Ballast • How many times

Texte paru dans le n° 11 de la revue papier Ballast (mai 2021)

Two days ago, we published an interview with the writer and poet Claro, author, to date, of around twenty books.Today we publish eight small texts of its composition, initially published in our paper review.It is a question, pell-mell, a farm and baudelaire, pizzas and the world's population, a wagon and worn shoes, an Algerian newspaper and a flower name.

Next to the plate

The farm, of course, was for the elder, and the elder also seemed made for the farm, no one would have had the idea of ​​contesting the merits of this passing, as if the words "well -fondé "and" Passement "themselves were stones intended to make the son, the oldest, after the father. The farm would remain the farm, we might change the wallpaper in the kitchen, it would also be necessary to enlarge, or shorten, says the elder by trying to laugh, after the aperitif. The notary had laughed at his pen. Then his turn had come, and he had been given a setting for him. Or rather a box, a box, something flat and square, covered with an old burgundy felt, which opened with the disconcerting disappointment of a housewife. Inside, a fairly thick, heavy glass plate, on which he sought then guessed darker areas, a vague, angular shape, but the light in the notary's office was chick, he did not want to take out his Glasses of his case, he put it back in place, closed the case - the worn setting.

From time to time, once a year, when he wanted to leave, or hang himself, or do nothing more, to stay there, his hands on his knees like chenets, he was taking it on him and was going to look for theBox, which he had posed the first day at the top of the dresser and which had his place there, that of the objects that we know forgotten, but not lost.He took out the plate, made her shive away before her eyes, always saw the same thing: spots, like the advance of a roof, the puddle of a courtyard cut by the sun, perhaps a silhouette, a wheelbarrow.Stacks anyway.Anyway spots.

His brother, he no longer saw him.He passed in front of the farm, slowed down and then took the path that led to a field he knew could go along in order to return to his starting point, from which never leave.Years worse.The years were driving up.He had to sell almost everything, and learn to live little.

"More for a long time. This is how he understood the words of the doctor. A friend of yesteryear, whom he did not immediately recognize his car was so new, solid, shiny, came to see him without warning, without even knowing that "more for a long time". He was looking at the plate. He saw new things, less sad, but more definitive. The friend spoke, commented, laughed alone. Then the friend was you. It looked like he was shaking. The friend then got up, he asked to look at the plate, to interpose it between the sun, which was going to disappear, and his gaze which seemed to be inflamed. Then came, stamped, confused and as irradiated, the explanations of the friend. The stains plaque was a daguerreotype, it was even signed, there, below, on the back, in pale ink but readable - denpce - and also carried a date: December 15, 1825. It was, said the friend Having become an artist or gallery owner, the very first photo in the world. The word "invaluable" was then pronounced. Its possible price too, in which we could have made dozens of farms, hundreds of hectares - several lives in one.

He resumed the plate from the friend's hands and looked at her one last time.Where he should have distinguished, even in a dream, the court of a Dijon residence, he only saw the hexagonal and stretched form of what, at best, could have passed for a coffin.The white of the courtyard, cut irregularly, evoked a fabric fell, barely serrated.It was not missing to this deceased table that the shadow of his brother to perfect the nightmare.

Older than

His first thought, upon waking, after a night while avoiding and jacks: less a thought than an observation, from an incongruous calculation: he was now older than Baudelaire. Coffee, although to love and burning, did not manage to hunt this idea which sought to overlap in its conscience, but in what place and for what purpose, immediately his appetite cut he returned to bed. Indifferent to poetry for what he knew, having undoubtedly retained the dates of birth and death of the poet without his knowledge, in his childhood or that of his son at the bend of a duty, he had to indulge in a Summary arithmetic to be confirmed what the dream had bequeathed to him. Death at forty-nine, Baudelaire. He had six more. But while the figures should have folded up on themselves and leaving it on the sidelines of their false enigma, it offered itself the slightly idle luxury to develop this without radiance revelation.

