The Deception of the Thrush

Cagliari, 1 January 1900

I am alone, sitting facing the grey expanse of the shifting sea…I am alone…alone as I’ve always been everywhere, as I’ll always be throughout this seductive and deceptive universe….alone, with a whole world of dashed hopes, disappointment and disillusion behind me, and of memories that grow daily more distant, almost losing all reality.

My soul is tempered now for good, and now is indestructible, resolute even through the worst storms, devastations or loss. My knowledge of life and the human heart is now so keen that I know the two months ahead will bring me more sorrow, largely because I will not pander to mundanities nor to anything alien to the dreams, thoughts, and feelings of my true personality.

Seen from the outside, I wear the mask of the cynic, the dissipated and debauched layabout. No one yet has managed to see through to my real inner self, which is sensitive and pure and which rises above the humiliation and baseness I choose to wallow in. No one has ever understood that even though I may seem to be driven by the senses alone, my heart is in fact generous, one that used to overflow with love and tenderness and continues to be filled with boundless compassion for all those who suffer injustice, all those who are weak and oppressed….a heart both proud and unswerving in its commitment to Islam, a cause for which I long some day to spill the hot blood that courses through my veins. I shall dig in my heels, therefore, and go on acting the drunken, plate-smashing degenerate, steeping her wild, besotted mind in the intoxicating expanse of desert as I did last summer, or galloping through olive groves in the Tunisian Sahel, as I did in the autumn...