the yellow gleam of the flickering torch flame (I can still hear the soft crackle of the burning bamboo), and which were fixed onto the frames with pieces of thin wire. As for the side-pieces, every trace of the original material had disappeared; they were bound round with strips of cloth, dirty bits of rag, some of which were very long, hanging down behind his ears and fluttering in the mountain wind.
At first sight, any resemblance to Tumchooq consisted chiefly in that inimitable walk, the body leaning forward slightly, oddly nimble, with big jerky strides so like Tumchooq’s you’d have thought it was him I saw in my dream, but twenty-five years older—two and a half decades the father spent in a prison camp and during which his son grew up without him. Paul d’Ampère.
He stayed within view as far as the lie of the land allowed; from time to time he disappeared behind fronds of trees and I lost sight of him, then the feeble glow of his torch appeared again, further away on some rocks, beneath a thick fog; I kept my eyes wide open, pinned on that tiny dab of light in the darkness, which still glows before my eyes as I write these words. That dab of light reminds me of The Right into Egypt, a film I saw as a child, which begins with a very long stationary shot, all but black with this insubstantial glow hovering in the middle while a voice-over talks about the souls of the exiled, condemned to wandering in the desert. Later, I saw that same dab of light captured by a reporter at a refugee camp in a desert in black Africa; it was after a massacre, and dejected exiles—who would never be able to return to their native country and who reminded me of Conrad’s characters—told their story over and over again. I saw it again one evening beside Joyce’s tomb as I watched the shifting shadows of a tree projected by the last rays of dusk onto the statue of the writer, thin as a skeleton, his elbow resting on one knee, his legs crossed, his huge long head in one hand … until there was just one last dab of light on the glasses of that voluntary exile who had fled his own country, like Paul d’Ampère.
The solitary traveller slowed down and started to walk along a path, or rather to advance along it almost on all fours, while his last bamboo stick was consumed by the flames without which he could go no further, growing steadily smaller, one centimetre at a time, heralding the onset of complete darkness. It was a long path, not dug into the rock but formed by a landslip which made the going very dangerous and provoked the eminent intellectual to swear in French: “Shit! Shitting Hell!” The path was barely thirty centimetres wide but seemed to go on for ever, at least fifty metres, every centimetre of the way fraught with risk, because there was nothing to either side, apart from the terrifying drop of the cliffs, the unfathomable abyss, darkness, death.
The small flame of his torch, now reduced to one twig, flickered, a few sparks flew and every glimmer of light went out. As if struck blind, Paul d’Ampère stood still on the path, unable to see anything, defenceless, in all that darkness, which grew bigger and more dense and swallowed him up. I couldn’t see him now but guessed his reflex action in the dark: he automatically took off his glasses, breathed over the lenses and, unseeing, cleaned them with the dirty rags wrapped round the side-pieces. He reminded me of his son Tumchooq, who, on the rare occasions that we argue, sits on one of the benches in the shop, runs his hand over his face in an atavistic gesture, irritably rubs his forehead and eyes, seeming to have aged ten years in a flash, and—just like his father—launches into meticulously cleaning his glasses with the end of his shirt or his T-shirt, which may be just as dirty and impregnated with sweat as his fathers rags; I’m quite sure he’s happy he can’t see me any more and, for one furtive moment, has managed to make the filthy outside world disappear.
Low, heavy cloud spreads across the mountain, impenetrable mists crawl over the rocks and along the path where, suddenly, after the sound of several matches being struck, a dazzling flash lights up as Paul d’Ampère’s shirt