Next Episode Read Free Page A

impenetrable mystery of all. The more I circle it and target it, the further it moves beyond my grasp, multiplying my own riddle tenfold even as I step up my efforts to grasp it. I simply don’t seem able to decipher the code, and since I can’t translate it into my language, I write it down in the insane hope that by paraphrasing the nameless, I’ll finally give it a name. Yet even though I cover this hieroglyph with words, it gets away from me and I’m left behind on the other shore, surrounded by vagueness and hope. Crowded inside my closed sphere, I descend, compressed, to the bottom of Lac Léman, and I can’t step outside the flowing themes that constitute the thread of the plot. I’ve closed myself inside a constellate system that has imprisoned me in strictly literary terms, so much so that this stylistic sequestration seems to confirm the validity of the symbol I’ve used from the outset: diving. Encased in my funerary barque and my repertoire of images, I have only to continue drowning through words. Descending is my future, diving my sole activity and my profession. I drown. I become Ophelia in the Rhône. My long manuscript tresses mingle with water plants and invariable adverbs while I glide, variable, between the two long jagged shores of the cisalpine river. And so duly cofferedinside my metallic concept, certain that I won’t get out but uncertain as to whether I’ll live for a long time, I have just one thing to do: open my eyes, look at this flooded world, pursue the man I’m looking for and kill him.
    Kill! What a splendid law, one it’s sometimes good to comply with. For months now I’ve been preparing myself inwardly for killing in cold blood and with maximum precision. On that rainy Sunday morning I was secretly preparing to strike. My heart was beating steadily, my mind was clear, agile, precise as a weapon has to be. The months and months that had gone before had genuinely transformed me. And it was with an acute sense of the gravity of my effort and with reflexes perfectly trained that I was inaugurating this black wedding day. Suddenly, around half-past ten, the break occurred. Arrest, handcuffs, interrogation, disarmament. An unqualified disaster, this trite accident that earned me nothing but a stay in jail is an anti-dialectical event and the flagrant contradiction of the undeclared plan I was going to carry out, weapon in hand, in the purifying euphoria of fanaticism. Killing confers a style on one’s existence. And the prospect of it, when shamefully introduced into everyday life, injects it with the energy it needs to avoid feeble crawling and endless boredom. After my trial and my liberation I can’t imagine my life outside the homicide axis. Already I’m bursting with impatience at the thought of the multiple attack, a pure and shattering act that will restore my appetite for life and establish me as a terrorist in the strictest privacy. And that violence will bring order back to my life, because it seems to me that, for thirty-four years now, I’ve only lived the way that grass lives. If I were to make a quick tally of kisses given, of my powerful emotions, of my nights of wonder, of my luminous days, of the privileged hours and the great discoveries I have yet to make; and if I were to add up over an infinity of perforated postcards the cities I’ve passed through, the hotels where I’ve had a good meal or a night of love, the number of my friendsand of the women I’ve betrayed, to what sombre inventory would these irregular operations lead me? The sine curve of real-life experience doesn’t translate the ancient hope. I’ve perverted my life line repeatedly and obtained less happiness through an accumulation of indignities, which has led me to give back less than nothing of it. Before this inborn statistic that suddenly and wearily haunts me, I can imagine nothing better than to continue writing on this sheet of paper and to plunge hopelessly into the ghostly lake