PLOUÉZEC, I NEED your spring tides and morning mists and the sun that breaks through without warning. That place could be my home. To leave, with no preparation—that is my only wish. I have just shaken the hand of my worst enemy. Obviously he knew who I was, and he couldn’t care less. There is nothing here but jostle and uproar, pugnacious, demanding odours, sweat and dime-store perfume, a concert of car horns and shouting, harsh colours, tragicomedy, theatre, and representation. I love this cacophony, the sheer disorder of it, I’d like to slip into it like a skin, but I can’t. A thread is holding me back and I don’t know which one it is.
Wherever you look, the sea is missing. It seems as distant as happiness, that honey I’ve never tasted. Only sounds and the rustling of the earth, only human noise and brutal cacophony reach my ears. Those things attract and repel me. A spring tide, the kind that washes the bed of the bay and tears down the cliffs, that would do me a world of good. A little peace, a little silence. No such luck. Myriam has started lecturing me on justice and right, equity and vengeance. I think of Josué and my other children that I don’t know. On my left wrist is the scar inflicted by his fear when the plane landed. My children! Now I’m inventing children for myself. I don’t even know them. They’re paper children, testimony children, like dolls. I thought I knew everything about their pain. But only their wounds I’ve never seen and the thousands of pages of words I’ve never heard bind me to them. Reading life doesn’t mean you understand it, it’s only constructing, deducing, and imagining. You can read the world, but not a human being. I don’t know them. I’ve never experienced the first hesitations, then the screams, the first steps, and then the first wound. I’m eager to defend them, but can I love them? What if I didn’t love them? What if they were all Kabangas waiting to spring? No need to love them to defend them. Besides, how can I defend them? I can’t do anything for them, I’m not with the Court anymore, I can only support them, give them a little money, try and give them advice. I remember a study written by an American psychologist. “We cannot transform a child into an adult with impunity. By imposing adult behaviour on children, we deprive them of their childhood rites. When they torture and kill, they do it with a child’s eyes and reflexes. When they become adults, they have a child’s nightmares, not an adult’s. They carry their stolen childhood into their adult lives. This creates a child adult, a schizophrenic individual who suffers from the violence inflicted, but knows only violence as a way of self-expression.” My paper children are sick. I need to think. In this forsaken place, I am doing what all expatriates do when they try to think or forget: I drink. I don’t even know why, as if drinking were a form of breathing, something automatic, a conditioned response.