ADVENTURES IN THE IMMEDIATE UNREALITY

(Romanian title: ÎNTÎMPLĂRI ÎN IREALITATEA IMEDIATĂ)

(1936)

By Max Blecher (1909-1938)

Translated by Alina Savin

„I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire"

P. B. Shelley

When I glance for a long time at a precise point on the wall, I sometimes forget who
and where I am. At that particular moment my identity vanishes, and I feel, for a second, no
more, like a totally different person. This abstract character and my real self are fighting for
my awareness with equal forces.
But very soon after my identity recomposes itself, like in those stereoscopic views in
which sometimes the two images are being separated by mistake and the operator reunites
them, offering, all of a sudden, to the viewer’s eye, an illusive relief. My room appears in
those instants of a freshness never before existent. It regains its precedent consistency and the
objects flow wisely into their places, just like a clod of soil thrown into a glass of water lays
to its bottom in layers of different elements, well defined and of various colors. The room’s
elements stratify in their own contour and in the coloring of the old memory I have of them.
This feeling of remoteness and loneliness during the instants when my daily being is
dissolved into inconsistency is tremendously different from any other physical sensation.
When it lasts longer, it converts into the pure terror that I might never again regain myself,
and an insecure silhouette lingers in my brain, surrounded by a strong and profound, almost
tactile light, as certain distant objects seen in the fog.
The terrible question “Who am I?” lives by its own in me, like a totally new entity, a
mere excrescence from my body, made out of new and totally unknown skin and bones and
organs. Its solution is being asked for by a sort of clearness, more profound and more
essential than that of the brain’s. Everything capable of motion in me begins to stir, to move,
to struggle, to revolt, more strongly and elementary than in my daily life. Everything begs for
a rapid solution.
I sometimes rediscover the chamber as it usually is and as I know it, just as if I simply

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closed and opened my eyes; and every time the space is clearer, just like a certain landscape
appears through the field glass, better and better organized, while, setting the distances, one’s
eye sails through all the veils of intermediary images.
I finally recognize myself and my room, and I feel a slight feeling of drunkenness. The
chamber is unexpectedly condensed in its inner matter, and I’m implacably back to the tactile
surface of things: the deepest the wave of obscure misunderstanding, the highest its peak; now
I have the clear certitude that every object must occupy its inherent place in the universe and
that I must be the one I truly am.
Thus my awkward struggle in the midst of uncertainty has lost all its denominations, it
becomes just an untainted regret that I had found nothing in the depths of my efforts. I am
only surprised by the fact that such a complete lack of meaning could ever have been attached
so profoundly to my intimate matter. Now that I found myself and I try to express my
feelings, these appear to me like totally impersonal, simple exaggerations of my identity,
grown up like a cancer from their own substance. Like a jelly fish’s tentacle, stretched
immeasurably, having desperately explored the waves’ entrails before returning safely under
the gelatinous sucker, I traversed all the certainties and uncertainties of my existence, in order
to come back, irrevocably and painfully, under the opaque shell of my solitude, which all of a
sudden becomes infinitely pure and pathetic...
The feeling of remoteness of the world is clear, and more intimate: a lucid and tender
melancholy, like a dream which comes back into one’s mind in the midst of the dark night.
Only this melancholy reminds me something of the mystery and the slightly
distressing charm of my childhood crises.
Only in this sudden vanishing of my identity can I revive the past fallings into cursed
spaces, and only in the seconds of immediate lucidity that follow the return to the surface does
the world appear to me in the light of its unusual inutility and desuetude, which grew around
me when my hallucinatory trances had overthrown me.
My crises were always provoked in the very same places, a street, the house, some
garden. Every time I was overrunning their borders, I was overwhelmed by a state of swoon
and dizziness. Invisible traps placed at random through the town, differing in nothing from the
surrounding atmosphere, they were ferociously waiting for me to fall a prey to their special
substance. A step, one single step was enough to enter deep in one of these cursed spaces, and
the crisis was inevitable.
One such place was in the town’s central park, in a small clearing at the end of an
alley, where nobody was ever walking. The ring of bushes and wild roses and dwarfish

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acacias surrounding it opened tightly towards the desolating landscape of an empty field. In
the whole world there was definitely no other place so sad and so deserted. Silence was
setting down, opaque and condensed, on the dusty leaves, in the summer’s musty heat. From
time to time one could hear the echoes of the trumpets from distant regiments. Infinitely
poignant were those long callings from the desert… Far away, the air heated by the sun was
trembling, vaporous like the transparent steam flowing above the boiling water.
The place was wild and isolated, of an endless loneliness. There, the day’s heat was
infinitely more tiresome, and the air heavier by a long way. The yellowish dusty bushes were
burning in the sun, in a scenery of an absolute seclusion. A bizarre feeling of uselessness was
flowing above the clearing, which was living its own outlandish existence somewhere in the
world, where I had come without any purpose or reason, in a certain summer afternoon,
useless as well, an afternoon chaotically lost in the warmth, anchored through the bushes in
the tangential space. At that particular moment I was feeling, profoundly and painfully, that I
didn’t belong to this world, that I had nothing to do in it but wander through lost parks,
through their dusty, heated clearings, deserted and wild, wild and deserted. And this
wandering was finally breaking my heart to pieces.
Another cursed place was at the other side of the town, between the high and hollow
shores of the river in which I was bathing with my playmates.
The shore was sunken on a side. Up on the bank there was a sunflower-oil factory.
The seeds’ hulls were thrown between the edges of the sunken shore, and in time the pile
raised gradually, until it became a long slope of dry hulls, uniting the bottom of the coast to
the bank of the water. My playmates were descending towards the water on this slope,
carefully, holing their hands, stepping deep into the carpet of rotten vegetable fabric.
The walls of the high shore, on the two sides of the slope, were abrupt and
fantastically irregular. The rain had sculptured long stripes of delicate fissures and intricate
arabesques, but hideous like the badly scared wounds, true rags into the mud’s wet flesh,
horrible and unwrapped cuts.
I had to descend as well amidst these walls which impressed me tremendously,
towards the river. When I was still far away, long before getting to the shore, my nostrils were
filled by the smell of the rotten hulls, which was preparing me for the crisis, as a short period
of incubation: this smell was unpleasant, and, at the same time, sophisticatedly suave.
Yes, my crises were all like this…
My olfactory sense was separated somewhere deep inside me in two different parts,
and the effluviums of decomposed aroma were vibrating in different regions of my enflamed

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brain. The gelatinous smell of the decaying dirt was very distinct, emanating, at the same
time, a very pleasant, warm and domestic smell of grilled peanuts.
When this perfume touched my nostrils, it was transforming me in only some seconds,
circulating abundantly through all my inner fibers, dissolving and then replacing them with a
more airy and insecure matter. From that moment on I couldn’t avoid my natural impulses, as
my chest was filled with a pleasant and bewildering feeling of fainting which hurried my steps
towards the shore, the place of my final defeat.
I was descending towards the water in a madman’s rush, on the pile of hulls. The air
was opposing me its strong density, sharp as a knife’s blade, and the world’s chamber was
crumbling, chaotically, in an immense hole with unexpected forces of attraction. My
playmates were witnessing with fearful eyes my fanatical gallop. The gravel was very narrow,
and the slightest wrong step could have thrown me into the river, in a place where the bubbles
at the surface of the water confirmed the evidence of tremendous depths. Still, I knew very
well what I was doing. Upon arriving near the water, in that rush, I was avoiding the pile of
hulls and running further on the shore, towards a place where the coast was hollowed. There
was a small cave deep down there, a shadowy cavern, cool as a small room engraved in the
rock. I would enter it and fall down, sweaty, tired and trembling.
As I was finally regaining my spirits, I would find next to me the intimate and
immensely pleasant scenery of the cave, with its delicate spring flowing directly from the rock
on the ground, forming, in the middle of the floor, a basin of very clear water, over which I
was leaning to see the wonderful laces of the green moss on its bottom, the worms attached to
the pieces of wood, the fragments of old iron, covered with rust and mud, and other living
creatures and various things, fantastically beautiful.
Except for these two cursed places, the rest of the small town was lost in a paste of
shapeless banality, with anonymous houses, which could have replaced one another, with
trees unbearably immobile, with lazy dogs, vacant lands and dust, dust everywhere.
Still, in closed spaces, the crises were coming more easily and more often. Usually, I
couldn’t stand being alone in an unfamiliar room. The mere fact of waiting would produce in
some seconds the suave and terrible faint. The whole space was repairing for it, a warm and
hospitable intimacy was filtered by the walls, flowing gently over the furniture and the
objects. All of a sudden, the room became sublime and I was feeling immensely happy. But
this was only a betrayal of the crisis, one of its delicate and tender perversities, because, in the
next second of my ecstasy, everything would fall down into tiny pieces, completely mingled. I
was staring around me with eyes wide open, but the objects were gradually losing their

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common sense, and a new existence was surrounding them, as if they had been suddenly
uncovered by an unseen hand from under the multiple layers of thin and transparent papers
which had hidden them until then, and their appearance was suddenly ineffably new, destined
to a superior and mysterious utility, concealed to my modest understanding.
But this is not all: the objects were revived by a regular freedom frenzy, they were
becoming independent, not only isolated but also ecstatically exulted.
I was always touched by their enthusiasm to live in a new aura: I was tied to them by
powerful adherences and invisible anatomical cohesions, I was becoming part of the room,
like all the other objects, in the same way in which a new organ, grafted on the living flesh,
integrates to the foreign body, through subtle exchanges of fluids and substances.
Once, during a crisis, the sun had sent on the wall a tiny cascade of rays, as an unreal
water of marble and gold and shiny waves. I could see the corner of a large wooden bookcase
with thick volumes with leather covers protected by the glass windows, and these prosaic
details, perceived from the remoteness of my faint, finally anaesthetized and overthrew me,
like a last inhalation of chloroform.
I was regularly disturbed by the most common and known aspects of those objects.
The habit of seeing them so many times finally managed to dissolve their exterior skin, and
thus they seemed to me of an excoriated purple-red color, and alive, tremendously alive.
The supreme moment of the crisis was consumed in a floating beyond any world,
pleasant and painful in the same time. But if I heard steps on the corridor, the room was
reintegrated quickly in her old appearance. The walls were again condensed, the room was
imperceptibly diminishing its exaltation, and this fact was offering me the assurance that the
certitude in which we live is separated by the world of uncertainties by a very thin pellicle.
I would wake up in the far-too-familiar room, sweaty, tired and filled by the sensation
of the uselessness of the surrounding things. I could observe in them new details, just as if one
can discover a strange facet in an object which he had been using for years.
The room preserved vaguely the memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of sulfur
after an explosion. I was looking at the books in the bookcase and I could notice, in their
immobility, in a strange way, a treacherous air of complicity and mystery. Actually the
objects around me never abandoned this secret attitude, ferociously hidden in their severe
stillness.
The common words loose their viability at certain depths of the soul; for example,
now I try to define exactly my crisis and I can only find images. The magic word expressing
them should borrow something from the essences of other sensitivities, dissolving from them

