African Heat 2 - ebook

No perceived temperature

After the accident it was Massimo who took care of my rehabilitation. Yet my stay in Sicily was more of a nowhere stop and my seeming peace of mind was just a brief moment. The secrets from Pierre’s, Massimo’s, Claude’s, and Jean’s pasts, though paved with good intentions, turned out to be a bomb about to go off. Old wounds started to hurt again and, as a consequence, I spent countless days and nights sitting idly and pretending to be doing something, then I came down with virtually all diseases of the world for which I was later treated. I looked as if I didn’t care about anything. Massimo’s hypothesis had to be verified and, as a result, I landed up at an epidemiological centre thinking it must have been some kind of an exotic fly that made me feel so unwell. In the process of this truth judgement I was rushing headlong between evidence and what was just circumstantial; I was also supposed to get on with my projects when I felt up to it. However, instead of doing all those things, I gave in to his, and later mine as well, hypochondria. I was close to getting in a wheelchair with my sore brain which, due to excessive use of pharmaceuticals, forgot its purpose and function.

Just shortly before my coming back to Paris, Massimo had started to speak in an indeterminate and forgotten language only known to him. Indigenous ones were the apple of his eye. He loved them! A few months before I had been trying to work out the Tamasheq interpolation in Pierre’s utterances. It had worn me out. I had got fed up by time Massimo took up Andamanese. Apparently, he worried too much about the promise to look after me which he had made to Pierre. Or was he a genius of manipulation perhaps? Or, alternatively, could it have been another stage of the training he was providing me with? With time I was no longer able to discern. I had the impression of seeing the same person in different bodies. His stories sounded quite like Pierre’s from years before. It had even more in common that I had originally thought. Algorithms, codes, PINs… I no longer knew which PUK to use enter to decipher the secret of The Tower of Babel. When to push enter… Being in such in a disarray, how was I to come up with a masterpiece?! Well, in the mirror I could see only the tattoos on my face, which were not artistic at all. I was no longer able to stay in such a place. I was short of both strength and patience to, once again, calm down and psychoanalyse another individual, and myself too, taking into consideration my frame of mind. Thanking for the hospitality and care and wishing a successful outcome for the working out of the algorithms, I was soon about to wave a white handkerchief and go away. Instead of this, Claude came and what took place was an… accident. Damn! Grazie Don Vito, grazie Sicilia, grazie a tutti! Adam was quick to deal with all the formalities, arranged us posts at local magazines as well as the transportation home. The home was occupied for a few months. I changed Sicily for Paris at point zero.

A small flat, in Rue de Lille. Barely thirty square metres to house a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a living room partitioned by an enormous bookshelf with numerous titles. It adjoined to a couch on which I slept. I returned to the old place where I used to live along with Pierre.

One more time, I had to be here… In this way I was trying, regardless of the price, to extend my inner need for great pathos since it might be this state and this place which could give the answer as to how to finally link the past with the future. I was counting on unaddressed sources of knowledge and my recovery. Owing to the new column in the magazine, I could finance my projects and keep the flat. I wrote about art. Politics section was taken over, to my notable surprise, by Laurent. Now I spent most of my days at Centre Pompidou. Watching exhibitions, I visited forgotten places from my student days. I was helping my friends from the organisation, although I was making sure I wouldn’t put every fibre of my being into it as I had this plan to revise my own secrets and mysteries. It was my idea of how to take deep breaths.

In the meantime, another conflict had broken out. It was in Syria this time and it became an issue for the whole world. Europe wasn’t succeeding in dealing with all the problems resulting from the massive migration. Aleppo needed as many people willing to provide humanitarian aid as possible. The difficulties concerning safety were piling up. It was not a good time to retire. Jean made only a single call to be sure if it was actually the case that I’d come back. All he heard in his receiver were several words which amounted to saying sod off. I was not at my best when it came to helping others and I hoped he would give it up this time. In that condition I was rather useless, and that was the whole point of it. I had other priorities along with reasons for them and they needed taking care of. I was putting together puzzles consisting of events into patchworks of past stories. Everything seemed to matter but it wasn’t meant to be like that. I needed to find a way out of this vicious circle.

The opening day of the exhibition was coming nearer and nearer I was getting nowhere with my work. I devoted every spare moment to designing and painting. This way of expressing myself calmed my surroundings and myself down. This kind of self-expression supplemented my rehabilitation and it was, most importantly, a camouflage of sorts. The peace of mind and the first month of seeming freedom didn’t go on for long. Demons from my past started to knock at my door more and more loudly…