One's mind

 "On this long road, we didn't meet any bandits. But your eyes were constantly worried. I saw the violence in your country as a political problem, and you opposed it with a simple fatality: "Being in the wrong place at the wrong time". I saw defeatism in this abandonment to destiny, as well as a justification for the flight that was yours later on. This country fascinated me. As much as it fascinated Napoleon, Artaud or, between quotation marks, between your quotation marks, "Mon connard de Le Clézio". He fascinated me in the sense of a loss of meaning, of a dangerous, irrepressible and unspeakable attraction, like those other Europeans who were never able to reduce and explain it in their writing, ending up more or less naively invoking the magic of shamans, the air, or the Aztecs.
I know that it was this line of tension between extreme violence and the sovereign plenitude of immense spaces that attracted me like a moth.

Extreme violence. A shameful fascination with violence, echoing the fascination with blood. As in the videos you showed me of young guys leaving a nightclub and capturing a dog to slit its throat. "My sister, you're my sister!" one of the guys shouts over the dog's last yelps. Fascination with the randomness of violence, when people in khaki, posted on the roads with their machine guns, choose at random whether they'll be guardians of order or ruthless bandits. The fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fatality of having been a dog, the fatality of having been one of hundreds of women whose bodies are found in the morning and whose murderers are never found or prosecuted.

We didn't meet any bandits, but your gaze was constantly worried. I placed my gaze in yours with the camera, constructing and deconstructing images. I found your concern, but not the danger. We didn't encounter it. This time, at least, we were in the right place at the right time in an unnamed country. Let's be nice to tourists," said the billboard.

You told me that the image reminded you of an animal dazzled by a car's headlights at night. You may not remember, but it wasn't the first time I'd heard about this animal.
You told me that you'd once seen a snuff film - in the wrong place at the wrong time - in which a woman was raped and, while still alive, enucleated with a knife. Her torturers then injected her to death (like putting a dog to sleep, you said). You remained petrified in front of these images, unable to move, unable to save yourself, your gaze captured, trapped like the animal on the road in front of the car's headlights.

This story made me angry. I used to say that you should have run away immediately, that you should have refused this horror so as not to become an accomplice to it, even if only by looking at it. 
It was stupid of me, as stupid as saying that the animal on the road, fascinated by the glow of the headlights, would be complicit in the car that was going to run it over the next moment. Fascinated... That ultimate fascination with the encounter with death, one's own death, the death of another. That's what you've encountered, and that's what I've also felt about your country, when I talk about my own fascination. "let's be nice to the tourists..."

We didn't encounter danger, but your gaze was constantly worried, because it wasn't a problem of danger, but of looking. You had seen through the eyes of the madman. By filming his torture with a camera, he offered himself another pleasure besides murder. The pleasure of raping you too. From that day on, you lost the innocence of your gaze. The gaze of every stranger was no longer so unfamiliar.
Even when no one was around, you sought out the gaze of the man who "only" wanted to kill you... ...because you were a woman. By making you intimately acquainted with his gaze, he marked you forever with the seal of his anonymity. For you, his gaze had become the gaze of anyone and everyone. Somewhere, he knew this. Those who film know this. You didn't "flee" your country. You left to find something. The innocence of the gaze."