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as a new smell in a scholarly composition of perfumes.
In order to exist, it should contain a small piece of the stupor which overwhelms me
when I’m looking at a person in reality and then I am following his or her gestures in a mirror,
and then something from the disequilibrium of falls in a dream, with their whistling fear
which crosses my spine in an unforgettable second, or something like the fog and
transparency surrounding the bizarre landscapes in the crystal globes.
I envied the people around me, hermetically closed in their mysteries and isolated by
the tyranny of the objects. They were prisoners under their overcoats, but nothing coming
from outside could harm them, or terrorize them, or defeat them, nothing could infiltrate in
their magnificent prisons, while between me and the outer world there was no boundary, I was
invaded by everything surrounding me, as if my whole skin were pierced. The attention,
anyway very distracted, with which I was looking around me, was not a simple act of will.
The world was prolonging in me, naturally, all its tentacles, and all the long arms of the hydra
were crossing my entrails. I was facing with despair the conviction that I was living in the
world I was seeing. And I had no weapon to fight against this certitude.
The “crises” belonged in the same measure to me and to the places where they
occurred. Well, it’s undeniable that some of these places contained in their being a sort of
“personal” evil, but all the rest were already fallen into trance long before my arrival there,
such as certain chambers where I could feel that my crises are being crystallized from their
melancholic immobility and their infinite loneliness.
Reminiscent of a sort of equity between me and the world (an equity which was
deepening me irreparably into the uniformity of the unrefined matter), the conviction that the
objects could be inoffensive became equal to the terror which they were sometimes imposing
to me. Their harmlessness was produced by a universal lack of forces.
I vaguely felt that nothing in this world can be accomplished, that nothing can be
brought to perfection. The objects’ fierceness was being exhausted as well. In this way an idea
grew into my mind gradually, that of the imperfection of any manifestations in this world, be
they even supernatural.
In a perhaps endless interior dialogue, I was sometimes defying the evil forces around
me, in the same manner in which I was sometimes despicably eulogizing them. I was
practicing certain strange rituals, but far from useless. If, having left alone from home and
walking on different roads, I was always coming back to my initial trajectory, this happened
only because I never wanted to draw with my steps an invisible circle and close in it houses
and trees; my walk resembled to a thin wire, and if I hadn’t closed it on the same road, after

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having declutched it, the objects assembled in the footsteps’ knot would have remained
forever and irremediably tied to me.
If, during the heavy rains, I was trying not to move the stones in the steams’ way, this
was only because I didn’t want to add any effort to the water’s action, and thus, to avoid
interceding with the displaying of its elementary forces.
Fire was purifying it all. I was always carrying in my pocket a box of matches. When I
was very sad I was lighting a match and passing my fingers through the very flame, first one,
then the others.
In all these actions there was hidden a certain melancholy of being, a sort of torment
organized in the limits of my childhood existence.
In time, some of the crises disappeared naturally, but still, their strong memory lingers
in my brain.
When I become a teenager, I had no more crises, but that crepuscular state which
preceded them and the feeling of the profound uselessness of the world which followed, all
these become gradually my natural condition.
The uselessness filled the hollows of the world, like a liquid diffused in all directions,
and the sky above me, always correct, absurd and indefinite, acquired the concrete color of
despair.
In this surrounding uselessness and under this everlastingly cursed sky do I still
wander, today and forever.

A doctor was consulted regarding my crises, and he pronounced a weird word:

“paludism”; I was very surprised that my most intimate and secret anxieties can have a name,
and, above all, such a peculiar name. The doctor prescribed me quinine: again I was
astonished; I couldn’t understand how the sick spaces, they, could be cured by the quinine
which I was supposed to take. But I was mostly bewildered by the doctor himself. Long time
after the consultation he kept existing and wiggling in my memory, with tiny, automatic
gestures, and I was unable to stop their inexhaustible mechanism.
The doctor was a tiny little man, his head like an egg. The pointed extremity of the egg
elongated itself with a little black beard, in continuous stir. His small velvet eyes, his short
gestures and his ejected mouth made him look like a mouse. This impression was so powerful
from the first moment, that it seemed to me natural, when he began to talk, to hear him
prolonging the letter “r” in every word, lengthily and sonorously, as though, while speaking,
he were crunching something hidden and delicious. Also, the quinine he gave me

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strengthened my conviction that the doctor had something mousey in his personality. I got the
confirmation of this certainty in the weirdest way, and it is so intimately connected to very
important occurrences from my childhood, that I must devote some individual lines to this
incident.
Close to our house was a shop of sewing machines, where I used to go every day, and
remain there for hours and hours. Its owner was a young man, Eugene, who, after having
recently accomplished his military service, came in our town to make a living and opened this
shop. He had a sister, Clara, one year younger than him. They were living together in a slum
somewhere, and during the day they were working in the shop; they had no relatives or
acquaintances in the town.
Well, the shop was just a simple private room, rented for the first time for trade, that’s
why the walls preserved the memory of the previous saloon painting, with violet garlands of
lilac and the rectangular and discolored traces on the places where paintings had been hanged,
and from the ceiling a bronze lamp was still suspended, with a shade of dark-red ceramic,
covered on the side with green faience leaves; it was a very remarkable collection of precious
ornaments, old and obsolete, but impressive, it reminded me of a royal funerary monument, or
of a retired general, wearing during the parades his old and elegant uniform.
The sewing machines were meticulously placed one near the other on three lines
separated by two large alleys. Every morning, Eugene was carefully drenching the floor, with
an old pierced sardine can. The trickle of water was very thin and Eugene was handling it
with adroitness, drawing on the floor spirals and scholarly eights. Sometimes he was even
signing himself, or was writing the date. The elegant painting on the walls evidently
reclaimed this kind of delicate craft.
At the back of the shop there was a sort of cabin, separated by the rest of the space by
a sort of screen of wooden boards, its entrance hidden by a green curtain. Eugene and Clara
were sitting there all the time, they were also eating lunch there, in order not to leave the shop
during the day. They called it “the artists’ cabin”, and one day I heard Eugene saying: “This is
indeed an artist’s cabin. What am I, if not an actor, when, for half an hour, I masterly try to
convince the client to buy a swing machine?”
And then he added, with a very erudite tone: “Well, life as a whole is but pure drama.”
Behind the curtain, Eugene was sometimes playing the violin. He was leaning over the
music papers on the table, patiently deciphering the notes, as if he was untangling a ball of
knotted thread, in order to take out of it only one single delicate purl, the music line. The
whole afternoon a small gas lamp was burning on an old wooden bottom drawer, filling the

8
room with a dead light and projecting on the wall the enormous shadow of the violin player.
I went there so often that, in time, I became a sort of furniture-guest, a prolongation of
the old oilcloth couch on which I was lingering immobile for hours, a thing which didn’t
bother anyone and of which nobody took care of.
At the back of the cabin, Clara was making her toilet. She kept her dresses in a small
wardrobe and she was looking into a mirror, placed on the bottom drawer, near the lamp. It
was such an old mirror that, through the partly faded foil and through the transparent spots,
the objects behind the mirror could be seen intermingled with the reflected images, like in a
photograph with superposed negatives.
Sometimes Clara undressed herself almost completely and perfumed her armpits with
Eau de Cologne, raising shamelessly her arms, or her breasts, shuffling her hand through the
shirt’s wide opening. Her shirt was short, and when she was bowing, I could see entirely her
amazingly beautiful legs, squeezed by the perfectly-stretched stockings. She looked exactly
like a half-naked woman I had once seen in a pornographic postcard, which a seller of
cracknels had shown me in the public garden. Every time, her presence provoked in me the
same unidentified feeling of fainting, just as the obscene image did, a sort of void in my chest
intermingled with a atrocious sexual longing, which was clutching my pubis like a claw.
I always sat in the cabin in the same place, on the coach, behind Eugene, and I was
waiting for Clara to finish her toilet. At that moment she was usually getting out of the shop,
passing between me and her brother, through a space so narrow, that she had to rub her legs
against my knees.
I was waiting for this moment every day, equally eager and tormented. But its
accomplishment depended of a long inventory of infinitesimal circumstances, which I was
weighting and spying with a maddening and unusually sharp sensitivity. If Eugene for
example was thirsty, or didn’t feel like playing the violin, or had to welcome a client in the
shop, then he left from the cabin, and the space between me and the table was thus large
enough for Clara to pass far away from me.
When I was going there in the afternoons, while getting close to the shop’s door, long
and vibrant antennas were growing from my body and explored the air in order to catch the
sound of the violin; if I heard it, I was suddenly becoming peaceful and tranquil. I was
entering as quietly as possible and I was saying aloud my name even from the doorway, so
that Eugene wouldn’t believe that I was a client, and thus stop his playing even for one
second; it might have been possible for that precise second of silence to interrupt suddenly the
calm flowing and the enigmatic miracle of the melody, and he could have put his violin aside

