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And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.
felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that that is what they call being consumed with remorse.
Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?
If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought. I never argued with the women, in fact I already found them stupid, but I hadn’t formulated it so clearly.
But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I’ve realised these past few years.
‘True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’
Look at the way we live: we know we have to behave as if it’s morning, because they make the lights brighter, then they pass us food and, at a given time, the lights are dimmed. We’re not even certain they make us live according to a twenty-four-hour pattern. How would we measure time? They’ve reduced us to utter helplessness.’
Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’
‘Then they’d be acknowledging my existence. If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself.’
I’d grown, my body had recorded the passage of time.
I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry.
He too would be a clock, we would grow old at the same speed. I could watch him and judge how much time I had left from the springiness of his step.
That rekindled a spirit of rebellion in their dulled minds. We had our own time, which had nothing in common with that of those who kept us locked up; we’d rediscovered the quality of being human.
In fact, we’d merely moved to a new prison.
It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.
We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.
I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious. I sighed and left.
Only now, I tell myself that what I’d felt for her, the trust that slowly built up, the constant preference for her company and the joy each time I was reunited with her after an expedition were probably what the women called love. Now, I had nobody left to love.
But a sky does not die, it is I who am dying, who was already dying in the bunker—and I tell myself that I am alone in this land that no longer has any jailers, or prisoners, unaware of what I came here to do, the mistress of silence, owner of bunkers and corpses.
But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting
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Anthea had tried to explain to me what the Christians meant by God, and the soul. Apparently, people believed firmly in it, it’s even mentioned in the preface to one of the books on astronautics. Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: ‘Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.’ Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to—really had a very vivid imagination.
It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.
‘I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all’,
‘After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear, or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.’
