A tremor beneath the words

 

Don Carotte arrived that morning with an uncertain step, as if he were walking through the mist of a dream that refused to dissipate.
Lucian, in his armchair, welcomed him with that warm stillness that only long discipline in the art of listening can produce.

After a few customary phrases, which Don Carotte received with a distracted nod, Lucian, slightly tilting his head while scribbling in his notebook, said in a deliberately absent, almost dreamy voice:

— And that memory, Igniatius…

The name arose like a stone thrown into still water.

Don Carotte straightened abruptly. His face, usually mobile and nervous, became smooth, almost petrified.

— Why… why do you call me that? he asked, eyebrows furrowed, looking both angry and startled.
— “That way?” Lucian replied with a studied gentleness. Oh… I’m sorry, I believe the name slipped out. Perhaps because you yourself have pronounced it… it seems to me… and more than once, if my memory doesn’t fail me.

A silence, barely two seconds, yet enough for Don Carotte to wonder whether forgetfulness was a door he himself had left ajar.

Lucian resumed, with the delicate neutrality of a man touching fragile material:

— I wanted to return with you to that scene of the storm. You described the light descending… that strange sensation of the day withdrawing into itself to make room for something deeper. And then the beast, the straw, that warmth…

Don Carotte nodded slowly, as if reluctantly.

Lucian continued, his voice slower, almost meditative:

— I thought of something, Igniatius — forgive me if the name returns again, but it seems intent on joining our conversation. Perhaps… perhaps what you described wasn’t only a storm in the sky. Perhaps it was also a storm inside. A kind of… how shall I say… dialogue between forces older than you. As if the earth spoke, the sea answered, and the sky, that same sky that suddenly illuminated the flank of the donkey, tried to intervene in that dialogue.

Don Carotte narrowed his eyes: something in these words seemed both true and forbidden.

Seeing the effect, Lucian refined his thought with a softness that resembled a verbal caress:

— You know, sometimes memory, especially childhood memory, moves scenes around, transposes voices. It attributes to nature what may have belonged to… something else. To adults, perhaps. To figures of authority. To the voices that surrounded us before we knew how to understand them.

 

 

 

He paused, then lowered his voice slightly:

— I was simply wondering… whether you remember — not visually, no — perhaps just an echo… of what the earth and the sea were saying up there when the storm broke. Or, to put it differently: if you remember what father… and mother… were saying.

A breath passed through the room.

Lucian, seeing Don Carotte freeze, added at once, with the faintest inflection, a nearly invisible smile:

— And perhaps… what the sky was saying.

He had pronounced “sky” in such a way that one might also have heard she…

— She who sometimes intervenes, illuminates, cuts through or soothes… Do you see what I mean?

Don Carotte did not answer immediately.
He seemed to be listening to something within him, or outside him, a murmur from before words existed.

Then he said, very slowly:

— I… I didn’t hear clearly. It was all confused. It sounded like… yes… like voices. Voices searching for one another or colliding. It rose, it fell… sometimes it was very loud… in waves…

His hands trembled slightly, though he did not notice.

— And I… I pressed myself against the donkey. He… he heard for me. I didn’t want to listen. Or perhaps… perhaps they didn’t want me to listen. So I hid in his warmth, in his smell… as if… as if by clinging to him, I entered another world where the voices could no longer reach me.

Lucian placed his notebook on his knees, without writing.
He did not want to break the thread.

— And do you remember, he asked gently, if those voices… after rising… calmed down? If, like after storms, there was a moment of reconciliation… a sort of rainbow?

Don Carotte shuddered.

— Yes… it’s true… after the loud creaking… there was silence… then… another sound… lower… softer… moans and then cries. I didn’t dare look. So I stayed in the straw. The straw smelled… you know… like a warm coat. And the donkey… the donkey didn’t move. He kept me safe.

He lifted his head toward Lucian, a glimmer of fear in his eyes.

— Do you think I’m mistaken… that I mixed everything up?
— I believe, Lucian replied, that your memory has a poetic way of protecting you. It tells you things by dressing them in clouds, showers, light, and animals. And I also believe that now… it is beginning to speak to you more clearly.

Don Carotte said nothing.
But his eyes, strangely wet, seemed to be searching a memory he had perhaps never been able, or never dared, to face.