Franketienne - Ready to Burst

With time, the giant got old, and even more cruel. But the men remained undaunted. They waited. Hoped. Watched. Prepared their revenge. The great trap … One night, while the monster slept, they lit great wood fires. In the mountains. In the islands. Everywhere. The flames rose up to the sky in a pure yellow. Awakening with a start, the giant, whose vision had weakened with age, thought that some new sources of gold, oil, and petroleum had emerged from the earth. Without losing any time, he plunged his long fingers in deeply … Fateful error! He let loose a long and horrible scream. A death wail that shook up all living things. First his fingers, then his arms scorched to the elbows. Given that he was detested in his own home by his subjects, he was finished off quickly. Ferociously. And with the fatty flesh of his body, the overjoyed people made firecrackers and torchlight tattoos. Torches of fraternal reconciliation. Of friendship. Of true love. Which exploded in a hail of stars and fires of joy .

With the change in weather, the drummers and the sambas of the new season sing, and so proclaim a future tale: there will sometime be …

One time, a little girl with a triangular chin, in love with a blue bird …

Ah! Nathalie, my child, your father is so jealous!

Each new day brings with it a truckload of worries. Old wheelbarrow of suffering. More and more, Raynand feels as if he’s been secured to a paralytic’s stretcher. And no longer has control of his legs in the sand-blocked bitterness of dead ends. His arms only know how to carry the hideous box of endless bad luck on the paths of sorrow. How would he ever manage to clear out such stony earth with a strike of the shovel? To hollow out the hard and compact granite with a strike of the pickax? To break apart my convict’s chains? My skull, trapped in a steel girdle, shelters a devastating nightmare. It’s crucial that I unbind the rope of my inner pain. That I exorcise the demon that resides in each one of us. On my interminable path I’ve already crossed too many sickos. Lovers of vice, pedophiles, impostors, mass murderers, con artists, lesbians, adulterers, alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, wanton liars, impenitent criminals — they all crawl out of their lairs. They shuffle around, masks lifted. Deploy their dark banner against a rusty sun. Carry the sacrament under the richly adorned canopy of imperial audacity, arrogance, and impunity.

Absent any revolutionary salvation, there’s only anarchy left capable of striking the most furious blow on the demoniacal fortress. I’m waiting for the savior to come. The avenging Christ will unload his stock of violent poisons into the streams, the rivers, the cisterns. I’ve already begun laughing at all those people who walk around the streets not knowing they’re all going to die, one after the next. They don’t realize that their security is nothing but an illusion, that the whole town could disappear in one day if, in a single punitive act, the lord of anarchy were to unleash his cargo of violent poisons into their drinking water. Let him come, the god of popular vengeance for the redemption and the salvation of the world! Then the restaurants, the bars, the hotels, all kitchens would serve nothing but poisoned dishes. The prostitutes would shoot off the cocks of all the flesh peddlers, magnificent celebration in honor of sex. The hairdressers and the barbers, discovering the violent power of their razor blades, would slit their clients’ throats. Oh, blessed exterminating bombs! The vastness of pain salutes you on the highest pinnacle of the planet. Bloody genuflection in death’s kitchen. Let the flames of terror shine! Let the total revolution explode so that the universe might be cleansed of all its rottenness and all its pestilence!

However, accompanied by the angel of suicide, I would make a majestic bid for immortality. But the sea in which I try to drown myself freezes up. Blind mirror that reflects my ugliness back to me. The blade I pass across my throat doesn’t cut. Becomes a bow that extracts nothing more from me — sexless violin — than a parody of sound. The stiletto, with which I’d pierce my heart, breaks against my chest of dead stone. All firearms jam as soon as they’re turned on me. I’m courting eternity by way of suicide. I attain the sainted purity of the devil. I’d like to throw myself off the top of some edifice. Be crushed against the hard ground. Star-shaped bloody splashes. But I’m as light as a feather. Swallow a dose of arsenic — my stomach rejects it. Hang myself — all the ropes are already rotting away. Slash my arteries — my blood coagulates. Throw myself under the wheels of a train — the spiral of its speed whisks me away.

So goes Raynand, a locomotive of despair, life nipping at his heels. Death doesn’t leave us free to choose it. To hold it tight. To wed oneself to it. The thing is, it only knows how to give traitorous kisses. Suicide, sacred tabernacle, proves difficult to access for the conscious being. All flight, impossible. Only the trials of intolerable days and nights. Purgatory, in which total atonement bleaches one’s bones.

And Raynand, tired of walking endlessly and without any objective, becomes an incessantly speaking mouth. The suffering flesh becomes word through my voice. I sniff out the yapping of dogs perched atop the peak of a flaming bonfire. Castrated soldiers carry rusty rifles. No transit for the merry-go-round. Paradise lost. Man lies crippled in a space under surveillance, where anarchic violence reigns. Counterfeit freedom. The barycenter shifts epileptically with every second. Scalp the leprous skin and cauterize the wound with vitriol. At the midday tribunal, Saint Nicholas judges the criminals, the murderers, and the masters of power waiting at the construction site of evil. A generation of epileptics gushes out. No more muzzles! No more straitjackets! No more!..

Raynand walks. Talks. He doesn’t only talk from his mouth. His entire body traces the triumphant space of the forbidden word. Ostracism or communion in the suffocation of the word. He walks. When he arrives at Paulin’s house, the latter is busy writing a chapter of his novel.

— Still no title, Paulin?

— The title is a fiery scab that I leave for the cover. For the skin of my work.

— You know, Paulin, I’ve been at the end of my rope for a long time. Over and over I’m brought to consider the gratuitousness of my little drama, the uselessness of my existence. If I were a writer like you, if I were working on a novel, I’d make it so that each printed page inspired the taking up of arms. The sad thing is that since my childhood I’ve been living as if pursued by a pack of rabid dogs. In a locked enclosure. Without any openings in the fence. A recluse, I wonder if my life has done nothing but ferment decay, vermin, and rotting carcasses from one end to the other. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I amount to nothing more than the suppurations of some malodorous fate.

— Raynand, you’re heading backward. You’re caught up in yourself. And you seem to be saying: look how I’m suffering. Raynand, never attract the compassion of others. Despise the pity of others.

— Paulin, what do you know of my troubles? What do you know about my problems and the drama of waiting for someone to throw me a rope?

— But, Raynand, everyone has problems. I have them, too. I’ve long been living out the tribulations of my childhood. Have I ever told you the story?

— Go ahead, I’m listening.

— Yes, we all have our problems. I often imagine the conversation that could take place between myself and Death. Between Death, in its macabre attire, and me, dying in my bed. Between Death, with its cursed mouth, and the dying man I already am.