(165) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

Where Don Carotte, having learned that scientists give certain phenomena names whose terrifying precision takes nothing away from their beauty—speaking of a convective column, of pyrocovnection, of ascending currents capable of drawing air into the highest layers of the atmosphere before sending it back toward the earth as descending winds that, in turn, overturn the course of the fire—feels ancient flames, which he had believed forever buried, rising within himself...

Don Carotte's Notebook

They describe the birth of a pyrocumulus, sometimes even of a pyrocumulonimbus, that thunderstorm engendered by the fire itself, in which flames, vapor, ice, lightning, and wind ultimately come to belong to a single movement.
These words teach me nothing that my body had not already begun to understand on that day; they merely give a more precise—and more terrifying—form to an undeniable truth: there are times when a fire ceases to be carried by the world and begins instead to create a world of its own.
What I felt was not merely fear.
Fear always has an object.
It knows what it is approaching.
What was gradually taking hold of me belonged to another order altogether.
The fire remained upon the neighboring island...
And yet the sky beneath which I stood was already no longer the same.
The wind had changed.
The light as well.
I could have sworn that the sea itself, no less than I, had begun to breathe differently.
Then an image, coming from I know not where, passed through my mind.
I saw again those empty fields where, only a few hours earlier, nothing had announced the slightest human presence; then, all at once, masts, ropes, canvas tents, caravans, animals, kitchens, and voices would arise, until an entire circus had taken possession of a place that seemed to have been waiting for it forever.
It was never merely a matter of setting up camp.
It was a world appearing within another world—not to replace it, but to impose upon it, for a while, another way of existing.
I resisted comparing the fire to the circus.
I merely recognized, without yet understanding it, the same power of appearance.
Since morning, vegetation had sprung from the stone.
Now the fire was springing from the vegetation.
And the longer I watched that island, the more a thought, still formless, began to make its way within me.
Perhaps these two events were not as foreign to one another as they appeared.
I did not mean that one caused the other.
Such an explanation would have been far too simple.
Rather, I had the feeling that they both answered to the same breath, hidden beneath the ancient lava flows, as though volcanoes, long after their craters had fallen silent, continued to speak a language that we hear only on the rarest of occasions.
I possessed, of course, no proof.
Only that persistent impression that an eruption perhaps never truly ends...
That it remains present beneath the stone with a patience that not even centuries can exhaust...
And that, on certain days—days whose memory no account seems capable of preserving exactly—it rises once more to the surface, now in the form of an impossible forest, now as a fire so immense that it compels even the sky itself to begin anew.
It was then that a strange thought came to me...
Might it be that my own life resembled, in its improbable way, that fire—far too vast for me to contain?