Читать книгу The Supreme Orchestra - David Turgeon - Страница 11

We believe the fine art of waiting can be accessible to any old johnny-come-lately; nothing could be further from the truth. Waiting is a martial technique lost to the mists of time, acquired only with the greatest of difficulty.

It’s not a matter of distracting oneself, but rather of plunging wilfully into the very heart of boredom, simulating it if need be, to perfect the training regimen and trigger the ominous peripeteia that takes us into that state of reclusion and sensory deprivation – and, while you’re at it, low-intensity torture – all things it’s so much easier to just choose not to think about.

Fabrice Mansaré spends several hours of each day like this, behind drawn curtains, seated on an ordinary chair, methodically clearing his mind. He classifies the ideas that occupy his mental space, attempting to control their nature and rate of flow. Certain matters of the kind that normally escape our vigilance – song choruses, nursery rhymes, insistent leitmotifs – he diligently evacuates and laboriously replaces with others, apparently more rational and ostensibly easier to control, like the creation of an algorithm, the drawing of a map, or the logistics of a rescue operation. But such material soon runs out. Fabrice Mansaré is concentrating on not thinking of anything, convinced that therein freedom lies. Does it, though? Because after a long and very real period of mental respite, something starts creeping its way up, those old, sticky obsessions and confused, poorly lit scenes Fabrice Mansaré knows are part of his past life, buried in a loam packed far too loosely, as if with the express intent of ensuring that he’d be haunted forever. And, instead of chasing them away, the infinitely receptive Fabrice Mansaré directs his dim projector at them, casting ever more light on this dusty scene, patiently conjuring back to life, back into a thorny form, a parody, a gaze he’s known before and that, with enough time, he just might expand into an almost complete face, or perhaps a texture of skin he recalls frequently caressing and which, in his memory, is among the most unimpeachably soft things he has ever been blessed to touch; and perhaps, on days when he has truly achieved heightened perception, a state of clarity, what appears to him are colours, copper highlights dappling dark skin. A sudden green flash lights up this vast sad gaze and there emerges, dug up from a forbidden stratum of his memory, that skin’s sharp fragrance.

Fabrice Mansaré shudders. It’s five o’clock. He’s cold.

No, he’s hot. The thermal stimuli continue to contradict each other, until they reach consensus: hot on the outside, cold on the inside. Where is the opposite? His naked body seems to be covered in a viscous liquid, and seminal fluid is smeared across the head of his erect cock, which he grabs and satisfies without further ado, a matter of hygiene.

The curtains, once open, show a grey street where taxis and people hurry by on their way home from work. Motors rev in response to the call of the traffic lights. Horns honk. Evening falls. Fabrice Mansaré turns on a little light.