Slowness Read Free

not entirely sure that contact with the sick mouth was not infectious; in the next phase, he decided to surmount his caution, figuring that the shot of his kiss
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    The French children rushing to help their little African friends always remind me of the face of the intellectual Berck. Those were his glory days. As is often the case with glory, his was instigated by a defeat: let’s remember: in the eighties of our century, the world was struck by the epidemic of a disease called AIDS, which was transmitted during sexual contact and which, early on, rampaged mainly among homosexuals. To stand up against the fanatics who saw the epidemic as a
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    would be worth the risk; but in the third phase, an idea stopped him in his course toward the seropositive mouth: if he kissed a sick man too, that would not make him Duberques’s match; quite the opposite, he would be reduced to the level of a copycat, a follower, a minion even, who by this hasty imitation would add still greater luster to the other man’s glory. So he settled for staying put and smiling inanely. But those few seconds of hesitation cost him dearly, because the camera was there and, on the nightly news, the whole of France read on his face the three phases of his uncertainty, and snickered. Thus the children collecting bags of rice for Somalia came to his rescue at exactly the right moment. He took every opportunity to pelt the public with the fine dictum “Only the children are living in truth!,” then took off for Africa and got himself photographed alongside a little dying black girl whose face was covered with flies. The photo became famous the world over, much more famous than the one of Duberques kissing an AIDS patient, because a dying child counts more than a dying adult, an obvious fact that at the time still escaped Duberques. But the man did not
    consider himself beaten, and a few days later he appeared on television; a practicing Christian, he knew Berck to be an atheist, which gave him the idea of bringing along a candle, a weapon before which even the most obdurate unbelievers bow their heads; during the interview he pulled it from his pocket and lit it; with the perfidious purpose of casting discredit on Berck’s concern for exotic lands, he talked about our own poor children, in our villages, in our outer suburbs, and invited his fellow citizens to come down into the street, each carrying a candle, for a grand march through Paris as a sign of solidarity with the suffering children; then (suppressing his mirth) he issued a specific invitation to Berck to come join him at the head of the procession. Berck had a choice: either participate in the march, carrying a candle as if he were Duberques’s choirboy, or else dodge it and risk the blame. It was a snare he had to escape by some bold and unexpected act: he decided to fly off straightaway to an Asian country where the people were in revolt, and there shout out loud and clear his support for the oppressed; alas, geography was never his strong suit; for him the world divided into France and
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    Not-France, with its obscure provinces he always mixed up; so he stepped off the plane in some other, tiresomely peaceful country, whose mountain airport was frozen and underserviced; he had to stay there eight days waiting for a plane to take him home, famished and flu-ridden, to Paris.
    “Berck is the martyr-king of the dancers,” commented Pontevin.
    The dancer concept is known only to a small circle of Pontevin’s friends. It is his great invention, and perhaps regrettably, he never developed it into a book or made it a subject for international symposia. But he doesn’t care about public renown, for which reason his friends listen to him with all the greater amused attention.
    not power but glory; his desire is not to impose this or that social scheme on the world (he couldn’t care less about that) but to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self.
    Taking over the stage requires