Apparently, I'd met him at a very critical moment of his current life. Stranger that I was to the city, I tried to be hospitable to the other stranger that he was. I offered him drinks to loosen his tongue. It was not difficult for me to see that something unknown was eating away at him. Monsieur F. was obviously consumed by some mysterious force. That same night, with iron eyes that still betrayed no sign of a faltering sobriety, he said that he feared he'd finished before he was done, a concern that he repeated over and over again during our time together and of which I could make no damn sense until it was too late.  Was it this flow of words that gushed out of him into the air and onto the paper that was reducing him? Where was the adulterous mother he talked about to nourish him then? Hospitality or exotic curiosity, whatever it was, I stayed with him and invited him to my apartment.

           Apparently, I'd met him at a very critical moment of his current life. Stranger that I was to the city, I tried to be hospitable to the other stranger that he was. I offered him drinks to loosen his tongue. It was not difficult for me to see that something unknown was eating away at him. Monsieur F. was obviously consumed by some mysterious force. That same night, with iron eyes that still betrayed no sign of a faltering sobriety, he said that he feared he'd finished before he was done, a concern that he repeated over and over again during our time together and of which I could make no damn sense until it was too late.  Was it this flow of words that gushed out of him into the air and onto the paper that was reducing him? Where was the adulterous mother he talked about to nourish him then? Hospitality or exotic curiosity, whatever it was, I stayed with him and invited him to my apartment. Our unhurried steps cut through wild drunken shouts and staggering Friday night ghosts, as his flow of words continued to cut through me. We stayed up the remainder of the night and continued our ambulant conversations the day after. And the days after. The one-sided conversation went on as we went on through the green spaces all around Iowa City. He talked continuously.  He had talked so much that I felt my ears had grown numb to his voice. Strange alchemy of his words: as they started to run through you, you would also see the world through his eyes. Confused, I could no more say whether what was going in my head was my own inner speech or whether it was him who was speaking. I tried not to hear his voice and to perceive anew his presence, which had faded: In front of me I saw a pile of words shaped like a human carcass. Tall and lanky as he was, he resembled a moving, loosely cemented stack of bricks, a walking tower of words. Tower of Babel maybe, since the words he was made up of belonged to different languages of different worlds where he had previously lived. His every gesture was an effort to express a meaning, a desperate attempt to communicate. Every single move he made turned into a sentence, and, rarely, into a poem: Monsieur F. was an involuntary eruption of words. A rosary of words. Thin as he was, however, to the point of transparency, what other people said would modify him; they could easily blow through him and readily make of him a gibberish wreck. Their talks would blow through him "like the autumn wind that whirls through fallen leaves" as he put it, or, as I imagined (less poetically it is true), like an American cowboy on horseback in a Western, who cuts through a troop of Indians, howling and shooting frantically at the sky.
           I did not know if through all his wanderings he was in search of something or trying to escape from something. But I was sure that there was "something." And I constantly pricked up my ears to spot it somewhere in that unstoppable flow of words, or to see it somewhere among his lexical organs. But it seemed that one word was buried deep within that moving mass.
           All through our endless walks, his health and sanity never ceased to deteriorate. And the obsession never left him a single moment: "It will finish me before I am done." And the light that suddenly dawned on me: "IT" was the word, the infectious organ, the cancerous word. And he would babble it in French: "le sacré ça" "le maudit ça."
           It was only through his notes that I finally found out what it really meant. His not very numerous notes, reading through which I learned about the tragic parallel life that Monsieur F. had been living. While reading these notes the oscillating pendulum swung once and for all to one side.