.

only really listened to the sounds of my father and brother as they went down the stairs on their way to work. Oh how that stairway seemed to twist and turn like a snail’s shell, spiralling down into the centre of the earth as their beautiful youth and their freedom sank further and further into it.

      Beneath the earth, they disappeared without actually dying. Still they ate and they moved like the living. This is the image that obsessed me.

      “Goodness, you’re squirming just like a worm! Will you please sit still!”

      As I approached the table, I knew they were opening a metal box to take out their frozen sandwiches. It made me lose my appetite, thinking they might be eating right next to the buried corpse. I still remember how cold his skin was to my touch. His skin white as satin.

      “Come on, eat up! Your food will be cold!” said my big sister, her face thin and worn.

      Our eyes met and told of all our pain... Our descent into hell.

      I never really existed anywhere but there, in that underground place, where the miners and dead men mingle and meet.

      I was never in my body, as it moved around. Not at home nor at school. I was where my father and brother lived, where my brother-in-law-to-be lay sleeping, three men with no future. Like them, I lived at the bottom of the earth.

      One day, as he came home, bowed over, my big brother said, “You dance so well, I’m going to get you lessons...”

      I had always dreamed of this, soft and supple movements sweeping harmoniously through space suddenly filled with such beauty and grace.

      Yet I said no. I thought, “I won’t dance on the earth, while you suffer beneath it.”

      I also turned down singing lessons, drawing and theatre, without telling him why. Deep inside, I said to myself, “I won’t sail my voice over the earth when the silence of mines makes you mute. I won’t awaken bright colours while you live in darkness. I won’t take on other lives when you cannot live yours. I’ll feel less guilty if I do nothing at all.”

      The picture of me playing on the surface while he spat out his life far below paralysed me.

      “I’d love to hear you sing when I come back from work. And listen to your poems too. It would do me good, you know.”

      I did that for him, because he needed me to, without accepting his offer of lessons paid for with his sweat in the indelible dark.

      I did it all by instinct. I needed only to close my eyes. Then I could imagine the movements, the words, stories, brutal disappearances and magic apparitions. I erupted like a Jack-in-a-box! I didn’t move... I bounded. Instead of walking, I skipped, held in place by a tightly wound spring of contained anguish. A spring like a drill spinning into torn flesh. Tearing me. My tears. I had been drilled, gutted.

      At the end of the spring danced a bright-coloured puppet no one ever thought might be hurting. It may have seemed like enthusiasm, but those bursts were a death-rattle, the exuberant makeup was outlined with blood, and everyone was fooled, not least the puppet herself...

      My energy came from hidden wellsprings deep in the earth where the dead sleep, and life ought to begin.

      The puppet swung and dipped to keep despair off-balance, to beguile those dying of boredom at the surface because they know only too well what is happening below.

      And there I was at every click, every signal someone gave, every request and reproach and accusation and sudden sound and clapper. Out of my black box I sprang, hardly bigger than the lunch-box of freezing sandwiches carried by starving miners. Nourishing dreams became vital to me. With illusions, if need be. With the energy of despair, if need be.

      I plunged into the lives of others with peals of feigned joy. Unpredictable, incoherent, inarticulate, excessive from being held down, held in.

      Living submerged in oneself costs far too much...

      Living outside myself in that otherwhere I had appointed as my ascetic retreat.

      “There you go. You’re in the clouds again!” someone grumbled.

      Not in the clouds, in stone.

      And in the sunlight of a July morning, the young neighbour singing on his way to work. We all called him Gazou because he trilled like a bird. Life and love to him were still wondrous games, and he lived outside the narrow rules of morality and duty.

      He sang as though he were happy and free! Then I never heard his voice again. My brother said a gut-wrenching scream was the last thing he uttered.

      “Go up to the board and write down what I just said” repeated my teachers, one after another, as I grew up.

      Motionless, silent, face to the board, so close to clay and slate.

      Time passed. They dynamited the mine, always at the same time; but I still jumped every time.

      A detonation, tearing into my gut.

      All mines filled me with horror! I pitied those who worked in them, coated in the smell of misery and resignation. Counting every breath to make sure it wasn’t the last!

      I’d have loved to wrap them in love, help them forget the depths of injustice they had to plumb. They worked to put bread on the tables for kids like me, powerless to assuage their condition, even as they began to resist the mounting deaths it caused.

      A sudden stop to the explosions.

      No more dynamiting!

      The strike of the starving had begun!

      The Asbestos Strike.

      Billy-club time.

      Armed police beat the rebellious miners, fracturing the skulls of my brother’s and father’s friends. The papers showed their ravaged faces. Proud men came out of their hole, stood upright and demanded their rights, then were broken, little people born to misery, playthings of a cruel fate. Hard, black bread, the kind you eat first to get it over with... and because there’s nothing else. The injustice turned my stomach.

      Fate strikes, again and again!

      Dry snap of the box closing on impossible promises. I open the case again, take out the engagement ring, slip it on my finger to promise myself to death wearing the magnificent face of the lost...

      Life wore that of my inconsolable sister.

      “Please repeat the question I just asked you” said the teacher.

      “Which one?”

      “You’re just a regular little Jack-in-a-box, now, aren’t you?”

      “You asked me what a spring was, but I don’t know. I don’t have one any more. The Jack-in-a-box is broken, the puppet on a spring doesn’t work any more. I can’t entertain you any more...”

      “Stop talking nonsense and go to the board.”

      Again I obey. I take the black chalk of sweat from all the dark-slated mines and begin to write. Black-on-black. Draw my life on the board. Black-on-black! Like the eye of a blind man pressed up against the night.

      Thus began this silence of mine where words are swallowed up...

      Face to the blackboard.

      On the very edge of the gulf between slate and chalk. A huge hole where words disappear without ever being spoken. Where lips close forever without uttering that very murmur of truth which is life.

      In this silence of mine, one must not dig too deep...

      Better stop... come back up. No more spring of hard energy to surprise and amuse...

      The puppet rests in peace and gives birth to a woman who takes her first steps outside the Jack’s box to find the beauty of day after years of night. Such long darkness underground...

      Forward, one step at a time, hoping to find my other self in light, a sister painting in the sunshine. Perhaps, in the foreground,