9
and not touch it for the rest of the afternoon. But this was not the only possibility of
unfavorable occurrences. So many other things happened in that cabin… While Clara was
making her toilet, I was listening to the most inaudible sounds and I was observing the
slightest movements, because any of them could have ruined the afternoon. For example,
Eugene could vaguely cough, swallow a drop of saliva or say that he is thirsty and wants to go
to the confectioner’s to buy a cake; these minuscule facts, like this cursed cough, could ruin,
monstrously and enormously, full afternoons. The whole day was then losing its vital
substance, and during the night, in my bed, instead of thinking at leisure (and stopping for
some minutes on every detail in order to visualize it and remember it better) of the precise
moment when my knees touched Clara’s stockings (that is, to hollow, to sculpture, to
disembowel and to caress this beloved image), I was tossing and turning in my burning sheets,
unable to sleep and waiting anxiously for the next day.
One day, something particularly unusual happened; it all began with the halo of a
disaster and ended with an unforeseen surprise, but so abruptly and starting from such a
insignificant gesture, that my whole subsequent joy, relying on it, was like a scaffolding of
heteroclite objects held in a fragile equilibrium by a magician in a single immobile point.
With a single step, Clara changed entirely the content of my visits, giving them
another meaning and a new fever, like in that old chemical experiment, in which a small piece
of crystal, put into a goblet of red liquid, transformed it instantly into a startlingly green one.
I was sitting on the couch, in the same place, waiting with the same impatience as
usual, when suddenly the door opened and somebody entered the shop. Eugene left the cabin
immediately. Everything seemed lost. Clara continued to make her toilet, unconcerned, while
the conversation in the shop prolonged endlessly. I secretly hoped that Eugene came before
his sister finished dressing.
I was following the painful deployment of the two events, Clara’s toilet and the
conversation in the shop, thinking that they could continue to unfold independently until Clara
got out of the shop, or, on the contrary, they could have met in the fix point of the cabin, like
in certain movies, when two steam engines come one towards the other with a crazy speed,
and they will smash or will pass one next to the other, depending if a mysterious hand
intervenes or not to change the switch, in those moments of febrile waiting I clearly felt that
the conversation is following its own way and, in parallel, Clara kept powdering her nose…
I desperately tried to correct the fatality by stretching my knees towards the table, so
that they could meet Clara’s feet. I was sitting exactly at the edge of the couch, in a position if
not weird, then at least comic.

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 I had the impression that, through the mirror, Clara was looking at me, smiling.
Soon she finished rounding with carmine the contour of her lips, and powdered her
cheeks for the last time. The perfume spread in the cabin dizzied me with despair and lust,
and, the moment she passed next to me, the thing I least expected happened: she touched her
legs to my knees, like every day (or maybe even intensively? But this was of course just a
physical illusion), with that air of indifference that between us nothing is going on.
There is a complicity of the vice deeper and more rapid than any understanding
through words. It sweeps instantly all your body, like an interior melody, and transforms
completely your thoughts, your flesh and your blood.
In the minuscule second when Clara’s feet touched me, new expectations and new
hopes were born in me, immense and incontrollable.
With Clara I understood everything from the first day, from the first moment; she was
my first complete and normal sexual experience. An adventure full of torments and
expectations, full of inconsistencies and anxieties and gritting of teeth, something that could
have been love if it weren’t just a simple continuity of a painful eagerness. Just as I was
impulsive and daring, Clara was calm and capricious; she had a violent manner of provoking
me, and felt a sort of doggish joy in seeing me suffering, a joy that always preceded the sexual
act, playing a tremendous part in its process.
The first time the thing I had been waiting for so long happened between us, her
challenge was so elementary and almost brutal I might say, that the poor phrase she uttered
then, and the anonymous verb she used, still preserves in my memory something from that
past initial virulence. It is enough to think a little longer of that phrase, and my present
indifference is corroded like by an acid, and her words become again violent as they were
back then.

Eugene was away in town. We were both sitting silent in the shop, Clara was wearing
her regular afternoon dress and she was sitting cross-legged behind the screen, knitting
attentively.
Some weeks passed from the occurrence in the cabin, and between us grew suddenly a
sort of severe coldness, a secret tension manifested through an extreme indifference from her
part. We stayed one in front of the other for hours, without saying a word, and still, in this
silence one could feel the threat of a sudden explosion, a perfect secret understanding, I only
lacked the mysterious word that could have gone through the conventional layer; every
evening I was building dozens of projects, but the next day they were crushed by the most

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elementary obstacles: the knitting that could not be interrupted, the lack of a more favorable
light, the silence in the shop or the three lines of sewing machines, too correctly arranged in
order to permit any change in the shop, even a sentimental one. My jaws were always
clenched; the silence was terrible, locking in itself the evidence and the contour of a scream.
Clara interrupted it. She spoke almost in whispers, without raising her eyes from the
knitting: “If you had come today earlier we could have done it, Eugene left immediately after
lunch in town.”
Until then, never in our silences the shadow of a sexual allusion could have been
found, and all of a sudden, now, from only some words, between us sprang a new reality, so
miraculous and extraordinary, like an antique marble statue grown from the floor in the
middle of the shop, among the innumerable sewing machines…
In one second I was near Clara, I took her hand and begun to violently caress and kiss
it. She wrested it and said, irritated: “Leave me now, it’s too late.” “Please, Clara, come…”
“No, it’s too late, Eugene will come back, just leave me alone.” I was touching feverishly her
shoulders, her breasts, her legs. Clara kept protesting. “Come now, we still have time.” I was
imploring her. “Where?” “In the cabin… come on, it’s so good there…”
And when I pronounced the word “good”, my chest was filled by a warm hope, I
kissed her hand again and I forced her to rise from the chair. She let herself go, without
enthusiasm and trudging her feet on the floor.
From that day on, all the afternoons changed their “habits”: the scenery was the same,
Eugene, Clara and the same sonatas, but now I could hardly stand the sound of the violin, I
was waiting for Eugene to leave, tormented, in the cabin my unrests transformed into other
monsters, as if I was playing a new game on a paper with lines drawn for a game already
known.
When Eugene was leaving, the true expectancy begun: it was heavier and more
unbearable than the previous one; the silence of the shop turned into a block of ice.
Clara was sitting at the window, knitting: this was our every day “prelude”, without it
our adventure could not take place. Sometimes Eugene was leaving while Clara was almost
naked in the cabin: at the beginning I thought that this detail could rush the course of the
events, but I was wrong, Clara did not permit any other prelude than the one in the shop. I had
to uselessly wait for her to dress and to go near the window so that I could open the fleshy
book of the afternoon at its first page, behind the window.
I was sitting in front of her on a stool and I was beginning to talk to her, to beg her, to
ask her, for a long time. I knew it was in vain, only rarely did Clara accept to come with me,

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and then she used one of her foxiness, only because she didn’t want to offer me her perfect
allowance: “I’m going in the cabin to take a pill, I have a horrible headache, please don’t
follow me.”
I would promise her not to do it, of course, and in one second I was following her, and
in the cabin one of these fabulous fights was starting, a fight during which Clara’s forces were
of course ready to give up. She was then falling on the couch, as if she had stumbled over
something. Then she put her hands under her head and closed her eyes as if she were sleeping;
it was impossible for me to change even with a centimeter the position of her body; I had to
wrest her dress from under her legs in order to touch her. Clara had no resistance to any of my
gestures, but didn’t help me either. She was immobile and indifferent like a piece of wood,
and only her intimate and secret warmth proved to me that she is attentive and that she
“knows”.
During this period the doctor who prescribed me the quinine was consulted. The
proofing of my impression that he had something mousey in himself was accomplished in the
cabin and, as I already said, in the most surprising way.
One day, while I was pasted to Clara and I was tearing her dress with hungry gestures,
I suddenly felt something strange moving in the cabin and –with the obscure but very sharp
instinct of the extreme pleasure towards which I was heading, and which couldn’t admit any
foreign presence around, and not with my real senses- I understood that some living being had
penetrated our intimacy and was looking at us.
I turned my head, scared, and I saw on the bottom drawer, behind the powder box, a
mouse. He stopped exactly near the mirror, on the drawer’s edge, and was looking at me with
its small black eyes, in which the light of the lamp was reflected in two shiny golden round
spots. For some seconds long as the eternity its gaze pierced my eyes and descended deep
down into my brain, and I felt in its silent meditation a heavy reproach towards my actions.
All of a sudden this mutual fascination dissolved and the mouse ran away, disappearing
behind the drawer. I was now positive that the doctor had come to spy us.
The same evening, at the moment when I had to take the quinine, my theory was
enforced by a perfectly illogical reasoning, but very plausible for me: the quinine was bitter,
and the doctor had seen in the cabin the pleasure which Clara was offering me; thus, in order
to establish an universal equilibrium, he prescribed me the most unpleasant medicine ever,
and I could almost hear him crunching his reasoning: “The biggerrrrrr the pleasurrrrre, the
bitterrrrr the rrrrrrrremedy.”
Some months after the consultation, the doctor was found dead in the attic of his

13
house; he had shot himself in the head.
My first question when I heard the news was:
“Were there any mice in that attic?”
For me, this piece of information was vital.
In order for the doctor to be truly dead, it was imperative that a wild herd of mice to
raid over the dead body, to hole it and to extract the entire mousey matter, borrowed by the
doctor during his lifetime, in order to be able to practice his illegal “human” existence.

