Franketienne - Ready to Burst

— Writer of prefaces for state-sponsored publications, I announce the disintegration of abandoned towns. I weigh the fleshy lips of the poets. I clean the mold off of animals and plants. I open the shutters of the clouds and throw the herb tea of the Assumption down the throats of drinkers of warm blood .

— Where have they gone, my feet and my arms, leaving me unable to run and embrace the girl being auctioned, and thus to try my luck against the prejudice of love? Without regret, I bet my pupils on the washed-out cheekbones of an anonymous cadaver .

— We live in the muck. From morning till night we empty out the mass graves, looking for the organs we’re lacking. It’s nothing but a waste of time. Everything gets mixed up and entangled under the piles of fallen rocks thrown at us by some intruder. We would do better, crippled companions, to seek out the guilty one and punish him. He’s here. Hidden among us .

— Here’s the intruder! The one who has never spoken. He’s all in one piece, this one. He’s been making fun of us. He’s not missing any organs. Let us seize him. And distribute his parts to the mutilated. His ears. His eyes. His nose. His brain. His heart .

— Yes. Let us share his organs. Take him alive!

And all these pieces of humanity came closer to me. Pounced on me. Tied me up with intestines. I wanted to scream. I realized that I was mute and that my tongue was missing. So I tried to explain to them that I was missing an organ, that I’d been denied the use of language. But all my gestures were in vain. To convince them, I jumped up and down on my two feet. Then I opened my mouth wide. I woke up with a start in my own bed. Bathed in sweat. Out of breath. I got up wearily. After drinking a bit of cool water, I checked my watch for the time. Five in the morning. I reflected on the strangeness of my nightmare, which seemed to have lasted the entire night. Understanding nothing, I spoke about it with my friends that same day. My stupefaction was all the more troubling when it became clear that they’d all had the same nightmare, with only some slight variations. The agitated repose of famished sleepers, the peasants said to me whenever I spent my holiday in the provinces .

— How’s it going, Raynand?

— My dear Paulin, things aren’t going well at all. For some time now, everything has gotten complicated. A rise and fall that yields nothing. Even finding some grub has become an unsolvable problem.

That day, Raynand and Paulin meet outside Sylvio Cator Stadium. It’s six in the evening. Paulin has just returned from a tutoring session he’s been doing for the past month with two sons of a businessman from the Carrefour-Feuilles area. Raynand, for his part, has been walking for hours. He isn’t even aware of how long it’s been. He’s always been a pair of legs walking. Bringing him nowhere. In the city. In the wind. From the earliest hours of the morning on, he begins his walk, contemplating the pale light of night’s end. His secret joy, the conquest of dawn. It’s then that the most rebellious stars fight not to disappear into the greedy mouth of the invading light in which the day sets up house. Inscribe a new page in the blue of the sky. A sweet ravishing. Surprising the sun’s retractable claws as they scrape at the death throes of the night. Peeling back the mourning veil from all dead things. Destroy. Create. Change. Place oneself at the center of all movement. Transform oneself. Become the very hinge, the supreme core of movement. Get mixed up with the dust of atoms, essence of infinite vertigo. Immortality. Raynand has often told himself he’ll never die. He knows it. He’s convinced of it. And if it were to happen, his heart would lift up the earth. And out of it would emerge a flamboyant mango tree that would flower in the month of June. Flowers to decorate a great altar of repose, for the Corpus Christi. Benediction for the pair of shoes we’re lacking! Benediction for our worn-out clothes! Benediction for our handicapped love stories! Benediction for the victims of assassination! Benediction for the blood of innocents!

Raynand begins walking very early in the morning. The last star is swallowed up. The road menders sweep the streets, clean the gutters, wash out the sewers, gather up the detritus in metallic wheelbarrows. All this, in his presence. Every day. Every morning.

Peeking over the flakes of white clouds, the sun immediately opens its heavy lids after a long sleep. It tears off the paralysis of the night. The trees quiver. Raynand perceives the slightest palpitations of the landscape and participates in all the stirrings of the day. Each time he’d imagine that something strange was going to happen; that the earth would capsize … That the balance would tip once and for all … That the planet would topple over … That the houses would collapse … That all beings and things would fly away, scattered — sucked up by the headwinds … His detached head would become a black moon … His dispersed limbs would light up, like so many incandescent cigars … Each time he left his house, he’d imagine that an extraordinary explosion would make the whole world blow up. But nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. Nothing came along to change the order of things. The days followed one another monotonously. Raynand seems condemned to repeat the same gestures, to hit his head against the stone walls and harshness of daily disappointments. Illusions. Dissatisfactions. What’s more, he still hopes to be able to grab hold of that nodal point out of which all movement unfolds. That’s the secret. The real discovery he’s after. To seize movement by the throat. And to create the event!

From morning on, he walks without stopping. His sole and apparent freedom: walking. Although he often considers his meanderings to be nothing but a sham. A sort of open prison. A boxing in without motivation. An absurd environment. Because he can do nothing other than walk. He has no choice. He’s needed nowhere. He passes unnoticed. The world functions well enough without him. He’s nothing more than an appendix, like his brother, dead three years ago, struck down by a bullet at point-blank range. He was trying to cross the border to find work as a cane cutter in the Dominican Republic. The sentinel had cried, “Halt!” And off went the gunshot that had made no change to the course of history. Nor to the flow of rivers. The sun continued to rise in the East, to set in the West. Nothing had changed. Except that the next day, he’d had the overwhelming certainty of his brother’s death. Fallen stone dead near the border. A bit of warm blood trickling from his mouth, a scarlet snake boldly emerging from its inconvenient hiding place. And then, the tears of an old mother. The bothersome words of people from the neighborhood, who, with a melancholy air, said, “Poor devil” when they heard the news. Nothing more than an appendix sliced off. Nothing more than a crushed ant. Nothing more than an earthworm torn to pieces.

Raynand walks all day long. Sometimes all night. He barely eats. A sort of ache, a rope sling made up of the tough strings of suffering, devours his entrails. Grains of sand roll about in his dry throat. Thousands of leeches drink his blood. Little by little, the pain in his stomach is joined by a strange army with spears that drill into his navel and pierce through his entire body. An invasion of open jaws. Masses of hooked teeth. He’s reduced to a body of pain in motion. He no longer has any consciousness of the streets. So it is that one afternoon, at six o’clock, he runs into his friend Paulin and invites him to dinner, a dish of grilled pork and rice. At the little bar, Eugene’s Place. South end of Sylvio Cator Stadium.