BROKEN WRITING

Perhaps because of the nakedness and simplicity of what is beneath them, the skies over the Sahara are no doubt the most impressive in the world. None of the world’s inhabitants can have the sky over their heads so present as those who live in these lands. As if that weren’t enough, the sky in Béni Abbès has many more colors than that of any other place. Here dusk hardly exists: it’s daytime and suddenly, without announcement, it has become night. The sun doesn’t set behind the dunes; it falls as if it were a star thrown by a god. Like a ball of fire that crashes.

“It’s You, right?” I said to God. I think that this was the first time that I ever formulated something like a prayer. “If you exist, make yourself known,” I challenged, convinced I was before the most religious of landscapes.

Such a silence reigned, that if there were a God, I am sure that he would have established his dwelling place there.

God, however, did not show up. Or perhaps He did and His answer was the silence that surrounded me, the hot sand of the day and the cold sand of the night, the sky and the stars.

Have I still not written anything about the stars of the Sahara? It would be enough to say that before I came here I didn’t really know what a star was. I didn’t know how big they could get nor how much they could shine. I didn’t know—and perhaps this was the main thing—the enormous number of stars that light up our firmament.

Everything in Béni Abbès is gathered when afternoon falls, even the human spirit. Reddish, the sky approaches the earth until melting into it. I would say that they take each other’s hands, that they embrace. Then the stars appear very slowly—as if someone were lighting them one by one—and the sounds of man go out as the sounds of nature, in exchange, emerge. On January nights, the Saharan sky, like a black sheet splattered with white lights, doesn’t resemble the sky of any other geographical place. So enormous is the number of stars that the desert sky is, to human eyes, like a unique, colossal star where, occasionally, a small black stain appears to recall the backdrop that is the firmament.

My first line drawings were still very diagrammatic and were almost always sketched at dawn. I made it a habit to intersperse my notations with drawings like this one, which was one of the first:

But the day came that I noticed that my handwriting had become stylized and that, without intending to, the words had stretched out until—some at first and eventually all of them—only one fit on each line. Like this:

Conscious of what was happening, I stretched them even farther on purpose; and that is how my lines appeared.

It’s true that a single line, with the valleys and mountains that the letters insinuated, still hardly evoked—with sufficient force—the image of the desert; but many, one after another, kept making it more eloquent.

And so on until the moment arrived that I stopped worrying about what I had written—I didn’t even read it—to focus on the visual aspects of the page, which I contemplated with greater pleasure and benefit than, surely, I would have extracted from reading it. I understood then that my writing had broken and that I had become something like an illustrator. I played with the letters, unconcerned with their meaning. I had fun. Was I…an artisan? No, it would be pretentious to say something like that. I confined myself to working with my hands. Working with my hands? No, what I was doing wasn’t what you call work, but neither was it a game. My deserts weren’t useful maps or useless works of art.

What were they then? It is impossible to define my lines, and I like having invented something that no one in the world could really understand. Isn’t that something to feel proud of? Isn’t it beautiful to outsmart words, even if just once?

I have thought a lot about this revealing process by which my notations were stylized until becoming strange line drawings. And I have concluded that the stylization of my handwriting, until becoming almost a line, is a good symbol for my life. I don’t know, certainly, where all these lines are headed but…who knows where they are going? Those who think they know are the worst: they have domesticated life, which will surprise them some fine day, making them fall flat on their faces. Perhaps one of these lines that I draw will direct me to the place that I’m not looking for but that, surely, has been reserved for me.

I don’t know, but I suspect that it will be these same lines—not anything else—that will have to reveal it to me.

When I didn’t know the desert, I could well have said that I expressed myself, like any other person, through the particularity of my letters: their size and shape, rounded or pointed, their tilt. Now, in contrast, I feel that I must put the final period on this manuscript because I desire to become a line that it would be difficult to distinguish from any other. Yes, I desire it; I desire to be like the desert. Before, men could understand me. Now, no longer. I am more mysterious. I am more like God, if indeed He exists.