I must have been twelve years old when I met Clara. No matter how deep I explore my
childhood memories, they are all related to the sexual awareness, which appears to me with
the same nostalgia and the same purity, like the adventures of the night, of the fear or of the
first friendships, different in nothing from the melancholies and the other hopes, for example,
the boring expectation to become an “adult”, which I was measuring concretely every time I
was shaking the hand of someone older, trying to determine the difference in weight and size
of my small hand, lost under the unrefined fingers, in the enormous palm of the one holding
mine.
At no single moment in my childhood did I ignore the difference between men and
women. Maybe at a certain point I confused all the living creatures in a unique clearness of
movements and stillness, but I have no exact memory of this period. The sexual secret was
always only apparent. It was a simple “secret”, but just as well it could have been an object,
like a table, or a chair.
When I examine attentively my most distant memories, their lack of actuality is being
revealed through the misunderstanding of the sexual act itself. My imagination distorted the
feminine organ and the carnal act itself, which for me was more pompous and eccentric than
what I subsequently discovered with Clara. Still, in these misinterpretations, which became in
time more and more accurate, there was a feeling of mystery and bitterness, which completed
its consistency little by little, like a great artist’s painting, which started from a simple sketch
of shapeless forms.
I remember myself very small, in a long shirt touching the ground, crying in a
doorway, in a sunny yard, its gate opened towards a deserted market, an afternoon market,
warm and infinitely sad, with sleeping dogs and people sleeping in the shadows of their stalls
with fruits and vegetables. The air was filled with the smell of the rotten fruits, some huge
flies are buzzing around me, sucking my tears fallen on my hands; they are flying in frantic
spirals, in the yard’s dense and heated light. I rise, I begin to urinate, attentively, in the dust.

14
The ground absorbs avidly the liquid, and on that place remains a dark spot, like the trace of
an inexistent object, I wipe my face with my shirt and I lick the tears gathered on the corners
of my mouth, feeling their flavor. I sit again in the doorway and I feel miserable. I was beaten.
Not long time ago, in the room, my father slapped me several times on the naked
buttocks, I don’t know too well why. I’m trying to think. I was lying in my bed, near a little
girl of about my age; we had been put there to sleep, while our parents were gone for a walk. I
didn’t hear them coming, I don’t remember what I was doing to the little girl under the
blanket. I only know that, the moment my father suddenly raised the blanket, the little girl had
already begun to accept my proposals. My father became red, got angry and beat me. This
was everything.
I sit in the doorway, in the sun, I cried and then wiped off my tears, now I draw with
my finger in the dust circles and lines, I change my place, I move at the shadow, I sit cross-
legged on a big rock and I feel better. A girl came in the yard to take some water, she whirls
the rusted wheel of the pump. I listen carefully the squeak of the old iron, I look at the water
springing in the pail, like a magnificent silver horse tail, I look at the girl’s big dirty legs, I
yawn because I didn’t sleep and from time to time I try to catch a fly. It’s the simple life that
starts again after tears. In the yard, the sun keeps pouring its overwhelming heat. It’s my first
sexual adventure and my oldest childhood memory.
From now on, obscure instincts swallow, grow and distort, entering in their natural
limits. What should have been an amplification and a continually growing fascination was for
me a long series of renouncements and dreadful reductions towards the ordinary; the
evolution from childhood to teenage meant for me a continuous diminishing of the world and,
as things organized themselves around me, their ineffable aspect disappeared gradually, like a
shiny surface covered steadily with vapors.
Ecstatic, miraculous, Walter’s shining figure still fascinates me.
When I met him he was sitting in the shadow of an acacia tree, on a trunk, and was
reading a number of Buffalo-Bill. The clear morning light was filtered by the green and thick
leaves, in a fizz of chilly shadows, and his clothes were far from ordinary: he was wearing a
dark-red tunic, with buttons sculptured in bone, deer-suede trousers and, on his naked feet,
sandals knitted from delicate strips of white suede. When I sometimes want to live again the
extraordinary sensation of this meeting, I stare for a long time at the yellowish cover of some
old number of Buffalo-Bill. Still, Walter’s real presence was beyond any description, no word
could possibly portray his red tunic in the greenish air at the shadow of the acacia.
His first gesture was a sort of elastic jump, like an animal’s. We immediately became

15
friends. We spoke a little and all of a sudden he made me a stupefying proposal: to eat acacia
flowers. It was the first time I ever met someone who ate flowers. In only a few seconds
Walter was up in the tree, and he gathered an enormous bouquet. He then got down and
showed me how the flower should be delicately detached from the corolla, and then suck only
its top. I tried as well; the flower crackled a bit under my teeth, with a very pleasant click, and
a suave and fresh perfume spread in my mouth, a new perfume, never tasted before.
For a while we ate acacia flowers, in complete silence. All of a sudden, he grabbed
my hand tight: “Would you like to see the headquarter of our gang?” His eyes were burning, I
was suddenly afraid. “Do you want to or not?” he asked me again. I hesitated for one second,
then I said “I want to”, with a voice which wasn’t mine anymore and with a desire of risk and
adventure exploded suddenly from in my inner depths and which I felt as not belonging to me.
Walter took my hand and we passed through the small gate at the far end of the
garden, and got to a deserted and vacant field. The grass and the wild herbs had covered the
soil. The nettles were burning my feet and we had to put aside with our hands the thick stalks
of hemlocks and burdocks. We finally got to the ruins of a wall; in front of it there were a
ditch and a deep pit. Walter jumped inside and called me after him; the pit opened directly
into the wall, and it is through there that we entered into an abandoned cellar.
The steps were broken and covered with moss; the walls were filtering moisture and
the darkness in front of us, impenetrable. Walter clenched my hand and dragged me after him.
We slowly descended about ten steps, and then we stopped.
“We have to stay here, he said, we cannot walk further, there at the back there are
some iron people, with iron hands and heads, grown from the floor. They stand still and if
they find us in the dark they will strangle us.”
I turned my head and I looked with despair towards the circle of light on top of us,
coming from a simple and clear world, where no iron people existed, and where one could see
from the distance the plants, the people and the houses. Walter brought from somewhere a
wooden board and we sat on it. We remained silent for some minutes. It was good and chilly
in that cellar, the air had a heavy smell of humidity and I could have remained there for hours
and hours, isolated, far away from the heated streets, form the boring and depressing little
provincial town. I felt good there, closed between the cold walls, under the earth which was
walloping in the heat. The useless hum of the afternoon could be heard like a distant echo,
through the opening of the cellar.
“We bring here the girls we catch”, Walter said. I vaguely understood what he was
talking about. The cellar become swiftly of an unprecedented appeal.

16
 “And what do you do with them?” Walter laughed.
“You mean you don’t know? We do what all men do with women, we sleep with them
and… with a feather…”
“With a feather? What kind of a feather? What do you do with them exactly?” Walter
laughed again.
“How old are you, little boy? You don’t know what men do with women? You don’t
have a feather? Here is mine.”
He got out of the pocket of his tunic a small bird’s feather.
In that split second I felt that one of my habitual crises was starting. Maybe if Walter
hadn’t got out of his pocket that feather, I would have continued to tolerate around me that air
of complete and desolating seclusion of the cavern, but all of a sudden this isolation got a new
and painful and deep meaning, only now did I realize how far away that cellar was from the
town and its dusty narrow streets. It was like I was withdrawing from myself, in the loneliness
of an underground depth, under some ordinary summer day. The black shiny feather which
Walter was showing me was the concrete proof that nothing more exists in my decipherable
universe. Everything was melted in a swoon where it was shining weirdly, in the middle of
that odd chamber with wet herbs, in that darkness which was inhaling the light like a cold,
hungry, wide open mouth.
“What’s wrong? Water asked. Let me tell you what we do with the feather…” The sky
outside, seen through the cellar’s opening, was becoming more and more white and vaporous
with every second.
His words were hitting the walls and were crossing my soft flesh as if I were a liquid
creature. Walter kept talking, but he was so far away from me, and so airy, that he seemed just
a simple clearness in the dark, a spot of fog wiggling in the shadow.
“You first caress the little girl with the feather, I could hear like in a dream, and then
you caress yourself… You must know these things…”
All of a sudden, Walter came close to me and begun to shake me, as if he wanted to
wake me up. Slowly, slowly I began to regain my consciousness. When I opened my eyes,
Walter was bowed over my pubis, its mouth tightly stuck to my sex. I could not possibly
understand what was going on.
Walter rose in his feet.
“This did you good… The Indians during the war wake up the blessed like this, and
we in our gang, we know all the Indian charms and incantations and remedies…”
I woke up smashed and tired. Walter ran away and disappeared. I climbed the stairs as

17
well, very carefully.
During the next days I searched for him everywhere, but it was in vain, the last option
was to meet him in the cellar, but when I went there, the deserted field was completely
changed, everywhere there were piles of garbage, with corpses of animals and rotten rubbish,
smelling horribly in the sun. With Walter I hadn’t seen any of these things. I gave up going to
the cellar and so I never saw Walter again.
Soon after this I got a feather which I was keeping secretly in my pocket, wrapped in a
piece of newspaper. Sometimes I had the impression that I was the one who invented that
entire story with the feather, and that Walter never existed in reality. From time to time I was
unfolding the piece of newspaper and I was looking at the feather for a long time: its mystery
was unreachable, I was touching my cheek with its soft and silky shine and this caress was
shuddering me as if an invisible person, but still a real one, had touched my face with the top
of the fingers. The first time I used it was one beautiful evening, in quite unusual
circumstances.
I always liked to stay outside until late, and that evening a heavy and ponderous storm
had started. All the day’s heat was condensed in an overwhelming atmosphere, under a black
sky cut by lightings. I was sitting in a doorway and I was looking at the game of electric lights
on the walls of the narrow lane. The wind was sheering the bulb which illuminated the street
and the concentric circles of the globe, shadowed on the walls, were swerving like a liquid
agitated in a vase. Long ribbons of dust were raised on the road, rising in spirals.
All of a sudden, in a wrapping of wind, I had the impression that a white marble statue
is rising in the air. At that moment I could guess an incontrollable certitude, like every
certitude. The block of white stone was moving up fast and edgeways, like a balloon escaped
from a child’s hand. In only a few seconds the statue became a simple white spot in the sky,
the size of my fist. I could now see distinctly two white persons, holding hands and sliding in
the sky like two skiers.
In that precise moment, a little girl stopped in front of me. I must have had my mouth
and my eyes wide open, looking amazed at the sky, because she asked me, astonished, what I
was seeing up there.
“Look, a flying statue… look quickly… it will soon disappear…”
The little girl looked up attentively, knitting her brows, but told me that she could see
nothing. She was my neighbor, a fattish creature with red cheeks like the rubber and hands
always wet. Until that night I had only seldom spoken to her. Now, in front of me, she
suddenly began to laugh:

