Formerly

He was mistaken… about Don Carotte… and about Sang Chaud…
The thin cord that bound them having snapped, Sang Chaud is separated from Don Carotte. He believes him dead, or at least vanished. Igniatius sees the change taking place without having anything to do with it. Which makes him bitter… Without me he would be nothing, and here he is slipping away from me and even allowing himself to turn against me… he speaks to me and no longer listens…
I am nothing other than the fruit that Igniatius’s thought tears from time… and yet, despite that, I remember…
It was another time, like a performance. Don Carotte was unconscious. For him, what was happening on the island was very far away. For me, it was exactly the opposite. I did not know where Don Carotte was… perhaps he was even dead… in any case, dying.

While the island, deserted until then, was being submerged by the giant roots of an unknown tree multiplying endlessly, drawing us into its fall as surely as the slightest eruption would have done, at the heart of this variegated chaos, winding along the edges of that unknown soul, the same ghost arose beside me: a presence and an absence, a complicit double and a tyrannical specter.
Thus the irrepressible acrobat never dances alone: a second partner, invisible, accompanies him, and his hesitant step seeks to fill the shadow left by the other. There lies the knot of his act: friendship transformed into haunting, memory becoming a character.
I watch, fascinated. This circus has neither wild beasts nor tamer, but a man struggling with his own shadows, trying to master them. The observer, pensive, never ceases to take notes. Every spectator, sooner or later, becomes an accomplice. For in truth, as I listen to this foreign voice, I recognize my own. Yes, Don Carotte’s hesitations have become mine, his forgettings are my own abysses. This man is a mirror, and I, who thought I was observing a clown, discover that I am being observed by him.
Then, in the silence of the big top, once again asleep, I would almost applaud. Not to salute a feat, but to thank this man and this circus for daring to offer as spectacle what each of us hides: the secret disorder of a memory that keeps us standing.
As the circus, with all its torn drapes and sagging columns, its lights extinguished, seems to disappear, the weary observer struggles to keep his eyelids open. Slowly, he falls into a deep sleep. Little by little, images come alive in his mind: a man stands at the center of the ring. But he does not really stand upright: he sways, drifts, as if caught in the invisible current of a time that thickens and recedes. His gestures hesitate, but his hesitations have style… a whole art.
The big top engulfs him, spits him back out, as if it wished to make of him not a clown but a mystery trying to reconnect with its origins. Around him, as around me, the spotlights turn, light up, go out. Light and shadow pursue one another, overlap, like two furious beasts in a circle that is too narrow.
I, the other, the attentive observer, remain in the shadows… themselves the shadow of Igniatius… His features slip away. His step blurs. It is a striking paradox: the center is invisible. Light does not reveal it; it skirts around it, as if afraid to expose what stands there.
So, instead of seeing, I listen. I strain my ear to this voice that speaks in the air, a voice that claims to be his own and yet perhaps is not entirely so. Still, my vision is never complete. For before me rise the poles of the big top, massive columns that cut the circle into pieces. Thick ropes, stretched like nerves, prevent me from grasping the whole. I have only fragments—truncated, veiled—that, for lack of true communication, signal from the outside.
As if I were watching a redeemed memory shatter into pieces… having lost its irrevocable belonging to the present. And already I understand: what I perceive of this man is exactly what he sees of himself. A succession of screens, of impediments, of fragments of the past that cannot be brought together.