Gringo

VIII

THE WHITE RAY

Night was falling already.

Gringo had a choice: run through the night and perhaps get lost — or wait for the first hours before dawn and slip out, only to arrive too late as well, when the camp would already be awake.

In such moments, it was Gringo's feet that knew, and his feet felt like running. But running... one couldn't see three meters ahead.

A last ray of light pierced the forest before him, all rosy. He stopped, fixed himself before that ray as if his whole body had to fill with this ray from the West. He closed his eyes. His nostrils flared. He drank in the West: "Oh! stay-stay, hold me by your pink thread" — he had to trace an invisible path, not move, above all not move from this garland of fire he was casting from his heart through the night.

Slowly, he set out, eyes closed, hands extended. The pipa-pipa¹ with their small silver hammers rang the immense crystal of the night, flooding the darkness, enveloping Gringo in a million tinkling notes — then the insects, the crickets, the great buzzing beetles, the high, mounting stridulation. Gringo wasn't listening; he walked with slow steps, eyes still closed, listening elsewhere, deeper, still deeper, to the point of heartbreak — as if this rock of night would split and let through a sliver of light. His hands grazed smooth bark, his steps stumbled, faltered and set off again; wild branches lashed his face, the epiphytes passed clammy fingers across his forehead; he moved forward as through a curtain, one step, another step, through a sliding, burning tide — and then suddenly fell to one knee, rose again, set off again, clinging blindly to that burning point deep within, which was him, purely him, so small and so intense in this immensity of night. He walked as if to meet himself, out there, at the end... the end of what? A million sorrows and whistling nights and ages heaped like layers of black humus at the edge of vanished rivers; he followed the deep bed carved by lives and lives in vain, marches and more marches, for nothing, through forests alike — rustling, inexorable; he went on endlessly toward a small point out there, a single small something that would be warm and sweet and full, a single clearing from all these marches, a single sure point — oh! something at last, something... He sank suddenly to his waist in a muddy swamp — Ma!

¹ Pipa-pipa: frogs.

He cried out.

Then it seemed to him that a white softness enveloped him.

He pulled himself free, skirted the swamp, and that thread of West seemed to be drifting: he had to turn, to turn — he was going to lose the thread. Or was it the thread pulling him?

Gringo leaned to the left. He was no longer listening to his feet or his hands or his eyes; he was listening deep inside to this single heartbeat, this burning of being — as if he absolutely had to sink in there, as if this were the only place in the world, the only path. He descended into this crevasse of night, clutching in his hands an invisible pink thread while his steps strode over obstacles, climbed, descended, knocked against things and advanced again. He thought he was going to fall — and then it was over, he would not be able to move again, this was the night of nights — Ma!

He cried out. A tiny cry that had no sound. A cry from the limit when everything is about to be dismissed with a shrug.

He stopped.

He stood there, eyes closed, hands outstretched towards nothing. Never-never would he make it through this night.

"Go!"

Then, with a cry, Gringo seized hold of himself; he seized this whole creaking, whistling, thick night as one seizes a python by the neck, and flung himself headlong into the clammy nothing — and what did it matter! He sank body and soul into a soft, stridulating tide — there was no more Gringo. There was a sudden fissure that let through a white ray — Ma!

A third time, he cried out.

And Gringo entered the white ray. 

A motionless flame. White.

Like a gateway of fire between two pillars of night. He was that white flame.

It was so perfectly still and gentle: his whole body drank in luminous softness, stretched, dilated, opened through a million pores and small doorways of light — and through each doorway, through a million doorways like a foam of light, it spread, extended, departed in a white effervescence... motionless. Motionless as centuries and centuries can be — tranquil and gentle when all the songs have been sung and all the cries lost. A million small white windows looking through light spaces, blinking here and there and everywhere, as if the world were only this white softness touching itself everywhere, finding itself everywhere. Gringo advanced in a living, fraternal light, and nothing was jarring anymore, nothing wounded, nothing was uncertain. He went through a great night of snow, carried by a million pipa-pipa, enveloped in the soft folds of a glittering train that bore away the stars and the foam of continents and all the footsteps of creatures, with each small trembling leaf and each cry in the night.

And there was no more night anywhere.

There was no more night anywhere — no more distances, no more strangeness. The world was home. Gringo was home forever, seeing through all the doors of his body; he moved lightly among eternal kindred souls, and it was like a million joys in a single heart — of cricket, frog, or star. He stopped dead.

A smell of smoke filled his lungs.

Then he climbed into a leafy tree, sat astride a branch, and waited for dawn. And in a flash he understood: that white light was the non-death.