The Silence of the Spirits. Wilfried N'Sondé

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      Christelle casually continued on her way to Gare de Lyon. She was welcomed into the anonymous, hurried mass of commuters, whose eardrums are overwhelmed by the chaotic concert of announcements and information spewing out of loudspeakers, accompanied by the noise of shoes beating the floor in a steady rhythm. In this familiar setting, Christelle acted by instinct, walking as she usually would, head down, back slightly bent, accustomed to the mask of rush hour on exhausted faces with no smiles that kept moving past her. An interminable parade of features, colors, clothes, sizes, thousands of destinies meeting for a fraction of a second, blank stares colliding for an instant and then ignoring each other forever. Every day, Christelle heard the depressing echo of these silences. She kept walking, her pace dictated by the hustle and bustle of the crowd. Dazzled by the overpowering, blinding neon lights, she squinted and then looked up to verify the times. Always on the move, a prisoner of the rapid chaotic swell. Impossible to stop herself. The clickety clack of train stations going by at an unheard-of pace on the display panel until it suddenly stopped on a destination, a number or a letter indicating the platform. At the shrill sound of the train horn, a human tide would converge on the same escalator. Christelle participated in this merciless mad rush twice a day. It worked. Everyone just got swallowed up by cars in haphazard gulps, a chaotic ballet of automatons, exhausted from their daily work.

      The crowd carried Christelle to the train that was waiting for her. Accustomed to the routine, she was among the first to enter and quickly find a seat. Discreet, never wanting to disturb anyone, she found a seat in the middle of the car, farthest away from the draft. She sat with her back to the direction in which the train was traveling. She sank all the weight of her exhausted body onto the seat, ready to savor the ever-so-slight feeling of getting away.

      She was surprised when she recognized the melancholic young man she had passed on the Pont d’Austerlitz much earlier.

      I was sitting in front of her, terrified, with even more pain and bitterness in my expression. She saw that I was frightened! Christelle carefully scrutinized my tormented face and my pupils, dilated from anxiety, then closed her eyes.

      THE DAY ON the bridge, a broken soul, I was not dreaming. Squinting beneath the setting sun, my gaze had simply gotten lost in the river’s filth. Horrible images of war and flames were rumbling deep down inside me. At times, I was thinking of Marcelline and the rare honeymoon hours of our childhood, my lips on her shoulder, the tender taste of the first quivers that are never spoken. These treasures with her, I secretly cherished them. Her absence was making my heart bleed, constantly reminding me of what I had become, a pathetic reflection of humanity, inconsequential, a shipwrecked victim of happiness . . . An illegal alien!

      An infinite silence in my soul, an abyss, beyond fear and doubt, a sharp pain in the gut, immense uncertainty, worse than a feeling of malaise. Emptiness, absolute despair.

      Every day, I kept a low profile in Paris, walking with my head down and staring at my feet to avoid looking in front of me. I had forgotten all about the dream, which risked ending up in bureaucracy, a file with some numbers stamped on it. I was running away, heading nowhere, to avoid being detained, confined behind bars, with wrists and ankles handcuffed, accused of having tried everything, defied every unimaginable danger, flirted with death a thousand times, suffered everyone’s contempt, and all I wanted was simply to live! A misdemeanor of hope, a crime of dreams, of better days! The last few months, I had been living a nightmare with no future in sight. From early morning until late afternoon, I spent sleepless nights in insalubrious places, ten or more of us occupying a few square meters. The misery I was carrying around was especially noticeable in my resignation and lack of self-esteem.

      I wandered for hours on foot or bicycle in the scorching July heat or during the worst November days. Unnoticed. I saw walls everywhere, even inside me! I had escaped my country in filthy clothes, there where you were dying slowly but surely, anywhere, at any given moment! In Paris, I had become yet another anonymous soul among the worst dregs of society, broken, to be swept away by any means, in an airplane or to a camp, with police vans, police officers with clear consciences, clubs, and despised by everyone. An illegal immigrant.

      The day I met Christelle, I had spent the afternoon on a public bench. As usual, I was basically staying out of sight to avoid the looks that made me feel like a pariah. I was waiting it out, trying to escape by blending the unbearable images of my past with the gray sky and the concrete, with the cacophony of the deafening metallic sounds of the street. I was fighting a losing battle against the cold, this venomous, loyal daily companion, distilled by this world that never failed to close its doors to me and had nothing to offer me. Sitting on the bench, I would occasionally caress the cold change for the meal of the day, a baguette or a tin of sardines, that I held firmly in my hands, buried in my pants pockets.

      That same morning, a former militia comrade had asked me to move out after having put me up for almost a month. His wife refused to keep bumping into me in the apartment during СКАЧАТЬ