He got up, went to the living room, took a chair and sat down in front of the bare wall where the television screen he had threw the previous week should have threw.The wall would help him think, to concentrate, as in the past, alone, in front of another wall, thanks to a punishment, at the bottom of the class.He waited for ten good minutes, turning thought in his head like a salad in a bowl - it is at least the image that came to his mind, and which prevented him from reaching the slightest conclusion.

He driven out the image, wrung the salad and then chewing it with sheets.An interrogation, then, was insinuated: was it possible to be older than a death, even if it is a poet?If I am older than a corpse today fully decomposed, am I still alive?There was behind it, he felt it, a logic of a disturbing kind.Older than a death.It was different than being alive.It didn't prevent being alive, no doubt, but it was different.He was missing an element for the pieces to be put in place.So that the message of the night delivers its meaning.

He planned to get up, to open a Baudelaire book, but he had the impression that it would be cheating. Maybe he was taking the problem with the wrong end? He then said to himself that Baudelaire, although dead, continued to age, in his own way; that, in his grave, he continued, necessarily. The process of decomposition was, after all, only the acceleration of a phenomenon which was to start at birth, or even before. But Baudelaire would not catch up with him. He would always be older than the poet, even if Baudelaire had been still alive. Baudelaire would always be younger than him. To go against that, he would have had to die earlier, let's say in adolescence. If he had died at the age of seventeen, an illness, or an accident, then never Baudelaire would have been, even dead, younger than him. And perhaps Baudelaire had woken up one morning, harassed by a similar thought, one of these thoughts which not only lead to nothing, but they are leaving, dispersed, disturb, and end, over the years, by mine , bite you.

He got up from the chair and slowly approached the open window.

Bedside note

He couldn't play any instrument. But he bought a piano - without having ever lesson. He gave up on the conservatory. Did not go to the concerts. Waited for months before lifting the black cover. He hugged the keys for hours. Took himself for a prodigy laughing. Spent hours there, tireless. Tried to improvise a continuous piece. Sang. Took him for confidant. Insulted it: rotten piano, darling piano. The Phalanges bruise. He licked the keys. Said satanic ranges. Despair, insisted. Was at two in the morning, fervently. Discovered Glenn Gould, resumed lullabies. (Was a pizza seller for three months.) He claimed it in his sleep. Caught his fingers of the right hand in the door of a taxi. He dreamed less and less: darling piano, rotten piano. (Enter his parents two weeks away.) He was now playing day and night, even from afar. Knew that he never knows, neither playing nor not playing it. Took more and more drugs. Played without playing until exhaustion. Tore the keys one after the other. Sleeping on the strings, open hood. Made his nights there. Heard everything. Did nothing. Will cry. Cried. Pale piano complaint - hush.

N+ 1

He had read in a magazine this: if more than half of the world's population - in other words: n+ 1 - closed the eyes at the same time and denied reality, the latter would then cease to exist, since philosophy teaches us thatIt is the fruit of our senses.He also understood that such a thing would not happen, but that being possible, it was nonetheless conceivable.He was looking for the magazine for a long time where this idea was exhibited.He asked his wife, children, even the household worker.No one saw which magazine he wanted to speak.He did internet research, but it was difficult, apparently, to synthesize his request with keywords.

Half +1. And if he was, precisely, and very concretely, he, this "+1"? If it was enough for him, now, in the kitchen, to close his eyes and to deny the reality of reality? The chances for half the world's population to do the same thing as him at the same time were thin, certainly, but he had also read that the probabilities, fundamentally, were always one in two, since at each recovery of statistics - He was not very sure of the terms -, we left zero. N + 1. One in two chance, therefore, if he was right, so that everything ceases. The. Now. Or at another time. Any time. Every other moment. Reality, then: non-reality. Close your eyes, concentrate. Deny. He would have liked to find this magazine so much. Whoever talked about the negation of reality and also the one who exposed the functioning of probabilities. But the magazine that exhibited this idea that was both simple and incredible, was not found, to believe that it had never existed. Or existed only in his imagination. If it was real.

