‘Pourquoi? Le diable est mort!’
‘Oui, oui … d’enfer …’
I throw my last silver coin down on the bar and flee from this underground chamber, back up onto the street, into the night and its wind. But the electric-lit streets are still full of people. I cannot bear the thought of running into any acquaintances by chance, so I choose only the darkest streets, slinking along like a thief or a murderer, thinking of Raskolnikov, imagining I am Raskolnikov, desperately wanting to confess all I have done. But I know my confessions would only bring tragedy for others, besides even my immediate family. And I’m far from certain my desire to confess is even genuine. If only my nerves could be as steady as those of ordinary people.
I walk down another dark street, this one alongside a canal, and I’m reminded of my adoptive parents’ home in the suburbs, the two of them waiting there each day for my return. My children, too, perhaps. But I dread the power that would naturally bind me if I go home to them all. I pass a barge moored at the embankment, upon the choppy waters of the canal, a dim glow seeping from within. Even in a place like this, families are living, men and women hating each other in order to love each other …
Perhaps buoyed by the whisky, I decide to go back to the hotel, to try to write, to salvage something from this day, this life …
In the hotel room, I light a cigarette and stare down at the blank sheaf of manuscript paper. I turn to my bag and take out a pile of books. On the top is The Collected Letters of Prosper Mérimée; letters which give me the strength to go on living. But as I read, I learn the author had become a Protestant at the end of his life and, for the first time, I see the face behind the mask: he, too, was one of us, condemned to walk through the darkness –
As Sainte-Beuve said, ‘Mérimée does not believe that God exists, but he is not altogether sure that the Devil does not …’
In the middle of the night, there should be no one in the corridor outside my room. Yet I can still sometimes hear the sound of wings outside my door; who could be keeping birds in their room?
Unable to stand anything more, especially the blank pages of manuscript paper, I go over to the bed. I lie down and open up A Dark Night’s Passing again; everything about the protagonist’s spiritual struggle is painfully familiar to me. Yet compared to him, I feel such an idiot. Tears well in my eyes and I let them fall, sobbing on the bed, feeling at peace at last. But not for long, never for long; again I begin to see those translucent, spinning, turning gears and wheels in my right eye, and again they gradually increase until they occupy and blind half my field of vision. I know the headache is not far behind. And now I can hear the rats in the walls again, maybe even closer, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the wardrobe, maybe under the bed, and the beating of wings, too, the beating of wings becoming louder and louder, the gears and the wheels spinning, turning, faster and faster. Enough is enough; I throw the book to one side, go over to my bag and take eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, just wanting to knock myself out …
In my dream, that dream again, in a deserted, ruined and wasted garden, there is an iron castle with iron grilles on its narrow windows. Inside the iron castle, there is only one room. In the room, there is only one desk. At that desk, a creature who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot read a long poem about a creature who in another room is writing a poem about another creature who in another room is writing a poem. Yet still I try to read the words the creature is writing, but now it turns to look at me and shrieks, ‘Quack! Quack …’
I open my eyes, the room flooded with a bright early-morning, early-summer light. I leap from the bed, go to the desk and begin to write, my pen sailing over the paper with a speed that startles even me, just writing and writing with a savage joy, then smoking and smoking, getting up from the desk to pace the room, on top of the world, then back to the desk and back to my pen, writing and writing, no parents, no wife, no children, just the life that flows from my pen across these papers, these pages; two pages, four pages, seven pages, ten pages more, more and more: under my pen, before my eyes, the manuscript grows and grows, just keeps on growing, as I write and I write with a frantic intensity, filling the decaying world of this supernatural story with horrific beasts, one of whom is my own self-portrait –
The telephone by the bed rings.
I stand up, go over to the bed, pick up the phone and say, ‘Who is it?’
‘Quack, quack,’ whispers a voice. ‘I’m the ghost of Tock …’
‘What? What,’ I scream. ‘What, what did you say?’
‘Are you ready to go yet, ready to go now …?’
‘What? Who are you, who is it?’
‘It’s Uno’s wife,’ says the voice now. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you …’
‘What is it,’ I ask. ‘Has something happened to Uno?’
‘I called your house,’ she says, ‘and your aunt said you were here, and I hate to disturb you, but Uno’s condition is really deteriorating …’
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her, ‘I’ ll come as soon as I can …’
‘Thank you,’ she says, then cuts the connection.
I put the receiver back in its cradle. I go back to the desk, stuff
