Farnèse, the Tightrope Walker, splits the water, as light as a Gerris, that skating insect who skims across the surface of rivers. He recovers his lost agility, revived by weightlessness. He likes being alone on the rooftops, as before, closer to the sky than the earth, invigorated by the atmosphere, alone to look at the world from on high. But tonight, high and low merge, and for him, losing the ground below means compensation, reconciliation. He has never wanted to tread on the earth, to leave the slightest footprint; he’s always been up high, until the fall. Stop thinking about it. He glides ahead, getting closer, using his feet to push away alder branches as if they were tall grass. Alder trees from the banks of the river, their trunks bathed in mud, their branches tickling and scratching his ankles. He keeps along the riverbed, having found the route once more. The church is on the right, dark and severe, deprived of the smile that appears each night from the incandescent spotlights arranged at the foot of the steeple. They’ve all blown out. Not one light is left. The church has gone back to the dismal outfit it wore the evening it was built. Then city hall goes by, a stucco cube with pretty letters, bloodred on a meringue pediment. Then come the school and the houses, then nothing more, the alders again, poplars, ash trees, and, beyond that—yes, it’s definitely coming from here. Bursting from this black hole, blacker than the metallic night, is the cry he’s been hearing.
A house with a skylight at the point of its gable, far away from everything, isolated; the house at the water’s edge, the old windmill.
Is it possible to be swept along even faster when the wind picks up and agitates the waves, mixed with leaves and debris? Farnèse leaps from one crest to another, his face whipped by twigs, leaves, thorns. He is joyful, without memory. Sometimes, a shape appears out of the dark, narrow frame he has chosen to reach: a white oval, a mauve wing like a turtledove’s. It’s a face, it’s a hand, a hand reaching out. Farnèse seizes it, projected toward the face whose eyes, black pebbles emptied with fear, stare at him.
“Take him. Take the baby. I brought him up here, but if I keep him, I’m going to die. I’m going to drown. Help me. Drown the baby. I won’t say it was you. I can’t do it. I tried. But I’ve been taking care of him for three months. I know him. He depends on me. For you, it’s nothing. I’ll give him to you and you can leave him in the water. I don’t want to die. Drown him. For you, it’s nothing. He won’t realize it. He’ll think he’s going to sleep.”
The mauve hand, the turtledove wing, holds a package out to Farnèse. Farnèse recognizes the cry. This is the cry he swam for.
“Don’t tell anyone what I told you. It’s our secret. I won’t say anything either. It’ll be the river’s fault. Can you? Is that okay?”
Farnèse takes the package, holds it above the water.
“Get out of here,” he orders. “Go in the direction of the current, let it carry you, don’t fight it, float if you can; don’t hold on to any branches, just use your arms to avoid obstacles, don’t try to stop yourself. The faster you go, the faster you’ll be rescued. You’re going to make it. I won’t say anything. We never saw each other. Do what I told you.”
She disappears.
Farnèse doesn’t take the time to watch her float away; he looks over to his right. The child is crying very softly; he is light in Farnèse’s palms, which lift up the child like a baptism.
The sycamore tree with round stumps, the one where the walking path starts at the side of the hill—is it still standing? Farnèse squints, raindrops pecking at his eyeballs, crows’ beaks at a gallows feast. He grasps the package with one hand while paddling with the other; he recognizes the flaky gray and whitish spots of the tree’s bark shining there, just a little farther.
Sometimes the child slips under the water. Farrnèse doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive—he’s not making any more noise—but dead or alive, Farnèse has to save him, so he keeps going. He clutches a fistful of leaves that rips off immediately, is plunged downward, comes back up, catches hold of a branch, climbs up, pulls himself out of the water, the mud, jumps from branch to branch, sees that the waters are still rising, continues his ascent. Now he’s rising into the jumble of leaves that the rain can hardly penetrate.
A strange heat sheltered in the treetops, a refuge.
He sits on a branch, contemplates the water below, a few yards under him, examines his parcel: calm pearl face. Farnèse thinks he sees a nostril quiver. He doesn’t have the courage to know any more. Quickly, he unties the scarf around his neck and uses it to fasten the swaddled body to the largest branch he can find. He makes sure it will hold up, withstand the storm, won’t fall, fly away, get carried off, and he dives. Leaves, leaves, branches, leaves, branches and branches and branches, leaves, branches, mud.