Continuation of Lucian's letter, through which Félix comes to understand that one of the two previous letters was probably never meant to reach him. He reads and rereads this new version—and the continuation that follows—whose enthusiasm, whose verve, far from subsiding, grows ever more intense. Not only does Lucian vary while repeating himself, but he reveals more and more of a hidden side of himself, and the slight fever continues to rise. If yesterday Félix had attributed it to the fatigues of travel, today his doubts are fading away. He is deeply worried, yet still hopes that this condition is only temporary.
Continuation of Lucian's Letter
Then he sat down and, while unrolling several drawings, began to speak of the Moon Child.
Ah, Félix... how I wish I could convey to you the precise disturbance I felt in that moment when, for me, Igniatius was no longer a man describing a character. He had become a voice speaking of another voice which it seemed to have heard before ever understanding it.
He said:
"When he closes his eyes, it is not night that begins. It is the visible world that pauses."
Or again:
"His cloak is too vast because it carries more than a single body."
And as he spoke, something within me began to tremble like a magnetized needle searching for a hidden north. Suddenly a terrible conviction imposed itself upon my mind with the silent violence of certainties that are born before reasoning. Igniatius was the author of the Moon Child. Not in the banal sense in which a writer invents a figure in order to fill pages—no—I mean that he seemed organically bound to that creature, as the shell belongs to the mollusk or lightning to the storm. Every sentence he uttered appeared already to have passed through the secret flesh of the character.
Even his silences breathed with the same respiration.
Even his hesitations seemed clothed in the Child's great nocturnal mantle.
And yet—here lies the true vertigo—at the very moment that this conviction was growing within me, another sensation, darker still, began slowly to rise from the depths of my memory.
Certain phrases...
My God, how difficult it is to write this without immediately feeling ashamed of one's own words...
Certain phrases gave me the impression of having returned to me.
Not like ordinary memories, but like black birds finding again an ancient perch after years of absence.
At times I had the dreadful feeling that Igniatius was expressing aloud images that had once crossed my own mind without ever reaching the page.
Do you understand the abyss?
It was no longer simply him speaking of the Child.
It was as though an entire region of my own imagination had suddenly been restored to me by a foreign voice.
For a few seconds—only a few seconds, yet sometimes that is enough to crack an entire life—I wondered whether certain words attributed to Igniatius might not have originated in forgotten notebooks of my own.
Immediately the thought seemed monstrous to me. I rose almost violently.
The sea was beating against the cliffs with that lugubrious majesty of nocturnal oceans that resemble immense invisible herds galloping through the darkness. The red gangway appeared intermittently through the fog like a wound suspended above the waters.
When I turned around, Igniatius was contemplating one of my drawings hanging upon the wall. And the gaze with which he observed it... Félix, I have never seen a man look at an image in such a way. He seemed less a spectator than a survivor suddenly recognizing a landscape from his childhood long since submerged.
Then he murmured:
"You too... are trying to find him again."
Find him again... do you hear that word? Again.
As though he had already existed.
As though the Moon Child preceded his own appearances.
As though we were both—he speaking, I drawing—nothing more than awkward instruments of a figure slowly seeking its passage into the world.
Since then, an idea has pursued me with the persistence of a rising tide. What if inventing did not mean creating?
Old Latin knew better than we do: invenire—to find, to discover, to come upon what was already waiting in the shadows.
Then who truly writes?
The one who manufactures—or the one who encounters?
I sometimes begin to believe that genuine figures choose their own bearers.
They pass through several beings, several voices, several notebooks. They circulate. They migrate.
And each person believes himself to be the origin when he may have been only a stage along the way.
That is why the origin of the Moon Child recedes each time I advance toward it. Igniatius leads me toward the drawings. The drawings lead me back toward forgotten regions of my own memory. My notebooks sometimes seem to precede the words of Igniatius.
And his words suddenly illuminate pages I do not even remember having written.
Which comes before the other? Who calls? Who answers?
All this... I do not know.
Perhaps the figure—I no longer know how to name this voice... or this presence—feeds precisely upon this impossibility.
Perhaps it lives within the passage itself.
I hear someone again upon the staircase... or perhaps the wind... or perhaps my memory.
At this hour, my dear Félix, I fear that these three things possess exactly the same face."
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