Franketienne - Ready to Burst

This can’t be possible! It seems as if all the women I pass in the street are pregnant. But it’s true. Even the female animals. What could have happened in the space of one night? All these women visibly pregnant! Bellies nine months big. Ready to give birth. Can they all have become — in the space of one night — a bunch of dangerous conspirators hiding explosives in their guts? Nuclear bombs — who knows? Look at them walking, their eyes haggard. Blind women, carriers of bombs! They’d better not get hit by some speeding car. If their stomachs were to burst!

Raynand walks with a long, brisk stride. His heart, a cauldron of blood, beats violently in his panting throat. His stomach, his own stomach, swells as well and pushes irrepressibly against his leather belt. A bitter smell roasts his nasal passages. He’s thirsty. He walks more quickly. He encounters a pregnant woman who looks oddly like Solange.

— Solange!

— What do you want from me?

— Are you pregnant?

— You know full well this is your doing.

— Of what do you so unjustly accuse me?

— It’s your cursed seed I carry. Don’t pretend not to know.

— But I haven’t seen you since our breakup. A year ago. How could this be possible?

— The same way you impregnated all the women of the island, by spraying them with your salty sperm.

— Solange, you’ve got to be kidding me. What are you talking about?

— About the fact that you knocked me up, Raynand.

— Solange, you’re lying. I can’t have children. I’m sterile. Encrusted with tumors, nothing works anymore. You know that. And what’s more, my doctor castrated me and placed two oval stones in the place of my testicles.

Solange doesn’t respond. She turns her back to him, revealing an ulcerated sore on the nape of her neck. Startled, Raynand turns away, his lips pinched in disgust. He gets out of there hurriedly, his temples suddenly clenched between the brass disks of an explosive pair of cymbals. He catches himself running in a street he can’t identify, and stops short at a crossroads blocked by a mound of small, naked bodies. Swarming. Covered with bruises. Viscous. Dumbfounded, he refuses to believe his eyes. A sticky pile of newborn children. Strange mass grave blocking the way along a radius of thirty feet. Some are already dead. Throats cut. Strangled by nylon stockings twisted around their necks. Other cry. Squirm. Let loose screams that drive into his ears like so many corks. Into his head. Raynand sees no way out. He has goosebumps. With a start, he goes back the way he came. Starts running again. This isn’t possible, he murmurs imperceptibly. I’ve got to go see Paulin this very minute. His novel … I’ve found the title for his novel … The title, a fiery scab on the skin of his book!

Raynand slips into a winding corridor. As he is swallowed up within, his unease worsens. He experiences the painful feeling of being gulped down by some enormous intestine. A carnivorous boa constrictor. Who would have predicted that he’d end up as a pastry crust thrust into the oven of some reptile’s’s mouth. It seemed as if he were threading his way through some kind of trenches, boarded up by rusty iron sheets. He raises his eyes toward the cutout bits of sky. He sees his own image there, reversed.

The corridor is strewn with the cadavers of children, which he avoids brushing against. What can it mean, he ruminates, this evil spell? This macabre sorcery? In front of him a dazed old man is walking with a comic limp. Once he’s closed the three-meter gap between them, he glances furtively at the old man and notices that he’s dragging along a voluminous hydrocele that hangs down to his knees. Stupefied, Raynand distances himself hurriedly. Further ahead, a chubby-cheeked, obese woman raises the cloth between her legs. Lets loose a powerful stream of piss. When Raynand passes by her, he can’t help but look lustily at her hairy genitals. But under the effect of some curse or other enchantment, she suddenly pushes out a set of stillborn twins. Two little runts coated with tallow, or maybe wax. A bloody placenta. Overcome with nausea, Raynand speeds up, thinking that, whatever the cost, he’s got to dig up Paulin. See him. Talk to him. Get to the bottom of all these magic spells. Try to exorcise himself. Finish that novel … and come up with the title.

A newcomer to sorrow, the widow has a bloody star where her belly button should be. With its tail, the serpent kills the child in its sleep and sucks the breast of the slumbering mother as she dreams of violent love .

Hated Death, pit without bottom, old garbage pail that the centuries can never fill up .

Nostalgia of the river that rushes along, unable to stop at the most beautiful landscapes, then dies at the vertiginous blue mouth of the sea. Hallucinatory visions. Dreams. Reveries. Melancholic revenge on a world gone mad. Memory, gaping wound that bleeds and lets flow diffuse streams of recollections. Noon, a burning killer, assassin of my creeping shadow — give me back my double and my memory. Voiceless actors metamorphose into statues of salt. Though his tongue has been cut off, the whistler carries on with his role. To the very last scene. To the very height of silence. Audience of the leprous and the paralyzed. Lazy toads from stagnant ponds, legs swollen. What happy chance will make you believe in the sovereign urgency of walking?

Stones, slumbering minerals, reason awakens in the troubled waters of my memory. Stones! Are you still sleeping while I go thirsty?

Season of blindness, what a groping track this is, where our dreams run out of breath! And if our passions die out and our desires are silenced, misery is sure to follow. The great blue fear ferments in the solitary caves of exile. Can it be that I’ve never succeeded in hearing the voice that calls to me? I’d so love to inhale the warm odor of hairy armpits. I won’t live in the city of these white houses, pure spaces of solitude. Formidable exile, don’t distance me from the stench of the word and of sex. I reject my pride and become a faithful spouse. Sacrifice reclaimed by the long drudgery that goes on and on through the night. Jealousy, hatred, vengeance, petulance, impatience, annoyance, for some time now you’ve been eating away at me, down to my very roots. Now let my plant grow in good health, in peace, and in wisdom .

Right at dawn, an incessant rain taps lightly against the roof. Clouds engorged with moisture pushed along by a cold wind. The sun gives in. The town wakes up late. The doors open only halfway. Through the half-open windows, a few women talk about the vagaries of the weather.

— Such a dreary day! Who’d have predicted such a thing last night?

— Looks like it’s going to be cloudy all day.

— It’s the beginning of the rainy season.

— That calls for a nice hot dish of ground corn.

— I figured that out as soon as I woke up.

— I sent that maid to the market a while ago now. I’ve had enough of her dawdling.

— Maybe that’s how she manages to get the goods at a better price. The cost of food has gone up.

— Well, I’ll bet she passes the time listening to the local boys spout their nonsense.

And so goes a typical conversation among the old ladies in the town’s working-class neighborhood every time there’s a rainy day. Without sun. Somehow it makes them happy to talk about what a dreary day it is, about what bad weather we’re having. But without attributing any particular misfortune to it.

Smack in the middle of the streets, on the sidewalks, surrounding the houses, the wanderers meet up. With noisy exaltation, they clasp hands. Happy as can be to be able to up their ration of raw rum on this rainy day. Then to relax in their bedrooms papered with photos, pages from foreign magazines, places where some sweet forsaken neighbor lives. The street children exult. Play Hula-Hoops. Push wheelbarrows. Stamp at the ground as the soft rain falls. But on this particular day, at around noon, something different happens that causes a general worry to spread. And then full-blown panic. The wind suddenly stirs up more and more intense gusts.