Blog:Fabrice/Brooding by the tutelary hills

Today I am fourty-eight. I have one year left before getting older than my mother was when she passed away, like Brel, like all those people with a heart too frail to resist the encounter with a

half-century.

Y en a qui ont le cœur si frêle
Qu'on le briserait du doigt.
Y en qui ont le cœur trop frêle

Pour vivre comme toi et moi.

I am, like so many of my birthdays, like, maybe, all of them, on my own, although this time I am lonelier than I probably ever was or ever will be.

I am not brooding about the War, this time, in the solitude of my hotel, or about the dying children fallen forever asleep in their blood and toys, I am brooding about myself and . I have always known, God knows where from—from God himself, probably—I have always known that I would loose my parents at a young age, that I would loose my wife and that I would myself die young. My parents obliged. My wife decided a beautiful day of July that she didn't love me anymore. Being Spanish, she doesn't love (amar), she wants (querrer), so she doesn't want me anymore. I've also always known that the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis was after me and everybody who tries to extend their reach beyond their culture, their people, their pack of things he learned before you turn ten.

I've always said to Elena that she would 'abandon' me. That's the exact word I used, abandon. I also used it to reassure our pets, our little dog, "on va pas t'abandonner". This was all as a sordid, subconscious joke. I never really believed anybody would abandon anything. Still the trauma was lingering from the future. I was telling Elena "you'll leave me when I turn completely blind". She always emphatically denied she would ever do something so horrible. Then came a time when she started to argue that she might leave me, but never on account of me becoming invalid, but if I'd ever turn into a monster, a child molester or a criminal or whatever is .... I stopped telling her. The mere idea I could become someone who could be abandonned . Isn't it ugly to abandon even the monster?

Oh I am not a monster. I am probably not even the narcissist pervert or Asperger autist or whatever Elena's psychologues have diagnosed me, without knowing or even seeing me. I sure am an introvert. I am, after all, a fairly standard species of INTJ.

Well, I didn't see it coming, although knowing it all along, but it came the time when, like in Master and Margarita,

I don't know if I'll make it to the age of my parents. I still have a good four years before feeling this Buzzati's feeling that has haunted me since I first read it, in my teens, in the K. You remember, I already knew then that my dad would pass away soon. I also knew I'd die young. I don't know why, or how, I just know. I remember wondering if I'd ever feel this peculiar feeling. I'm still wondering this now, as I write. A few years left to know.

Well...