SHADOWMAN

6 October.

At nightfall, when I dispose my body to rest, an apprehension invades me with growing step and, before I surrender my brow to the pillow, I lean out the window seeking an impossible escape; the kindly dreams of the innocent do not come to me, but creatures without eyes that cast me into the mire of my own mind, crooked parables where the shepherd abandons his flock and, with my name upon his lips, fattens the wolves; there is no corner that has not been overrun by that shadowed power, for it vibrates in my blood and beats with my pulse like a war drum buried beneath the skin.

In my clumsiness I close doors that do not exist and, nonetheless, he enters through the fissures of fear like ancient smoke that knows itself master of the house; he governs pain with an unbaptized tyranny and lets fall, from invisible cellars, black thoughts, words that rot before they are born, murmurs that cling like leeches to my ear; and his claws, ah, woe is me!, are alien ideas that tear me from within, while his laughter, which is no laughter, sharpens the iron and sets it turning, with teeth as long as broken promises; when he is silent, silence grants no truce, it opens rather a pit without end and, in tongues I do not understand, it wounds; he feeds upon my guilt and upon consecrated bread, he lulls it, preserves it, turns it into a hymn with which he marches over me, and so he inhabits my veins.

If he is the guilt, I bear the cross as if it were a sick child; I try to keep him far, yet to hold back the sea with bare hands is a doomed enterprise, and the sea, insolent, drinks my salt; he reigns in pain like a monarch of saltpeter and rust, he recreates the ugliness I think of myself, the clandestine outrages with which my soul spits upon itself, and he distorts my pulse, plucking my nerves like the strings of a violin from which someone has torn the tuning. I have not seen his face; nevertheless, his breath has brushed my mouth and my nape so many times that I no longer know whether I breathe or drown; I fall, then, soaked in sweat, with lips numbed by pills and fingers yellowed by nicotine, and I let myself fall, night after night, into his lair without walls, as if I returned to a temple of shadows and saliva. Yet, at times, oh, most rare mercy!, the day rises like a luminous beast and harries the night until it trembles; it does not kill it, yet it forces it to hide beneath the stones, and I breathe with a splintered chest, not free, though alive; not redeemed, though awake.

It dawns.

And it does so as if some hand had washed the world with icy water. I return from the bottom of a well, clinging to the shore of this wearied body; I bear dark circles and a languor that scarcely sustains me; I breathe with caution, for the light enters the chamber like a beast timid and fierce at once, it licks the curtains, it wounds the suspended dust, and it names me with a golden tongue that does not forgive. I hear the rumor of the house that wakes in pieces, the wood that creaks like an ancient bone, the kettle that whistles with a grandmother’s patience, and the heart, poor uncertain musician, that rehearses another meter, another obedience. I rise; the damp sheet keeps the map of the night, islands of sweat where I was lost; yet the morning, stubborn as a prayer that does not abdicate, places in my hands a glass of water and a parable: if the sea fits in a shell, fear also fits in a word; and if a live coal lights the hearth of an entire people, a smallest gesture sets the blood aright. I look at my fingers, they still keep the nicotine of defeat, and yet they tremble with a different tremor, branches after the storm, still soaked, yet obstinate in living. I order that tea be brought; the steam coils in the air like a white serpent that does not bite, but blesses; the first sip leaves upon my tongue the slight cross of an invisible monk; the bitterness opens a door and, behind it, I hear a courtyard of new voices. I go out barefoot; the floor, cold as an oath; the world answers with birds that exercise their throats upon the wires, with a distant dog that barks at memory so it will not sleep, with a tree that shakes its leaves to expel the ghosts that escorted me; I understand then that the nocturnal tyrant does not reign here, that light does not battle, it occupies, and its victory consists in remaining.

I speak to myself a name that is not insult, but promise; the skin learns it as a true language; guilt persists, yes, although now it possesses an edge by which to seize it, a rope with which to tie it to the post of the day. I walk toward the mirror, I am no wonder, and, nonetheless, I keep a spark; I am no saint, yet I carry a thread of air that does not break; I wash my face and the water loosens scales of shadow, diminutive fables in each drop, a fish returning to the river, a bell summoning those who only feigned to be dead. I open the window, the murmur from without enters, the steps of the servants, the cries in the stables, my father’s carriage which, each day, departs from Linlithgow toward St Michael; it is a world that ignores my war and, nevertheless, sustains its own. I seem to hear the market that raises its curtain of fruit and voices; the sun writes its daily letter upon the façade. In that division of small duties, in that coming and going of what is simple, I discover that life rehearses with me a liturgy of restitution; not music of polished beauty, but of truth that breathes.

I take my daybook; I draw a clumsy line, then another; I accept clumsiness as one accepts the scar that returns the pulse; while the ink settles, I understand that I am not free, yet I am underway; that I am not saved, yet I keep direction; and that fear, that horse which last night dragged me over the stones, at dawn consents that I touch its back and admits a bridle made of bread and patience. With the house in its low continuo, the tea still warm, and the air newly washed, I advance toward the day, entering a church without marble or stained glass, a church of flesh and dust whose only rite is persistence and whose only god who tends us is the light, inexhaustible in its return.

Supplication.

Lord and my God, who weigh the souls in secret, grant me this night a rest without siege; keep from the threshold of my bed the shadow man, or gentle his step like the wolf that recognizes the shepherd’s staff; if my flesh trembles in the same ember where pain and delight are confounded, do not count me reprobate, rather look upon me with pity and pardon, for none loves without wounding who lives in a mortal body; set balm upon my brow, silence in my veins, a humble lamp beside my name, and if temptation must return, let it return disarmed; grant me, Lord, the gift of sleep and the grace to wake without shame, that tomorrow I may bless thee with clean lips and a pacified heart.

I dedicate this work to you, shadowman. You know it’s yours.