18
 “I know why you tricked me, she said, I know what you really want…”
She began to move away from me jumping in one leg. I rised and ran after her; I called
her in an obscure passage and she came without any resistance. There, I raised her dress. She
let herself be handled, submissive, holding my shoulders. Maybe she was more surprised by
what was going on, than aware of the indecency of the action itself.
The most surprising sequel of this adventure came some days after, in the middle of
some market. Some masons were slaking lime in a container. I was looking at the lime boiling
when suddenly I heard someone calling my name and someone said aloud: “Aha, with the
feather… you like to do it with the feather…” He was a young man of about twenty years old,
a big reddish boy, a horrible and unbearable creature. I think he was living in some house
inside the dark passage, I only saw him screaming at me for one second no more, on the other
side of the container, emerging like a phantom from the lime steams like an infernal
apparition speaking in the middle of the fire and of the thunders. Maybe he told me something
completely different, and my inflamed imagination gave to his words a new meaning, one of
which I was preoccupied during those days, I cannot believe he could have seen something in
the compact darkness of that passage. Still, thinking more about it, I finally concluded that
maybe the passage wasn’t as obscure as I thought it was, and everything was visible, and
maybe we even stood in the very light… All these presumptions strengthened my conviction
that, during the sexual act, I was possessed by a sort of dream, which was blurring my sight
and my whole senses, and finally I imposed to myself to be more cautious next time. Who
knows to what sort of aberrations my inflamed body and spirit could force me to accomplish:
in full day, under the weight of the excitation and possessed by it like by a heavy sleep in
which I was moving unconsciously?
In deep, almost organic connection with the memory of the feather there is another
one, with a small black book, extremely bewildering. I once found it on a table and looked in
it with a lot of interest. It was an ordinary novel, “Frida”, by Andre Theuriet, in an edition
illustrated with many drawings. In every one of these drawings appeared the image of a blond
little boy, with curly hair and velvet clothes, and of a fattish little girl, with a dress with
furbelows and frills. The little boy looked exactly like Walter. The children appeared in the
drawings sometimes together, sometimes separately: it was obvious that they mainly met in
the hidings of a park and in the shadow of the ruined walls. What were they doing together?
This is what I wanted to know. Did the little boy have a feather, like me, and kept it hidden in
his pocket? You could not see it in the images and I didn’t have time to read the book. Some
days after, the little book disappeared without traces. I begun to look for it everywhere, I

19
asked of it in all the bookshops, but nobody ever heard of it. It was probably full of secrets
and hidden truths if one couldn’t find it anywhere.
One day I dared to enter in the building of a public library. A tall, pale man, with
slightly trembling glasses, was sitting in the back of the hall, on a tall chair, and looked at me
coming timidly. There was no way back. I was bound to go to his table, and there, to
pronounce the sensational word “Fri-da”, like a confession, in front of the shortsighted man,
of all my hidden vices. I got very close to his desk and murmured with a feeble voice the
infamous title. The librarian’s glasses begun to tremble more evidently on his nose, he closed
his eyes as if he was searching for something in his memory and then told me distinctly that
he “never heard” of it. But still, for me, the trembling of his glasses was the proof of some
interior trouble; I now had the concrete proof that “Frida” contained the most veiled and most
thrilling revelations.
Many years after this I found the book again, on the shelf of some forgotten bookshop.
It was not my small book dressed in black fabric, but a humble and miserable brochure, with
yellowish covers. For a second no more I wanted to buy it, but I changed my mind and put it
back again. The image of a small black book is still intact in my memory, in it is enclosed
something from the bitter and authentic perfume of my childhood.

In the minuscule and unimportant objects: a black bird’s feather, an ordinary book,
and old photograph with fragile and obsolescent characters, who seemed to suffer from some
serious internal disease, a tender ashtray of green faience sculptured like an oak leaf, always
smelling of old ash, in the simple and elementary remembering of Samuel Weber’s glasses
with thick lentils: in these tiny ornaments and domestic things can I find the whole
melancholy of my childhood, and that essential nostalgia of the world’s futility, which
surrounded me from everywhere like a water with mineral waves. The raw matter -with its
profound and heavy masses of soil, rocks, sky and waters, or with its most far from
understanding forms, the paper flowers, the mirrors, the small glass spheres with their
enigmatic interior spirals, or the colored statues- always kept me prisoner, and this state of
slavery was always hitting painfully my inner walls, perpetuating in me, meaninglessly, the
weir adventure of being a man.
Anywhere my reason was heading towards, it always met objects and immobilities,
like some sort of walls in front of which it had to kneel.
I was thinking, terrorized by their diversity, of the infinite forms of the matter, and I
was tormenting myself during the endless nights, stirred by the series of objects continuously

20
aligned in my remembrance, like a mechanical stair unfolded in thousands and thousands of
steps.
Sometimes, in order to stop the wave of things and colors which was flooding my
brain, I would imagine the evolution of a single contour, or of a distinct object. I was
imagining, for example –and this, like a correct repertoire of the world- the succession of all
the shadows on the earth, the outlandish and fantastic grey world that sleeps at the bottom of
the so-called real life.
I imagine, in my solitude:
The black man, lying like a veil on the grass, with his thin legs slopped like water,
with arms of dark iron, then walking between horizontal trees, with diaphanous branches.
The shadows of the ships fleeing on the sea, unstable and aquatic like the common
sadness which comes and goes, sliding on the scum.
The shadows of the birds flying, like black birds born from the black dust, or from a
gloomy aquarium.
And then the solitary shadow, lost somewhere in the space of our round planet.
I was also thinking of the caves and the grottos and the unbearably deep precipices in
the mountains, of them, but also of that elastic and warm and ineffable cavern, the sexual
cavern… I don’t remember from where I got a small electric lantern and, during the night, in
my bed, maddened by the lack of sleep and by the objects in the room that were continuously
changing their place, I was hiding under the blanket and observing, with strained attention, in
an intimate and aimless study, the folds of the sheet and the minuscule valleys between them.
I needed such a precise and minuscule occupation to calm down. My father found me once, at
midnight, exploring with the lantern the unknown under the blanket, and took it from me. But
he didn’t scold me, I think that for him this discovery was so strange, that he couldn’t find in
his common vocabulary the words and the morality which one could have applied to such an
action.
Some years later I saw in an anatomy book a photograph with a wax casting of the
ear’s interior. All the channels, all the sinuses and all the holes were made of full matter,
representing their positive image. I was tremendously impressed by this photograph, I almost
fainted, all of a sudden I realized that the world could exist in a more authentic reality, in a
positive structure of its caverns, so that all that is empty could become full, and the present
relief could simply become a void of an identical form, without any content, like those
delicate fossils which reproduce in the rock the traces of some prehistoric shell of leaf, which
macerated during the time-consuming epochs, leaving behind only the delicate prints of their

21
shape.
In such a world, people would stop being only these fleshy and colored excrescences,
full of complicated organs and bound to rotten, but pure voids, floating, like the air bubbles in
the water, through the humid and supple substance of the full universe. It was exactly like the
intimate and painful sensation which I often felt during the endless teenage wanderings, when
all of a sudden I would wake up in the core of a terrible isolation, as if all the people and the
houses around me had pasted up in a compact and shapeless mucilage, in which I was just a
simple void, sadly wandering around, purposeless.
Seen as a whole, the objects formed different settings. The impression of spectacular
reality was always inside me, and I had the feeling that everything evolves in the middle of a
sad and fictional show. When I sometimes managed to get rid of the boring, uniform vision of
a colorless world, its theatrical, emphatic and obsolete aspect appeared hideous in front of my
eyes.

Within the framework of this general show, certain amazing performances were
particularly drawing my attention, because their artificiality and insincerity and the actors who
played in them seemed to have understood completely the world’s sense of mystification.
They were the only ones to know that, in a spectacular and decorative universe, the real life
had to be played falsely and artificially. Two of these incredible shows were the cinema and
the panopticon, with its carnival sideshow.
Oh! The cinema hall, long and dark like a sunken submarine! Its entrance doors were
covered with crystal mirrors, in which a part of the street was reflected: thus, there was a free
show even from the entrance, before the one inside the cinema, an amazing screen in which
the street appeared in a dream-like greenish light, with somnambular people and cotton
carriages, moving softly in its waters.
In the hall itself the atmosphere was hot, moldy, sour and acid like in a public bath.
The floor was cemented and the chair’s creaks sounded like some short and desperate
screams; in the first rows, in the very front of the screen, a full crowd of shop-boys and
tramps were eating sun-flower seeds and commenting the movie aloud. The titles were
syllabified by some dozens of mouths in the same time, like the texts for an adult school.
Exactly under the screen the orchestra was playing, composed of a woman piano player, a
violin player and an old Jew, precipitately playing the contrabass. This old man also had the
mission to utter different sounds according to the actions on the screen. He was screaming
cock-a-doodle-doo when, at the beginning of the movie, appeared on the screen the cock of

