Capas de oscuridad

He was never aware of how he dragged himself to his bed.

He closed his eyes, obeying the need for sleep that his aching insides demanded.

Had he had the strength, he would have thrown himself into a pit.

Gushes of despair crowded together in his throat, suffocating him, and his eyes grew more sensitive to the darkness than an open sore to salt.

At moments he ground his teeth to dull the creak of the stiffened nerves inside his flesh, which surrendered, with the slackness of a sponge, to the waves of darkness his brain discharged.

He never finished descending — who knows how many leagues of invisible length his physical body had, for it never managed to halt the sinking of his consciousness, now heaped into a bristling of despair!

From his eyelids fell successive layers of ever denser darkness.

He could find in his soul not a single crack through which to escape.

Erdosain contained all the suffering of the world, the pain of the world's negation.

He felt that he was no longer a man, but a sore covered with skin, that shuddered and screamed with every beat of his veins.

And yet, he lived.

He lived simultaneously in the remoteness and in the dreadful nearness of his body.

He was no longer an organism canning up sufferings, but something more inhuman... perhaps that... a monster coiled in on itself in the black belly of the room.

Each layer of darkness that descended from his eyelids was a placental tissue that isolated him more and more from the universe of men.

The walls grew, their courses of bricks rose up, and new cataracts of darkness fell into that cube where he lay coiled and throbbing like a snail in an oceanic depth.

He could not recognize himself... he doubted that he was Augusto Remo Erdosain.

He pressed his forehead between his fingertips, and the flesh of his hand seemed strange to him and he did not recognize the flesh of his forehead, as if his body were made of two different substances.

Who knows what had already died in him?

There endured for his sensibility only a consciousness foreign to what had happened to him, a soul that could not have been longer than the blade of a sword and that quivered like a lamprey in the water of his clouded life.

Even the consciousness of being occupied in him no more than a square centimeter of sensibility.

Yes, his whole body lived, was in contact with the earth, only through a square centimeter of sensibility.

The rest faded away into the darkness.

Yes, he was a square centimeter of man, a square centimeter of existence prolonging, with its sensitive surface, the incoherent life of a ghost.

All the rest had died in him, had merged with the placenta of darkness that armored his atrocious reality.

A sensation from another world!

An invisible sun lit the walls forever, an orange the color of a storm.

The wing of a solitary bird slanted across the blue above the rectangle of the walls, but he would be forever at the bottom of that taciturn cube, lit by an orange storm-sun.

Had he loosened his will just a little, the reality it held back would have screamed in his ears.

Erdosain did not want and did want to look... but it was useless... his wife was there, at the back of a room hung with blue.

The captain was moving in a corner.

He knew, though no one had told him so, that it was a tiny bedroom, hexagonal in shape and taken up almost entirely by a wide, low bed.

He did not want to look at Elsa... no... no... he did, but had they threatened him with death he would not for that have stopped fixing his gaze on the man undressing before her... before his lawful wife who now was not with him... but with another.

Stronger than his fear was his need for more terror, for more suffering, and suddenly she, who was covering her eyes with her fingers, ran toward the naked, stiff-legged man, pressed against him, and no longer shrank from the livid virility risen against the blue background.

Had they run him through the rollers of a rolling mill, his life could not be flatter.

Did not the toads end up like that, the ones the cartwheel pinned on the rut, crushed and burning?

But he did not want to look, so much did he not want to that now he saw with clarity how Elsa leaned against the man's square hairy chest, while his hands cupped the woman's jaw to lift her face toward his mouth.

Her face had flushed with desperation, her clothes whirled around the triangle of her milk-white thighs, and with her eyes entranced on the rigid muscle of the trembling man, she uncovered the mane of her sex, her raised breasts... ah!... why was he looking?

In vain Elsa... yes, Elsa, his lawful wife, tried with her small hand to encompass the whole virility in a caress.

The man, under the howl of his desire, pressed his temples, covered his eyes with his forearm; but she, leaning over him, drove this red-hot iron into his ears: "You're more handsome than my husband! How handsome you are, my God!".

Had they slowly twisted his head on his neck to screw that atrocious vision deep into his soul, he could not have suffered more.

He suffered so much that, were that pain to break off, his spirit would burst like shrapnel.

How is it that the soul can bear so much pain?

And yet he wanted to suffer more.

Let them split his back open with an axe into several pieces on top of a gash...

And had they thrown him in four pieces into a garbage bin, he would have gone on suffering.

There was not a square centimeter in his body that did not bear that towering pressure of anguish.

His life ran silently downhill, like a lake after the bursting of its dam, and, without sleeping but with his eyelids closed, the lucid swoon was more of an anesthetic for his pain than a chloroform sleep.

With difficulty he moved his head to lift his scalp off the overheated pillow, and he let himself be, with no other sensation of living than that coolness on the nape of his neck and the half-opening and closing of his heart, which, like an enormous eye, opened its drowsy lid to make out the darkness, nothing more.

Nothing more than the darkness?