Lucian travels under the confused influence of the drawings and of Igniatius's stories, searching for possible traces left by the Moon Child, Pinocchio the Other, Don Carotte, and many others.
Félix travels as well... though in his own manner... with his own resources, his own reading, and his own vision of the drawings that reach him.
Yet he too must contend with his imagination.
He cannot help constructing with the logic that relentlessly surrounds him.
Thus he cannot help constructing hypotheses about these journeys that seem to possess neither beginning nor end... much like the letters he receives from Lucian, which continue to multiply into endless continuations... without anyone being able to define their true origin.
Dear Félix and esteemed colleague,
I had scarcely written and sealed my last letter when, you see, Félix, something quite literally leapt into my face. I know... the expression is not especially elegant... perhaps it was due to fatigue... or to certain tides... Perhaps it was due to that sensation of remaining on the edge of a confession whose true nature I do not yet fully understand myself...
Be that as it may... I must now speak to you about Igniatius.
I know how his name, despite your impassive expression, seems to trouble you somewhat... and I know that my oscillation between perhaps and certainly sometimes irritates you. You find that I pronounce his name as one might bring a lamp close to an inflammable cloth... with excessive caution. With that manner of circling around things that makes you believe I am trying less to describe something than to protect it.
You may not be entirely wrong.
I saw Igniatius again three days ago.
Or rather—observe how language itself already hesitates—he returned... just as the subject of this letter has returned to me...
Within that nuance, within that hesitation, lies a difficulty I have not been able to resolve. Some presences seem to enter a room from an entirely identifiable outside. Others give the impression of slowly emerging from an interior region, as though their arrival could be sensed long before they became visible.
Igniatius belongs to the latter kind.
I heard him climbing the staircase long before I could distinguish his silhouette.
You will smile again... the staircase was empty when, anticipating his movements, I opened the door.
Yet the sound had occurred.
I heard it, and I record it because such absurd details sometimes become the only fixed points of a memory.
Then, suddenly, he was standing before me.
Under his arm he carried several tightly rolled sheets, pressed almost flat against himself, as one protects something from the wind—or from curious eyes.
He seemed thinner than I remembered.
Or perhaps simply more distant.
He laid the drawings upon the table without looking at me immediately.
Then he began speaking about the Moon Child.
Strangely, he never said, “my character.”
He spoke of him as of someone already encountered.
As one might speak of a child glimpsed several times beside a deserted harbour.
He said:
"He believes he is sleeping when he closes his eyes. Yet that is precisely when he begins to see."
Or:
"His hat is too large because it contains more night than his head."
I quote these remarks only approximately. Their exact wording matters less than the movement they produced within me while he spoke.
For something extremely strange then imposed itself upon my mind with an almost unpleasant force.
I suddenly became certain that Igniatius was the author of the Moon Child... and not merely the author of the drawings depicting him.
I do not mean an intellectual conviction.
I mean something much deeper and much more immediate.
Like suddenly recognizing a voice behind a partition before knowing to whom it belongs.
Everything seemed to fit.
The way he described the Child's silences.
His manner of speaking about oversized coats as though they were a second skin.
That insistence upon closed eyes seeing more clearly than open ones.
Even the pauses between his sentences seemed already to belong to the character.
I experienced the disturbing impression that the Moon Child was less represented by Igniatius than prolonged through him.
As though the figure itself were passing through his body at the very moment he spoke.
And yet...
Here is the point where everything begins to waver again.
While he described the Child, some of his phrases also gave me the impression of having already existed within me before him.
Understand carefully what I am trying to express.
This was not the ordinary sensation of déjà vu.
It was far worse.
Sometimes I felt that I was hearing formulations returning to me from an ancient region of my own thought, yet I could find no written trace of them.
As though Igniatius were speaking from a place where my own images had continued their existence without me.
I know perfectly well how ridiculous this sounds.
That is precisely why I am writing it to you.
There was even a very brief moment—a few seconds at most—when I wondered whether certain phrases attributed to Igniatius might in fact have originated in my own notebooks.
The thought immediately struck me as absurd.
I stood up.
I walked to the window.
Outside, the sea was almost black.
The red footbridge was barely visible in the fog.
When I turned around, Igniatius was looking at one of my drawings pinned to the wall.
He was looking at it with such unwavering attention that I felt an almost physical unease arise within me.
Then he said softly:
"You too are trying to find him again."
I did not ask whom he meant.
I believe I was afraid of the answer.
Or worse still: afraid there might be none.
Since that day, an idea has pursued me.
What if to invent meant something other than to fabricate?
The word itself may contain a forgotten truth.
Invenire.
To find.
To discover.
To encounter what was already there, before it had received a visible form.
If that is so, what does the writer truly invent?
Does he produce a figure?
Or does he gradually recognize a presence that was already seeking to appear through him?
I no longer know.
I am no longer even certain whether I am writing this letter to inform you... or merely to verify that someone other than myself still receives these events within the same world.
The most troubling thing, Félix, may be this:
the more I attempt to establish clearly the origin of the Moon Child, the more the origin itself seems to move.
As though the figure retreated as one advanced toward it.
As though it used our very attempts at explanation in order to continue its passage from one being to another.
I shall leave you now.
I hear someone once again upon the staircase.
Or perhaps only the wood shifting beneath the sea wind.
At this hour, the two become almost impossible to distinguish.
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