Cockcrow

‘You are the cock, I am the perch, the question remains who sings.’ One Tuesday in November, at 5:12, the national cockerel did not crow, and the country did not get up. No one knew that the cockerel had been dead for thirty-nine days. There was, however, a committee for that. Soon there were forty-one. While the Palace launches an invitation to tender, an application, a referendum and a Festival of Awakening, Amarante Lerouge, a roofer in Saint-Étienne, climbs onto the roof with a ladder and two school chalks, and finds a wire. He is the only one working. For nothing. The morning everyone had been waiting for has not come.