XXV

Fate

A

We were already on the boat, I was already on my way, well out to sea when, suddenly falling upon me like a debt come due, misfortune, ever mindful of the past, turned up, saying: “Listen, it’s me, time to turn back!” And it promptly whisked me off and returned me back home, like a retracted tongue.

Already on the boat, already the many-voiced ocean lithely parting its waves, already the oh-so-modest ocean parting itself, generously curling its long blue lips into itself, already the mirage of distant shores, already. . . but then all of a sudden . . .

When misfortune, taking up its crate and tool box, makes its way into newly electrified neighborhoods, on the lookout for one of its own who might have tried to mislay his fate . . .

When misfortune follows the path of one of its fellows and finally manages to lay its huge paw on his back, misfortune is most pleased with itself. Misfortune’s day is quickly made. Good fortune has to work at things far longer.

Good fortune makes a mistake and this mistake erases it; misfortune makes a mistake and there’s nothing to it, misfortune always gets another shot.

Misfortune having missed its opportunity (for I was able to clamber back on board; this was a miracle, I’m aware), it was absolutely fit to be tied. It was asking itself: “How am I going to get my mitts on this fellow this time around? He’s beginning to get used to the blows I land. I just can’t let go of him like this—especially this fellow, he’s got my name written all over him.”

Misfortune was kicking itself.

Such is the situation at the present. Who’s going to get the upper hand? There’s a scintilla of hope. In the eddy appears the head.

B

I’m surrounded by voices. When will they leave me in peace? How imperious they are:

— Get going, you’ve been sitting on this bench long enough now. Shake a leg!

— But . . . there’s no bench here.

— Come on, don’t play dumb. You know full well you’re taking it easy. Plus you stink.

When these voices speak to me it is with the utmost brutality, rarely otherwise.

I who only ask for confidence, who only wants happiness, who wants his share of love like everybody else, who feels so deserving . . . yet who is so continually shattered. It’s the voices that knock me on my ass; left to myself, I think only of soaring.

To certain people these voices speak with a tenderness that never tires, that accompanies them from cradle to grave, providing solace to the anguish of dying, guaranteeing them lifetime success.

These voices teach them everything. They are said to be proficient. But left to themselves, they wouldn’t have a clue. Everything needs to be whispered into their ears.

If they had been, I wouldn’t go so far as to say assailed, but at the very least isolated, perhaps these voices would still be struggling with the alphabet at the age of thirty.

Whenever I tried my hand at something: “Come off it, this is not for you; just let it go. You’re ridiculous enough as it is.”

Well as of now an extraordinary power has risen within me, the power to detest all these voices, an inflexible power, obstinate, inconvenient, a power they deem worthless, sterile from the start: the hatred of fate.

I’ve never gotten help from anybody. What I have I owe to nobody. Such is the situation at present. There is a scintilla of hope. In the eddy appears the head.

C

Hate greatly envies love. It would like to act as love does. But it always returns claiming that there were no objects of love, but only objects of hate to be had.

Jaguars unanimously agree that the company of gazelles is annoying. They can find no rest among the latter.

There is something else as well. There is the jaguar’s smell.

Gazelles are without exception repelled by the smell of jaguars and are quick to avoid them.

Ah! Ah! Can the jaguars put up with this?

You need to learn once and for all what you’re dealing with when it comes to gazelles.

You need to learn once and for all that gazelles form a union from whose membership jaguars are excluded.

Can jaguars put up with this?

The coterie of sweet dears, a league of intolerance. Munching grass, cursing your ass.

When vinegar approaches milk, no hope for the milk, it shall sour more greatly than the vinegar, it shall be robbed of all sweetness. This the milk knows, and it drives it crazy.

The vinegar is by contrast perfectly at ease, executing as it does the workings of nature. Jaguars likewise always look utterly unembarrassed, utterly unostentatious. They are among those creatures who are in the right.

Why don’t gazelles learn Turkish from jaguars? It might prove useful to them someday.

Why don’t they go into training to become jaguars by going on a diet of blood-soaked grass? . . .

Remains to be seen what the jaguars would think of all this.

Between the gazelle and the jaguar there throbs an un-bridgeable abyss.

