(71) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

— Look, please.
— I see him…
— I am not speaking of the Moon Child…
— Whom are you speaking of?
— There behind, far beyond those poles and the ropes that hold them, he stands.
— But whom are you speaking of?
— Of the one who is watching us… or who is watching the Moon Child. There behind those poles… he believes he is alone, looking into the big top.
— Does he see us?
— I am not so sure… I think he is watching the Moon Child and, perhaps, he can hear us… In any case, we can hear him… and look closely… it seems to me that he is writing.

In this deserted place, I am alone… or so I believed when I entered. For very quickly it became impossible for me to know whether one is still attending a spectacle, or whether one has entered something older, deeper, a kind of living space where theater, memory, sea, and birth continue to mingle within the same red darkness.
There was almost no true light. Only thick glimmers, purple reflections sliding over great rocky masses that seemed to rise from the very depths of the Archipelago. Red rocks. Not merely lit in red, but red like certain volcanic cliffs when fire still seems to sleep beneath their cooled crust.
And all around them long pale flames were rising.
At first I had taken them for ropes or for some ghostly vegetation suspended in the heights of the circus. But no. They were flames. Slow flames, almost white, twisting upward toward the invisible summit of the big top, where they were lost in thick smoke. They burned nothing. They seemed rather to consume space itself.
Below, dark waves rose against them.
That too was strange: the sea seemed present inside the circus itself. Thick, spiraling, almost mineral waves came striking the bases of the flames as if trying to push them back or smother them before they reached the heights. The whole scene thus oscillated between rising and submersion. Between fire and engulfment.
Then I saw the Moon Child. He did not appear like an actor entering the stage, but like someone already long engaged in a crossing of which I knew nothing. His small body seemed almost lost in the immensity of the structures, canvases, and slanting beams cluttering the belly of the big top. Yet the whole scene reorganized itself around him. One foot still rested on a rope… along which he was making his way. The other was stretched toward the red rocks of the island.
And that rope crossing the void possessed something unbearably ambiguous. For it was at once a path and, so I saw it, an ancient instrument of captivity. One guessed that, on another scale, in another time, it had served to hold him, to guide him, perhaps to manipulate him like a puppet. And now he was advancing upon it. As if the old bond of dependence had suddenly become a possibility of flight. He was not truly walking. He was launching himself.
His body remained almost folded in upon itself, carried along in a fragile movement hesitating between fall, swimming, suspension, and birth. Yet there was nothing heroic in it. No triumph of the acrobat. One might have said that he was trying less to conquer the void than to pass through it before something disappeared entirely. For everything around him… around us… was disappearing. That is what I gradually understood with growing anguish: the circus did not merely seem abandoned. It was disappearing before my eyes. The great red canvases hung like torn-out organs or sails ripping in an inner storm. The beams and poles still seemed to hold more by habit than by true solidity. The ropes vibrated slowly, as if, at moments, the whole structure hesitated between holding and collapse.
I had the strange thought that my presence itself was participating in this disappearance. I could not explain why, but the more I looked, the more I had the terrible feeling that the spectacle needed a witness in order to continue dying. As if the mere fact of seeing were completing something. Then the silence became almost unbearable.
I lifted my eyes toward the dark heights of the big top, and another absurd thought came to me: perhaps we were not in a circus, but inside the very belly of the Leviathan.
Everything suddenly took on another meaning.
The flames became inner breaths rising toward an invisible throat. The waves seemed to beat against the walls of a primordial body. The ropes evoked ligaments, fibers, gigantic nerves. The entire circus appeared like an architecture built and then dismantled inside an original belly.
And the Moon Child advanced there… between birth and engulfment. Between manipulation and freedom. Between the thread that once held him and the one he now attempted to cross.
I then understood why he seemed so small. He was not a character confronting a setting. He was a consciousness crossing a world coming undone. The flames kept rising. The waves kept pushing them back.
And he advanced still, suspended above that impossible struggle between fire and sea, as if his whole existence depended on a few more steps taken before the final collapse of the living big top.