Читать книгу The Past Ahead - Gilbert Gatore - Страница 11

2. Today, like yesterday and the day before, when night falls, Utiwonze, Uwera, and Shema come out of their holes to keep watch together. Niko, who himself is being watched by the monkeys, observes them from the opening to the cave. According to a rule that no one tries to justify, the piles of stones beneath which these three live should be seen as houses. What one really shouldn’t think about are the mounds indicating the fresh graves. The whole thing should be considered a village whose name, Iwacu, exists nowhere other than inside Niko’s mind.

3. Niko saw the other three people who live here in addition to the monkeys arrive one after another. Uwitonze came first, followed by Uwera. Shema was the last one to appear.

4. The cave is located at the top of the hill, which is itself an island. It lies in the center of a lake whose entire perimeter can be seen from the promontory.

5. If a stranger were to appear in the middle of Iwacu, he would surely ask himself a few pointless questions. He would wonder whether a pile of stones becomes a house by the simple fact of sheltering a human being. He wouldn’t understand why these three individuals remain consistently mute and burrowed inside their shelters as long as the sun hasn’t yet vanished below the horizon. He’d be astonished to find no trace of a path or a harbor on the island, as if coming and going were out of the question here. The intruder would be surprised to notice that in order to penetrate the three little mounds of earth you have to crawl feet first, like a snake moving in reverse. The troublemaker would end up thinking that Uwitonze, Uwera, and Shema are here as runaways. He’d assume that the houses of Iwacu look like graves so as not to attract any attention. That’s why there’s never any fire. And that’s also why the three inhabitants are attached to the silence, the disconnection, and the thinness that turn them into living abstractions. Proud of his analysis, the stranger disappears the way he’d come, without any warning.

6. “Dear bystander, if you are in as much of a hurry as this stranger you should follow him and vanish as well. This is the best time, for after these lines it won’t be as easy for you as it is now to leave.”

7. The cave contains the source of a much sought-after hot water spring. No one has seen it because entering is taboo. Indeed, it is said that offenders will even be punished by being permanently swallowed up by the cave’s wafting breath. Water collects in a basin that has formed a little lower on the side of the hill. It cleanses everything, even gullibility. At least that’s what the most trustworthy springs have always confirmed.

8. Among other pieces of evidence, the perils of the cave and the efficacy of its water are recognized both by the most respected therapists and the most ancient tales.

9. Besides the water, at the entrance of the cave where the daylight begins to make way for darkness, there is a print the length of a hefty adult male’s foot. Here, too, tales provide the best information since no one is supposed to have come close enough to the cave to have seen this outline. The footprint, the story says, is that of a king who lived at a time when God still dwelled inside the entrails of monkeys. His size and strength gave him everything that his birth had forgotten to offer him. According to the legend, it was while he was visiting his land that the king passed through the island. And he put his signature on the property by striking the soil with his powerful foot inside the shelter so that the rain wouldn’t erase the imprint. Ever since then, on the night that they are to become men, boys come here to ask the footprint for the strength and courage with which to mark their own life as the giant king had marked the ground. It’s the only night that anyone is allowed to disembark on the island, climb to the summit, approach the cave, and draw a little of its miraculous water.

10. That is why the island is the only place where the soil has retained its true color while blood drenched the rest of the country. Niko must have thought it a safe place to be when he came there to live.

11. Niko doesn’t believe the story of the giant king. His experience and his imagination have constructed an entirely different version. The day he became a man and came to say the ritual prayer before the footprint, he didn’t heed the advice he was given. He entered the cave, although he’d been told that he shouldn’t, under any circumstances, either look at or approach it too closely. They had guaranteed him that he’d run the risk of being sucked up and he would disappear for good. Besides, Gaspard had added, it wasn’t just a risk, but a certainty, for all the known tales were adamant on that point: none of those who’d been too curious or foolhardy had ever come back.

12. In spite of all these warnings Niko couldn’t resist the urge to take a few steps inside the cave, or else curiosity and regret would have killed him. On that particular night, by the light of the torch they’d made for him to avert animals and demons, he’d moved forward into the darkness, holding his breath in terror. He’d barely begun to advance when he saw a shadow flee ahead of him. As he ran, the vision made him give free rein to the fear he’d been able to control until then. The size of the cave echoed the sound of his steps that, multiplied tenfold, made him run even faster, and he sweated as he’d never done before. Once outside, he realized he’d dropped the torch but didn’t dare go back into the cave to find it. When he returned to the village he told them that he’d been forced to throw it at an animal that was threatening him.

