The Past Ahead: A Novel

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T H I R T E E N 235. Niko realized that Uwitonze, Uwera, and Shema had come here only to wait for death. Nothing they do links them to life. They’re lying down most of the time, and at dusk they go out. That is all they do. 236. As if they’d agreed on it beforehand, the three of them have built their shelters side by side. They’ve made horizontal excavations in the ground, covered them with foliage and stones against the rain. From where Niko can see them, the little earthen hillocks look like ill-protected graves. 237. They stay put all day long, and only when the sun has vanished completely below the horizon do they all come out to sit at the entrance to their holes, facing the eastern constellations. That’s how, in silence, they keep watch until fatigue or weariness overcomes them and they crawl back into their hole. 238. Niko feels he lives with them and so considers the three earthen hillocks as a village of which he is a virtual inhabitant. His fear of the monkeys and his frailty don’t allow him to actually join them and dig a fourth lair beside the other three, as he would like to do. In his mind he has named the village: Iwacu, which means at home. He enjoys thinking that his idea has taken flight and reached them and that they, too, think of it in those terms. That way, both the image and the name would be the secret link between them. 239. He shares something else with them as well: resignation. Lately he’s been letting himself slip into it with a certain joy. He’s even surprised himself recently when he noticed that his mind, THE PAST AHEAD 115 once incessantly agitated by uncontrollable fantasy, is no longer struggling, has been extinguished, like a flame that darkness has defeated. The void is taking over. He no longer lays himself open to the memories that so violently obsessed him only a short while ago. 240. To endure. Nothing motivates him except a subtle warmth, a dying indication of a life perhaps already gone. 241. His outsider’s eye can clearly see that soon it’s only Uwera and Shemawhowatchatnight,barricadingtheentrancetoUwitonze’s lair. Not long thereafter Shema is alone, using his last strength to block Uwera’s hole. When it’s Shema’s turn, Niko is sorry he can’t go over to close up his hole. 242. Is it the odor of their corpses he smells or his own? 243. Are the monkeys still paying any attention to him? Why did they deal with him this way? Is it a mission? Who is behind it? In any event, he perceives that gladness is returning to the group of monkeys. Is it because they’ve finished mourning, because they no longer have to keep an eye on their prisoner? Is it because the three troublemakers aren’t there anymore? Is it because of the good weather, which makes the colors of nature come out of their recesses and the other animals out of their silence, that they’re in such a good mood? 244. Impervious to the racket the monkeys make, Niko is seized by an assault he doesn’t fight. In his body, under attack from insects , his life is gradually yielding ground. First it leaves the hands and feet, but very quickly it must retreat from every limb. Perhaps it thinks that the insects will make do with this area alone long enough for his life to regain strength and retaliate. But that doesn’t take their appetite into account, which commands them to cover the body’s entire surface, forcing Niko’s life to shrink back inward. Once there, it doesn’t wait long to hand the belly over to bad smells and put up its last bastion in the chest and head. A heart. A head. Niko is flooded with suffocating pain. 245. Is it he who spreads through the air in the form of an unbearable smell and in the ground as a viscous, blackish liquid that the sickened insects leave for the worms? 246. In a delicate, almost imperceptible movement, his heart persists in its routine. Just as slowly, his brain, overtaken by pain, contains a single query: what will come next? 116 GILBERT GATORE 247. Niko doesn’t feel he...