The Past Ahead. Gilbert Gatore
are devouring the bananas in silence. They seem uninterested in Niko, who studies them from a distance.
54. Satisfied, Niko lies on his back amidst the melons and their remnants. The rough leaves scratch his arms and legs, but he’s not paying them any mind. He’s looking for the moon in the sky but finds only a vague light veiled by an unmoving cloud. Happiness, he thinks, is a man forgotten by the others, his natural needs properly sorted out, comfortably settled down to feel the regular beating of his heart, listen to the distant noises, and admire the moon and the stars.
55. What’s happening that, without any transition, the images of the killings resurface and stiffen him in that convulsion that always leaves him with the look of a drowning victim who’s just been rescued from the water?
56. At the same time, there’s the rumble of a detonation, and with it the fruit that Niko had dropped beside him explodes. Overwhelmed by a flood of unbearable images and in the grip of tremors, he’s unaware of what’s happening and remains flat on the ground. Dimly some kind of commotion reaches his ears. Another blast and the dust surging forth beside him bring him back to himself and to what’s glaringly obvious: they’re shooting at him. And yet, as if this assessment didn’t really concern him, Niko doesn’t budge, a rock among the rocks, a melon among the melons. In the center of his expressionless face, his eyes, still staring at the sky, reflect the moon’s discarded glow.
57. Another explosion, and this time its discharge penetrates him while a terror tempest lifts him up. He slides behind the rock on which he’d been splitting melons just before. Hugging his bent knees, burying his head inside the ball he’s formed, and holding his breath, he focuses on locating the monkeys by their sound. Could they have left without him? And what if all this were merely a trap meant to eliminate him, the intruder that he is in the cave? Is he right to trust them?
58. Noticing that he’s in the same position in which he had surprised so many of his victims, he’s once again overcome by a flood of memories that sicken and exasperate him to the point that he vomits out everything he’s just eaten. The bits of melon that stream onto the ground are still intact.
59. The firing stops but Niko doesn’t feel safe, and so he waits. Even if he must wait several days before he can be sure it’s safe to stand up, he’s prepared to do so. Patience has always been his primary quality. After a lengthy silence during which, in addition to being watchful, he must avoid falling into the snare of his drifting thoughts, a groan catches his attention, growing weaker and weaker and more disjointed. Like a wary turtle, he carefully exposes his head so he can hear better; then, to pinpoint where the sound is coming from, he crouches to let his sweat-covered forehead, and then his eyes, glance over the rock. A few steps away lies a monkey, a bullet in the back of its head. The flowing blood forms an opaque puddle around him. Its position leads him to infer that the animal was hit as he came running in the direction of the spot where Niko was lying. The scene, sanitized by the pallid light of the moon, doesn’t seem real enough to unleash the avalanche of ominous thoughts lying in ambush deep inside Niko.
She roams around inside her memories as in a place that is both familiar and unknown, a house fallen into darkness where she searches for markers by feeling her way. In this half trance, she sees herself, a different self, stretched out on the bed, intoxicated with confusion and her surrender to sadness. She lies there for a long time, and it is the ringing of her telephone, she recalls, that draws her from her inertia.
A friend suggested they go to the theatre that evening. Since she couldn’t remain lying on her bed indefinitely and had no idea what to do next, she accepted the invitation. The voice on the other end of the line was clearly delighted, and she had trouble responding to it. It was always the same voice that showed up when things weren’t going well with the other one, the voice she also associated with the most substantial discussions: Victor’s voice.
The play presented a man with an incurable disease whose unpronounceable name hinted at a connection to the country that had so harshly regained her attention that morning. She could easily identify her mother tongue even if she didn’t know how to speak it. In the play, the man was visited by his guardian angel, who suggested that, while he was awaiting death, he spend his time collecting inside a small box everything he wanted to leave behind of himself, everything that he’d want to be associated with afterward. The play’s title was In Memory of Him. For some reason she didn’t admit to herself at the time, she thought it was beautiful but hard to take and disturbing. A few years later, sitting at her desk, she thinks she knows why the show had been so gripping. Perhaps that was the moment when the link was formed between the revulsion that had submerged her and the project to which she now devotes herself thousands of kilometers away.
After the play, she invited Victor to have a drink. At first she was surprised that he didn’t seem to have heard the news that had so shaken her that very morning, and, powerless to think about anything else, she only half listened to his comments on the play. Still, he came to it in the end:
“Did you hear those unbelievable figures on the prisons in your country? It seems that the number of prisoners is so enormous and the legal authorities so overloaded that it will take several centuries to handle all the cases.”
“Yes,” she answered, feigning the same neutrality as if she’d been told the score of the cricket world cup.
“It’s really incredible, all the same, that such a situation can exist. It gives you a terrifying idea of the violence in that country but also of the indifference that obscures it all. It’s as if a crime were committed in France resulting in the imprisonment of the entire population of Lyon and no one would care.”
“It’s terrible, but what can you do . . .” she uttered, to see his reaction.
For a moment he held the glass he’d just picked up to his lips, put it back down, and yelled at her, “You’re appalling!” She smiled at him, and then he understood she wasn’t speaking seriously.
What he said was exactly right: what she’d just expressed, which is what she’d heard that morning from the mouth of a classmate, was appalling. That’s what had shocked her in the sentence: the world’s obscenity, not in the display of horror and injustice but in the attitude of those who could find nothing else to say in reaction but “It’s terrible, but what can you do . . . ,” who could do nothing about it except allude to it between a sip of coffee and a little joke, as they’d invariably become indignant over it before moving on to something else, to normal life. That’s what she could no longer deal with, that way of being resigned to every upheaval, of not letting themselves be shattered at the risk, they thought, of adding their own misery to the already-crushing wretchedness of the world. Suddenly, the attitude she had been so lovingly taught and in which she had wallowed so comfortably for years made her sick. But could it be any other way?
Perhaps, she thought as she came back to Victor who was still dwelling on how unacceptable he found the situation, that was why she’d always had a special feeling for him. He was always moved, even if it was just limited to words, and he’d always react while drawing the attention of the indifferent to the issue. That’s already something.
She can’t understand why she’d managed to be insensitive to the world for so long. How many times before today, when her normal routine had fallen apart, had saying “It’s terrible, but what can you do . . .” been enough for her as well? How many people have, and will always have, no other reaction but that? Would she still be among them if the volume on the radio hadn’t shattered her routine?
She sighs and goes back to her memories.
The interminable discussion and her walk back brought her home at the break of dawn. But instead of sleeping she began to write. That day had just made her decide to embark on a crucial project. Writing the summary of this undertaking couldn’t wait. She concentrated first on writing the title in calligraphy on a separate sheet of paper: In Memory of . . . It took her a solid hour before she was satisfied with the result. At the time she thought she was following her usual meticulous ways. Today she knows she was mostly taking the opportunity