A
very small horse
At
home, I've raised a very small horse. He
gallops about my room. It's my
distraction.
To
begin with, I had some worries. I
wondered if he would grow up. But my
patience has paid off. His height is now
more than 53 centimetres and he eats and digests the food of an adult.
The
real problem was with Helen. Women are
complicated. A bit of manure discomfits
them. It puts them off balance, and they
don't feel like themselves.
"Such
a small rear end'" I told her, "couldn't produce very much
manure," but she... Well, so what,
now she's out of the picture.
What
worries me is something else: suddenly some days there are changes in my little
horse. Within less than an hour, his
head inflates, his back curves in and buckles, and he flaps in the breeze that
comes in the window.
Oh!
Oh!
I
wonder if he isn't tricking me, in representing himself as a horse. Even when small, a horse doesn't rise up like
a tent, or flap in the breeze, even if only for a few seconds at a time.
I
wouldn't want to have been duped, after having taken care of him for so long.
nights spent watching over him, protecting him from rats, the dangers always
nearby, and the fevers of youth.
Sometimes
he is upset to be so small. It troubles
him. Or in rut, he makes great bounds
over the chairs, and starts to whinny, to whinny hopelessly.
The
female animals in the vicinity prick up their ears, the bitches, the hens, the
mares, the mice. But that's all. "No," they decide, each one for
herself, according to her instincts, "No, it's not for me to answer." And so far, no female has answered.
My
little horse looks at me with distress, with anger in his eyes.
But
who is to blame? Is it me?
Village
of fools
Formerly
so lively, now a deserted village. A man
under an awning was waiting for the rain to stop. It had been well below freezing for months
and there were no signs of rain.
A
farmer was looking for his horse among the eggs. It had just been stolen from him. It was market day. There were innumerable eggs in innumerable
baskets. The thief had certainly
considered this as a way to discourage pursuit.
In
a room in a white house, a man was pulling a woman towards the bed.
"Stop
that!" she said. "What if I
turned out to be your father?"
"You
can't be my father," he answered, "since you're a woman. And besides, a man can't have two
fathers."
"See,
you're worried too."
He
left the house, defeated. A man in a
suit crossed his path and said, "Today, there are no more queens. It's useless to claim otherwise, there are no
more." And he went on his way, making threatening gestures.
They
want to steal my name
As
I was shaving this morning, stretching out and lifting my lips a little to have
a tauter surface, affording a good resistance to the razor, what do I see? Three gold teeth! I, who have never been to the dentist!
Ha!
Ha!
And
why?
Why?
To make me doubt myself, and then to take my name of Barnabas from me. Oh, they're pulling hard on the other side,
they're pulling and pulling.
But
I am also ready, and I hang onto it.
"Barnabas," "Barnabas," I say, softly but firmly,
and on their side, all their efforts are reduced to nothing.
The
car of the Avenue de l'Opéra
It
is a mistake to think, if you live on the Avenue de l'Opéra, that numerous cars
pass by, a mistake which in fact you don't commit. It is always the same car that passes, the
same one whose clutch is let out, that accelerates, that honks, that goes by in
second gear, that stops sharply, that goes out into rue d'Antin, that comes
back by rue Ventadour. It's because of
this car that all of us in the city are descending into neurasthenia. It's uncertain, has not yet gone by, has
already come back, it brakes in a sidestreet, it drives off at speed, and
already it is the "next" one seeking the same labyrinth. Imperious and monotonous, this is the one we
were really missing.
When
Louis XIV arrived somewhere, he liked to make a dramatic announcement of his
presence. But he never heard of such a
device for making noise. The idea was
absent. In his time, the most snobbish
person (and God knows there were plenty of snobs) couldn't have proposed a car
to him.
Athlete
in bed
Fundamentally
I am an athlete, an athlete in bed.
Don't misunderstand me--I've hardly shut my eyes and I go into
action. The thing I can do like nobody
else is diving. I don't remember ever
having seen, even in movies, a plumb-line dive like mine. At that moment, everything in me is perfectly
rigid.
And
the others, if there are competitors, don't even exist beside me. Also it's with a smile that I attend (when it
occasionally happens) sporting events.
The small faults everywhere in the execution, which do not strike the
vulgar, immediately attract the attention of the virtuoso. It's not that kind of Phelps who is going to
beat me. They don't attain real
correctness.
It's
difficult to explain the perfection of my movements. For me, they are so natural. The tricks of the trade would do me no good,
since I have never learned to dive or even to swim. I dive the way my blood flows in my
veins. Oh, slipping into the water, that
admirable slipping. One hesitates to
resurface. Who among you will understand
that it's possible to move about in the water as if at home? The real swimmers
no longer know that water is wet. The
horizons of solid ground stupefy them.
They constantly return to the bottom.
Hugh
Thomas
lives in Montréal, where he teaches mathematics at UQAM. His first solo book, Maze,
was published in 2019 by Invisible Publishing.