At a good distance

Sitting in the compartment, he believes or wants to sleep, his hands tied around a book, his feet flat on the roar of the ground. His mind aspires to open and close alternately, around an idea or an image, smooth. He's a little weary, it's evening, and going home will take time. But something prevents him from getting to himself. A smell, which soon gives it nausea. He opens his eyes. In front of him, standing but absent, a guy scratches his hair hair, the pants wide like a trunk, also gaping. The stench surrounds him, precedes him, almost cancels him. The man who only aspires to go home takes advantage of the next stop to change the wagon. To change air and capacity. He immediately finds a free place, sits down and almost dreams. But the smell has returned, all the more distinct as it recognizes it now. He reopens his eyes, perplexed. The type with hair-rings is there, very close to him, to mumble or sing, to falsely dance from one foot on the other. The man who would like to dream, sleep, gets up without thinking, approaches the doors of the wagon, awaits the next stop, descends, makes several meters on the left, goes up two wagons further at the moment when the doors , deaf, try to guillotine the latecomers. There is no place, not yet everyone has planted their elbows in the space of the other. So he waits, leaning against the doors overlooking the track and the void. Little music, exfiltrated with neighboring headphones, with another head, helps him rock. Suddenly, it takes it up. This nausea. This challenge. The guy is again there, always as muddy, more disgusting than ever. Unable to do anymore, the man who would like to move away from the game as at all approaches the tramp and asks him, in a plaintive, knowingly human tone, why the other harasses him thus. "You feel so good," says the grime. The fact is that the man who returns home disputed, before taking the metro, a part of squash with a sort of friend, then what he was washed at length, even going so far as to massage his experienced members With a scented cream, he believes, in eucalyptus. Yes, it smells good, it's true. Why wouldn't we follow a pleasant smell, just as one fled one that undesides? He understands very well. No longer changes wagon. Until the terminus. It does not even go down. He is waiting. He knows that he cannot flee himself, that he has no reason to flee himself. At least, not yet.

The secret of the medical

He had left the doctor of the doctor almost backwards, like in front of a summacy or a threat, his eyes lowered, almost attracted by the eliminated end of his shoes. Eliminated: his body was too, if he believed the distinguished oncologist. But distinguished: no, no more of its organs, more for very long. What was he going to say to his family, who had always believed him of iron health, unfit to shirk his obligations; to his colleagues, who knew it gently forced, and considerate; To his parents, who owed their longevity to a rascal character and solid training? to traders, who counted on its regularity? No treatment was prescribed to him, frankly, since his days were counted, like sheep, before falling asleep for good. At least that was what he had understood, because the words used by the doctor remained, on the semblance of these beans whose germination we are not sure, wrapped in a damp cotton, out of big Moite lips of the science man, of the man of generalized cancer. It was then that he, in an early mortal, remembered this fundamental thing that was medical confidentiality, and not only remembered it but judged that he could only have dropped to the practitioner, and that he had to 'Observe the strict rules. He would not betray his body. He looks like nothing. To anyone. He would certainly decline, and his deficiencies would make him suspect to the admirers of health, but he would not give up, he still preferred to pass for a simulator, a lazy, a hypochondriac 2.0 than to admit that the crab pinched for him Each point of its anatomy. It would be his last baroud of honor. Medical confidentiality. Respect for this brass law would make him the equal of a doctor. He almost felt his costume to slim down and whiten, become a blouse. His hearing became stethoscopic. His eyes diagnosed the world that was moving away. He perceived, lower, the clear beats of the surrounding hearts, the flow fluid of juices in the stomachs, the sweet small menuet of breathing that the effort relaunches at regular intervals. And the more he was rotting from the inside, the more he was criticized, made fun of him, almost jostled him. And the more he perceived, understood, thought. His imminent death had become a pure point of view. The will he wrote more like a prescription. And medical confidentiality prevailed in death with his long procession of backbiting.