13. Could there be a link between the fate that constitutes a life, a secret breath that might guide its trials and errors? Is it possible that in reality life has a direction that everyone simply follows? Why was it that Niko, who would find refuge in the cave later on, defied the taboo of entering it?

14. Niko didn’t tell anyone about his adventure. He’d committed a desecration, and if on top of that he’d broadcast his audacity he would have been severely punished. But his experience in the cave continued in his innermost thoughts. What was that creature that had run away from him? It wasn’t any ghost or monster, for it wasn’t anywhere near as big as he. Of that he was certain. Perhaps it was only a cat or a rat that had terrified him so. That hypothesis made him think again of his mad dash to the cave’s entrance that now seemed painfully ridiculous. Was it to exorcise this shame that he returned to the cave?

15. Niko also remembers the reverberation his footsteps had made, which gave him the feeling of being in an infinite hollow. An echo whose muffled and interminable vibrations continued to resonate inside his head for years. Had he returned to the cave to overcome that insistent vibration?

16. The night he’d felt that shameful fear he’d left the cave too quickly to know what it looked like. Judging by the sound, he was sure it was immense, and his imagination had done the rest. At first he pictured the cave as the entrance to an unknown subterranean village of which the hill and the island were merely the roof. But soon this theory seemed too basic to him. Before long he preferred thinking that the cave was simply the beginning of a path allowing you to travel to the center of the earth, and in reality the latter was only a superimposed infinity of worlds. A secret passage. The cave would have to go very deep and come out above the clouds of another world. Similarly, when his imagination rose above the clouds, it ended up encountering a vault that was nothing other than the floor of a new world. That idea pleased Niko and in these new universes he could let his imagination run wild. This elsewhere, which in his mind was fleshed out more every day, became so interesting in the end that he spent most of his time there. Nothing is more delightful, he’d say when he came back to himself, than living inside a universe you have created.

17. There was no light in the world whose entrance Niko was so happy to have discovered. Life was expressed in the form of vibrations that governed three different states: rest, action, and meditation. The beings living there were shaped like bubbles floating from one state to the next according to a spontaneously balanced distribution. Thus, everyone was always at ease.

Niko liked thinking he was one of those bubbles. Nothing is more delicious than being an element of a world you have invented yourself, he kept saying. Was it to escape from those who found his reveries too disquieting and to live fully inside his head that Niko had chosen to find refuge inside this cave?

18. If Niko were to hear the theories that explained his presence here he’d undoubtedly be embarrassed. He might even get angry. How can you not see the real reason for my withdrawal? he’d think. Do I have to unlock my breast so that what drove me here would be on display? Don’t you smell the odor that accuses me? And the sorrow that I breathe? To express all this he’d laugh in that peculiar way of his. He’d laugh without anything showing in his face, and that inner laughter would accompany a mirthless gaze.

19. Niko’s face is well proportioned and even graceful. Nevertheless, when it cracks into a smile, which hasn’t happened in a long time, it reveals dirty, crooked, and uneven teeth. Then a repulsive demon pierces his harmonious features. Niko knows it. That’s why his smile no longer passes beyond his innermost thoughts, the enclosed compound where he lives most of the time.

20. Before he became aware of the horror it stood for in the eyes of other people, Niko used to smile a lot.

21. Is it this smile that made them call him Niko the Monkey?

22. The day he felt the urge to come and live in the cave, Niko was afraid of two things: that they would try to prevent him, or that someone had the same idea before him and was already living there. But other than killing himself he had no further solution. To assure himself he hadn’t been followed or, more importantly, hadn’t been preceded, he spent some time in a eucalyptus tree overlooking the slope of the hill and consequently a good part of the island. From the height of this tree he was able to observe the shrub-covered ascent through which he’d come and the slender band of sand on which he’d landed. Farther in the distance the calm waters of the lake stretched out. Farther still, the greenery began again, in whose center he tried fruitlessly to make out some place he knew. He also surveyed the entrance to the cave, especially at night when light, noise, and smoke were easier to spot. After several days, when he still hadn’t noticed any sign of life either preceding or following him, Niko decided to come down from the tree and approach the cave.

23. The first time he came here, on that unfortunate night, he’d been obliged to hold his torch at ground level to see where to put his feet. He was in complete darkness as soon as he’d crossed the threshold of the cave. He seemed like a ghost floating in black water. Everything materialized at the last moment, just to scare him. He could see no further than his outstretched hands palpating the darkness around the luminous halo inside which he was moving.

24. This time Niko waited for the daylight. It ultimately changes nothing since the light abandons him as soon as he’s inside the cave, but he feels more secure. Knowing what to expect, he didn’t forget to bring a torch.

