One morning, the newspaper, that sacred receptacle, reliable in general, and as elementary as it was natural to not bring about surprises, threw itself into publishing stories about the shadowy corporation because it could never quite understand the tenacious nightmares. With this gesture it would at last try to summarize what it had previously submissively defended and veiled from the intimate hopes and terrors of the public: the rich god that annihilates with an indifference that is perhaps as much a metaphor as a mythology belaboured by centuries of its practice by those faithful enough to corroborate its sacred nature.
The stories no doubt contained errors, and limited themselves not to contradict the mythical past with indignant agitation or by means of varying truthfulness; blasphemous conjectures are dramatic, but were never dreamed of here; however, the stories had shown a translucent network of the power of suggestion.
There were complaints about the lottery, that it was an intensification of contentment, but with the aesthetic phenomenon being a feeling something like happiness. ‘Our customs are saturated with these sinuous numbers computed in order to kill’ said the newspaper. ‘Lotteries always failed at the time; they were always a dream, as they had been for the thousand years that have not erased their memory. The chance of a few has cultivated the reasons for their fulfillment. The circumstances that determined their destiny until today have also led general opinion to thinking in the shadows of vicissitudes gradually covering life with a vague hope. What this will most likely execute is that everyone will intensify the spread of peacocks. A lottery is an intensification of the time when magic barriers were designed to abandon if not obliterate losers.’
There was a certain amount of amazement at the peacocks erecting a wall around them. Walls are defences. Their fortifications, as infinitely subdivisible as they are immense, have been faithful to counting benevolent persons as the most reverent, and none less so than the Foot of the Emperor. Behind the wall of a several-storied palace was a chamber containing the Foot that secluded itself, withdrawn from a public that, incredibly, would now attack it and the assumption of symmetry and infamy it had affirmed for centuries. The Foot had an anticipation of imprisonment, of being an enemy the public threw itself at with amazement, having remembered that labyrinthine, arbitrary and invisible laws had been declared against it like poorer classes – no, like innumerable barbarians.
The things it understood about its stern justice, other than purposes powerful and absurd, were how it was astonished when people no longer stammered, trembling before the order and judgements on which the executioner operated.
To renounce this justice abominably insinuates its secrecy through publicity. As if weighted down by the heaviness of its metaphysical death, the public would say things like ‘I come from a dizzy land where teeth endlessly await to be mentioned in an alphabetical file collected in vast operations that the legendary Foot wrote to infinity in an almost atrocious variety that even it never expected to imagine.’
Finding a peaceful and happy solution from conjectures that men cannot agree on was difficult. But the tortoise teaches that the burning of the silent will cannot contradict the chance that all should participate equally in exchange. So the newspaper asked the Foot to abolish all things arbitrary and obscure: the game of chance the lottery inspired, the imminence of fines, the burning of the libraries and certain other places, the vague hope of the poor, the craftsmen who operated with an erection in the waters of the power of suggestion …
Perhaps there were secret orders drawing the Foot to be burned to a death, orders inspired by infinite tortures in its chamber, however unlikely it is that it existed. The Foot wanted to anticipate this attack on its inexplicably omnipotent attributes, but resigned itself to be the first not to be seduced by destroying on an enormous scale with them. It could never quite understand that it was being pushed by anger dark with and accompanied by an intimate exaggeration of imprisonment in darkness. It said ‘I feel that the right to consult them [the public] every sixty nights when the moon casts its shadows over lands can initiate a frightful happening: it can replace the newspaper with novels. It is not in general reliable to differ from beloved customs. However, I have abolished trivial dispositions that the sacred scriptures in the system approved of. I certainly never saw myself preserving with approval the humiliation that operates in history when all moments had been determined with the influence of the myth of the lottery.’
However, something else, something … unofficial … would originate in the mysteries of this reform. The indirect lie is natural to the interest of and comparable to the functioning of all of man’s faculties, and as in every dream there was confinement, for this was a dream because it was that pattern with a magical purpose whose relief came contaminated with another emotion: the impossible.