Language genius

He hadn't been careful while listening to the radio that morning. But once in the metro, sitting next to a couple who spoke a foreign language to hers, the thing quickly became obvious. He understood everything. He did not know if the man and the woman spoke Spanish or Portuguese, but their sentences were lying, clear, on the page of his mind. Once at work, he connected to various foreign sites, Russians, Chinese, Wolofs. Everything was transparent. Written, spoken, no obscure language. At noon, for his lunch break, he wanted to take another step. He went to a small Pakistani boui-boui-boui and commanded, in Paki, a dish whose name seemed promising. The server mounted a few words from which he grasped up to the slightest inflection. Between the restaurant and its office, in the street, the voices had ceased to modulate their diversity to compose an uninterrupted runoff of more or less interesting words. He had trouble concentrating that afternoon, busy thinking in Aramaic, Japanese, Finnish, dazzled to the dizziness by the ease with which languages ​​shared his mind. However, he decided to dwell after the departure of his colleagues in order to chat with the Mauritanian cleaning man, whose dialect posed no problem for him. He didn't want to go home, not immediately, he walked along with conversations, informing a Lithuanian who seemed lost, joking with Chinese. He was finally able to know what the English songs were talking about that came out of the shops. He even bought an Algerian newspaper, in which he spotted some shells. Then he thought that his wife was going to worry. When he pushed the door of his home, she was there, on the sofa, smoking, his features worn by a concern that immediately changed into a sort of held rage. She got up and planted herself in front of him, trembling. Then her mouth opened and she spoke to him without stopping, a frightened flow, for endless minutes, chaining questions that were no longer barely formulated. He looked at her without saying anything, perfectly upset, not knowing if he had become deaf or stupid, so much he did not understand a traitor what she was saying.

Madame P.

But for him, the biggest enigma was the discretion surrounding the writer's wife. Yes, it was to recognize that we knew, in any case, he especially probably, very little about Marcel Proust's wife. The few biographical elements he had gleaned with regard to the author of the research had not taught him anything interesting about this necessarily devoted person, necessarily attentive. What had been the share of her involvement, she read each new version, assisted her in her asthma attacks, had he showed him Balbec, she liked Vermeer, all that was still mysterious, even if he knew that man and the work are two different things, sometimes waterproof, at least with regard to posterity. He did not even know, as the information he benefited was chick, if she had survived her husband, at what age she died. However, something told him that it was Proust the widower. Reading and rereading it, he felt less and less confusedly than the latter wrote in widower, in a widowed and present widower. In future widower. There was something inconsolate in his prose, which did not delay. From there, no doubt, the feeling that we had, by reading it, to attend a formidable demonstration of modesty. On each page, in fact, we felt, above all, how much Proust showed constant restraint, forbidding to never evoke the memory of his wife, of Madame Proust, not even daring to name her, even less the Describe, do even an allusion. What was it called, by the way? Had he only knew it? Hawthorn? A flower name, surely. He promised to go see his grave one day - Combray could not be far away. And yet, the more he read the research, the more he felt Madame Proust presents everywhere, she seemed to be a sign behind Albertine, Odette, even behind Swann or Charlus, as if Proust, in her immense and painful widowhood, had wanted to do of each research character, even men, the fragmentary depositary of his memory.

All the illustrations are from Mathieu Pauget.

Rebound

☰ Read our new "the factory", Marc Graciano, November 2021 ☰ Read our new "La Pierre de Naplouse", Jérémie Rochas, June 2021 ☰ Read our new "Magnolia", Oskar Vaughn, March 2020 ☰ Read our new "thatThe stones fall ", Romeo Bondon, January 2020 ☰ Read our new" Tomorrow begins today ", Alain Damasio, October 2017 ☰ Read our new" at the Hôtel des morts chosen ", Tristan Cabral, July 2017