Towards the end of 1956 Jean Genet met a young circus performer, Bentaga Abdallah, son of an Algerian acrobat and a German acrobat. 
The French writer committed himself to him in a relationship that caused him to wander for Europe. In the course of their journeys, Genet tried to convince Abdallah, who worked as a juggler and acrobat to the ground, to get on the tightrope. He plagiarized him up to get him undergoing a grueling workout. On a sheet of paper he also designed a number, drawing the steps. The young Algerian fell from the tightrope for the first time in 1959, but he came up again on it. He joined the company of the Orfei Circus for a tour in Kuwait. But he fell a second time and it was the end of his career. Genet was convinced he had made with Abdallah, his narcissistic double, a kind of masterpiece that the incompetence and weakness of the boy sent to hell, as he wrote to a friend. In February of 1964 Abdallah swallowed a barbiturate and cut his veins. Seven years before Genet had written to him and about him a little prose poem, The tightrope walker. 
It is one of the most beautiful texts by Jean Genet, one of his most sparkling, where the writer exposes its aesthetics but also its erotic. It is a great hymn to the Poetry of the artistic creation, to the courage of the artists who risk everything to create a little beauty, walking always on the thread of time.

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Daniele Salvo