25. Since the day he should avoid thinking about for fear of feeling dreadfully ashamed, he has given up on various expressions that normally animate the human face. Gradually, he’s replaced them with a single expression that he now wears like a mask. Besides, to anyone not paying particular attention, Niko’s head would look like a real mask.

26. What is it that could have brought Niko to keep his face frozen in such an enigmatic contraction? Is it the same reason that led him to return to the cave?

27. The mask Niko displays as a face seems to be sculpted out of hard wood covered with a brownish, fairly uniform patina. It is topped with a rug of raffia fiber, surely meant to represent a head of hair. Wide, black eyes are outlined below a smooth forehead. One could assume that in the past they must each have been bejeweled with a diamond. From the center of these eyes juts out a long nose with small nostrils. The hollows of the mask’s cheeks emphasize the high cheekbones, each decorated with two prominent lines that suggest scarification. Finally, the sculpture displays a diamond-shaped mouth formed by thick lips surrounded by fine specks hinting at a beard. This mask is Niko’s face today. The rest of his body is wrapped in a bulky, grayish cape, from which protrude two slim, dry legs set upon large bare feet.

28. At the moment, the most noticeable difference between a mask and Niko’s face lies in the hunger, the exhaustion, and the guilt that cannot afflict a mere piece of wood with such intensity.

29. After his watch from the top of the tree, he assured himself that the cave was empty by pricking up his ears in front of the entrance and standing motionless longer than even the most seasoned hunter would have tolerated. All he heard or saw were insects, water, bats, and small animals that were probably rats or wild cats or both. But since his mind is not happy with the evidence, Niko decides to assume there must have been a monster, too, that had fled at his approach. If it’s true that monsters sense invisible things, as fables describe them, it’s normal that it would have frightened him. As always, Niko soon finds his first assumption too simplistic. In fact, when he starts to listen to the cave with complete attention he feels a breath. A breath that’s as light as it is regular. What if the island and the hill were only the projection of the nose of a giant who drowned in the lake? The shock of his head against the bottom of the lake could have knocked him unconscious without finishing him off. And what if in reality the two volcanoes in the distance were the feet of this same giant? And couldn’t the series of hills that rise from the lake here and there be the arms of the colossus? To end his description, he imagines that the head split by the shock must have dissolved in the lake, leaving only the nostril that stubbornly keeps breathing. It is this nostril that had shaped the cave in which he was going to seek refuge.

30. How is it possible to imagine that a hill and a cave forming an island in the middle of a lake are actually the remainders of a half-dissolved but still living giant? To Niko such a concept comes as naturally as thinking that two and two make four comes to others.

31. Convinced that he’s alone, is Niko really satisfied? Wouldn’t he like to meet the monster, of whose presence he has always been assured, so he can be devoured and finally relieved of the hunger, exhaustion, and above all the nausea that torture him?

The room is dark, yet welcoming: a strange mix between a place to live and a place to work. She holds herself rigidly, and one has to pay close attention to make sure that she’s not a mannequin. Sitting amidst a mound of papers, notebook and pencil in hand, she’s not writing. She’s looking through the narrow window.

Methodically, she starts by recalling how it all began. At times she loses the thread. She no longer knows what brought her here. Often she even tells herself that she’s made a mistake, a “fine fuckup,” as the other one told her one day.

The other is the one who was important at some point but would be crushed today if he were aware to what extent he no longer means anything to her. But in her inner dialogue she recognizes this is an always-fleeting doubt. She knows that being here can’t have been a mistake. A mistake happens only when you have several options. She isn’t sure she ever had a choice.

She remembers the morning when everything began, she is now certain of that. That morning is set firmly in a recess of her head. Every now and then she likes to take it out, the way you unfold an old garment to let it breathe, consider its wear and tear and its obsolescence. Almost indifferent, she sees it unfurl again, as precisely as possible.

It’s a typical morning. A strident ringing wakes her. Seven o’clock. A few minutes later, she gets up, slowly. She puts on the kettle and lights a cigarette. She takes a shower. She gets dressed after spending a minute, dazed, in front of her closet. She has cereal and drinks tea. She gathers up the things she needs for her classes and goes off to catch the 8:10 train. A typical day also means that she puts on makeup before leaving while the small apartment whose window she has opened fills up with fresh air from outside and that she turns off the clock-radio whose sound has been her companion since seven o’clock. Usually, nothing of the flow of news, weather reports, commercials, and songs reaches her foggy consciousness. Just like her yawns, the shower water, or the tea, the radio is only a means of stimulating her sleepy senses.

