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will be original; and that in any case, in the hypotheses of the Dia party the persuasion factor actually acted as a catalyst, seeing that in the final analysis the fellow with the glib tongue completes his triumph by talking to himself.
    In short, civil war. And one of atrocious cruelty. Once the steak- tracts had been launched, an epidemic of the bacteria of contradiction broke out. Every individual affected by the microbe considered that his arm and his head, his eye and his foot, his navel and his spleen, were irreconcilable. He destroyed himself by tearing out, burning, or vivisecting the contradictory organ.
    Methuselah was physically preserved from the disease, but he contracted it spiritually because of his great porosity. Thus the painful theme became an integral part of the orchestral score, and Methuselah’s identity was realized through the absurd, by the projection of his psyche beyond the confines of parrot identity.
    When the carnage came to an end and Methuselah’s body was discovered intact on its perch, a qualified psychoanalyst equipped with an oscillograph approached it. The currents recorded by the machine traced a graph which was deciphered a thousand years later. Translated, this is what it says:
    “What-I-don’t-understand-is-that- in-spite-of-my-confusion-and-the-absurdity-of-the-world-I-am-still-happy.”
B ETWEEN F ANTOINE AND A GAPA
    “Alopecia-impetrating prohibited.” My wife and I came across this notice. This was on our last weekend. We’d taken the tandem, with the tarpaulin, the camping equipment, and the kid on top. We’d gone along the autostrada as usual, but instead of branching off to Fantoine we’d carried on in the direction of Agapa. After riding for a couple of hours we decided to stop. We stopped. We pushed the tandem into a little field to have a nice quiet picnic and we were just going to sit down in the hay when my wife saw the sign. I read it. I wondered whether I wasn’t going haywire. What did it mean? Me and my wife, we aren’t very educated. I work in an office. I met my wife and we got married. The kid came along right away.
    There we were, wondering whether we could sit down or not. My wife said: “Better not. You never know.” But the kid was hungry. So we did sit down, a bit farther on. We didn’t eat it all. It’s my opinion that we were scared slightly shitless. Then we set off again. We hadn’t had anything to drink. We stopped at an inn. My wife was worried. Even though she isn’t very educated, she does sometimes look things up in the dictionary. She asked the innkeeper for one, she gave us a funny look and brought us a Larousse.
    Prohibited , we know what that means. For impetrate , it says: “To obtain from the competent authority.” Alopecia : “Baldness occurring in patches on the scalp.” That already made it more complicated. I’m a bit bald, but not completely. Did it have anything to do with me? My wife asked the innkeeper whether she knew of the prohibition. The innkeeper made a face as if she thought we were talking balderdash and we didn’t dare insist. There was a bit of a rumpus at the inn. The grandmother had got drunk. The previous night she had urinated in the jam pot on her bedside table, thinking it was the other one. At teatime they’d given her the jam pot without noticing and she’d swallowed the lot.
    So we left. The whole of the rest of the journey we were cudgeling our brains:
    “Could it mean that people are prohibited from obtaining the right to be bald from the competent authority? Would it ever occur to anyone to ask for it? And why write it in the middle of a field?”
    “Maybe on account of it makes people think?”
    “It didn’t stop us sitting down   …   ”
    “But we didn’t have much of a lunch, did we?”
    “You’re joking, I stuffed my guts.”
    “Not true; we left half the roast.”
    My wife wanted to get me to say that we’d been upset. I didn’t like that. We dropped the subject. The kid