The Child Is Lying!

Abstract

What are you, Dark night within a stone? - Henri Michaux, Poteaux d'angle Lac Une, early autumn. The family settled me here, quite isolated, in this rather comfortable chalet so that my rehabilitation of the last few months may be followed up by a period of rest that gets my mind working again. They want to take everything from me to restore it and to perfect me again according to the model of the average citizen with two TVs. They are especially keen on my forgetting the events of the last few months and that I stop worrying about the Falling Brat. They are intent on transforming me into a disciple of wisdom, but why wisdom - this state that is so close to the end? This is being told therefore not for edification, even less for transmitting rational knowledge, but in order to pretend that I rid myself of something oppressing. To pretend, yes, this may be said without hesitation, for telling doesn't uproot anything, doesn't put any evil to rest. Let's go back four months when I had just stayed for a week in the backcountry to comply with a specialist's prescription for what apparently isn't due to organic disfunctioning, but diminishing energy. Close to the babbling waters running through the old parishes, I hoped to forget the languor, the melancholy, the state of prostration into which my insignificant existence had thrown me and to unlearn the unnamable that caused me to devote myself to these excessive disconnected researches of the present, which has brought to the breaking point the medieval story at the center of my life. Anyway! It would have been some other passion if things had been different. As usual I found myself incapable of staying for more than a few days in my native village with my sisters and cousins. Especially at the end of the day I longed for the city's rare, but seldom-shared, atmosphere, the cultural excitement in which I evidently hardly participated, but whose presence obviously reassured me. I would have liked to tell them, all my family and childhood friends: Don't upset me, I'm close to tears. Instead I had chosen to flee, on the pretext of things to do and people to see to tear me away from what we had never become, none of us, since the dream necessary for our survival had preceded us to a distant territory so that its realization was prevented. So I found myself again, at midday during an unbearable week in spring, in a provincial town with as impossible a name to remember, for a mind as passive as mine that has abdicated, as Kawawackikamach, and as difficult to pronounce as Kangiqsualujjuaq. I found myself somewhere on the road to the capital that I had largely bypassed on the outward journey to delay until later offering my friends, whom I would inevitably visit there, the caricature of myself, pallid behind this hollow look, this tremulous voice, this appearance of a gorilla after thirty years in a zoo, and the spectacle of this surrender that infected even my pride which these very friends, and especially they, considered as indomitable as a Mohawk reserve. I thought I would find there, to distract their attention for a while, a trinket for him, a fragile object for her, and a present for the little one, a tin soldier, perhaps! Why not? A crusader, if possible, in remembrance of the crusaders we, his father and I, had been and to begin poking a bit of fun at my passion for medieval things. Something like a knight on his charger, carrying a three-pointed pennant topped by a cross, or a Godfrey of Bouillon as king of Jerusalem or, even better, a knight of the Teutonic Order, one of those who pursued their crusade into Slavic territory, who marched on to Nevgorod, against the Russian prince Alexander Nevski, then fought on Lake Pepous frozen over at that time and who perished by drowning when the ice gave way under the weight of their horses and heavy armor. Of course neither too violent nor too colorful a crusader, something pleasing that stirs the father's nostalgia and reassures the mother. …