22
the cinematographic house, and once, I remember, when the life of Jesus was presented, at the
moment of the resurrection, he started to hit frenetically with the bow in his contrabass’ box,
in order to imitate the celestial thunders.
I was living the episodes in the movie with an extraordinary intensity, integrating
myself into the action like a true character of the drama. It sometimes happened that the film
absorbed my attention to such an extent that all of a sudden I had the impression that I was
walking in the parks on the screen, or that I am leaning on the balustrade of the Italian terraces
on which Francisca Bertini was acting pathetically, with disheveled hair and arms agitating as
through transparent veils.
And anyway there is no clear difference between our real person and our different
imaginary interior personages. When light was turned on during the breaks, the hall seemed
like coming back from very far away. There was something precarious and artificial in this
atmosphere, much more uncertain and ephemeral than the action on the screen, I would close
my eyes and wait until de mechanical grind of the equipment announced me that the movie
continued; then I was finding again the hall submerged in darkness, and all the persons around
me, illuminated directly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues,
in a museum illuminated by the moon at midnight.
Once, the cinema took fire. The strip of celluloid had broken and took fire
immediately, so that, for a few seconds, the flames appeared on the screen, like an honest
premonition that the cinema is burning down and, at the same time, a sort of logical
continuation of the function of the projector to present the “latest news” and whose mission
thus made it, through an excess of perfectionism, to present the last and the most thrilling
information, that of its own fire. From everywhere burst screams and short shouts, “Fire!
Fire!”, resembling some revolver shots; in only one second the hall was filled with so much
noise that it seemed that the watchers, silent and obscured until then, had been gathering in
themselves only howls and rumble, like a sort of calm and inoffensive batteries which explode
when their capacity of recharging was violently exceeded.
In only few minutes and even before half of the watchers had been evacuated, the
“tremendous fire” was extinguished, but still they kept screaming, as if they had to consume a
certain quantity of energy in themselves. A young lady, with her face powdered like plaster,
was screaming stridently looking straight into my eyes, without making any step towards the
exit. A muscled pretzels-seller, convinced of the usefulness of his physical power in this kind
of situations, but still not knowing how to use it, was raising one by one the wooden chairs
and was throwing them towards the screen. Suddenly an ample and very sonorous boom was

23
heard: one of the chairs had hit the old musician’s contrabass. The cinema was always full of
surprises.
In the summer I was entering at the matinee and getting out in the evening, when it
was almost dark. The light outside had changed; the ending day was dying slowly. Therefore I
could see that during my absence the world had experienced an immense and essential
transformation, a sort of sad obligation to continue endlessly its regular flow, for example
towards the night, its diaphanous and spectacular flow on the way to the unknown. I was
entering then in the middle of a complete certitude which, through its daily rigor, appeared to
me of an endless melancholy, in a world subjected to the most theatrical effects and obliged
every evening to perform a correct sunset, while the people around me appeared like some
poor beings, pitiful for the seriousness with which they were consuming their modest lives
and for the naivety of their occupations. Only one human being in the whole city could
understand these things, and I admired her without any boundaries: she was the town’s fool.
She alone in the midst of these rigid persons, all just a package of prejudices and conventions,
had kept intact her freedom to scream and to dance in the street whenever she felt like. She
wandered on the streets all ragged and dirty and toothless and crazily-raveled-red-haired,
holding close in her arms, with a motherhood tenderness, an old little wooden coffer filled
with dry bread and various objects gathered from the rubbish.
She was showing her sex to the passers-by, with a gesture which, having been
employed with another purpose, could have been qualified as “stylish and elegant”. Oh, what
a sublime and splendid thing, to be a fool! I was thinking, and unfortunately I had to confess
to myself, infinitely sad, that I was separated by he extreme freedom of a lunatic’s existence
by a whole chain of strong and stupid familiar habits and a strong and crushing rational
education. I think that someone who never had this feeling is condemned to forever ignore the
true amplitude of the surrounding world.
This general and elementary impression of spectacular was becoming a real terror as
soon as I entered a panopticon with wax figures. It was one of those fears intermingled with a
drop of vague pleasure and somehow with that weird feeling that any one of us has that he
already lived in a certain place. I think that if once the instinct of having a goal in life will
flourish in me, and if this impulse will be related to something really profound, essential and
irremediable in my true being, then my body should become a wax statue in a panopticon and
my life, a simple and endless contemplation of the exhibitions from the panorama.
In the somber light of the carbide lamps I was feeling like truly living my own destiny,
unique and impossible to imitate. All of my daily actions could be mixed like a pack of

24
playing cards, I didn’t care for any of them; the people’s irresponsibility towards their actions,
even the most conscientious ones, was of an undeniable evidence. It didn’t matter that it was
me or another person who was committing them, the world’s diversity was swallowing them
in the same shapeless monotony. In the panopticon, and only there, there was no contradiction
between what I was doing and what was going on. The wax characters were the only true
thing in the whole universe; they were the only ones to falsify the life in the purest and
evident manner, belonging, through their strange and artificial immobility, to the world’s true
matter. The uniform holed by bullets and stained with blood of a certain Austrian archduke,
with a yellow and sad figure, was infinitely more tragic than any real death; in a crystal box
was lying a woman dressed in black laces, her face shiny and pale, with an incredibly red rose
between her breast, and a blonde wig which had begun to peel off at the edge of the forehead,
while on her nostrils the red color of the powder was still palpitating. Her blue eyes, limpid as
only glass can be, were staring at me, immobile. It was out of the question for that woman not
to have a deep, troublesome significance, undiscovered until then. The more I contemplated
her, the clearer her true meaning appeared to me, persisting somewhere deep inside me like a
word which I would have wanted to remember, but which only lingered in me like a very
distant rhythm.
I have always been fascinated by women’s uncontrollable appetite for the artificial
objects, cheaply ornamented. A friend of mine was collecting the most diverse things he could
find, for example, in a mahogany box, he kept a strip of black silk, adorned with infinitely
delicate lace on the borders and sewed with some shiny sequins. It had been obviously torn
from some old ball dress; the silk was moldy in some places. Just to let me see it he would ask
me stamps and even money. After the payment he would introduce me in a small old-
fashioned saloon, while his parents were sleeping, and he let me see it. I would stay like this,
holding the delicate strip of silk, bewildered of stupefaction and pleasure. My friend was
standing in the doorway, and was attentive to see if someone was coming; he would come
back after some minutes, take the strip from my hands and put it back into the mahogany box
and say to me: “Your time is over, you must go now”, just as Clara used to do sometimes in
the cabin.
Another object which perturbed me immeasurably when I first saw it was a gipsy ring.
It was definitely the most fantastic ring which a man could ever invent to adorn a woman’s
hand.
The birds’, flowers’ and animals’ extraordinary ornaments, all having a very precise
sexual role, the ultramodern and ultra stylised tails of the birds of paradise, the oxidized

25
feathers of the pea-cock, the hysterical lace of the petunias’ petals, the improbable blue color
of the monkeys’ intimate parts are only pale attempts towards sexual ornamentation
comparing to the dazzling gipsy ring. It was a superb, elusive, grotesque and hideous article,
made of cheap metal, attacking love in its most darkened regions, at its very basement, a
veritable sexual scream. I am sure that the artist who made it had been inspired by the same
visions in the panopticon. The ring’s stone, actually a simple piece of glass melted until it got
to a lentil’s thickness, looked exactly like the fights in the panoramas through which I was
looking at the magnified sunk ships, at the combats with the Turks or at the royal
assassinations. In the ring I could see a bouquet of flowers chiseled in the cheap metal and
painted with the aggressive colors of the panopticon: the violet of the corpses dead by
asphyxiation, near the pornographic red of the women’s garters, the livid pallor of the
infuriated waves in the core of a macabre light, or the semi-obscurity of the glass sepulchers.
All this microscopic landscape was surrounded by small Titian leaves and other mysterious
signs. Hallucinating…
Everything that is imitated makes a deep impression on me, especially the artificial
flowers and the funeral garlands, especially these, forgotten and dusty in their oval glass
boxes in the cemetery’s church, surrounding with an obsolete delicateness anonymous old
names, forgotten in an eternity without echoes.
I’m also impressed by the cut-out images with which the children play and the cheap
statues in the fairs. In time these statues lose their heads or some limb and their owner, in
order to repair them, delicately surrounds the head with white gypsum jewels. The bronze of
the rest of the statue gets then the tragic significance of a noble suffering. I also like the
natural-sized statues of Jesus in the catholic churches. The stained glass throws in the altar the
last reflections of the red sunset, while the lilies at the Christ’s feet exhale at this exact hour of
the day the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume, and in this atmosphere filled with
airy blood and odorizing faint, a pale young man plays at the organ the last notes of a
desperate melody.
All these things emigrated in the real life from the panopticon. In the fair’s panorama I
can find the common place of all these nostalgias scattered in the world, which, gathered in
the same place, form its deepest essence. I have only one single supreme desire in life: to
assist to the burning of a panopticon, to see the slow and scabrous melting of the wax statues,
to witness, speechless, how the yellow beautiful feet of the young bride in the glass box curl
in the air, while the untouchable sex between them is consumed by a real, devouring flame.
Except for the panopticon, the August fair was every time bringing with it the same

26
sadness and exaltation. Its oversized performance was swelling like a real symphony, starting
from the prelude of the isolated panoramas, which were coming long before everything else,
and were indicating the general rhythm of the festival, like the secluded and prolonged sounds
which announce, at the beginning of a concert, the theme of the whole composition, which
lasts until the heroic ending, exploding of screams, thumps and fanfares, like at the Judgment
Day, followed by the immense silence of the deserted field.
The few panoramas which were coming earlier basically enclosed in themselves the
whole fair, presenting it in its most minuscule detail. It was enough for the first to be installed,
soon after all the colors, all the glitters and the full smell of carbide of the complete fair had
already filled the town, like foam. In the multitude of the everyday noises one could suddenly
hear a slight sharp sound, but not the chirp of a tinned spoon on a ceramic plate, nor the
distant tinkling of a set of keys, not the jingle of an engine, it was the easily recognizable
clatter of the “Wheel of Fortune”.
In the obscurity of the boulevard, all of a sudden, in the evening, a circle of colored
flamboyances was suddenly inflamed, like a very primordial constellation. Soon, others were
following, and the boulevard was becoming an enlightened corridor, through which I would
pass bewildered, just like a young boy of my age whom I saw in an illustrated edition of a
Jules Verne novel, who was incumbent to a submarine’s window, looking at the mysterious
marine phosphorescence, floating in the deep ocean’s darkness.
In only a few days the fair was completely settled. The halo of barracks was finally
organized, complete and definitive.
Well established sectors sectioned it into regions of shadows and lights, the very same
every year. Firstly, the area of the restaurants, with its dozens of necklaces of tinted lamps,
the district composed of the panoramas of monstrousness, the façade bewildered with light of
the circus and finally the obscure and humble barracks of the photographers. The visitors were
walking in circles, passing from the highest luminosity to the deepest darkness, like the moon
in my geography book, which was passing alternatively through different typographic spheres
of white and black.
We usually entered some small and badly illuminated panorama, with few artists,
which didn’t even have a roof, where my father could bargain at the entrance, with the
director, a collective and reduced price for our numerous family.
There, inside, the performance had an improvised and clumsy aspect. The chilly night
winds were wafting above the viewers’ heads and far away up there the cold stars were
shining glassily. We were lost in a fair barrack, gone astray through the night’s chaos, on the

