinine I was taking. But what disturbed me exceedingly was the physician himself. For a long time after the consultation, he continued to exist and to fidget in my memory with rapid automatic gestures whose inexhaustible mechanism I could not manage to stop.
He was a man small in stature, with an egg-shaped head. The pointed extremity of the egg extended into a black, continually quivering little beard. The small, velvety eyes, his clipped gestures and protruding mouth made him resemble a mouse. From the very first, this impression was so powerful that it seemed only natural to me that, on hearing him speak, he pronounced each “r” sonorously and trillingly, as if while talking he were always nibbling something on the sly.
The quinine he gave me also strengthened my conviction that the physician had something mousy about him. Verification of this conviction came about so queerly and is bound to such important events in my childhood that the occurrence is, I believe, worthy of being narrated separately.
Near our house there was a sewing machine shop where I used to go every day and stay for hours. The proprietor was a young man, Eugene, who had just finished his military service and had found himself an occupation in town by opening this shop. He had a sister a year younger than himself: Clara. They lived together somewhere in an outlying district, and by day they looked after the shop; they had neither acquaintances nor relatives.
The shop was merely a private room, newly let out for trade.
The walls still preserved their living-room paint, with violet garlands of lilac and the rectangular, fading traces of the places where the paintings had been hung. In the middle of the ceiling remained a bronze lamp with a dark-red majolica calotte, its edges covered with green acanthus leaves in faience relief. It was a highly ornamented object, old and outmoded, but imposing, something resembling a funerary monument or a veteran general wearing his old uniform on parade.
The sewing machines were lined up in three orderly rows, leaving between them two wide lanes as far as the back. Eugene took care to sprinkle the floor every morning, using an old tin can with a hole in the bottom. The thread of water that trickled out was very fine and Eugene dextrously manipulated it, tracing erudite spirals and figures-of-eight on the floor. Sometimes he would sign his name and write the day’s date. The painted walls evidently demanded such delicacies.
At the back of the shop, a screen of planks separated a kind of cabin from the rest of the room. A green curtain covered the entrance. It was there that Eugene and Clara always used to sit. They ate their lunch there, so as not to leave the shop during the day. They called it “the artistes’ cabin” and one day I heard Eugene saying: “It’s a genuine ‘artiste’s cabin’. When I go into the shop and speak for half an hour to sell a sewing machine, am I not acting out a comedy?”
And he added in a more learned tone: “Life, in general, is pure theatre”.
Behind the curtain, Eugene would play the violin. He kept the notes on the table and stood hunched over them, patiently deciphering the jumbled staves as though he were untangling a knotted clew of threads in order to extract from them one single fine strand, the strand of the musical piece. All afternoon, a small petroleum lamp used to burn on a chest, filling the room with a dead light and scattering the enormous shadow of the violinist over the wall.
I went there so often that in time I became a kind of additional piece of furniture, an extension of the old oil-cloth couch on which I sat immobile, a thing with which no one concerned himself and which hampered no one.
At the back of the cabin, Clara used to do her toilette in the afternoon. She kept her dresses in a cupboard, and she would peer into a broken mirror propped against the lamp on the chest. The mirror was so old that the silvering had rubbed away in places and through the transparent spots loomed the real objects behind the mirror, blending with the reflected images as though in a photograph with superimposed negatives.
Sometimes she would undress almost completely and rub her armpits with cologne, raising her arms without embarrassment, or her breasts, thrusting her hand between body and chemise. The chemise was short, and when she bent over I could see in their entirety her very beautiful legs, squeezed by well-smoothed stockings. She wholly resembled the half-naked woman I had once seen on a pornographic postcard that a pretzel vendor had shown me in the park.
She aroused in me the same hazy swoon as that obscene image, a kind of void that swelled in my chest at the same time as a terrifying sexual hunger clenched my pubis like a claw.
In the cabin, I always sat in the same place on the couch behind Eugene, and waited for Clara to finish her toilette. Then she would leave the shop, passing between her brother and me through a gap so narrow that she would have to rub her thighs against my knees.
Every day, I would wait for that moment with the same impatience and the same torment. It was dependent upon a host of petty circumstances, which I would weigh up and lie in wait for, with an exasperated and extraordinarily sharpened sensibility. It would be enough for Eugene to be thirsty, for him not to feel like playing, or for a customer to come into the shop to make him abandon the place by the table and then there would be enough free space for Clara
