8

ABDO-JULIEN

I THINK THE DEAD are not dead but go on with their little lives, only on another planet. When the evening wind comes in with its troubling scythe, someone you love leaves you. Death should not be proud; people do not die, they just become invisible. God, it's so cold alone here in the grave, they whisper. Like that grandmother from ancient times with the face of a great sachem, affectionate and despotic, who died in her eighty-fifth year, well, she's walking along over a dried-out wadi on the Moon with her long, majestic stride, hampered by a double pain in the hip. She could read the future in the flight of birds and would raise her head to search the stars and the Moon at every occasion. Ah, she could see herself on that lunar land inhabited by old people, stunted acacias, a natural world in suspension or in miniature, bony camels, cats with stringy coats, cacti with a fragile constitution. Life is not abundant there, it's a break in the clouds, but peace reigns permanently and men have lost their vanity and their destructive energy. Every man bears witness for humanity. Besides, don't they whisper behind my back that I, Abdo-Julien, am the reincarnation of my grandfather, who was assassinated by a thug in the Foreign Legion? Grandfather often comes to visit me. Over there, in the country where he is, they don't call children “children” but “the ones with small feet”; men are companions of the Sun, the other point of reference, along with the Moon—Earth has been utterly forgotten. Round, white flat stones are found there in great numbers, like on a beach of the alabaster coast between Dieppe and Étretat, where I spent a few days during my last summer vacation in Maman's part of the country. Bristling with volcanic knolls, the earth of the Moon seems plunged in a long eternal sleep just slightly smoothed by the sand winds that surge up out of nowhere. The companions of the Sun have slept peacefully, with a clear conscience, ever since they let the people on Earth be born, die, and be born again wherever they are, do their thing and walk round and round inside the circle of their well-fed sedentariness. They remain at the mercy of a big, violent current that will swallow them up forever. Speaking of the ones on the Moon like Grandpa Awaleh, they fit into their new existence with the ease of an alley cat. They're like flying leaves fluttering in the arms of the wind; their own horizon loses its weight and sways along on its wings without a trace or a final point. They are humble; they are able to love slowness and appreciate the wisdom of former times. They have left our wretched enclosures forever. They're not struggling along any more under the constant threat of earthquake in the country of dead stones.

I learned all that from Grandpa, who would tell it to me during his unexpected visits. Experience is a lantern on your back, he would teach me when I asked him a tough question; it only lights up the path behind you. It's weird, these days his face is round and soft, with no hard cheekbones or tense muscles. A face like the Moon.