For a long time I would consume myself happily with tales of duels, of
slaughters, of massacres. Sometimes the expectation of an incident that I hoped
to be bloody kept me up until dawn came, traversing the curtains of my window,
billowing through their folds, entering through the slit between them, finding
me in the process of enunciating, "another death...," my eyes closed in spite of
myself. However, I did not cease while asleep to reflect upon that which I had
read, but these reflections took a peculiar turn; it seemed that I myself was
being talked about by the work: a crypt, a love triangle, a duel to the death
between a lover and his rival.
My imagination, enflamed by crime stories, by cruel tales, by noir novels
which I read voraciously in my bed, was a kaleidoscope in which knights errant
in red robes, with pale and melancholic faces, of supernatural essence that no
obstacle could encumber in their horrible plans, their sinister quest endlessly
revolved.
When, in my dreams some evil fairy in an orange dress, blue belted, with a
mauve cravat, with a sudden caprice fell in love with me, dragging me by the
hand through a shadowy gallery of ice where she keeps, hanging upon enormous
hooks, the bodies of her murdered lovers, and invited me to tell her about the
evil acts I have conceived; I was aware that if I ever wanted to access the
variegated, marvelous, magic lantern universe of crime, it must be clear that I
intend to commit. But as soon as the fairy tasked me with finding a victim which
would bear my infinite hatred, my spirit ceased to function, my mind went blank.
I felt that I would not have the genius for evil -- or maybe a moral inhibition
prevented its emergence. The fairy, the dream, vanished. And suddenly revealed,
in the night, in the darkness of my room and warmth of my bed, that I seemed to
be the same as other men, that I will age, that I will die like them, and that I
will be only one among many who have not the killing disposition.
Sometimes, as to Cain son of Eve an Abel, a brother was born during my
sleep, mirrored upon my pillow. Fully formed of the embrace in which I kept him
attached, I imagined that it was he I was strangling. My body which felt in my
breast the pure violence I wanted to hold there, awoke me. The rest of humanity
appeared to me so uninteresting beside this brother which I had failed to
suffocate there in a moment of pain; my throat held tight; hands tensed by the
resistance of his neck. Even if, since he only came sometimes, he took on the
traits of a boy I knew in real life, I gave myself entirely to that goal: to
remember him and to suffocate him. Little by little his memory decomposed; I had
erased the victim of my dream. And when at random on the playground, she
represented herself to me, she appeared so like the rest of humanity, prosaic
and fallen from that gripping proximity which in the shadowy room of dreams had
given me the power of her evil desire.
Murderous prestige! I always held there a personality which knew, more or
less well, how to kill, but it was a discontinuous personality, not returning to
life when it manifested some particular phantasmagoria which resuscitated its
cruelty like the snap of a whip. So, this personality produced evil desire, but
by virtue of a certain tenuous relationship, of the kind which punishment does
not benefit.
Thus, discouraged, I renounced violence for ever, despite the affronts which
my classmates heaped upon me daily. That private sentiment, immediately before
the birth of my hate and inanity of my vengeance, prevailed against all the
mortifying insults with which they might swamp me.
How painful it seemed to not have the disposition for violence and to
renounce ever becoming a celebrated killer. The regret I felt, while returning
home through the streets at night after school, made me suffer so extensively
that to not feel it, itself, by a sort of inhibition before the pain which
caused my pusillanimity, my spirit stopped entirely to ruminate upon rape, upon
murder, upon that enchanting and cruel future which my humanity has forbidden to
allow. So, out of the blue, an altercation between drivers, a drunken quarrel on
the sidewalk, the echo of a scene between a couple in a large open window would
make me stop due to a particular envy they gave me and also since they had the
ability to hold, further than I perceived, something which they invited me to
partake, and which despite my efforts I could not attain: the secret of evil.
