I never had the knack for crime. In fact, quite the opposite. I have already
presented my absence of murderous disposition; I have already stated how, as a
child, when I became the butt of my classmates' jokes, suffering the torments
inflicted by teachers, I had cause to conclude that vengeance would be
impossible and renounced my dreams of brutal extractions of conciliation.
A detour is therefore necessary to render sensible the murderous concept's
cunning development within myself.
Some years ago (never mind how long precisely), finding myself aimless, and
with nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a
little. It was a way to drive off the spleen, to regulate the circulation which
I experienced, not daring to go down into the street lest I pick a fight with
some passerby.
January is the cruelest of months: infiltrating my soul it arrested me
before every funeral home, stationed me before the coffins, the wreaths, the
poor marble stelae and their legendary moralities.
All the streets on the island where I lived, left, right, by the water, on
the shore, popping out upon all the avenues, laneways, alleys, to the north,
south, east, west, lead like magnetism attracting thousands of mortals, entire
crowds precipitating, straight to the water upon which they cast themselves.
Nothing is there to fulfil their passion but the extreme limit of terra firma.
There, finally, they stop. Back-to-back, bitter, upon the pilotis of quays where
no ships come to dock anymore, beside the rotten jetties sown of depressions
where foam splashes back from the beating of waves, shaking the foundations
underneath, they stay like so many sentinels, lost in dreams of the ocean, to
watch the next flood which will burst forth. And the water, with the sun dying
sallow upon the horizon, darkens, mixing with the night.
With them, transfixed, I suffered the irresistible attraction of these
shores, excessively aware that the old books could only prescribe one remedy for
my analogous melancholies: to go to sea. The idea still makes us feel broken by
the waves, straining towards fantasies of sinking. But the idea of the sea and
the marine only evoke within us the idea of murder. Murder presents itself with
such a precision as an image or sensation: the passers-by decapitated, the
satisfaction of bashing in their skulls, containers of mathematical symmetry, to
squeeze and empty it like a tube of makeup recumbent at the foot of a wall the
amber, grey, and white jelly, filamented cocoons where an impalpable phantom
foments like an effluent, a monstrous mirage like a Leviathan, the immaterial
worm of the Self.
One day when I was wandering the streets, en route beside the shuddering
abyss of the tidal bore where my steps marked not my passing, I chanced upon a
trout beached on the sidewalk at the foot of a fish-seller's stall. It was not
dead, breathing by jerky contractions and brusque tremors of its body towards
the gutter. No-one except me seemed to notice its escape. The sidewalk was wet,
glistening with runoff from the transparent carpet of crushed ice fish-sellers
regularly have. On the uneven paving stones, the trout was dying, the rainbow of
its stomach tarnished, its gills opened wide, its fins convulsing, useless. All
its meagre flesh asphyxiated, tense yet still obstinate through an instinct more
ancient than itself, in the direction of the large slope, that streams down to
the water. What remembrance of profound blue intoxicated this trout in its
terrors? What vision of freshness and scintillating light insisted on its
boundless perseverance to reach the gutter? What dream of baptism in the wash of
the paving stone's trash, what dream of thirst-quenching bitterness floated once
again in the hidden corners of its gills, desiccated by the stifling air? But
this jump that it made again and again upo the paving stones remained useless.
The gutter where the atrocious mysterious memory called it was only a stagnant,
diseased puddle of water which did not even reach the shadowy mouth where the
silted canals are joined by the fecal slime of subterranean Venice which is the
mirrored underbelly of every Occidental city. It would never reach that dark
river of hell which collects and mercilessly carries along in its putrefaction
dead fish and sewage water, returning them to their native sea.
I directed myself every night, at the time when the enchantment of my
melancholy threatened rambling, by the central station. I paced there for a
while on the concourse. Late one night, when the station was closing and where
already the police like the iron whip of an incendiary bomb chased before it the
heard of haggard beggars, tramps, and sick who went there daily to find refuge
from the wind which sweeps the streets and freezes the body, as a dream of
possible departure and rocking of a train, I saw from afar on the stairs I had
just run down a dark, gleaming red trail set off against the stone steps. At the
base of the flight of stairs I arrived at one of the silhouettes which
investigators from the crime squad trace out in chalk on the ground around the
limbs of a man who died a violent death, and which they abandoned after taking
away the body and taking down the neon plastic tape with which they enclosed the
scene. Only an empty void remained and behind her, the trail deployed in
cascades upon the stairs like a sovereign to her coronation, not of beautiful
purple inaugural, lively with widespread blood, but of sticky crimson which
turns to black as soon at it leaves the secretive arteries.
Down the cruel stairs the line of white chalk delimited the fossilized
perimeter of a pool which had been drained, where the curdled blood had flown
marking the edges of a pool whose area it no longer covered.
Automatically, overcome by the gloomy wandering and the prospect of an even
gloomier night, I crossed the chalky shore and entered its nocturnal halo; and
first, as though dipping a toe in to test the water, I was, at the point of
stepping over the shore, simultaneously inside and outside. At the instant my
sole touched the asphalt, I flinched. An abrupt horror invaded me which, just
as death does, insinuating within us a toxic poison, suddenly rendered poignant
the tribulations of life, rendered sensible its disasters, rendered atrocious
its brevity. And I felt mediocre, contingent, mortal like everyone else.
Where could this obsession have come from? I knew that it was tied to the
entrance of my body into the chalky figure's aura. Where did it come from? I
entered completely, feet joined within the silhouette, I made a step toward its
desiccated heart. The last stride was no less horrible than the first. It was as
with the first contact of icy liquid, the body bristles after which, the shivers
recede, as soon as the entire body is plunged into the ocean it no longer
notices a difference anymore, it may drink from the glass without choking on the
beverage.
I asked my body to make an enormous effort, to once again reel-in the desire
to flee; I exited the chalk contour, to plunge in again in a retrograde
movement; I felt something flinch within myself losing ground, which would have
liked to sink, something which seeked to anchor itself, I do not know what it
is, but it slowly sunk; I heard the rumbling of interjecting breakers.
Sure, that which strains to sink into the depths of me, that must be the
spectre attached to the chalk silhouette in the heart of which I penetrated, and
which in turn has tried to infiltrate my own heart. It is so weak, weighed down
with such a meagre presence, so empty of qualities to go any deeper within me.
Pure absence of memory: I am reminded of nothing which was there, and of which
an empty figure and a mute purple rag is all that remains. A stride propelled me
into its place, but this encounter stirred no linked spiritual landscape: only
darkening upon the horizon. No identity was able to switch with mine; an
abstract figure without form, voice, nor solidity and against which I leaned ten
times to no avail to ask it, as the only possible interpreter, to translate the
testimony of its double's vanished flesh, asking it to teach me of its face, its
name.
It never accommodated itself deep in my heart, leaving me as a wreck run
aground upon its chalky shore. Only when an identity is defeated nothing is
left, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, after the
disappearance of works, they too, so distinct but so empty, so mute, so
ephemeral, so fragmentary, the contours and markers of which blur immediately,
like the silhouettes, shelled, abraded, ground, into indifference with the rest,
dispersed with the exhaustion of lines tightened across an immense shadowy
chasm.
Who has not seen, in every city, copies of these celebrated paintings, with
their garish colours, with their grossly accusing lines, which these iterant
artists sketch out identically in chalk upon the paving stones of busy
neighbourhoods and which, when night comes, the copyists desert to be trampled
on: tapered Venus and Giocondas, whose smile dribbles and is cut down on a chin
which flakes and splinters, gazes which scuffle, spreading and reaming with the
rain which falls?
