The origin of the drawings

A pain long kept silent suddenly began to scream.
The scream, formed in Sang Chaud’s belly, slowly rose, forcing the throat to tighten before bursting out of the mouth, open to the four winds.

That day, Igniatius entered the office with a strange, almost ceremonial slowness.
He held in his hands, wrapped in brown kraft paper and protected by tissue, three drawings from the gallery.

Lucian, still shaken by his supervision with Félix, sensed immediately that a shift was coming. Igniatius did not sit. Like a man who comes not to speak but to reveal, he remained standing before the armchair, without daring to occupy it.
He slowly removed the kraft paper. Three drawings appeared.

First, the one Lucian had shown Félix.
Then the one where a character, seated on a dark throne, watches his own struggle within a rippling, swirling, almost vegetal landscape.
And the third—one that neither Lucian nor Igniatius understood at first—in which a donkey, neither heroic nor prestigious, stands upon an almost ascetic rock, looking strangely noble while everything around is tangled and chaotic.

More witness than actor, patient in silent endurance, it could, Lucian thought, symbolize an inner presence… or a presence within a presence.
At the edge of the ocean, in a peaceful stillness, a mechanism—almost a psychic machine—marks the boundary between the solid, the known, and the vast shifting immensity that symbolizes the unknown.
It radiates an impression of calm and lucidity, instinctive yet profound, like a vital force crossing a complicated world.

Under the indirect light of the moon, waves coiling upon themselves regularly collapse on an invisible shore where lies a wrecked, broken-hulled boat.
Outside the illusion of a circus in distress—tragic but lucid—could this be a guide, humble and persistent, within a hostile terrain facing a decaying human project?
“Why does it not flee the flames that surround and illuminate it?” Lucian wondered, before feeling a tension in his fingers… and falling mute.
Something in Igniatius’s posture was making him uneasy.

Igniatius inhaled deeply.
— I must tell you something, Lucian. Something I had never put into words before, but has been working inside me for weeks.

He placed the drawings between them.

— I saw them in a small gallery… you know, the one near the port, where the paintings hang slightly askew, as if the wind, even indoors, still found a way to blow. I never went there, yet that day, months ago, I don’t know why… I entered.

He smiled faintly, a smile balanced on the edge of melancholy.

— And I saw them. Those drawings. Those silhouettes. Those doubles. That figure struggling against shapes that undulate, coil, envelop him. You see the movement… the tensions… the layers, the overlaps?

With his fingers he imitated the lines that dance and lash within the image—lines of wind, of serpents, of algae, of fire. Images of a complex world, if not a complicated one.

— I came closer. And then… I felt something. Not a simple emotion. A recognition.

He pointed to the triangular-bearded silhouette leaning back in the armchair.

— That figure… is me. Or at least it is what I think I see.

Lucian did not move.

— But then I looked more closely, and something shifted in my mind. It wasn’t me. Or rather, it wasn’t only me. It was… someone else. Someone I knew without yet knowing.

His eyes met Lucian’s.

— It was you.

A silence, deep and nearly tearing, settled between them.

— Yes, Lucian. I saw you in that gallery before ever meeting you. Or rather… I saw in those strokes something of you. The posture, the way you listen while leaning back, the head slightly tilted as if to capture a sound that does not yet exist but keeps arriving.

He picked up the second drawing—the diptych where two identical silhouettes, on either side of an armchair, seem to emerge or withdraw, one reading a book while the other recoils from a breath rising from the seat itself.

— And this one… this one is the worst. Two identical figures—two you, two me, two creatures of the same gesture. One reads, the other protects himself from the breath. And I became afraid. Truly afraid. Because I no longer know who is who.

Lucian gripped the armrests.

Igniatius continued.

— So I asked the gallery owner: “Who made this? Who is the artist?” He said he did not know. That the drawings had been left anonymously. That the signature was illegible, like a name erased by the artist himself.

He closed his eyes a moment.

— I stayed a long time in front of these silhouettes. And the more I looked, the more I told myself: “This is not a coincidence.” Someone drew this for me. Or about me. Or with me. Or before me.

Then he raised his head.

— And when I saw you for the first time… I knew.

Not knew as one knows a fact—
but knew as one recognizes handwriting once seen in a dream.

— Your way of moving, sitting, even your silences… it was that. It was you in those drawings. You… before you.

Lucian remained still, his gaze growing clouded.

And Igniatius whispered, voice nearly strangled:

— That is why I believe you are the author. Or, if you are not…

— Or if I am not…? Continue.

Igniatius made a vague but charged gesture.

— …then whoever made them knew you better than I did.

He stepped closer to the chair—without sitting—then said slowly a phrase that opened an abyss:

— Lucian… if you are in these drawings before I ever met you… then perhaps it is not I who found you.

He rested his hand upon the paper.

— Perhaps you found—

Lucian paled, unable to pronounce the word.
So he skirted around it:

— Perhaps I am your character. Perhaps Don Carotte, Igniatius, all these stories, the islands, the donkey, the storm… were born from a place in you. A void. A void that called me.

He stepped back, hands trembling.

— Lucian… am I real? Or am I… what you have drawn?
Or what you have drawn without knowing it?

And for the first time since the beginning of their sessions, Lucian found no words.
No breath, no voice.
Even his smile had deserted him.