Antarctica
Scene 5
An awesome silence prevailed over this snow-white world. A calm in which the sounds, swishes, buzzes and rings in his ears increasingly took on importance – the operating noise, the traffic in his head. As well as the black threads, which the eye doctor had given the beautiful name «Mouches volantes», that swam here through the ice like primitive worms through a moise Petri dish.
Maille was unprepared for so much purity. He did not wish for his own functioning with all its little disturbances to be thrown back at him. It was for the same reason that he usually gave abstract art a wide berth. Given that it was not pure decoration, it seemed to aim at pushing the person back toward himself, to not be a counterpart to him, to refuse him the opportunity of a dialogue, a story, a distraction. What a demand, what an aspiration. And this, when someone such as Maille stood there, a person whose ears occasionally heard only disturbing sounds and whose eyes found only optical mistakes?
The Antarctic was a gigantic monochrome, a veritable continent, akin to a painting by Robert Ryman. How dearly he would have liked, at that moment, to be in a city where there were distractions to be found at every step and every turn, where one could read the newspaper, stroll around, flirt, and do a thousand other things at the same time – in Buenos Aires, for instance.
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Menu Maille
In the white expanse of the Antarctic, Hektor Maille was more irritated than usual by the black threads flitting through his view, reminding him constantly that seeing is not an obvious thing, but an act of consciousness. This menu is a tribute to these «floaters»:
- Parsnip Soup
- Chicken Breast «Antarctica» (Steamed with summer truffle)
- Polenta «Mouches volantes» (White polenta with roasted sesame seeds)
- «Floaters» Vanillecreme (with Tahitian Vanilla)