Double Resemblance

 
“When the word ‘mind’ comes out of the Papalagi’s mouth, his eyes grow big, round and fixed; his chest swells, he breathes deeply and takes on the attitude of a warrior who has vanquished the enemy. For he is particularly proud of this ‘mind’.
This is not the almighty Great Spirit that the missionaries call ‘God’ and of whom we are all only a wretched reproduction, but rather the small spirit that allows man to think.
When I look from here at the mango tree behind the church, that is not mind, I am only seeing it. But if I realise that it is taller than the church, that is mind. It is therefore not enough to look at something; one must also draw knowledge from it.”

The Papalagi, Erich Scheurmann, Pocket

Lucian, so often quick, sharp, biting, froze. For the first time he saw himself in the drawing he assumed to be from the hand of Igniatius — and which Igniatius, who had brought it to him… believed to be from the hand of Lucian…
— We haven’t been seeing each other for very long… He tells me he found them in a gallery… but I must confess to you, I highly doubt that’s the case… My opinion is that he is the author…
But… how could he have made all these drawings in so little time?
Félix spoke again, thinking as he did so, murmuring almost to himself.
— It is your resemblance that has just been revealed… by him… in a kind of silence that was no longer emptiness, but depth.
Félix and Lucian continued to examine the drawing in the slanting light of the lamp, a light almost harsh which, by a strange coincidence, accentuated the features of the face sketched on the paper to the point of giving it a more vivid air, as if the line itself were breathing.
— Félix… this face…
Félix lifted his eyes, sharp, attentive, ready to catch the confession. Lucian drew breath, and his voice rose a notch:
— This face… doesn’t only look like me.
Félix frowned slightly, intrigued.
— What do you mean?
Lucian ran his hand across his forehead, like a man slipping out of a skin that has become too tight.
— It looks like him… at least as much, if not more… like Igniatius.
There was a silence so clear one might have thought the room had been emptied of air.
Félix went still.
— You think it looks like Igniatius? he said, in a voice that, for once, had lost its usual lightness.
Lucian nodded.
— Yes. I haven’t told you, and I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps because I didn’t want to admit it, perhaps because it frightened me. But here is the truth: the first time Don Carotte — I mean Igniatius — showed me these drawings, I had the disconcerting, almost staggering feeling that this face… this figure leaning over the islands, watching and enduring storms and volcanoes… this profile that always stays slightly to the side… was him as much as it was me.
Félix suddenly stood up — which, coming from him, was the equivalent of a shout. He paced a few steps across the room, as though he needed to clear some space around that sentence which had just opened a breach.
— Good God, he murmured. Good God… then that means…

Lucian said nothing, but his eyes were searching Félix’s, like a man on the edge of a cliff looking for a place to put his foot.
Félix came slowly back to the table, leaned on his elbows, and stared at the drawings as if seeing them for the first time.
— Lucian… if the face looks like you… and like Igniatius… then we are no longer in simple transference. We are no longer even in “you represent what I lack.”
He exhaled:
— We are in… superposition.
Lucian blinked.
— Superposition?
— Yes, said Félix, and it is infinitely rarer. It’s when two subjects, each from his own edge, confound one and the same third — the same symbolic face — and both begin to inhabit it. As if, without knowing it, you came from the same place of lack. As if you were, for each other, the same perforated silhouette edging the void.
He added, with an intensity that was almost painful:
— Lucian… it’s not simply that he sees you.
Lucian felt a shiver run down his neck.
— Félix… you think that… that we resemble each other?
Félix smiled — a sad, anxious, admiring smile.
— I don’t know if you resemble each other, Lucian.
He picked the drawing up again.
— Look: this figure… is neither entirely you, nor entirely him. It’s an in-between. An impossible face. A face braided from two solitudes searching for a form.
He laid the drawing down with studied slowness.
— And now… listen to me carefully: the fact that this face appeared in his drawing, and not in yours, means that he is the one who has borne, for you both, the function of revelation. He sends you back an image you could never have produced alone, but which he could “touch” because he has lived in pure lack.
He broke off.
Then, with a violent gentleness, almost Sibony-like:
— Lucian, it is not he who looks like you.
Lucian turned pale.
Félix murmured, as if confiding a secret:
— What if this figure… came from before you?
Lucian closed his eyes.
Félix, gently, placed a hand on his shoulder:
— It is not Igniatius who is inventing your resemblance.
Silence fell back over the scene…
Lucian reached out, delicately took hold of the drawing that Félix was handing him, and brought it a little closer, as though to avoid it and confront it at the same time.
— It’s that you occupy, in his imaginary, the same space that he occupies in yours. But… it may be that in him you are recognising yourself, and that it is you who resemble a figure he has “dug up”…
— Where would he have found it?
— How should I know… in his mind… in a place where you have never looked? In a silence you carry without having words for it?
A vertigo ran through Lucian — the vertigo of a man watching the curtain of his own origin being torn open.
Félix resumed in a low voice, as though speaking to himself.
Lucian, until then petrified, suddenly felt a wave rising within him, a familiar discomfort and, at the same time, an irrepressible necessity. The silence thickened, becoming almost solid between them.
And then, in that silence stretched tight like a wire on which the slightest word could tip everything over, Lucian murmured, in a low, almost strangled voice, as though speaking through a crack he had never known how — nor dared — to look at.