(rain)

And finally, over the darkness of the gleaming rooftops, the cold light of the tepid morning breaks like a torment of the Apocalypse. Once again it’s the vast night of increasing luminosity. Once again it’s the usual horror: the day, life, fictitious purposes, inescapable activity. Once again it’s my physical, visible and social personality, communicated by meaningless words and exploited by the acts and consciousness of others. Once again I’m I, exactly as I’m not. And as this light from the darkness fills with grey doubts the cracks around the shutters (far from hermetic, alas!), I begin to realize that I can no longer hold on to this refuge of staying in bed, of not sleeping but being able to, of dreaming without remembering truth and reality, of nestling between a cool warmth of clean sheets and an ignorance of my body’s existence beyond its feeling of comfort. I realize that I’m losing the happy unconsciousness with which I’ve been enjoying my consciousness, the animal drowsiness in which I observe – as through the slowly blinking eyelids of a cat in the sun – the movements described by my free imagination’s logic. I realize that the privileges of darkness are vanishing, and with them the slow rivers under the bowing trees of my glimpsed eyelashes, and the murmur of the cascades lost between the soft flowing of blood in my ears and the faint, steady rain. I’m losing myself to become alive. I don’t know if I’m sleeping or if I just feel as if I were. I’m not exactly dreaming but seem, rather, to be waking up from a sleepless slumber, for I hear the city’s first sounds of life rising like floodwaters from that vague place down below, where the streets made by God run this way and that. The sounds are happy, filtered through the sadness of the rain that’s falling, or that perhaps has stopped falling, for I don’t hear it any more; I’m aware only of the excessive greyness it gives to the light that’s advancing through the cracks, in the shadows of a clarity too faint for this time of morning, whatever time that may be. The sounds are happy, scattered, and painful to my heart,* as if they were calling me to an exam or an execution. Each new day, if I hear it break from the bed of my sweet oblivion, seems like the day of a great event in my life that I won’t have the courage to face. Each new day, if I feel it rise from its bed of shadows as linens fall in the lanes and streets, comes to summon me to a court of law. Each new day, I’m going to be judged. And the man in me who is perpetually condemned clings to his bed as to the mother he lost, and fondles the pillow as if his nursemaid could protect him from people.

The happy sleep of the hulking animal shaded by trees, the balmy fatigue of the tramp lying in the tall grass, the torpor of the black man on a warm and far-away afternoon, the pleasure of the yawn that weighs in tired eyes, everything that helps us to forget and brings sleep, the peace of mind that gently closes the shutters of our soul’s window, the anonymous caress of slumber… To sleep, to be far away, remote without knowing it, to forget with one’s very body, to have the freedom of unconsciousness like a refuge on a forgotten lake, stagnating among thick foliage in the hidden depths of forests…

A nothingness that breathes, a mild death from which we awaken fresh and nostalgic, a deep forgetting that massages the tissues of our soul…

And again I hear, like the renewed protest of one who still isn’t convinced, the abrupt clamour of rain spattering the lit-up universe. I feel a chill in my imagined bones, as if I were afraid. And cowering in my insignificance, so human and alone in the last vestige of the darkness that’s deserting me, I begin to weep. I weep, yes, over solitude and life, and my useless grief lies like a wheelless cart on the edge of reality, amid the dung of oblivion. I weep over everything – the loss of the lap where I once lay, the death of the hand I was given, the arms to embrace me that I never found, the shoulder to lean on that I never had. And the day that breaks definitively, the grief that breaks in me like the naked truth of day, all that I dreamed or thought or forgot – all of this, like an amalgam of shadows, fictions and regrets, blends into the wake of the passing worlds and falls among the things of life like the skeleton of a bunch of grapes, filched by young boys and eaten on the street corner.

The noise of the human day suddenly increases, like the sound of a bell that’s calling. I hear, inside the building, the softly clicking latch of the first door that opens for someone to go out and live. I hear slippers in an absurd hallway leading to my heart. And with a brusque movement, as when a man finally succeeds in killing himself, I throw off the snug covers that shelter my stiff body. I’ve woken up. The sound of the rain fades, moving higher in the indefinite outdoors. I feel better. I’ve fulfilled something or other. I get up, go to the window, and open the shutters with brave determination. A day of clear rain floods my eyes with dull light. I open the window. The cool air moistens my warm skin. It’s raining, yes, but although it’s the same rain I’d been hearing, it’s after all so much less! I want to be refreshed, to live, and I lean my neck out to life as to an enormous yoke.*