chisel, the accuracy of your hammering, those shards cluttering up the plank and the trestle, those stones which are coming apart, millimetre by millimetre. In a few hours youâll be sliding through the wet grass like a worm. Shirtless, shoeless, kneeling at the top of the scaffolding with your head almost touching the ceiling, bathed in sweat, you hammer away like a deaf man on the rough, off-white surface of the mortar and each blow echoes inside you with a longdrawn-out, strident intensity, with an obsessive rhythm â¦
Months and months, all that pointless effort? As if he had such powerfully rooted habits, or rather, a stubborn wish to go on; whatever the cost, to go to the very limits of his own misery, his own weakness. A decision taken once and for all to be entirely and only that absence, that hollow, that mould, the duplicator, false creator and mechanical agent of works of the past. Those clever hands, that precise knowledge of what erosion means to paint, his skill and craft. What did he want? Guilty or not guilty â¦
Sometimes, in spite of himself, his hands, his neck, shoulders and ankles shook, seized up, got cramp. He pressed on with clenched teeth, sometimes making a rough whistling sound, absorbed in his struggle, as if he were no longer capable of stopping, as if all his life had migrated to the flat, shiny blade of the chisel with which he was pummelling the mortar like a machine, had migrated into his painful, overdone, ever more tense movements and which with every second, with every minute, were loosening, unfixing the stone that would become a new door open onto the night.
The bedazzlement of life. From deep down in his consciousness rise the snows of Altenberg, the banners floating over the Olympic piste, the huzzahs of the crowd. And then the same fatigue and that feeling of peace. How beautiful he found those first steps towards conquest, the horizon suddenly coming into view after a long nightâs march. A small party of four or five men, barely a rope. Sunrise near the top of the Jungfrau. The suddenly revealed view of the Alps, on the other side of the mountain. The watershed. As if it had all hung on the suddenly friendly and familiar presence of the sun. Near. Because it was cold or because theyâd had to walk a long way to see it? Because his climb had been nothing more than the desperate call of that radiance â¦
Why not understand? And why should he have forgotten? Then one by one the masks had come: meeting Jérôme, getting settled in Geneva. An absurd memory. Altenberg and its too fresh snow, a thousand slivers of light, the proud accumulation of layers beneath the apparent protection of the iced-over surface that glinted in the sunlight. Altenberg, whose traces lay in him like ski-tracks: parallel headlong lines accompanied by a quincunx pattern of roundels, slightly inclined towards the direction of travel, made by ski-sticks scraping their steel tips visibly if minutely, and more or less deeply, on the snow.
Those vanishing, intertwining tracks, still sharp or else half rubbed out, each of which compacted the snow, solidified the ground, made it less and less fragile, less and less deceptive, just as â in the present â memories rose up in him, intertwined and vanished,strengthening his approach, and, like those pistes that were too hard for him to tackle, leaving immaculate, hostile landscapes of virgin snow on the north slope, offering wide open spaces that were waiting for him. Every instant, now, beyond the snow, beyond his memories, the paltry image of his own death rose up, the image of his fate, of his ridiculous saga, and the sickening grimaces of the masks. Twenty years had gone by. A hundred forged paintings, or more â¦
And here you are, at the present time, with your life in your hands, wallowing neck-high in your own story, and more lost in your memories than you ever were before. A tear wells up, youâre so touched by your own
Months and months, all that pointless effort? As if he had such powerfully rooted habits, or rather, a stubborn wish to go on; whatever the cost, to go to the very limits of his own misery, his own weakness. A decision taken once and for all to be entirely and only that absence, that hollow, that mould, the duplicator, false creator and mechanical agent of works of the past. Those clever hands, that precise knowledge of what erosion means to paint, his skill and craft. What did he want? Guilty or not guilty â¦
Sometimes, in spite of himself, his hands, his neck, shoulders and ankles shook, seized up, got cramp. He pressed on with clenched teeth, sometimes making a rough whistling sound, absorbed in his struggle, as if he were no longer capable of stopping, as if all his life had migrated to the flat, shiny blade of the chisel with which he was pummelling the mortar like a machine, had migrated into his painful, overdone, ever more tense movements and which with every second, with every minute, were loosening, unfixing the stone that would become a new door open onto the night.
The bedazzlement of life. From deep down in his consciousness rise the snows of Altenberg, the banners floating over the Olympic piste, the huzzahs of the crowd. And then the same fatigue and that feeling of peace. How beautiful he found those first steps towards conquest, the horizon suddenly coming into view after a long nightâs march. A small party of four or five men, barely a rope. Sunrise near the top of the Jungfrau. The suddenly revealed view of the Alps, on the other side of the mountain. The watershed. As if it had all hung on the suddenly friendly and familiar presence of the sun. Near. Because it was cold or because theyâd had to walk a long way to see it? Because his climb had been nothing more than the desperate call of that radiance â¦
Why not understand? And why should he have forgotten? Then one by one the masks had come: meeting Jérôme, getting settled in Geneva. An absurd memory. Altenberg and its too fresh snow, a thousand slivers of light, the proud accumulation of layers beneath the apparent protection of the iced-over surface that glinted in the sunlight. Altenberg, whose traces lay in him like ski-tracks: parallel headlong lines accompanied by a quincunx pattern of roundels, slightly inclined towards the direction of travel, made by ski-sticks scraping their steel tips visibly if minutely, and more or less deeply, on the snow.
Those vanishing, intertwining tracks, still sharp or else half rubbed out, each of which compacted the snow, solidified the ground, made it less and less fragile, less and less deceptive, just as â in the present â memories rose up in him, intertwined and vanished,strengthening his approach, and, like those pistes that were too hard for him to tackle, leaving immaculate, hostile landscapes of virgin snow on the north slope, offering wide open spaces that were waiting for him. Every instant, now, beyond the snow, beyond his memories, the paltry image of his own death rose up, the image of his fate, of his ridiculous saga, and the sickening grimaces of the masks. Twenty years had gone by. A hundred forged paintings, or more â¦
And here you are, at the present time, with your life in your hands, wallowing neck-high in your own story, and more lost in your memories than you ever were before. A tear wells up, youâre so touched by your own
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