Where Lucian, having read the journals of Don Carotte and Sang Chaud, and having set out in their footsteps, now writes his own account of what he believes—or perhaps merely hopes—to be the very same places.
From Lucian's Journal
Just before dusk, while I had not yet recognized any of the places described in the journals, the forest rose before me with a familiarity whose origin I could not determine. And yet nothing there was truly known to me. I had never come here before. But there are times when books precede landscapes so completely that, at their very first encounter, they already bear the face of a memory.
I paused for a few moments before passing beneath the trees.
Since my departure, I had often found myself thinking about Igniatius. He continued to insist that the drawings were not his. Stranger still, he sometimes seemed to expect from me a confession I was incapable of making. No matter how often I told him that, until he had brought them to me—and that, in order to understand them, I had copied them—I had never drawn those images, I felt that no denial could ever answer what he was really waiting to hear. It was as though the question no longer concerned the one who had drawn them, but the one who would one day consent to recognize what, through those drawings, had long been searching for its author.
That thought accompanied me as I entered the forest.
Almost immediately I rediscovered what Don Carotte had called its ancient architecture, and then what Sang Chaud had recognized as the slow intelligence of relationships. Both descriptions returned to me effortlessly, not as sentences learned by heart, but as two distinct ways of inhabiting the same place. I understood then that a landscape never truly remains the same; it is the succession of gazes that gradually gives it depth.
Yet I walked with a certain distrust of my own impressions. I feared less that I would fail to recognize anything than that I would recognize only what I had already read. So I tried to forget the journals. I wanted to see the trees—and the forest they together composed—before the words that had already named them.
The task proved far more difficult than I had imagined.
The great trunks climbed into an ever rarer light. The roots disappeared beneath thick carpets of moss. Every branch seemed to answer another; every silence found its place among the birds' distant calls and the invisible rustlings. Was it truly the forest I was observing, or the pages that continued to work within me? I no longer knew where the memory of words ended and where the memory of things began.
That hesitation, however, did not last.
As I moved forward, I slowly ceased comparing. The journals did not disappear; they simply changed their function. They no longer taught me what I was supposed to see. They taught me how to look.
Then a thought returned to me, one that had often crossed my mind without ever quite taking shape: perhaps there are works that have no desire whatsoever to be understood. They seek only to bring forth other ways of seeing. Their true author may not be the one who writes or draws them, but the one who, one day, consents to see differently through them.
When the moon finally appeared above the vaulted canopy of the trees, I continued my journey in a silence unlike the one in which I had begun. I had left the journals behind without abandoning them. They no longer walked ahead of me; they now walked beside me.
And I suddenly understood why it had become so difficult to know which of us—Igniatius, Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, or myself—was truly following the others' footsteps.
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