As she remembers it she is alone that morning. The other one hadn’t inflicted himself on her for the night. Before picking up her briefcase she makes sure she has everything she needs. She almost left the report she’d prepared for the marketing strategies course on her desk. She congratulates herself on her habit of checking everything before going out. How does an involuntary action manage to slip into an automatic physical function?

When she goes to turn off the radio before leaving, she raises the volume instead of turning it down until it clicks off. As unbelievable as it may seem, it’s because she increased the volume rather than turning it off that she is now here. Everything else flowed from that gesture.

She remembers exactly how violently the sound burst forth. She wonders whether it’s possible the sound never even left her ears from the day that she’s now revisiting in her thoughts. Besides, where does the sound go that we hear? Where do words go once we’ve heard them?

That morning the radio shouted at her that, in a country of which the mere mention made her freeze with anxiety, the number of prisoners was such that, at the speed with which the verdicts were pronounced, it would take two or three centuries to examine each of the cases. More softly now that she’d turned the volume down, the reporter quoted the percentage of the incarcerated population in proportion to the population of the country itself. He was talking about her native land.

She stared at the small clock-radio for a very long time, her gaze seemingly directed at a friend who had just betrayed her in the most shameful way. Until that moment she had managed to protect herself from the mere mention of the only word that was unbearable to her—the name of the country where she was born—and she couldn’t understand why she had failed. She ended up turning the radio off, but the news item on the air that had assaulted her the way a criminal pounces on his prey wouldn’t leave her.

As she was walking toward the station, it seemed to her that she was having a more difficult time than usual hurrying along so she wouldn’t miss her train and her first class.

In retrospect, it was apparent to her that at that moment, as she was dragging her feet going to school, she had already moved on to something else—to another place. She was merely going through the motions, fulfilling a routine, or doing something she still saw as a duty. But part of her was no longer following along.

She arrived a few minutes early anyway, even though she wasn’t rushing as much as she usually did. In the lobby a crowd of students was milling about and rustling like a disturbed anthill whose population had suddenly grown and whose sound had been amplified.

Some were falling all over each other to catch a glimpse of the screen that showed which courses were being taught in what rooms; others were waiting their turn at the vending machines selling drinks. Most were chatting and smoking.

She is pleased to note that this world, though it couldn’t have changed in any way, has become completely foreign to her today. It’s only in a dream that she goes back there, joins up with a cluster in the lobby, and, after the obligatory round of kisses, hears herself ask the question she had formed:

“Did you hear the newscast this morning?”

No one picked up on her comment so she began again:

“Did you hear that unbelievable item on the prisons?”

“Yeah, you mean about those massacres a few years ago? What do you expect, such horrible events implicate an awful lot of perpetrators, and so an awful lot of prisoners. It’s only normal.”

“What do you expect?”

“It’s terrible, but what can you do . . .” a voice added in a compassionate tone, raising his hands and dropping them to his thighs, as if to bring the conversation to an end.

A short silence followed this remark that had escaped everyone except her. She plummeted down inside her head, feeling as cumbersome and painful as a brick in the pit of her stomach would be. Her brain sap was trying doggedly to rein her in, to no avail.

When she resurfaced from her straying thoughts, the conversation had picked up again. Everything she heard made her nauseated. A burden similar to that which had kept her from running for the train that morning added to the throbbing in her head, immobilized her. She was incapable of going to class with the others and even less of giving a presentation, as she was expected to do. So she headed outside without alerting anyone, her face showing nothing unless someone could see how haggard she looked.

She slipped her student ID card into the door detector and abandoned it there. As she walked toward the station, the words of that one phrase etched themselves into her head, flickering as on the screen of an old computer on standby: It’s terrible, but what can you do . . . Had they said it to hurt her? Did they know, or were they making fun?

She felt like crying but restrained herself. She didn’t care to add another drowned face recovered from the water to all the ones in front of her in the train going back. She’d bought a newspaper should she lose control. She opened it and buried herself in its pages, too much so to look as if she really were reading. Had anybody been interested, he would have seen that she was trying above all to hide what, that morning, had so dramatically illuminated the absurdity and cowardice of her daily pattern. She lost her grip and ended up by shedding at first two tears, then four, until she stopped counting them.

Once home, she threw herself on the bed and closed her eyes for as long as she could. And she had wept and wept and wept.

That morning, whose every detail she is replaying, she blamed herself first of all for not getting a hold again of the enthusiasm that had always carried her forward. Then, imperceptibly, something else got in her way. She was taking pleasure in feeling lost, crushed, trapped—commendable for once because, satisfied to drop the mask, finally naked, this excess was not acquiescence.