What I felt could be found in them, I remained there, immobile on the sidewalk
watching, listening, straining my spirit towards the insults or beatings. And if
it was necessary for me to continue on my way, I retrieved them, closing my
eyes, even if I might fall over. I strained to remind myself exactly the rosary
of injuries, the embroidery of punches, the volley of slaps, from which I could
take inspiration, having so direct, so natural, a resemblance, ready to deliver
what was only a translation of action. Certainly, it was not contemplations of
this type which could regain the lost hope that I might, one day, become a
murderer, since they were always linked to some specific speech or gesture,
lacking criminal value proper. But, at least, they gave me an irrational envy,
the illusion of ferocity, and by the same token, the destruction of the
sentimentality and pity I felt every time I searched for a blasphemous or cruel
inspiration for a great, bloody crime. But the translation effort was so
arduous, that as I imposed upon myself the contemplation of scenes of brutality
and abjection, I took no time in finding excuses to back out of these efforts
and spare myself from exhaustion.
So, I did not occupy myself anymore with the mysteries expressed within
blows and insults; so quiet since I reeled them back into myself, protected by
the heart's stage curtain I made sure to keep intact, like fish shrouded in ice
as they are transported from sea to stall. One time at home I thought of
something else and thus piled up in my mind the reflection of a rump strung up
in a butcher shop window, an obscenity, a broken plate on the floor, a slammed
door, so many fragments of different scenes melted together whose presented
violence, which I had not the will to assimilate, took me long to decompose.
One time, though -- mother sent me to the grocer by the quay to get some
eggs for dinner -- I had an implosion of this sort and it left me no moment to
give it free reign. At the corner of our street, which lead out to the quay, I
saw on the sidewalk opposite, at the foot of the parapet, two bums fighting, and
I tried to feel the blow of this incomparable, ferocious appetite. Observing,
noting the series of blows they took, their bodies reeling from the alcohol and
the hail of fists, the bloodiness of their faces, I felt that went beyond my
appetite, to the thing behind this fight, behind this blood, that thing which
they seemed to contain and unveil, beckoning and inviting me, too, into the
violence.
I had, as was my envious habit, simply held in reserve in my head the
tangled masses of that ignoble scuffle and thought no more of it for the moment.
And it is probable that if I had made it, this quarrel between two bums would
have gone to forever join all the other slaps, injuries, brutalities, and
bruises that I had distinguished from others as cause for the dark desire which
they aroused within me, and which I had ever pursued. But upon returning from
the grocer, happily, they were back at it again. The one was pulling violently
at the jacket sleeve of the other; the item, half in tatters already, torn with
sinister snaps; one half held between the assailant's hands and the other held
by the victim. But a third thief, extremely old and prune-like, had run up on
the other side of the canal, boiling with anger and shaking his crutches atop
the bridge on his way to rejoin and place himself in front of his friend who was
being stripped, and by a brave manoeuvre contend for his part of the venture.
I was then the prey of an implosion which, nonexistent to me a moment prior,
now materialized as the tingling in my arms of an energy which was about to
explode. The ferocious appetite which I constantly brewed, on the way to feel
this found spectacle, so increased that, stricken with a sort of drunkenness, I
eviscerated the two boxes which the grocer carefully deposited in my basket, and
catapulted across the quay, with the total force of my arms, one by one, the
twelve eggs which fell upon the three astounded oafs who were rolling ground and
grabbing hold of each other, one or another of them emerging from the melee
waving the bloody rags. I saw them then, rise to their feet with difficulty and
after some stumbling of their tortoise-like, hunchbacked silhouettes, clutch at
one another, slip one behind the other, no longer making for the greenish
parapet and the canal's gleaming like a lone bloodstained, dilapidated
scarecrow, and run into the night.
In that moment, when I balanced on the empty boxes in the gutter, I was so
happy, I felt as though my exploit had cleared those bums out so well and
permitted access to the unveiled ferocity behind them, which I shouted with
enthusiasm brandishing my wicker basket: zut, zut, zut, zut!
But at the same time, I felt that my duty would have been not to hold onto
those opaque and innocent words and try to see clearly past my enchantment. I
finally had a taste of crime...
Upon returning home, without the eggs, penniless, I told my mother a lie:
the grocer was closed... -- But what happened to the money? -- Strangely, I
lost it on the way... -- So where did you go?
My crime led to a lie, a lie so implausible to become disastrous, and it was
doubtlessly worth being sent to bed early without dinner, deprived of the
regular, vesperal kiss from my mother...
