“After the apparition that was Gilgamesh, there was a long, interminable period in which nothing happened. If my task had been to dispel Gilgamesh’s last illusions, I had certainly done the job and could now consider myself superfluous. I began to think the Anunnaki had forgotten me. I was no use to them anymore. And perhaps they were no use to me, who would never die. But I felt no relief. On the contrary, a new poison seeped into me.

“Then one day I woke and saw another man sleeping in my tent. He must be a shipwrecked sailor. That was my first thought. We began to talk. Your stories amused and distracted me. But all at once I realized that I was the one who kept telling the stories. More and more often, you held your peace. One day it occurred to me that perhaps the Anunnaki had wanted this; they had arranged it all.

“They wanted a voice to tell the stories that had happened before the Flood. And I was the only one still alive. I had been part of those stories, or they had been told to me.

“All stories happened before the Flood. After that the only stories are stories of shipwrecks. There are always a discrete number of shipwrecks. Seven. Or three hundred. And they always finish the same way. Whereas the stories from before the Flood are linked together. I have yet to see an end of them. That’s why I have gone on speaking to you. Sometimes I had the feeling I was speaking to myself. But now I know that those stories, or at least splinters of them, and always with big gaps between one and another, are alive in you, too. Like me, they have escaped death.”

VII

One morning, Sindbad spoke up first, as if he couldn’t help himself:

“When I opened my eyes in this room the first time and realized there was someone lying down near me, I was overcome by terror. You are the oldest of the old and the most alive of the living. But what did I know of that, then? I had met another old man once on my journeyings; again, it was after a shipwreck. And more than any monster, he had me living in fear and torment.

“He was a handsome man, wrapped from head to toe in a cloak of woven leaves. I thought he must have been shipwrecked too. He looked at me and tried to get to his feet, but couldn’t. He begged me to carry him on my back so that we could go looking for fruit. The island was full of it. I picked him up and sat him on my shoulders and began to walk. There was an exact moment when I realized his legs had fastened tightly, irretrievably, around my neck. A viselike grip I couldn’t loosen. No longer covered with leaves, they were bare, rough, and dark, like buffalo hooves.

“It was the first of many desperate days. I soon sensed that nothing was going to change. I followed the old man’s orders, but couldn’t sleep because his legs were choking me. He simply ignored me. He emptied his bowels down my back. I was caked in his excrement. He would kick me in the stomach when he wanted me to move. I had begun to think that life would go on like this until my dying breath. As though that awful burden had become part of my body.