coldhearted scientist وداد

He was wearing a white summer suit with mother-of-pearl buttons, over which he had thrown a duster of the same color. Beneath his fine straw hat, broad-brimmed and newly washed, his great dying eyes shone around his sharply honed nose.

His right hand was of hard plaster and he carried, hanging on his arm, a wicker basket full of eggs.

I did not wish to address him.

He seemed preoccupied, as if waiting to be called. He defended himself against his extreme pallor with his Oriental beard, a beard which was the mourning for his own passing.

A vivid mortal outline placed its nickel initials on my tie.

It was the festive night upon which all of Spain crowds against the barriers to observe a black bull which looks towards the sky with melancholy, and bellows every four minutes.

The traveller was in the country which fit him, on the night which fit his thirst for perspectives, awaiting only the break of dawn to chase after the voices which would necessarily ring out.

The Spanish night, a night of red clay and iron nails, a barbaric night with its breasts open to the air, surprised by a single telescope, pleased the chilly traveller. Its incredible depth, in which sounding leads fail, was pleasant, and the traveller enjoyed burying his feet in the bed of ashes and burning sand on which he was resting.

He paced along the platform with the logic of a fish in the water or a fly in the air; he came and went, without glancing at the long, sad parallels of those who await the train.

I was very sorry for him because I knew he was waiting for a voice, and to wait for a voice is like sitting in the guillotine of the French Revolution.

A shot in the back, and unexpected telegram, surprise. Until the wolf falls into the trap, he is not afraid. He enjoys the silence and takes pleasure in the beating of his veins. But to wait for a surprise is to convert an always fleeting instant into a great purple balloon, which stays and fills the entire night.

The noise of a train was approaching, confused like a rain of blows.

I picked up my suitcase while the man in the white suit looked in all directions. At last a clear voice, stamen of an authoritarian loudspeaker, shouted at the back of the station: Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus! And the traveller began to run gently, full of unction, until he was lost in the last of the streetlamps.

The moment I heard the words, Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!, my mouth filled with fig marmalade.

I have been home for a few moments.

I was not surprised to find my suitcase empty. Only some glasses and a very white duster. Two themes from the trip. Pure and isolated. On the table the glasses took to the greatest extreme their precise drawing and their unusually flat firmness. The duster was fainting on the chair, always in its last posture, with a distance now barely human, a distance below zero of a suffocated fish. The glasses were moving towards a geometric theorem with an exact proof, and the duster was casting itself into a sea full of shipwrecks and sudden green luminosities. Glasses and duster. On the table and on the chair. St. Lucy and St. Lazarus.

FIN

Axé.