In the following moment my identity returns. It is like a stereoscopic slide in which the two images, separated by mistake, suddenly give the illusion of three dimensionality once the projectionist brings them back together. My room seems fresher than ever. It reverts to its former consistency, its objects finding their proper places, as when a crushed lump of earth in a glass of water settles in layers of various well-defined and parti-colored elements. The elements of the room take back their own contours and the colors of the old memory I have of them.
The feeling of distance and solitude during the moments when my everyday person has dissolved into amorphousness differs from all other feelings. When it persists, it turns into a fear, a dread of never finding myself again. A vague silhouette of myself surrounded by a large luminous halo looms somewhere in the distance like an object lost in fog.
Then, the terrible question of who I actually am comes alive in me like a totally new body with unfamiliar skin and organs. The answer requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain. Everything in my body capable of stirring stirs, struggles, and revolts more intensely, more fundamentally than in everyday life. Everything begs for a solution.
Several times I find the room as I know it, as if I had opened and shut my eyes, but each time the room is clearer, as a landscape in field-glasses comes together when, adjusting the focus, one penetrates the veils of intermediary images.
Eventually I recognize myself and find the actual room again. It gives me a slightly intoxicated feeling. The room is extraordinarily dense in terms of matter, and I have returned implacably to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of obscurity, the higher its crest. Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am.
My struggles with uncertainty no longer have a name; all that remains is the simple regret that I found nothing in their depths. I am surprised that a total lack of meaning should be so closely linked to my intimate being. Now that I have found myself again and am trying to express my reaction, that being seems completely impersonaclass="underline" a mere exaggeration of my identity arising from its own substance, a medusa tentacle that has strayed too far and, groping exasperated through the waves, finally finds its way back to the gelatinous sucker. Thus during several moments of disquiet I have passed through all the certitudes and incertitudes of my existence only to return — painfully and definitively — to my solitude.
Each solitude is of a purer and more elevated nature than the one before. The feeling of people banished is clearer and more intimate, a limpid, mellow melancholy like a dream recalled in the depth of night. It alone still reminds me of the vaguely sad mystery and magic of my childhood “crises.” In that sudden disappearance of identity I find anew my descents into the cursed spaces of those early days, and in the moments of lucidity that return immediately after I resurface I see the world in the curious atmosphere of futility and obsolescence that forms about me when my hallucinatory trances cast me down.
It was always the same places in the street, the house, or the garden that gave rise to the crises. Whenever I entered their space, I would feel dizzy and swoon. Genuine invisible traps placed here and there in the town, in no way distinguishable from the air surrounding them, they would lie in wait for me, ferocious: I was to fall prey to the special atmosphere they exuded. One step, a single step into a “cursed space” like that and a crisis was inevitable.
One of the spaces was in the town park in a small clearing at the end of a tree-lined path no one used anymore. The only gap in the dogrose and acacia bushes surrounding it opened onto a desolate piece of wasteland. There was no sadder or more forsaken place on earth. Silence lay heavy on the dusty leaves in the stagnant summer heat. From time to time the echoes of the bugles of a regiment filtered through, long-drawn-out cries in the wilderness, heartbreakingly sad. Far off the air baked by the sun quivered vaporously like the transparent steam hovering over a boiling liquid.
It was a wild, isolated spot, as lonely as could be. The heat of the day felt more enervating there, the air I breathed more dense. The dusty bushes blazed yellow in the sun in an atmosphere of utter solitude. A bizarre feeling of futility hovered over the clearing, which existed “somewhere on earth,” a place where I myself would end up quite by chance on a summer afternoon with no rhyme or reason of its own, an afternoon that had lost its chaotic way in the heat of the sun amidst bushes fixed in space “somewhere on earth.” At that time I felt more deeply and painfully that I had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do but saunter through parks, through dusty clearings burnt by the sun, desolate and wild. But the saunter would turn into a heart-rending experience.
There was another cursed place at the other end of town on the high, loose banks of the river where my friends and I would go to bathe. At one point the bank had caved in. Just above it there was a factory that made oil from sunflower seeds. The workers would throw the discarded seed husks into the section of the bank that had caved in, and over time, the pile grew so high that it formed a slope of dry husks extending from the top of the bank to the water’s edge.
My playmates would descend to the water along that slope, cautiously, holding one another by the hand, sinking their feet deep into the carpet of rotten matter. The walls of the high bank on either side of the slope were steep and full of outlandish irregularities — long, fine channels sculpted by the rain, arabesque-like but as hideous as poorly healed scars, veritable tatters of the clay’s flesh, horrible gaping wounds. It was between these walls, which made such an impression on me, that I too climbed down to the water.
Long before I reached the riverbank, my nostrils would fill with the odor of rotten husks. It would prepare me for the crisis like a brief period of incubation. It was an unpleasant smell, yet sweet. Like the crises.
Somewhere inside me my olfactory perception would split and the effluvia of putrefaction would reach different destinations: the gelatinous odor of decomposing husks was separate, quite distinct from — yet concomitant with — its pleasant perfume, the warm and homely scent of toasted hazelnuts. The moment I smelled it, the perfume would transform me, circulating throughout my body, dissolving, as it were, my inner fibers and replacing them with a more airy, less uncertain material. From that moment, the end was inevitable. A pleasant, heady feeling would arise in my chest, a dizziness pushing me toward the riverbank, the place of my ultimate defeat.
I would race down the husk pile to the water at breakneck speed, the air setting up a fierce opposition, cutting into me like a sharp blade, and space collapsing chaotically into an immense hole with an unexpectedly strong force of attraction. My playmates would watch my wildly precipitous descent in horror. The pebble beach below was very narrow, and the slightest misstep would have sent me sprawling into the water, whose surface whirlpools betokened great depths.
But I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Having reached the water, I would run past the husk pile at the same speed and continue downstream to a hollow in the bank. The hollow formed a small cave, a cool, shaded grotto like a room carved out in the rock. I would go in and fall to the ground, drenched in sweat, dead tired, and trembling from head to toe.
Having recovered a bit, I would enjoy the grotto’s familiar and enormously pleasant decor. There was a spring bubbling forth from the rock, running along the ground, and forming a pool of perfectly limpid water in the middle of the pebbles. I would never tire of leaning over the pool and gazing at the delightful lace of green moss on the bottom, the worms caught on slivers of wood, the scraps of rusty old ooze-covered metal, the myriad animate and inanimate objects in the fantastically beautiful water.