patriceARNOUD

What's the origin of this nagging shoulder pain I've been carrying around for too long?

Could it be due to these bike rides on goat paths - goats disguised as sheep - where only my legs and my head are moving along the Tensift, the wadi that used to serve as a sewer in the northern districts of Marrakech? The jbilets, a small mountain range of which I feel I am the sole owner, caress me on the right, while Atlas, lascivious, offers me on the left, some fifty kilometers away, its snow-capped massif from M'goun to Toubkal.
Of course, as I've forgotten my phone, I turn back, the landscape reverses, the caress is on the left and the panorama opposite, but in the end everything returns to its original order, as I've found in an unlikely pocket the indispensable tool that could locate me if I were to break my pipe - it's at the very spot of this reunion that I'd like to be buried, without fanfare - illico - as is the custom here.
Once, at the very edge of the Tensift, where the dry river follows the ochre ramparts of the city, I saw a crowd of people following a stretcher covered with a brightly-colored pilou-pilou. It's a marathon runner's funeral, I thought to myself, seeing this aptly named sidewalk dump its burden at the gates of a cemetery. Another time, in another place but in the same country, I saw a replica of this spectacle.
Two marathon runners is a lot, so I investigated: these dead were in a hurry to be buried before sunset. I'd love to have my teeth shaken like that when I leave this world rigid, only a small stone erected among its recumbent sisters would be my trace quickly swept away with a blow from a donkey's hoof, but you'd have to be a Muslim, no, it's embarrassing enough to carry the cross of my birth.
So why this insidious ache that twists my collarbone, distends my shoulder blade, stabs me from the sixth vertebra to the occiput. Pain that only drunkenness can alleviate.
The cause is there, on my left, in all its magnificence
It's Atlas avenging Zeus' vengeance.
Making my back a burden.
I had overstepped my bounds, too often identifying myself with him, carrying the weight of the earth, ashamed of such cruel humanity, even if this Greek's ego was worth a thousand times mine, since at arm's length he carries the celestial vault, while I have only the earth to brandish.
i had named one of my paintings "The Weight of the Earth" even before I came into contact with Atlas.
And long before I started talking to him in my rural monologues, I had met him.
I knew him so well, even before I started driving my four-wheel drive, a little ashamed of my diesel-scented farts, on his red laterite tracks, many of which became "tarmac", only to return to their original state from pothole to pothole. I knew him so well that he was stunned to the point of dropping his celestial vault as the sun rose, but he soon recovered, swapping night for day. Just long enough for a sigh.
I was perhaps twelve years old, touching its snow-capped mountains with my fingertips, skimming the walls of its vertiginous valleys, flying at drone speed over its torrents of white salt, narrowly avoiding the gendarme's hat watching over Ouarzazate, gliding over the Tafilalet, resting on the blue lake of Bine El Ouidane, whose turbines my uncle built with all those metalworkers from the factories of my hometown. I flew over the Oukaimeden without seeing any sledges or skiers, the Valley of Paradise, even though it didn't yet bear that name, but it wouldn't be long before the hippies arrived. Rare were the walkers poking the aggressive tips of their sticks at M'Goun or Toubkal. Only a few mules loaded to the ears. Only a few women hidden by the wood they had gathered. Only a few douars mixed up in the earth of its slopes.
I was a child, astonished by my body's transformation, and I saw it all with my own two eyes.
And I had my father's eyes.
I saw it all from above, but it was in black and white, like the films of the time, like family photos with jagged outlines suggesting the unfinished frame of passing time. It was much later that its color drove me mad. I was madly in love with Atlas and slept in his bed.
My father hid his affection, but his rare gifts were proof of it.
During his military service, standing on the wing of a propeller-driven cuckoo clock, a pacifist, he would shoot Atlas at rest in all its nakedness with his camera. He would double the photo, and the time elapsed between the two shots revealed to me all the intimacy of the demigod, from the deepest valley to his most beautiful erections.
In my little studio adjoining my bedroom, between the enlarger and the developing baths, I had other pleasures besides red light, other fixatives, and I often isolated myself to contemplate the Titan thanks to this little binocular camera.
This box containing these double-view glass plates, arranged in good order alongside the binocular, a Meccano-like revelation of the miracle, has disappeared. A brother's petty theft, perhaps jealous of this meagre inheritance for me, the eighth wonder of the world.
Today, I pedal at the feet of the giant, having forgotten about my shoulders and this insidious ache.
It's at rest that the pain returns, it's when he gives up the night for the day that Atlas hurts.
The time for a sigh.