The land of the jaguar is steeply bounded by that of the gazelle, and the land of the gazelle is steeply bounded by that of the jaguar, and to leave their lands each would have to die a hundred deaths before gaining a glimpse of the land of Canaan.

There are those who delude themselves when it comes to questions of sustenance. As for the jaguar, the gazelle just disappears into him, leaving nary a trace. The more he eats tender gazelles, the more he proves himself a jaguar.

D

What matters is the outcome. To turn up all of a piece according to one’s nature. And every man must carefully and repeatedly take stock of himself, to figure out to what extent he’s an herbivore or a carnivore, to figure out what’s fit to be meditated upon or to be slaughtered. And not to sacrifice the head that roars within him any more than the head that bleats.

In truth, many turn up missing an arm. Many turn up without noses.

Although Holiness views cripples in an unfavorable light. “Fakers! Why do away with teeth when this is the function of the jaw?”

There are those who turn up solely with a forehead.

“Don’t you have a head to go along with this?” they are asked. “And don’t you have a belly? And your legs? And didn’t you happen to be supplied with a hand or two?”

And then the one who turns up with but a single hair and whose entire body has been lost. Ahem! “So it’s you, Mr. Somebody or Other.” The hair introduces himself. Ahem! Quite a skinny little individual and even if he is proud to introduce himself, he is considered very much the weak-ling, tall and wispy though he be.

And the one who turns up in his entirety, he’ll be told: “Fine and dandy! But where are your children?”

And each according to his true nature.

The jaguar must give birth to jaguars.

Do you think that nature would have wasted thousands of years just to produce jaguars who’d try to give birth to calves?

Half-breeds be damned! They’ll never manage to figure things out, covered with the fungi of smoldering cigarette butts.

Fat-ass hearts born under the sign of pimples!

They have ceased to perceive clarity. Faced with them, the smoothest of mirrors develop cracks and the lakewaters start bitching.

E

When misfortune with its nimble hairdresser’s fingers takes up its scissors with one hand and with the other grabs a man’s nervous system, a frail mesh dangling amidst plump rolls of flesh, and draws lightning bolts and spasms and general despair from this stuffed, panicky animal . . .

Sorrow is the enemy of the within. Misfortune does nothing proud. It is desperate to jumble up the spheres.

And yet misfortune is welcomed by the wise man, after the initial shock, with a satisfaction that takes future benefits into account.

Blindness is the future of the ear. Blindness is the certain triumph of the ear, with voices everywhere breaking into stutters. You are no longer going it alone. You have been liberated for once and for all from the solitude of the eye, one of the most gruesome solitudes of all.

But there’s the piper to be paid. A bit here, a bit there. An eye here, an ear there. The awesome justice of communicating vessels.

But you were comfortable with what you were, you weren’t asking to change. What do we care about getting better?

This is the unvarnished truth.

He who has a thorn in his eye has considerable difficulty sleeping. And the future of the eye is of no interest to him. Sleep, O if he could only sleep. But his eyelid whisks his wound like a brush . . . O shitty world, how difficult to squeeze anything decent out of you.

No, the thorn in the eye is not the future of the eye, it is almost always the insane multiplication of the race of the eye, and the person so afflicted ends up going nuts.

If one takes an eye and removes it properly, one can also spin plates upon it to great effect.

What a wondrous sight, what a thing to behold. But the person whose eye’s in pain would do anything to get out of this game, without much convincing.

A miniature fireworks display within an eye would perhaps be an amazing thing, but the owner in chief of the eye would just be standing there, waiting for the show to be over, and had he discovered a door from which to exit, he would have surely vanished, of that one can be sure.

If the devil existed, who would not offer himself for sale? Who? I’m just saying.

Many are those who enjoy watching sword swallowers. And once the sword has been swallowed, they are suffused by a sense of great well-being. During my childhood, I too loved watching them. But I said to myself they are not swallowing blows. The performer I’m waiting for is the blow-swallower. If ever he turns up, the crowds will be amazing.

O! Dependency! To so depend on this heavy, shitty world.

No, I have not yet discovered the secret of making an escape. And such is the situation at present. There is a scintilla of hope. In the eddy appears the head.