THE RENEGADE
19
white-hot metal of the sky, a mouth voluble as mine, constantly vomit–
ing rivers of flame over the colorless desert. On the trail in front
of me, nothing, no cloud of dust on the horizon, behind me they
must be looking for me, no, not yet, it's only in the late afternoon
that they opened the door and I could go out a little, after having
spent the day cleaning the House of the Fetish, set out fresh offer–
ings, and in the evening the ceremony would begin, in which I was
sometimes beaten, at others not, but always I served the Fetish, the
Fetish whose image is engraved in iron in my memory and now in
my hope also. Never had a god so possessed or enslaved me, my
whole life day and night was devoted to him, and pain and the
absence of pain, wasn't that joy, were due him and even, yes, desire,
as a result of being present, almost every day, at that impersonal
and nasty act which I heard without seeing it inasmuch as I now
had to face the wall or else be beaten. But my face up against the
salt, obsessed by the bestial shadows moving on the wall, I listened
to the long scream, my throat was dry, a burning sexless desire
squeezed my temples and my belly as in a vise. Thus the days fol–
lowed one another, I barely distinguished them as if they had lique–
fied in the torrid heat and the treacherous reverberation from the
walls of salt, time had become merely a vague lapping of waves in
which there would burst out, at regular intervals, screams of pain
or possession, a long ageless day in which the Fetish ruled as this
fierce sun does over my house of rocks, and now as I did then, I
weep with unhappiness and longing, a wicked hope consumes me,
I want to ·betray, I lick the barrel of my gun and its soul inside, its
soul, only guns have souls--oh, yes! the day they cut out my tongue,
I learned to adore the immortal soul of hatred!
What a jumble, what a rage,
gra gra,
drunk with heat and
wrath, lying prostrate on my gun. Who's panting here? I can't en–
dure this endless heat, this waiting, I must kill him. Not a bird, not
a blade of gra$, stone, an arid desire, their screams, this tongue
within me talking, and, since they mutilated me, the long, flat, de–
serted suffering deprived even of the water of night, the night of
which I would dream, when locked in with the god, in my den of
salt. Night alone with its cool stars and dark fountains could save
me, carry me off at last from the wicked gods of mankind, but even
locked up I could not contemplate it.
If
the newcomer tarries more,
