Crack

Reason builds walls; the imagination always ends up escaping through a crack…

And it is certainly not cracks that are lacking...

The request, the refusal, and the portrait
Félix, in his office, seated across from Lucian, after having circled around the drawings like around a flame too bright, abruptly closed his notebook, then looked at Lucian with a calm, almost grave decisiveness.
— We had agreed that it was important to tell each other everything… Well, we are clearly not obsessed with breaking records, but in this matter, we’ve been treading water for far too long… so I’ll say it plainly… I need to see him.
Lucian lifted his head.
— See whom?
— Igniatius… who else? Arrange for him to come here. We’ll speak with the three of us present.
Lucian turned slightly pale. Just enough for Félix to notice. His breath snapped like an overtightened thread.
— I don’t believe that’s possible…
Despite the slowness of the reply, the intention came out too quickly, too sharply. It was a refusal not spoken at the level of reason, but at the level of the soul.
Félix reacted with a genuine, rare surprise:
a slight backward movement of the torso, a silence more rounded than the others.
— No! repeated Félix. Why would it not be possible?
Lucian remained frozen, as though he had not heard his own voice.
— It’s not… possible, I’d rather not… he repeated, stammering.
— Not possible? Félix tilted his head. Lucian, this is not a matter of possibility or preference. It is a matter of clinical necessity. You are… caught in something.
Lucian turned his gaze away, a gesture almost childish, almost guilty.
— I… I can’t, he whispered. Not now.
Félix stood up, walked a few steps, then came back in front of Lucian.
— Lucian. You’re afraid of something. But of what?
Lucian did not answer.
Then, as if he had prepared the gesture from the beginning,
or as though he finally resigned himself to showing what he had been hiding, Lucian reached into his satchel and took out a folded sheet of paper. A portrait. He unfolded it slowly, with an almost liturgical care.
Félix leaned forward.
On the paper: a man’s face, extremely finely drawn,
the gaze slightly lowered, an expression almost painful, almost gentle, almost… double.
The face of Igniatius… or Lucian’s…
… or someone else’s, someone between the two, an impossible face.
A face both exact and undecidable, as though the two silhouettes Félix had seen in the drawings had here blended even more radically.
Félix took several seconds before speaking.
— But this is… this is both of you, Lucian.
He turned toward Lucian, his eyes wide.
— This face… it’s you. And Igniatius. At the same time. I can see both. It is… fascinating. Troubling. But how… how could one not see it?
Lucian stared at the portrait with a devastating absence.
— I don’t see any of that… he said in an almost colourless voice.
— What do you mean, you don’t see it?
— I see Igniatius. That’s all. It’s him. Just him.
The sentence struck Félix like a blow to the solar plexus.
— Lucian… murmured Félix. You do not see that this face… is also yours?
Lucian shook his head slowly, like a man refusing an evidence
not out of resistance but out of blindness.
— No.
Félix lifted the portrait, held it beside Lucian’s face, bringing the two profiles within a few centimetres of each other, like a human mirror.
— Look. Look closely.
Lucian remained unmoved.
— I don’t see a resemblance, he said.
With a disconcerting sincerity.
A sincerity that was not a lie, but pure repression.
A shiver ran through Félix.
A cold one—clinical, almost prophetic.
— You do not see… what Igniatius sees.
— No.
— And you do not see… what I see.
— No.
Félix stepped back.
— Then we are facing something stronger than transference.
Stronger than symbolisation.
— Stronger than memory?
— Stronger than symbolisation… stronger than memory.
The supervisor, usually so steady, so anchored, seemed shaken.
— Lucian… when a subject does not recognise his own face… in a portrait that also resembles the other’s… that means something simple and formidable… that you and Igniatius share… a blind spot.
He added, almost like a sentence:
— And that blind spot… is the reason why you cannot meet the three of us together.
Lucian breathed:
— Because I would lose myself?
— No, said Félix. Because you would find yourself.
And you are not ready.
Félix placed the portrait on the table, the two faces superimposed.
— As long as you cannot see the resemblance… it governs you.
You will have to face it. But not today.
The room grew silent, as though the walls had understood that a secret had just been unfolded.