this she can’t help but wonder whether it isn’t she who is being visited, scrutinized, and subdued by her memories rather than the other way around.
ONE
2. Today, like yesterday and the day before, when night falls, Utiwonze, Uwera, and Shema come out of their holes to keep watch together. Niko, who himself is being watched by the monkeys, observes them from the opening to the cave. According to a rule that no one tries to justify, the piles of stones beneath which these three live should be seen as houses. What one really shouldn’t think about are the mounds indicating the fresh graves. The whole thing should be considered a village whose name, Iwacu, exists nowhere other than inside Niko’s mind.
3. Niko saw the other three people who live here in addition to the monkeys arrive one after another. Uwitonze came first, followed by Uwera. Shema was the last one to appear.
4. The cave is located at the top of the hill, which is itself an island. It lies in the center of a lake whose entire perimeter can be seen from the promontory.
5. If a stranger were to appear in the middle of Iwacu, he would surely ask himself a few pointless questions. He would wonder whether a pile of stones becomes a house by the simple fact of sheltering a human being. He wouldn’t understand why these three individuals remain consistently mute and burrowed inside their shelters as long as the sun hasn’t yet vanished below the horizon. He’d be astonished to find no trace of a path or a harbor on the island, as if coming and going were out of the question here. The intruder would be surprised to notice that in order to penetrate the three little mounds of earth you have to crawl feet first, like a snake moving in reverse. The troublemaker would end up thinking that Uwitonze, Uwera, and Shema are here as runaways. He’d assume that the houses of Iwacu look like graves so as not to attract any attention. That’s why there’s never any fire. And that’s also why the three inhabitants are attached to the silence, the disconnection, and the thinness that turn them into living abstractions. Proud of his analysis, the stranger disappears the way he’d come, without any warning.
6. “Dear bystander, if you are in as much of a hurry as this stranger you should follow him and vanish as well. This is the best time, for after these lines it won’t be as easy for you as it is now to leave.”
7. The cave contains the source of a much sought-after hot water spring. No one has seen it because entering is taboo. Indeed, it is said that offenders will even be punished by being permanently swallowed up by the cave’s wafting breath. Water collects in a basin that has formed a little lower on the side of the hill. It cleanses everything, even gullibility. At least that’s what the most trustworthy springs have always confirmed.
8. Among other pieces of evidence, the perils of the cave and the efficacy of its water are recognized both by the most respected therapists and the most ancient tales.
9. Besides the water, at the entrance of the cave where the daylight begins to make way for darkness, there is a print the length of a hefty adult male’s foot. Here, too, tales provide the best information since no one is supposed to have come close enough to the cave to have seen this outline. The footprint, the story says, is that of a king who lived at a time when God still dwelled inside the entrails of monkeys. His size and strength gave him everything that his birth had forgotten to offer him. According to the legend, it was while he was visiting his land that the king passed through the island. And he put his signature on the property by striking the soil with his powerful foot inside the shelter so that the rain wouldn’t erase the imprint. Ever since then, on the night that they are to become men, boys come here to ask the footprint for the strength and courage with which to mark their own life as the giant king had marked the ground. It’s the only night that anyone is allowed to disembark on the island, climb to the summit, approach the cave, and draw a little of its miraculous water.
10. That is why the island is the only place where the soil has retained its true color while blood drenched the rest of the country. Niko must have thought it a safe place to be when he came there to live.
11. Niko doesn’t believe the story of the giant king. His experience and his imagination have constructed an entirely different version. The day he became a man and came to say the ritual prayer before the footprint, he didn’t heed the advice he was given. He entered the cave, although he’d been told that he shouldn’t, under any circumstances, either look at or approach it too closely. They had guaranteed him that he’d run the risk of being sucked up and he would disappear for good. Besides, Gaspard had added, it wasn’t just a risk, but a certainty, for all the known tales were adamant on that point: none of those who’d been too curious or foolhardy had ever come back.
12. In spite of all these warnings Niko couldn’t resist the urge to take a few steps inside the cave, or else curiosity and regret would have killed him. On that particular night, by the light of the torch they’d made for him to avert animals and demons, he’d moved forward into the darkness, holding his breath in terror. He’d barely begun to advance when he saw a shadow flee ahead of him. As he ran, the vision made him give free rein to the fear he’d been able to control until then. The size of the cave echoed the sound of his steps that, multiplied tenfold, made him run even faster, and he sweated as he’d never done before. Once outside, he realized he’d dropped the torch but didn’t dare go back into the cave to find it. When he returned to the village he told them that he’d been forced to throw it at an animal that was threatening him.
13. Could there be a link between the fate that constitutes a life, a secret breath that might guide its trials and errors? Is it possible that in reality life has a direction that everyone simply follows? Why was it that Niko, who would find refuge in the cave later on, defied the taboo of entering it?
14. Niko didn’t tell anyone about his adventure. He’d committed a desecration, and if on top of that he’d broadcast his audacity he would have been severely punished. But his experience in the cave continued in his innermost thoughts. What was that creature that had run away from him? It wasn’t any ghost or monster, for it wasn’t anywhere near as big as he. Of that he was certain. Perhaps it was only a cat or a rat that had terrified him so. That hypothesis made him think again of his mad dash to the cave’s entrance that now seemed painfully ridiculous. Was it to exorcise this shame that he returned to the cave?
15. Niko also remembers the reverberation his footsteps had made, which gave him the feeling of being in an infinite hollow. An echo whose muffled and interminable vibrations continued to resonate inside his head for years. Had he returned to the cave to overcome that insistent vibration?
16. The night he’d felt that shameful fear he’d left the cave too quickly to know what it looked like. Judging by the sound, he was sure it was immense, and his imagination had done the rest. At first he pictured the cave as the entrance to an unknown subterranean village of which the hill and the island were merely the roof. But soon this theory seemed too basic to him. Before long he preferred thinking that the cave was simply the beginning of a path allowing you to travel to the center of the earth, and in reality the latter was only a superimposed infinity of worlds. A secret passage. The cave would have to go very deep and come out above the clouds of another world. Similarly, when his imagination rose above the clouds, it ended up encountering a vault that was nothing other than the floor of a new world. That idea pleased Niko and in these new universes he could let his imagination run wild. This elsewhere, which in his mind was fleshed out more every day, became so interesting in the end that he spent most of his time there. Nothing is more delightful, he’d say when he came back to himself, than living inside a universe you have created.
17. There was no light in the world whose entrance Niko was so happy to have discovered. Life was expressed in the form of vibrations that governed three different states: rest, action, and meditation. The beings living there were shaped like bubbles floating from one state to the next according to a spontaneously balanced distribution. Thus, everyone was always at ease.
Niko liked thinking he was one of those bubbles. Nothing is more delicious than being an element of a world you have invented yourself, he kept saying. Was it to escape from those who found his reveries too disquieting and to live fully inside his head that Niko had chosen to find refuge inside this cave?
18.