Crusoe’s Footprint by Patrick Chamoiseau

Author:Patrick Chamoiseau
Format: epub

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and therefore, thinking about the mirror on that day, I ran toward my main cave and started to rummage through my stores, baskets, countless boxes, chests and cases, lifting shambles of odd objects that I had not made use of, or that I had vaguely used before putting them back; despite how I may have torn through everything in a quivering fever, visiting most of my annexes, I never managed to find that illustrious shard; I exited like a madman to head to the nearest pond; while in solitude, I had also avoided ponds smooth enough to spot my silhouette in the water; this time, I looked hard in an attempt to examine this face of mine; the water was cloudy and grey during this season, and it did not reflect clearly enough to show what I had hoped to see; I came back to the cave where I grabbed a tin saucepan, I polished it as best as I could in an attempt to see myself, but the tin, dotted by salt, only reflected a vague blob; all I had left were my hands, which I used to explore this part of myself; what I felt beneath my fingertips—lips, eyebrows, nose, forehead, cheeks, chin, grimaces . . .—only caused my heart to panic; my mind recognized none of these forms that my fingers conveyed to me; I was not able to identify my face as a whole, or draw the slightest familiarity from it; my face felt completely foreign to me; I was aware that my memory lapses had erased everything about my own “person,” but such radical alterity emerging from the most fundamental part of me was difficult to accept; I lived in a stranger’s body;

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