with an important responsibility. It was a Thursday when I learnt from another tutor that he had resigned from the Institute of Oriental Languages. I couldn’t wait until that Saturday morning’s session, our last, and went to see him the same evening. He welcomed me in, surprised to see me. I had barely sat down, while he—as usual—prepared the tea, before I burst into tears. I knew he was embarrassed by my outburst, but I found it impossible to contain, overwhelmed by the sorrow of separation from the last person who connected me to everything I loved, to the Tumchooq language and, therefore, to Tumchooq himself. I was filled with fierce depression and a feeling of loneliness; until then I had been bolstered, sustained and brightened by the hope that I would one day see the mutilated scroll completed by Mr. Tarakesa, a hope he was now burying for ever. I recovered my composure as best I could, and when he started talking it was to ask me, as if he, too, were obsessed by the missing part of the manuscript, to let him know if the other fragment of the scroll or the integral text of the sutra were ever found. He himself, he admitted as much, had tried to imagine the ending, but in vain, even though the character in the fable—the man hanging on the edge of the cliff—had often appeared to him in his little studio, suspended in mid-air, a few inches above the floorboards, for longer than the laws of gravity allowed, but each time the image had vanished almost the moment he saw it.
“What I need,” he told me with a sigh, “is a pair of those golden wings like founders of religions, great philosophers, Buddha himself and some of his disciples, wings that allowed them to ‘take off’ and fly over the world. Without them, a mere mortal like you or me can never hope to be up to the task.”
“Even Paul d’Ampère?” I asked him.
He looked embarrassed by the question, repeated Paul d’Ampère’s name several times, then, after a long silence, said:
“I know him only from his work and from what you’ve told me about him. An individual as exceptional as him—erudite, sensitive and with his experience of suffering—would probably have acquired those wings and been able to fly. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had found the end of the parable, except that he was a Westerner.”
“I don’t see the connection.” My voice had a slightly shaky quality.
“Our imagination is dictated by who we are. It seems to me that finding the end of a teaching like that requires an entirely oriental mind, far beyond dissertations on the outside world, explorations of human conscience and earthly passions, beyond the unpredictable beauty of an isolated sentence or image …”
I brought an abrupt end to the visit, not even letting him finish what he was saying. I even ran to get away, because I was so exasperated by the way he talked about Paul d’Ampère. Whatever we do, we’re still just “Westerners” to them! Among themselves they can have hatred, wars and massacres, but they know each other, understand each other and never think of each other as foreigners.
I can’t remember whether I slammed the door or how I got out onto the street, but I do know my whole body was shaking, on the brink of hysteria, and I had to sit down at the bottom of the steps for God knows how long. Then I went home on foot, dragging my feet beneath icy rain, which reminded me of that sad night coming out of hospital in Peking when I wandered like a sleepwalker in a state of immense loneliness. When I reached Concordia, tortured by an appalling migraine, I locked myself in my room and stayed in bed for three days, more dead than alive. Since that day I’ve never set foot in the Tibetan department again. At a stroke, I sloughed off the three languages (Chinese, Tumchooq and Tibetan) that I had learnt for the sake of someone I loved, someone who had disappeared in the meantime; languages which had come to be—and would remain—prisons in which I shut myself away.
My renunciation of three Asian languages began a slow eradication of my memories of Tumchooq, perhaps even a decline in my love for him. The fact that he was not with me hurt less: my heartache was abating. The only thing that survived was my pleasure in