the war, of the occupation, of Luc also. What had started as a blunt revelation was developing now like a theorem in geometry, taking on the shape of what people used to call fate. Besides, it could be said in everyday words: Luc was him again, there was no mortality, we were all immortals.
“All immortals, old man. Nobody’d been able to prove it, and it had to happen to me, and on a 95 bus. Some slight imperfection in the mechanism, a crimp and doubling back of time, I mean an overlap, a re-embodiment incarnate, simultaneously instead of consecutively. Luc should never have been born until after I’d died, and on the other hand, I … never mind the fantastic accident of meeting him on a city bus. I think I told you this already, it was a sort of absolute surety, no words needed. That was that, and that was the end of it. But the doubts began afterwards, because in a case like that, you either think that you’re an imbecile, or you start taking tranquilizers. As for the doubts, you kill them off, one by one, the proofs that you’re not crazy keep coming. And what made those dopes laugh the hardest when, once in a while, I said something to them about it, well, I’ll tell you now. Luc wasn’t just me another time, he was going to become like me, like this miserable sonofabitch talking to you. You only had to watch him playing, just watch, he always fell down and hurt himself, twisting a foot or throwing his clavicle out, flushes of feeling that’d make him break out in hives, he could hardly even ask for anything without blushing horribly. On the other hand his mother would talk to you about anything and everything with the kid standing there squirming with embarrassment, the mostincredible, intimate, private … anecdotes about his first teeth, drawings he made when he was eight, illnesses … she liked to talk. The good lady suspected nothing, that’s for sure, and the uncle played chess with me, I was like family, even lending them money to get to the end of the month. No, it was easy to get to know Luc’s history, just edging questions into discussions his elders were interested in: the uncle’s rheumatism, politics, the venality of the concierge, you know. So between bishop calling check to my king and serious discussions of the price of meat, I learned about Luc’s childhood, and the bits of evidence stockpiled into an incontrovertible proof. But I want you to understand me, meanwhile let’s order another glass: Luc was me, what I’d been as a kid, but don’t think of him as the perfect copy. More like an analogous figure, understand? I mean, when I was seven I dislocated my wrist, with Luc it was the clavicle, and at nine I had German measles and he had scarlet fever, the measles had me out some two weeks, Luc was better in five days, well, you know, the strides of science, etc. The whole thing was a repeat and so, give you another example somewhat to the point, the baker on the corner is a reincarnation of Napoleon, and he doesn’t know because the pattern hasn’t changed, I mean, he’ll never be able to meet the real article on a city bus; but if in some way or another he becomes aware of the truth, he might be able to understand that he’s a repeat of, is still repeating Napoleon, that the move from being a dishwasher to being the owner of a decent bakery in Montparnasse is the same pattern as the jump from Corsica to the throne of France, and that if he dug carefully enough through the story of his life, he’d find moments that would correspond to the Egyptian Campaign, to the Consulate, to Austerlitz, he might even figure that something is going to happen to his bakery in a few years and that he’ll end on St. Helena, say, some furnishedroom in a sixth-floor walkup, a big defeat, no? and surrounded by the waters of loneliness, also still proud of that bakery of his which was like a flight of eagles. You get it?”
Well, I got it all right, but I figured that we all get childhood
“All immortals, old man. Nobody’d been able to prove it, and it had to happen to me, and on a 95 bus. Some slight imperfection in the mechanism, a crimp and doubling back of time, I mean an overlap, a re-embodiment incarnate, simultaneously instead of consecutively. Luc should never have been born until after I’d died, and on the other hand, I … never mind the fantastic accident of meeting him on a city bus. I think I told you this already, it was a sort of absolute surety, no words needed. That was that, and that was the end of it. But the doubts began afterwards, because in a case like that, you either think that you’re an imbecile, or you start taking tranquilizers. As for the doubts, you kill them off, one by one, the proofs that you’re not crazy keep coming. And what made those dopes laugh the hardest when, once in a while, I said something to them about it, well, I’ll tell you now. Luc wasn’t just me another time, he was going to become like me, like this miserable sonofabitch talking to you. You only had to watch him playing, just watch, he always fell down and hurt himself, twisting a foot or throwing his clavicle out, flushes of feeling that’d make him break out in hives, he could hardly even ask for anything without blushing horribly. On the other hand his mother would talk to you about anything and everything with the kid standing there squirming with embarrassment, the mostincredible, intimate, private … anecdotes about his first teeth, drawings he made when he was eight, illnesses … she liked to talk. The good lady suspected nothing, that’s for sure, and the uncle played chess with me, I was like family, even lending them money to get to the end of the month. No, it was easy to get to know Luc’s history, just edging questions into discussions his elders were interested in: the uncle’s rheumatism, politics, the venality of the concierge, you know. So between bishop calling check to my king and serious discussions of the price of meat, I learned about Luc’s childhood, and the bits of evidence stockpiled into an incontrovertible proof. But I want you to understand me, meanwhile let’s order another glass: Luc was me, what I’d been as a kid, but don’t think of him as the perfect copy. More like an analogous figure, understand? I mean, when I was seven I dislocated my wrist, with Luc it was the clavicle, and at nine I had German measles and he had scarlet fever, the measles had me out some two weeks, Luc was better in five days, well, you know, the strides of science, etc. The whole thing was a repeat and so, give you another example somewhat to the point, the baker on the corner is a reincarnation of Napoleon, and he doesn’t know because the pattern hasn’t changed, I mean, he’ll never be able to meet the real article on a city bus; but if in some way or another he becomes aware of the truth, he might be able to understand that he’s a repeat of, is still repeating Napoleon, that the move from being a dishwasher to being the owner of a decent bakery in Montparnasse is the same pattern as the jump from Corsica to the throne of France, and that if he dug carefully enough through the story of his life, he’d find moments that would correspond to the Egyptian Campaign, to the Consulate, to Austerlitz, he might even figure that something is going to happen to his bakery in a few years and that he’ll end on St. Helena, say, some furnishedroom in a sixth-floor walkup, a big defeat, no? and surrounded by the waters of loneliness, also still proud of that bakery of his which was like a flight of eagles. You get it?”
Well, I got it all right, but I figured that we all get childhood
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