An Endless Quest for Love

By Phayne ANTON

In a remote village in the Caribbean, a fanciful child encounters an old alcoholic hunter. The latter seems to hold a secret while being unable to reveal it. The child takes upon himself the task of unravelling the mystery.

The peregrinations of the child represent a quasi-impossible quest that is similar to an initiation journey: the passage from childhood to adulthood.

The novel will arouse the interest of adults and adolescents alike, appealing to their existential aspirations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabwaan Editions
• Release date: Dec 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071573327

Book preview

1

An archangel is an angel who occupies a prominent place in the celestial hierarchy.

Let's admit it! And what then is an angel?

It is a spiritual creature serving as an intermediary between men and the Good Lord, generally represented in the form of a winged creature wearing a halo.

... Well! All of this was hardly of any help. What I wanted to know was if an archangel (or eventually an angel) was capable of smiling. Obviously my dictionary ignored the notion.

Ms Desmarre is not an angel! She is enormous. Seen from behind she’s only buttocks, from the base of the neck to just above the thighs. This does not prevent her from walking around smoothly. You neither see nor hear her coming; when you feel the pain, well, you then know where she is!

Something else about Ms Desmarre: she's fast! In any case, faster than the pain. You only begin to feel the first wave of pain and she is already, obstinately at your shoulder. It is as I’m telling you: she is always two or three steps ahead of the pain.

A marvel about pain: it radiates - to radiate meaning: to propagate, to spread blistering from a point onwards. The dictionary is right about this a thousand times over. The pain spreads slowly, but irreversibly, from and all around a point of impact.

Here I must confess my shortcomings, and more than a dictionary would be necessary to enlighten myself: does the speed of propagation depend on the speed accumulated in the motion before impact? And is the area of spread proportional to the force exerted to the point of impact? Strength and speed are linked, my skin knows it well, but to what extent, to what end?

My little finger tells me that substance has something to do with it. I mean: the substance of the vector. The vector of pain, you are to understand... Ms Desmarre has a thong of very pure leather – cow skin, certainly taken from an excellent animal, fashioned in the best offshore tanneries, and distributed in very chic duty-free shops. It's a fascination to watch, and a delight to touch: pink and tender like a baby's bottom. Five centimetres above the leather your fingers already feel the smoothness. How can such a beautiful machine hurt so much? How can such a symbol of perfection be transfigured under the fingers of Ms Desmarre? Ms Desmarre is not an angel, obviously.

Neatly wound up in her claw, the object represents forty-five by fifteen centimetres of usable surface. Six hundred and seventy-five square centimetres of terror, which will radiate over a multiplied surface of your body, according to the principle of the propagation of pain. The leather adapts to any particularity of your anatomy, you have a painful range which can spread out all at once from the little pectoral to the great dorsal, whatever your physical peculiarities may be. If you take into account the other parameters: surface, force and/or speed of impact, zone of propagation and latency, you end up, by the good graces of a Ms Desmarre devoid of feeling, alone with a stinging pain on half your body, long after she's finished with you.

*

*         *

I owe a lot to Ms Desmarre. I learn a great deal from her...

But Ms Desmarre doesn't know everything, I'm sorry to say. There are flaws in her knowledge. Take the Huns, for example, page eleven of our history books... These were people who lived quietly in a land washed by a river called Love. Love watered the hearts as well as the gardens. Why would they have left, all together and without warning, a land so welcoming, only to emigrate where, from common knowledge, people were dying like flies from all kinds of diseases? Ms Desmarre was well embarrassed to tell us. But I know! It's because of the sheep.

These people were shepherds. Breeding sheep was a way of life for them. Better still: a culture. For them sheep held a special place. In many respects they were equal to their offspring. It was not uncommon to see one or two sheep warming themselves on winter evenings by the fireplace, or resting on quilts among the children... The animals were their only means of subsistence, which is why men, women and children pampered them, taking them daily to the best places to pasture.

The Huns were nomads, that is, they travelled often, settling where the grass was thick and plentiful, and clearing off as soon as the animals had eaten it all. It had always been that way.

However one evening, a Hun more far-sighted than the others, seeing that the herd was growing and that the land, immense as it was, would not be enough for all the tribes, each having its own herd, brought up an idea that was going through his mind:

... What if we went elsewhere...?

The others, raising their noses from their roast leg of mutton, stared at him open-mouthed, looked at the sheep, then looked at each other. There were cheers, and then someone asked:

And where would we go, Grand Khan?

Straight ahead! says the Hun, who was smarter than the others. He had stood up, and with a bloody femur he pointed to the horizon. To the West!

It was Attila. He was acclaimed.

*

*         *

It didn't take long for them to set off.

They travelled light and thus, improvising and multiplying the stages, driving the sheep ahead, they visited Europe. Straight ahead! was their motto. No obstacle stood in their way.

In their vision of the world, no longer moving forward with the sheep in front of them was the end of everything... They thought they had reached the edge of the world on the beaches of the Atlantic! The immensity of the ocean was a vision of the apocalypse to them: nothing would ever grow on this liquid area. Nostalgia invaded their hearts. They wanted to see their green meadows again...

However, they found the resources needed to continue their journey south, and soon forced their way to the beaches of the Mediterranean. The sea was calm and blue, the sand white and smooth, but they weren't in the least impressed. Such an accumulation of salt water accentuated their impatience.

Things really took a turn for the worse as they headed back north, then east, retracing the path that had led them there. In front of them: nothing! Deserted lands. Not a blade of grass!

The point is that the sheep had eaten it all! They were endowed by nature with an astonishing lingual appendage: longer and much more prehensile than that of other sheep, thanks to which they twisted each bunch, each blade of grass, and pulled them out from the root. This is why it is written: where Attila passes the grass does not grow again! It’s not Attila’s fault, it’s the sheep’s fault.

That was the trigger. Too much doubt, too much frustration, too much fatigue and impatience. Thinking of the long journey back and the forced abstinence of the sheep, they took revenge on the indigenous populations. Not one head was left attached to a body.

Ms Desmarre ignores the gist of the story. But I know it well.

*

*         *

There are many ways of learning.

The first is to learn from whoever possesses the authority of knowledge. This is the official schooling method, to which I do not adhere.

The second is pure intuition.

Every so often something goes through your mind. What it is, you can’t say; it’s like a stranger that you come across every day without really seeing him, but it happens incidentally, by chance, like a casual event, that you see him... Imagine a wild but familiar animal that lives very comfortably, as if at home, in your house. You didn't know it existed until you stumbled across it consciously in some hallway. Surprise! Hardly so. It feels like you know it's always been there.

There you are: the question is asked! From then on you will see your pet more and more often - if you are wise. I mean, if you didn't chase it away