of a sudden within a shroud of wind it seemed to me that a white marble statue was rising into the air. There was in that moment a certitude that was unverifiable, like any other certitude. The white block of stone was rapidly receding into the air, in an oblique direction, like a balloon released from a child’s hand. In a few moments the statue became a mere white patch in the sky, as big as my fist. Now I could distinctly see two white figures, holding hands and gliding across the sky like skiers.
In that moment a little girl came to a stop in front of me. I must have been sitting open-mouthed and gazing wide-eyed aloft because she asked me in astonishment what it was I could see in the sky.
“Look… a flying statue… look quick… soon it will vanish…”
The girl looked carefully, knitting her brows, and told me she could not see anything. She was a girl from the neighbourhood, plump, with ruddy cheeks like medicinal rubber, her hands forever moist. Up until that evening I had spoken to her only rarely. And as she stood there before me she suddenly began to laugh:
“I know why you tricked me…” she said, “I know what you want…”
She started to move away from me, hopping. I stood up and ran after her; I beckoned her into a dark passageway and she came without resistance. Then I lifted up her dress. She allowed herself to be manhandled, docilely holding onto my shoulders. Perhaps she was more surprised at what was happening than aware of the immodesty of the deed.
The most surprising consequence of this occurrence took place a few days later in the middle of a square. A few builders were slaking quicklime in a bin. I was looking at the seething quicklime when all of a sudden I heard my name called out and someone said loudly: “With the feather, you mean to say… with the feather… eh?” It was a lad of about twenty, a ginger and insufferable lout. I think he lived in a house down that passageway. I glimpsed him for no more than a moment, shouting at me, on the other side of the bin, emerging fantastically from the vapours of the quicklime like a hellish apparition, speaking in the midst of fire and cracks of thunder.
Perhaps he said something else to me, and my imagination lent his words a meaning about which I was preoccupied in those days; I could not believe that he had really seen me in the compact darkness of the passageway. Nonetheless, thinking about this thing more carefully, it occurred to me that the passageway was not as obscure as it had appeared to me and that everything had been visible (perhaps we had even been standing in the light)… all these were as many suppositions which strengthened my conviction that during the sexual act I was possessed by a dream that muddied my sight and my senses. I imposed greater prudence upon myself. Who knows to what aberrations I was capable of abandoning myself, in broad daylight, in the thrall of excitement and possessed by it like a heavy sleep in which I moved unaware?
Closely connected to the memory of the feather a very disturbing little black book also comes to mind. I had found it in a row of books on a table and leafed through it with great interest. It was a banal novel, Frida by André Theuriet, in an illustrated edition with a great number of drawings. In each drawing recurred the image of a young boy with curly blond hair, in velvet garb, and a plump little girl, in a flouncy dress. The little boy resembled Walter. The children appeared in the drawings now together, now separately; it was plain to see that they met above all in the nooks of a park and beneath ruined walls. What did they do together? This is what I would have liked to know. Did the young boy have a feather like mine, which he kept in the pocket of his coat? In the drawings this thing was not visible and I had no time to read the book. A few days later, the little black book vanished without trace. I began to seek it everywhere. I asked at bookshops but it seemed that no one had heard of it. It must have been a book full of secrets given that it was not to be procured anywhere at all.
One day I plucked up courage and went into the public library. A tall, pale man with slightly quivering spectacles was sitting at the back of the room and watched me as I approached. I could no longer turn back. I had to advance as far as the table and there pronounce distinctly the sensational word “Fri-da”, like a confession, before that myopic man, of all my hidden vices. I approached the lectern and murmured in a hushed voice the name of the book. The librarian’s spectacles started to quiver more noticeably on his nose; he closed his eyes as though he were seeking something in his memory, and he told me that he had not heard of it. The quivering of his spectacles nevertheless seemed to me to betray an inner disturbance; I was now sure that Frida contained the most secret and most sensational revelations.
Many years later I found the book on the shelves of a bookshop. It was no longer my little book bound in black cloth but a lowly and wretched pamphlet with yellowed covers. For an instant I wanted to purchase it, but I changed my mind and put it back on the shelf. It is thus that I still preserve intact within me the image of a little black book in which lingers a little of the authentic perfume of my childhood.
Point of Balance, Oil on Canvas, 2008
The Impression of the Theatrical
In small and insignificant objects: a black bird’s feather, a nondescript little book, an old photograph with fragile and outmoded personages, seemingly afflicted with a serious internal illness, a delicate green faience ashtray, moulded like an oak leaf, forever smelling of stale ash; in the simple and elementary recollection of old man Samuel Weber’s spectacles with their thick lenses, in such trifling ornaments and domestic things can be discovered all the melancholy of my childhood and that essential nostalgia for the world’s pointlessness, which enveloped me everywhere, like water with petrified ripples. Gross matter – in its deep, heavy masses of earth, rocks, sky or waters – or in its most incomprehensible forms – paper flowers, mirrors, glass marbles with their enigmatic inner spirals, or tinted statuettes – forever suspended in a confinement that struck painfully against its walls and perpetuated in me, without meaning, the bizarre adventure of being human.
Whithersoever my mind might wend, it encountered immobile objects, which were like walls before which I had to fall upon my knees.
Terrorised by their diversity, I used to think of the infinite forms of matter and for nights on end I would writhe, agitated by series of objects that filed endlessly through my memory, like escalators ceaselessly unfolding thousands and thousands of steps.
At times, in order to dam the torrent of things and colours that flooded my brain, I would imagine the evolution of a single outline, of a single object.
For example, I would imagine – and this as a precise inventory of the world – the chain of all the shadows on earth, the strange and fantastical ashen world that slumbers at life’s feet.
The shadow man, spread like a veil over the grass, with spindly legs that trickled like water, with arms of darkened iron, walking among the horizontal trees and their flowering branches.
The shadows of vapours gliding upon the sea, shadows as unstable and aquatic as transient sadnesses, skimming over the foam.
The shadows of birds in flight, black birds rising from the depths of the earth, from a sombre aquarium.
And the solitary shadow, lost somewhere in space, of our spherical planet…
At other times I would think of caverns and hollows, from the vertiginous heights of chasms in the mountains to the warm, elastic, ineffable sexual cavern. I had procured from somewhere or other a small electric torch and in bed at night, maddened by insomnia and by the objects that kept filling my room, I would crawl under the quilt and examine with taut attention, in a kind of aimless but painstaking study, the wrinkles of the sheet and the little clefts that formed between them. I needed such a precise and trifling occupation in order to
