Shaman

1
I happened to come to a village.
If I had not been on horseback I would never have thought of going through there.
There was a festival.
There were no tourists.
However, there was a white man.
He spoke to me in my language.
"Do you have anything to read?" he asked me in an impatient tone.
I said no. He made a gesture of weariness and walked away.

2
He had a straw hat and a dirty T-shirt.
He had spotted me from afar and had approached me quickly, roughly pushing the villagers aside.
This abruptness had worried me. I had thought I saw an aggressive vagabond in him, perhaps a thief.
But he stopped three meters from me and asked me this question, speaking in my language: "Do you have something to read?"
The request was so urgent that I was sorry for my answer: "No, I'm sorry." He immediately turned away with a slightly contemptuous gesture that I understood as an injunction to return to where I had come from.
He split the crowd in the other direction and disappeared.
I remained pensive. I would have liked to help this lost man. I had refused the buoy to a castaway.

3
I rented a horse from a one-eyed man. On horseback, it's easier to get lost in the landscape. You can get away from the roads, you think. But eventually the fear of getting lost in the stranger, however fascinating, takes over and you end up on a trail. This is how I arrived in a remote village. I left the horse at the entrance to the main street. People were everywhere. Boys dressed as devils, little girls in satin-white dresses, candy vendors, women busily preparing for the evening feast. I was the only white person there, but I wasn't an intruder because I was so transparent. One man noticed me. He was the only one who looked like me. The same age, blond and white too. Haggard, he reminded me of a slightly mad vagrant. He came towards me quickly. I was a little frightened. I think I even recoiled. I remember thinking for a long time that he was taller than me. Now I'm not so sure. Now I think that's what I was afraid of: not his vagabond air or his brusque manner, but his resemblance to me, his inexplicable familiarity. I thought I saw myself, just for a moment. How did he know my language?
"Do you have something to read?"
He had the attitude of someone who recognized me. From where? From when?

4
I had taken a horse for the day.
I well remember taking a horse for the day.

I'd rented it from a one-eyed man whose cloudy, yellow eye remnant didn't inspire confidence. Equally disturbing was his expression, at once indifferent and penetrated. A mystic, I thought, or a drug addict, or both. In any case, the horse had both eyes and a good head. The beast was obviously well cared for. This made me reconsider my judgment of his master, who won the case.

As I write this I am finally no longer sure that my desire to go on horseback was prior to my encounter with the one-eyed man. I think I felt the sudden need to lose myself in this fascinating landscape, and the horse was a means of doing so at little cost. The animals always recognize the path to the manger.
I set off on the road, giving him a wide rein. After a few hours of riding he brought me to a village. I left him at the entrance, at the bottom of the hill, and entered the main street on foot. I remember a party in preparation. All the inhabitants were outside. A vagabond spoke to me. I don't remember the rest and I miss it. Did something happen to me?
I don't remember seeing the one-eyed man again. What did I do with the horse? I don't remember giving it back, and forgetting it makes me feel guilty. Someone you were responsible for and left behind. This feeling overwhelms me enough to justify going back there to get rid of it. I won't find the horse, but at least I'll have done something. Unless this feeling is linked to the anxiety caused by the lack. This piece of memory that's missing. It's inexplicable. Three days, three months, three years. The lack remains the same. The lack of memory, or of something else. Perhaps the landscape, this landscape. I miss the stranger. I reread my notes, I retrace my life since that story, and it becomes clear: the lack of the stranger makes me a stranger in my life.
A wanderer.

5
In the three years there were the three months, and in the three months there were the three days. These times included each other and everything stayed the same. There is no time. There is only one time. That of the landscape. The time of the journey can be counted, but not the time of the landscape. I sensed this and it made me dizzy. Perhaps by losing myself, I wanted to abstract myself from time. And that's exactly what happened. I can no longer tear myself away from this fascination for the foreign, for the landscape. I just stand there. The sensation, the vertigo of no longer existing for anyone gives me an inextinguishable exaltation.
I know I began to no longer exist for anyone, to give in to this vertigo, to this drug, as soon as I abandoned the idea of returning the horse to the one-eyed man, as soon as I abandoned the horse. When you give up on others, you give up on yourself. I knew that.
I didn't think I wanted to lose myself so badly. When I come out of my contemplation to try and explain my fascination with the landscape, my arguments become more complex and obscure the deeper I dig. At the same time, that's all I want to talk about. That's why I don't talk to anyone.
I want to be left alone. Anything that reminds me of the past, of a time other than the landscape, hurts me. There's always this stupid attachment to I don't know what origin that makes me suffer. My mother tongue tortures me. I wish I'd never been born. A part of me stubbornly clings to a life from before when I'd like not to be, to melt away, not to be a stranger or a total stranger, but in any case to be outside time. In the time of stones and sky. To be everything and nothing, but especially not a man.
Yet I can't help it. There's the urge to return to the familiar, to speak, to remember. I hate this weakness in me. It's this weakness that tortures me.
Only once did I meet a stranger who looked like me.
I asked him if he had anything to read, something from where I came from. Something that would bring me closer to where I came from, to him.
I had one hand on my knife. If he'd said "yes", I'd have killed him, and by killing him I'd finally have been able to kill this weakness inside me that tortures me.
But he said "no, sorry".
He couldn't imagine the reasons for my disappointment. I left him.
He'll be back one day. He'll have made his arrangements and I'll kill him.