Prologue
I'm creating this garden, with my words. In this garden Chloe and the olive tree were lovingly flirting.
Who am I? I think I'll find out when... either you expose me, if you can do me a favor. Or Cloe will, who has been a pro at this since the very beginning.
Chloe, I almost couldn't believe it when, like an old boxer, I waited at the door to see you appear once again. Almost as if you were rising from this olive tree in this last garden. A garden still a little disheveled, not as tidy as a beehive. You, Chloe, what are you used to?
So, emerging from the olive tree, she looked at me jauntily as if she'd always known me.
Who do you want to fight, Chloe? Who are you mad at? I ask you because
everyone's been hitting you over the head lately, not to mention the fact that nowadays in general there are many to be mad at. And I
'm here to defend you from everything, from the bastard and most asshole races in the universe, from politics, from culture, from writing. Now you understand who I'm mad at, Chloe. And you, who are you mad at? Who ruined your spring?
Chloe, let me talk. The new is appearing. I'm tired of this rotten twentieth century. The new is hidden, but that doesn't mean it's gone. It's still a sapling. While the trunk of the bastard olive tree is strong and broad even though it's rotting.
It's rotting and so it becomes more bastard with each passing day. More manure for us, Chloe. I said to her, looking slowly into her blue eyes with emerald-green highlights.
Manure, Chloe, is all you see. There's nothing but manure. Let's change the subject. Yesterday my grandmother died. I was supposed to act cheerful, but instead...
We're a virtual illusion held together by four lines. And yet my grandmother existed. She did.
Today my mother died, or yesterday I don't know... What a guy, Camus... Here, I've already copied it.
I don't know if Camus's mother really died when he wrote it, but my grandmother really did die.
She did exist.
Maybe because once upon a time, everything still existed, and today nothing exists except you, Chloe, and a few other gods and demigods.
Maybe my grandmother existed because in her time there were wood-burning stoves, the star Sirius wasn't a sidereal distance away, and, well, people still existed, come on, just like this table exists.
I knocked on the table, to remind myself that I existed.
Now it's graveyard-cold, Chloe. You must have noticed. I remember my grandmother moving like a tortoise, she was a tortoise in a garden, almost like you, but old, and you young,
and tortoises live over a hundred years, sometimes they're immortal, and you are immortal, Chloe.
(Nineteenth-century literature, how many long-winded novels. They certainly did it to warm their hands: you can feel them breathing inside their fists with every sentence.)
A certain Rigaut, who was anything but a writer, wrote that he could only write a novel if he were in prison.
Considering my era, and considering the hours I work every day under a boss, I consider myself in prison, and so I will write.
To be honest, modern work rhythms don't allow time to make peace with things, said Chloe, you know, even nature works faster, it's changing.
I don't believe it, I replied.
In fact, it's not entirely true. I worked night shifts for a while. What can be done..., she said. At the bottom of Pandora's box, hope remains..., I replied.
Who knows, maybe we'll get by by paying homage to an old myth. A myth much older than my
grandmother.
Destiny lies in solitude. Eternal solitude. I've never heard of eternal
companionship, my grandfather once said to my grandmother. And then he left her. Eternity lies in doing nothing, in becoming nobody. Eternity is still, like an arrow that will never reach
its target. And then he left her and became a tree. A bastard olive tree.
If anyone wants to do something, they'll get lost in the process, just like this novel, which will stay here forever.
