We are waiting but we don’t know what for. We have to wait until the end of the night, but no one knows how long and black the night is and in the end, it doesn’t matter. From our fortress, our ruined outpost, our apartment in the suburbs or in the city centre, we observe the horizon by means of the enchantment of the TV. Familiar voices of perfect strangers keep us company every evening. They play out the happenings at our frontiers and even the dangers, and together with those even the solutions. We, obviously, no longer believe in the dangers, nor in the solutions. The dangers are much more threatening, already inside our borders, and the solutions are conjuring tricks from those who can do nothing other than to perpetuate their own power, and anyway they have no choice. The falsities with which we surround ourselves are too obvious and prolonged, but that future that is so threatening cannot be faced now, with these wretched weapons, without a strategy, without an ounce, or even a single gramme of courage. The fortress is welcoming. We lack for nothing apart from liberty and knowledge. The wait consumes us like candles, but the heat is enough to banish even the tiniest examination of conscience.
From the desert that stretches out interminably from the edge of the boundary wall, inside which we are enclosed by virtue of our wickedness or by choice, no one will come, no formidable and ruthless enemies, no friends coming to help us with the weapons of democracy and liberty, two words that we believe we understand the meaning of, but that we have mutated, more or less unconsciously, into dictatorship and servility. The wait must last forever. To resist (against whom?) is our only true objective. The waiting time has lasted for generations, one after the other cancelled out like stars with the light of the morning sun. In the fortress there’s still enough food, but the youngest ones often go off to foreign lands without ever coming back. By now there are millions of them.
The fortress gets old together with its inhabitants and its outer walls are starting to crumble. It’s said that that happens for all fortresses, that no fortress is eternal, that no wait is forever. The Berlin Wall fell came down, and now the fortresses of the Maghreb, one after the other. But the wait is sweet, even with the rumble of the first collapses. That enemy that will never appear from unknown lands, is in reality, ourselves, but it’s so reassuring to think of it as being different, far away.