“The Sausage Cellar,” a very short fiction by Henri Michaux

“The Sausage Cellar”

by

Henri Michaux

translated by David Ball

from Life in the Folds

I love to knead.

I get hold of a field marshal and grind him up so fine that he loses half his senses, he loses his nose that he thought really had flair and even his hand that he can’t raise to his cap any more even if a whole army saluted him.

Yes, through a series of grindings, I reduce him, I reduce him—a sausage unable to do anything from now on.

And I don’t limit myself to field marshals. In my cellar I have lots of sausages that were once important people supposedly out of my reach.

But my infallible instinct for jubilation triumphed over these obstacles.

If they act up after that, it’s really no fault of mine. They could not have been mixed and ground any more than they were. I’ve been told that some of them are still moving about. It’s printed in the papers. Is this real? How could it be? They’re rolled up. The rest is the tail end of a phenomenon, the kind that one might encounter in nature, a sort of mystery comparable to reflections and exhalations whose importance should not be exaggerated. No, absolutely not.

In my cellar they lie, in deep silence.