While Lucian’s absence is explained by his journey in search of the origins of Igniatius’s drawings, Félix realizes that one of the two letters he read yesterday and today was never meant to reach him. As he reads a new version of the previous letter—a version whose enthusiasm and verve are highly uncharacteristic—he discovers, with some surprise, that Lucian not only varies while repeating himself, but also possesses a hidden side, or at the very least a kind of mild fever or weakness, difficult to reconcile with the measured tone that usually characterizes his correspondence. He attributes this to the fatigues of travel, yet remains somewhat concerned, hoping that the condition is only temporary.
Second continuation of Lucian’s letter
"I was about to seal this letter, my dear Félix—to seal it as one closes a crypt, or as a captain, before a storm, has the hatches nailed shut—when an uneasiness returned and laid its hand upon my shoulder. Not a clear thought. A presence...
You know those moments when the mind ceases to advance like a reasonable machine and suddenly becomes like those mountain dogs that stop before an invisible crevasse hidden beneath the snow.
I must speak to you once more of Igniatius. Ah, that name! That name already resembles less a surname than an ember smouldering beneath ashes! Each time I write it, I have the absurd impression that I am tracing not letters, but the outlines of a slow combustion.
You have often reproached me, with that methodical irony which lends you such elegance, for speaking of him as a man speaks of an apparition whose material existence he still hopes to verify by hearing certain floorboards creak beneath its steps.
Precisely! Perhaps that is what troubles me.
For when Igniatius appears, he never entirely enters by the door... He occurs. An immense distinction, you will admit. My other patients pass through doorways; he seems instead to emerge from the very shadows of the staircase, as though the building itself were slowly secreting him from its own darkness. I saw him again three days ago—or three centuries ago. With certain beings, time ceases to be measured in hours and begins to be measured in depth, if I may put it that way.
He was climbing—or at least I believed I heard him climbing—the stairs leading to my consulting room. The wood creaked with that almost ceremonial slowness peculiar to old maritime houses, where every step carries the lament of a ship.
Yet when I opened the door... no one. Nothing.
Only the corridor, narrow and grey, like the throat of a sleeping animal.
And yet, Félix, something had already happened.
Do you understand? Absence itself had taken on the form of an arrival. Then he was there. How? I would be incapable of telling you without immediately feeling that I was lying. He stood near the window as though he had slowly condensed the surrounding twilight around himself until he became visible. Under his arm he carried several tightly rolled sheets. One might have thought he was transporting manuscripts rescued from a fire. He seemed even thinner than I remembered. Not the simple thinness of men deprived of food, but that of figures long traversed by some fixed idea, like those saints in Gothic stained glass consumed from within by their own light.
Then he sat down and, while unrolling several drawings, began to speak of the Moon Child.
...to be continued..."
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