27
infinitesimal point of a lonesome planet. In that precise point of that planet, men and dogs
were acting on an offhand stage, men throwing in the air different objects and then catching
them again, dogs jumping through circles of fire and walking on two paws. Where exactly
was all this happening? The immensity of the sky above us seemed even more
immeasurable…
Once, in one of these poor barracks, an artist promised in front of the public to offer a
prize of five thousand lei to the person able to imitate the sensational and extremely easy
number which he would perform. We were only few of us sitting on the low benches. A very
fat man, known in town to be of an extreme avarice, bewildered by this unprecedented
possibility to gain an enormous amount of money in that meager panorama, suddenly changed
his place, getting closer with some benches to the stage, decided to observe carefully the
artist’s slightest gesture, in order to reproduce it later and take the prize.
Some moments of terrible silence followed.
The artist got close to the footlights: “Gentlemen, he said with a profoundly raucous
voice, it is all about expiring from the neck the smoke of a cigarette.” He lit a cigarette,
inhaled deeply and then, taking his hand from his collar, where he had kept it up until then,
released a delicate trickle of blue smoke, through the orifice of an artificial larynx, which he
probably got after some surgery. That fat man from the first rows remained for some seconds
speechless and bewildered; he became all red and, while going back to his initial place, he
was murmuring quite aloud: “Well, sure, of course he can do it, I’m not surprised, he has a
devilish machine in his neck!”
Imperturbable, the artist on the stage answered him: “Please, please, come and try”,
and maybe he was honestly willing to give a prize to this unknown fellow in suffering…
In these barracks, in order to earn a living, pale and skinny old men were swallowing
in front of their public stones and soap, young girls were twisting their fragile bodies and
anemic and skeletal children, leaving aside the salty boiled corn they had eaten up until then,
were going up on the stage and were dancing with small bells tied to their trousers.
During the day, immediately after lunch, in the heated stuffiness, the fair’s desolation
was limitless. The immobility of the wooden horses, with their goggled eyes and their tanned
crests, acquired suddenly an unexplainable melancholy of paralyzed life. A warm and familiar
smell of food was coming from the barracks, while a solitary barrel organ, somewhere far, far
away, insisted in elapsing its asthmatic waltz, whose chaos, from time to time, was gushing a
metallic whistling note, like a sudden spout, high and strait, liberated from the mass of a pool
of water.

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 What I liked most of all was to sit for hours in front of the photographers’ barracks,
contemplating the unknown persons, in groups or alone, turned into stone and smiling, in
front of the grey landscapes with cascades and distant mountains. All these people, integrated
to the same landscape, looked like the members of the same family, gone on a trip in the same
picturesque place, were they were taken into photograph one after the other.
Once I saw my own photo in the window one of these itinerant studios, and this
sudden meeting with myself, immobilized in a fix attitude, there, on the outskirts of the fair,
had on me a somehow depressing effect.
Before getting back to my town, it had surely traveled in other places as well,
unknown to me. For one second I had the feeling that the real me was the one in the photo.
But anyway, I was experiencing very often this reversal of the mental positions, in the most
different occasions. It would come stealthily and change all of a sudden my interior body. For
example, stopping near a street accident, for a few minutes I was looking at the whole scene
like any other observant near me, but, all of a sudden, the whole perspective was changing
and –exactly like in that game consisting in seeing in the walls’ painting some sort of a weird
animal, which we cannot reconstruct again the next day, because we see in its place, and
formed by the same decorative elements, a statue, a naked woman or a landscape- even
though everything had stayed intact, I could suddenly see the whole scenery of the street
accident from the point of view of the blessed person, as if it was me and not another lying on
the street and looking up to the surrounding world, from the center to the periphery, and I had
the distinct feeling that the blood is flowing out from me. In the same way, without any effort
and as a logical sequel of the simple fact that I was staying on my chair looking at the screen,
I was imagining myself living in the intimacy of the scenes of the movie. It was from this
perspective that I saw myself, in front of the unknown photographer’s barrack, in the place of
the motionless boy staring at me from the cardboard.
My whole life, the life of the little person of flesh and blood and staying on the other
side of the show case, appeared to the boy in the photograph, all of a sudden, indifferent and
meaningless, just as the living me found absurd the wanderings through unknown regions of
the other me, the nomadic image. In the same way in which the photograph representing me
was rambling from place to place, contemplating through that dirty and dusty window
ceaselessly new perspectives, I, the truly existing me, was walking my own character in
totally different places, always looking at the world with different eyes and with the same
eyes at different places, and never understanding a thing from what was going on. The fact
that I was moving, that I was alive, was just a simple coincidence, a meaningless one,

29
because, just as if it was possible for me to exist on the other side of the window, I could also
exist here, in this world, having the same pale face, the same eyes, the same colorless hair,
and all these traces were composing in the mirror a rapid and weird figure, hardly
understandable.
I was always receiving from the exterior different warnings which tried to immobilize
and estrange me from the usual comprehension. They were bewildering me, stopping me and
resuming, all of a sudden, the entire world’s uselessness.
In that precise second, everything appeared to me chaotic, just like, when I was
listening to a fanfare and suddenly covered my ears, as I removed my fingers for one second,
the music was nothing but pure noise.
I was wandering through the fair the whole day, but even more on the surrounding
fields, where the artists and the monsters from the barracks, gathered around the huge boiler
with hot polenta, disheveled and dirty, were lowering their foreheads from the beautiful
settings and their nocturnal existence of acrobats, bodiless women and sirens, in the common
paste and in the sad filth of their irremediable humanity. What looked admirable, free and
even luxurious in front of the barracks, there, behind them, in full day light, was transformed
into an irrelevant and uninteresting familiarity, which actually became the one of the entire
world.
One day I participated in the funeral of the child of one of the strolling photographers.
The doors of the panorama were wide open and inside, in front of the photographic
background, the uncovered coffin was laying on two chairs. The background image was
printed on cheap fabric, representing a splendid park with Italian terraces and marble
columns. In this dream-like scenery, the little body, with its hands crossed on his chest,
dressed in his best clothes, with bracelets of silver tinsel around his thin wrists, seemed
immersed in an ineffable state of bliss.
The child’s parents and some other women were crying desperately around the coffin,
while outside the fanfare of the big circus, borrowed for free from its director, gravely intoned
a serenade from “Intermezzo”, the saddest piece in the whole program. In those moments, the
dead boy was surely extremely happy and tranquil, in the intimacy of his profound peace and
the limitless silence of that park with old and aristocratic plane trees.
But soon after he was wrested from that solemnity and put into a cart, in order to be
taken to the cemetery, in the humid and cold grave destined to him. The park remained behind
him, desolated and deserted; I realized that death itself was borrowing from the fair’s
implausible and nostalgic backgrounds, as if that reality was something completely different,

30
destined to prove the infinite melancholy of the artificial ornaments, from the beginning of
life itself till its end, with the living example of certain pale existences, consumed in the
dreary light of the panopticon, or in that chamber with one infinite wall, lost in surreal
beauties and in the photographers’ unbelievable panoramas.
Thus the fair was becoming for me a deserted island, invaded by the desolating
aureoles, looking exactly like the mysterious and still very clear world in which I was
transported by my childhood crises.

The upper floor of the Weber family’s house, where I would go quite often after the
death of the old Etla Weber, looked like a real panopticon. The whole afternoons the rooms
were sunny, and the dust and the heat were flowing in front of the old china-closets, filled
with obsolescent things, thrown one on top of the other on the shelves. The beds had been
moved to the first floor, and the rooms were now uninhabited. The old Samuel Weber (agent
& commissioner) together with his two sons, Paul and Ozy, was living downstairs.
The first room, facing the street, still served as an office. It had a moldy smell, filled
with registers and big envelopes containing samples of cereals, upholstered with old
advertisements, stained by the flies. Some of these, having stayed on the walls for years, were
completely integrated in the family life. Above the money safe, the advertisement of some
mineral water was representing a tall and thin woman, dressed in diaphanous veils, spilling
the healing liquid to the crippled crushed at her feet. I am sure that in the mysterious hours of
the deep night, Ozy Weber was coming as well to drink from the miraculous source, with his
thin arms like flutes and the hunch of his chest visible under the clothes like the turkey’s
swollen sternum.
The other familiar advertisement was that of a transport company, which, with its ship
flowing over the elegant waves, completed the person of Samuel Weber with a mariner’s trait,
together with his captain’s cap and his glasses with thick lentils. When the old man was
closing a register and gripping it in the pressing machine, spinning the iron wheel, he looked
like manipulating a real ship’s rudder on the unknown seas. The pink cotton filling his ears
was hanging in long plies and was surely a very wise measure of safety against the sea’s
currents.
In the second room, Ozy was spending his life reading popular novels, sunk into the
depths of a leather armchair, rising up the volume in order to place it in the thin light coming
from the street, through the office. In the darkness of a corner, a metal spittoon in the form of
a huge cat was shining monumentally, and on a wall, a mirror was strangely reflecting a

