Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
Slack waves cross the darkness. Like a very thin veil stretched out diagonally in the room, nylon that an inept stretching might crimp. At the far end, a white rectangle much higher than it is wide. Because of its brightness, which contrasts with the low ambient light, a notion of cinema is instantly evoked. Despite the screening room atmosphere, there is no evidence you’re at a showing. Nothing proves that the white rectangle is anything other than a white rectangle. On its bottom right edge, a sort of fuzz (left in passing by birds?!) would suggest you are in front of a window. Angled outward? A violent day cuts into the spotless opening. But the light from outside does not really enter. For that reason, it’s mostly interior and artificial. A cell that at once conjures up a prison, a clinic, a cloister, and great freedom. You return to the white rectangle.
Blue-stained plaster, the unpleasant color buffed. Four coils of hair represent the sides of a deformable square raised at an angle. Threads from a copper wire coated with a dark brown insulating varnish? The varnish is worn, turned grayish. In the center of the square, showing through white in dabs, in fadings, a blue background; a white halo comes out from it, diffuse light that doesn’t diffuse. A fixed halo, a little misshapen, which betrays all that’s misshapen around it. The shades soften in a flat relief. The coils are poorly bonded strands of wood, a shredding of rotten and bleached piles. Emerged platform. Rents in the wharf. The halo looks like an inner tube thrust into a petrifying fountain then pinned to the bottom of a smashed chest. The halo joins a ruin. A battered square. You search the screen for the flattened dimension.
A woman has her back to it, is dressed in white tights that hug the triple relief of her breasts and her belly, two balls surmounting a disc inscribed within a square. One leg slid over the other. Head that almost touches a corner of the screen, bottom right. Set back from this woman and the screen, to the screen’s left, another woman stares at her. An impression. Because she looks in front of her, beside the screen, a little under the screen. Neither her hands nor her arms are visible. She’s kneeling, seated on her heels. Her body is white. Impossible to tell if she’s dressed. Either way, she’s young. Her hair falls over her cleft rump. The woman with her back to the screen wears a bun, hair at the temples slicked down. Because of the light, or the peculiar darkness of this room, the features of her face are unreadable. The shadow turns her head into spikes. With her big toe, she reaches the knee of the other woman, who is not looking at her, who’s repositioning herself, the white spheres of her buttocks deformed for a moment by her heels.
Within the greenish track, the rectangle loses its aspect of pure geometry. A sort of outdoor arena, it lies like a trapezoid of fog laid out to the edge of the grass. The glare is absorbed into the vaporous activity localized in this cloak, this arena where four small metal panels confront each other two by two, close enough to form a box. But they are not joined. If three of them are intent on closing, one remains apart. This panel, the least recruitable for an image of enclosure, sends out a subtle threat to the opposite panel conducted through a rod on which it is attached. The furthermost panel stands on its own. Miniscule pieces (of what apparatus?) are scattered between the three closely spaced panels. The mist clears around the arena, revealing large dragonflies that smell the junk. Three panels are joined by a rod to a pylon surmounted by a machine resembling an insect, a paper glider, an arquebus. You’d prefer the mist cover this game’s backdrop, leaving the eyes to focus on the still panels. Incredible trickery in these little metal squares. And these pieces, in between, which simply fell there to fool the eyes. By default, a demonstration is performed. Emerging from the fog, slivered catenaries emerge from an old collusion. In the arena’s space, a defused connivance opens the final round. Nebulosity is a slippery thing to use. It’s in the unplayable that the game is played out.
This isn’t an illustration where, after rotating the image, one would make out the head of the hunter or the wolf among a network of twigs. You see, on the third floor of a small house, half-unlatched shutters of a vibrant lime green. On the beach, coves with screes piled like bones, leafless shrubs, a contortion of thorny lace. Everything is expressed on this beach brown with light where no city has toppled, among blocks that suddenly prove to be blocks of images. You note a chunk of wall, a residue of plaster coated with a residue of blue gouache. You notice lines, arcs of circles drawn with this and that—a piece of wood, a stylus, a tooth, the corner of a box, an elbow or a head. Remnants that are only provisional. Pieces of iron, ropes, posts wrapped in tape, nailed boards, mounds raised against the sky. A wall. A wall scraped to blue. Painted with a paint made during the Occupation, that creates this vermiculated sign, leaves a little pollen, a little talc on the fingers. Again you slip coins into a slot, out of habit, without noticing that the score remains the same. 827,500 for example. Or 1,376,800. Maroon scrap metal perpetuated up to an extremely well-plotted disaster. On-screen, the television host sees an odd play of waves. She cuts away, but the image refuses to fade; it settles in forcefully on the screen. It tries to possess its own film and seeks complete control. Now, everything could be derived from this image. An unforeseen moment takes a turn; for a few seconds, you witness the indignation of the giant foiled in a gag. Torsos fuse like linoleum scraps. A matter of insulation. A descent of large printed raptors. You take advantage of the opportune disorder of fade-outs, small refinements are lost. However, the screen grows clear again. Blue mingles with some terracotta architecture. On the glass of the screen are traces of tinted backing to be removed.
Head of the killer in its nylon stocking, bulbous nose broken and grafted on under the distended mesh. And the rain on the suddenly grievous face. Lips stiff and dour, slightly parted. Projection of the muzzle attached to the face like a phallus, between eyes you cannot see. Cranium sealed, pelted, feeling the rain. Stupendous and ghastly contemplation. Streak of violet light on the striped face. The forehead blind, struck down in the midst of power. Interrogating, yielding no more. Yielding. Rain of light on the egg of a head. Head-wreckage brought up in daylight. Head clotting the monumental diversion, head defenestrated. Unearthed by the wild rain.
The crowd watches a convolution of gray paths surrounding two islands, the light gray one nearly joined to the paths, rather hypothetical, the other one a chalky black. A crowd as if several summers outside had faded its color. She lives under her blouses and her bright dresses, her pants sewn strips of fabric—artfully done. A bare-chested man walks alongside an attractive, well-fed brunette. Painted mesh headpiece atop the hair. Nofrit. And her consort Rahotep? Next to them, a guy in his thirties carries a cushion on his back. Red, thick wooly hair. Lasso or tube hitched to a buttock. He dominates the crowd with his flaming shock of hair. Carroty tuft against a distant gray path between two monochrome, ash-gray masses. And these calm fans’ backs. It hardly matters what their faces show. Defiance. Rage. Or a kind of docility in waiting. Endless backs. Neither resigned nor abashed. Neutral. Crowd that does not truly wait. That observes. Two vague continents. Pallid calmness of imperceptibly drifting masses. Serenity regards serenity. Painted mesh. Nofrit. Game moved to distant paths. Nondescript backs. Solid, benign. The man with the tube urinates ably enough, not bothering anyone. Between his legs he shakes a long horse cock with a twisted and cavernous glans. Nobody turned around. Spectacle. Two dim continents. Grayish composition. Dappled.
Before me, I see the rat’s flesh decompose. A black piece holds out with more and more ragged edges, shrinking, curling, like a leaf under heat. With this wave that rolls under the skin, the larvae, animating short-lived pseudopods. Now what remains is a ball of soot that travels across a glass plate with infinite and tedious slowness. Something charred, under a force of iron. I don’t close my eyes. I observe a reddening wall, dark with sheets of dirt. A brown shadow high on top.
