Bernard Bonnet from France Marfa, West Texas. The panorama is amazing. There is nothing else but nothing. I am in an out-of the-way house, on the road to Alpine. There is not a living soul to be seen for miles around. That is why I am here: to be alone and quiet. The ground around the house is completely dry and cracked like the land in the Sahel Desert during the drought. The grass is defeated and the stones are burning. Nothing can resist the heat except maybe, a conceptual artist. The evening is shaping up just as I wanted it: silent. To have just the sound of my bottle-opener working on my ice-cold Budweiser. One says the sunsets are extraordinary and even, now and then, we can see the famous and mysterious "Marfa Lights. "I settle down in the best armchair in the house that I had taken off the porch. It was exactly the idea that I had of happiness. Nevertheless, the first zzzzz makes itself heard at the fifth minute. Zzzzs...the second one twenty seconds later. My bare feet on the guard rail were the first target. Obviously, I had made a mistake: there was a living soul between Del Rio and El Paso, one only mosquito, The Survivor, just beside me, around me, on me, zzzzz. I started to wriggle on my chair. My ankle was as red as the sky with a perfect globe, right on the bone where there is absolutely no flesh but just a huge vein under the skin. The globe on fire, the earth in blood and forgotten my peaceful evening by dint of itching, fighting, hunting, scanning the ceiling and the starry sky! Where are you, miserable mosquito? I want to see you dead, crushed in my hand. Miserable because they are always hidden, invisible and they attack when your hands and your eyes are occupied with anything else. For example, here in my study, I know there is one under my desk, waiting for me, watching me. He is immortal, arrived with me, and I will probably die because of him. Right now, he knows that I am concentrated on finding and typing some figures of speech, and I am sure that my final rhetorical question, at last found, will be rewarded by an unfair bite. You have probably understood that mosquitoes are my Achilles' heel. The hero of my dreams is definitely Clint Eastwood since I have seen Sergio Leone's western "Once Upon a Time in the West." In this movie, during his nap, his eyes closed, without moving, he was able to shoot a fly that disturbed him. It is surely possible to do the same thing with mosquitoes. You know, now I am myself in the West and desperate" "Hone Depot" and "Walgreen" have nothing more to offer me. I have tried all the products and nothing does the trick. I am ready for radical solutions. Do you think that it is possible to eradicate mosquitoes from the surface of the earth? But, at the same time, if the Earth starts to look like the Garden of Eden, what will Hell look like?
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