TE23 Double Feature

Sandrine Collette

The Forests

So, going up to the mirror, he understood that the world would have won if he became the animal he saw in the reflection. If he stuck to eating straight out of the pan, reheating at random whatever gruel he found among the cans, dipping his hands into it then wiping them on his sleeves, and when his sleeves became revolting, on his trouser legs, already splattered with stains; he ignored the fact that now there were Mathilde and Augustine, and that he owed them some sort of restraint, of the sort that would keep him from scratching himself like some beast simply because it itched, or from opening his fly to piss whenever he felt like it, and wherever, or from no longer washing, from stinking and not giving a damn, from rolling in the mud with Blind Boy simply because there was nothing else to do. He would become less than a man if he stopped talking, if he stopped hoping, if he stopped setting himself a tiny goal every day; if 84

he closed the door to the attic and simply waited for Mathilde to bring him some food while he just stayed there lying on the old floor—eating, sleeping, moaning, starting all over again the next day, and the day after that, and every day that followed.

And that wouldn’t do.

* * *

That was why he forced himself to get up, even though he was worn out, even though his very skin ached and wanted to stay on the floor—that was how he saw himself, like a pig wallowing in the mire dreaming of only one thing, never to move again, its back in the shit and its belly offered to the sun and the butcher’s knife, and one day it would be killed, that was all it was good for, to feed something else, and even then—it would smell of silt, and peat, and ruin, it would smell of evil and no one would want to eat it. 85