The Fata Morgana Books by Jonathan Littell, Charlotte Mandell Read Free Book Online Page B

older and more talkative too. “You definitely do not look well,”she said with birdlike gestures.Together,they had me undress, listened to my chest, palpated me, examined the various orifices of my body, with comments that were cryptic to me, but no doubt rich in meaning for them. In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there. They sent me home with some medicine, somewhat randomly selected I think, and I took it at random too, in the following spirit: if my condition got better, then the remedy was good, and if it got worse, then it was bad.
* * *
Despite my poor health, I still occasionally watched the little film. I had finally realized something: more than the sight of it, which had so absorbed me, it was the sound of this scene that moved me so violently. I made this discovery entirely by chance; by mistake, I had cut the sound on my computer; muted, these images were nothing more than grotesque gesticulations. Whereas all I had to do was close my eyes and listen to the groans, the gasps, the broken, stammered words, the interrupted breathing, to find myself rapt again: a dazzling, almost blinding discovery, this, but limited nonetheless, in that the echo of these sounds, which at first opened the way, itself ended up forming an elusive obstacle, flexible but insuperable; caught in its snare, I found myself once again rejected, brutally returned to myself, and thus everything began all over again, in a crazy whirling that only rooted me deeper in my own impossibility.
* * *
“Come with us!” my friend had called out, peremptorily— how to resist such a command? Thus I found myself with a whole company of people in another city, where a feria was taking place. Jubilation reigned in the streets, borne by a huge crowd, happy and overexcited, maddened as much by the liberties allowed on these few days as by the sun, the alcohol, the laughter, and the disordered jostling of bodies. We walked about aimlessly; whenever we felt like it, we would drink some chilled wine, standing in the street or packed into crowded cafés. Toward evening, my friend announced: “Come, let’s go and see the bullfight.” But I needed a cigar for that, and so I went into the first tobacco shop I saw, where the shopkeeper barked out: “A cigar, sure, but which one? What kind do you want?”—“Whichever you like, as long as it lasts through six bulls.” In the arena, people were crammed into the stone tiers; the ring spread out at our feet, a pale disk surrounded with red by a bright barrier of painted boards. Nothing could trouble its calm orderliness: not the shouts and gesticulations of the crowd, not the music started up by the brass band, not the succession—by turns measured and frenzied—of figures formed and dissolved by the men in glittering costumes around the bull, a black, brutal monster overflowing with vigor, and yet so quickly killed. When the mules dragged away its body, the blood inscribed a long red comma on the sand; men quickly raced forward with rakes to erase it, so that nothing would come to disturb the placid surface that reflected the glory and triumph of the killer of bulls. Everything delighted me, the movements that won roaring ovations as well as those that elicited boos, and I paid as much attention to the long ash on my cigar as to the horn of the animal, appearing and disappearing in the undulating folds of the pink and yellow capes. Already the fifth bull was charging out of the depths of the arena. The man who had to kill it was, apparently, famous for his talent, the purity of his style and of his movements. When the bull stopped, panting, nervous, confused, he provoked it from very far away, almost the opposite side of the red circle, before moving forward with tiny steps, stiff and with his back