me from the inside like poison and spread into the hollow of my left hand, where it formed a concentration of sharper, more intense pain, while my left leg stiffened, then the whole left side of my body, with a sort of cramp which I tried to release by changing position.
From one end of that plateau to the other I ambled like the giraffe I saw as a child under the big top of a circus; fired up by the music, it danced around the ring under a garland of coloured lights. In my feverish agitation, that distant memory marked the beginning of a transference which came to a head when the boatman brought me a bowl of a dark-coloured drink, probably a decoction of medicinal herbs, and I thought I heard an animal squeal coming from my own bitter mouth. It wasn’t me crying out, but the giraffe dying at the foot of the cliff, sacrificed by the Dogons, who then put its head on a pillory; unless it was the cry of the man in the sutra who, once on a moonless night, fell from a cliff.
Niger, never-ending Niger! My African boat was deteriorating as pitifully as my own physical and moral state with every metre of the river it covered. I didn’t get up for a whole week, staring at the sky and constantly reciting the text from the Tumchooq manuscript. Its simple words—strange, tender, often monosyllabic—resonated like a gentle incantation, giving me the illusion that I was flying up to the clouds, diving into the water, sliding between the aquatic plants, where my body dissolved and my flesh fell away. From time to time the old boatman intoned a Malian song, our voices overlapping, our two ancient languages in harmony. He tended me with his traditional infusions, with varying degrees of success, until we reached Segu, where he took me to a hospital, which immediately transferred me to Bamako, and from there I was repatriated to France, bringing an end to my short-lived humanitarian career. Perhaps that was written in my fate.
3
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SORT OF TROPIcal disease I’d contracted and the doctors had no clearer idea. My recovery was as swift as it was mysterious, and its only after-effect was a long period of depression following my hospitalisation in Paris.
Still this phase was punctuated by various achievements and broken up by bouts of enthusiasm, but the depression was always latent and reared back up from time to time, as regular as the breathing of the unknown demon that inhabited me, paralysing me for days on end. I was pinned to my bed, shut away in my “glass menagerie,” as I called my modest one-bedroom apartment, whose walls I had entirely covered with gilt-framed mirrors. (Buying a flat would have dispelled my constant anxiety about eventually dying on the street, but property ownership was far beyond my means and I had to make do with renting.) My own diagnosis was that my depressive state was due just as much to my unfortunate experiences, one in China and one in Mali, as to my obtaining the highly competitive agrégation teaching qualification and being given a job at a lycée in Nice, two events I felt, more or less consciously, were betrayals of Tumchooq.
By now I was thirty-two and could already see what I would be like at sixty, or even on the eve of my death: shrivelled, fragile, toothless, almost bald, surrounded by shoe boxes full of payment slips from social security, tax invoices, pension statements, insurance certificates, bills for the phone, electricity, plumbers and travel agencies, rent receipts, bank statements, warranties and guarantees, all neatly sorted and filed in chronological order. My ossified life was set to the rhythm of weekly phone calls from my family, disastrous Christmases, unsuccessful presents, weekly shopping, constantly postponed pay rises, arguments with colleagues or neighbours, in a word all the complications of human relationships. My glass menagerie was on the Rue des Terres au Curé (a bleak name evoking an impecunious curates measly plot of land), and I saw its apparently anodyne number, 77, as a premonition of the venerable age I would reach before breathing my last.
My windows overlooked a fish market and every morning the rumble of delivery lorries, the vendors’ cries and above all the fetid stench of the sea infiltrated my bedroom, where the countless mirrors in their gold filigreed frames flashed and shone in silent competition, bouncing back multiple images of me, huddled in