31
square of grey light, a sort of ghostlike memory of the outside light.
I would come to see Ozy, just like the dogs which enter the unknown yards just
because they see an open door and nobody chases them away. I was mostly attracted by a sort
of strange game, which I don’t even remember by whom it was invented, and under what
circumstances. The game consisted of an imaginary dialogue, performed with the deepest
seriousness. We had to remain somber until the end, and not to reveal the inexistence of the
things we were talking about.
I was entering, and Ozy was telling me with a terribly dry voice, without raising his
yes from the book: “The head pill I took last night to make me sweat made me cough terribly.
Until the morning I tossed in my sheets, but well, some moments ago Matilda came (there
was no Matilda) and gave me a massage.”
The absurdity and the stupidity of the things told by Ozy were hitting my forehead like
hammers. Maybe I should have got out of the room immediately, but, with a minuscule
voluptuousness to descend at his lever of inferiority, I was answering to him in the same
manner. I think this was the main secret of our game.
“I have a cold as well, I told him (even though we were in plain July), and doctor
Caramfil (he existed for real) prescribed me some medicine. It’s a true pity that the doctor…
you know, he was arrested this morning…”
Ozy raised his eyes from the book: “Well, I told you that he is making false money…”
“Well sure, I added, otherwise from where to spend so much with the dancers in the
music hall?”
First of all, in these words I felt first of all the disgusting pleasure of surrounding
myself in the dialogue’s mediocrity and, in the same time, a vague impression of freedom. I
could calumniate freely the poor doctor, who was living nearby and about whom I knew with
certainty to go to sleep every night at 9 o’clock. We could speak about basically anything,
mingling the real things with the imaginary ones, until the whole conversation was becoming
of a sort of airy independence, floating detached from us in the room’s heights, like a curious
bird, and we wouldn’t have been amazed by its exterior existence, if the bird had truly
appeared before our eyes, more than by the fact that our words had nothing to do with
ourselves.
When I was getting out in the street again, I had the feeling that I just woke up from a
very deep sleep. But the dream continued, and I was looking in deep amazement at the people
on the street, speaking with each other very solemnly. Didn’t they know that it is possible to
speak seriously about anything?

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 Sometimes Ozy didn’t feel like talking and then he was taking me upstairs, to
rummage between the old things. In those years since it had been deserted and because of old
Weber’s habit to send there all the useless objects, that space had become a true menagerie of
the most diverse and extraordinary things and inventions. In the rooms, a hot sun was entering
through the dusty windows without curtains. Their glass was slightly trembling when I would
walk on the old floors; between the rooms, a curtain of pearls served as a door.
I was coming from downstairs a little bit dizzy by the day’s heat. The complete
wilderness of the room was troubling me, I felt like living in a world which I had known for a
long time, but of which I had no memory, my body was strangely detached from this
existence. This feeling was more profound when I had to pass from one room to another,
through the curtain of pearls.
I searched in the drawers especially for old letters, in order to detach the stamps. From
the yellowish papers would fall aged dust and odd insects, which were quickly trying to hide
between the sheets. Some letter was falling aside, opening and revealing an out-of-fashion and
complicated calligraphy, written with discolored ink. There was something sad and resigned
in it, a sort of tired conclusion of the passage of time since when it was written and a quiet
sleep into the eternity, like the mortuary garlands.
I could also find old photographs with ladies dressed in crinolines and meditative
gentlemen with one finger pressed to their foreheads, smiling anemically, and in the lower
part of the image, two angels carrying a basket with fruits and flowers, under it being written
porte visite or souvenir. Between the photographs and the objects on the shelves –the elegant
fruit dish of pink glass with beclouded margins, the velvet purses which did not contain
anything else than the silk eaten by the moths, different objects with unknown monograms,
between all these there was an air of perfect understanding, as if they had their own
independent life, identical to the past one, when for example the photographs corresponded to
the people existing and moving in this world, when the letters were written by real warm
hands, but this was a life reduced to a smaller scale, in a narrowed space, in the limit of the
paper and of the photographs, like in a theatre’s scenery, which is being looked at through he
thickest lentils of a pair of opera glasses, a scenery which remained the same one in all its
components, but still is incredibly minuscule and distant.
In the evening, when we were descending, we often met Paul Weber on the stairs; his
wardrobe was upstairs, in the first room, and he was going up to change his clothes. He was a
reddish boy, with big hands and bristling hair. He had big, thick lips and a clown’s nose, and
in his eyes shone an incredibly calm and resting candor. Everything Paul was doing had,

33
because of this innocent look, a very detached and indifferent air.
I loved him very much, but secretly, and my heart was beating faster when I would
meet him on the stairs, I liked the simplicity of his speech and the smile he had on his face, as
if our conversation had, except for its basic meaning, another one, more distant and
ephemeral, and this smile of his persisted even in the most serious conversations, and even
when he was talking business with his old father. I mostly loved Paul for the secret life he was
leading outside his daily occupations, and about which I only knew from the distant echoes
whispered with stupefaction by the adults around me. Paul was spending all his money with
the artists of the music hall. There was in his debauchery a sort of fatality against which old
Weber’s will was running without any power. Once the whole town rumored that Paul had
unhorsed all the horses at the carriages in the central market place and had taken them inside
the music hall, where he improvised a sort of circus, to which the most eminent drunkards of
our town participated. Another time I heard that he bathed with a woman in champagne. But
what wasn’t rumored about him?
I am incapable of defining my sympathy for Paul. I could very well notice the
mediocrity of the grown-ups around me, the uselessness and the boredom which were
consuming their lives, and then, the young girls in the garden laughing stupidly, the merchants
with cunning and immodest eyes, my father’s theatrical necessity to play his role of father,
the awful tiredness of the beggars sleeping in the dirty corners; all these things were melting
and then combining together in a general and trivial aspect, as if the world, having been
waiting for too long inside me, and already having a definitive form, didn’t allow me more
than to verify its obsolete content in my deepest self.
All things were simple, only Paul was outside them, in the middle of a density of
compact life, completely inaccessible and obscured to my understanding. I was keeping deep
inside me all his gestures and his most minuscule attitudes, but not like a memory, but rather
like a double existence. Very often I tried to walk like him, I was studying intensely one of his
gestures and I was repeating it in front of the mirror, until I thought I could reproduce it
perfectly.
At the upper floor of the Weber house, Paul was the most enigmatic and delicate wax
figure, and soon after he brought inside the element lacking from the whole picture, a pale
woman with gestures and steps of silent mechanism… thus the upper floor completed the
gallery in the panopticon, starting with the old ship captain Samuel Weber and ending with
the delicate and mangled and infantile phenomenon named Ozy Weber.

34
 I could also find old and melancholic things on another upper floor, the one in my
grandfather’s house. Here the walls were covered with strange paintings, with thick frames of
golden wood or in thinner frames of red plush. There were also certain frames made from
juxtaposed small shells, worked with a fanatical attention for the detail, which made me
contemplate them for hours and hours. Who had glued the shells? To whom belonged the
hand which performed the tiny living gestures in order to unite them? In these kind of defunct
and minor works of art I could suddenly perceive entire lives, lost in the shadows of time like
the images in two parallel mirrors, hidden in the greenish depths of the dream.
In a corner rested the noble gramophone, its funnel overturned, beautifully painted
with yellow and crimson stripes, like an enormous portion of vanilla and rose ice-cream, and
on the table were different stamps, two of them representing the King Charles I and Queen
Elisabeth.
A long time these paintings intrigued me. I honestly thought that the artist was very
talented, because their traits were very delicate and firm, but I could not understand why he
used an ash-like painting, grayish, discolored as if the paper had been kept for a long time in
water.
But one day I made an amazing discovery: what I had thought to be a fainted color
was actually an amass of minuscule letters, only decipherable under the magnifying glass. In
the whole drawing there was not even one single trait made with the pencil or the brush;
everything was made of words describing the lives of the king and of the queen.
My stupefaction converted, all of a sudden, the misunderstanding with which I had
been looking at the drawings and the distrust in the anonymous artist’s mastery into a limitless
admiration, intermingled with the spite of not having observed before that essential secret as
well as with a growing mistrust into my modest perceptions: if for so many years I had
contemplated the drawing without even suspecting their true matter, wasn’t it possible,
because of an equal short-sightedness, to misunderstand the meaning of all the things around
me and their significance inscribed in their very tissue, just as clearly as the words composing
the two images with the royal couple? Around me, the world’s surfaces suddenly got weird
sheens and uncertain opacities like the curtains’, opacities which suddenly become transparent
and show us the profoundness of a room, when a light is being turned on behind them.
But behind the objects which intrigued me no light had ever been turned on, and they
remained forever hermetically enclosed in their volumes and sizes, even though sometimes
their surface seemed to become thinner and almost translucent, revealing to the deprived
human understanding their true meaning.

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 The floor had many more other curiosities, belonging only to itself, for example, the
aspect of the street as seen through the front windows. The walls being very thick, the
windows entered deep in their flesh, forming some sort of caves in which one could sit very
comfortably. I was entering one of them like I would a small glass chamber, and I would open
the windows towards the street. The intimacy of the cave combined with the pleasure of
gazing at the street from a comfortable position had given me the idea of a vehicle similar in
size and smoothness, with soft cushions on which to lie on, with tiny windows through which
one could to look at the different cities and unknown landscapes, while crossing the world.
Once, while my father was recounting for me some of his childhood memories, I asked him
which was in that epoch his most secret and burning desire, and he answered that he had
wanted deeply to have a miraculous vehicle, in which to lie on while crossing the whole
world. I knew that in his childhood he was sleeping in the upper room, and so I asked him if
he used to hide in the windows’ caves, to look down at the street. He answered, all
bewildered, that indeed, every night before going to sleep, he entered in one of those warm
caverns and stayed there for hours and hours, and sometimes even fell asleep there. He
probably had his dream of the magic vehicle in the same place and in the same circumstances
as me.
I understood then that in the world there were also, besides the cursed spaces secreting
vertigos and faints, more benevolent places, from whose walls pleasant images were flowing.
The walls of my cave were filtering the fragile reverie of a vehicle crossing the world and the
person lying in that exact place was slowly impregnated by this idea like by a wobbly hashish
smoke…
The upper floor also had two attics, one of them opening through a little aperture
towards the roof. I was climbing through there to the roof. The whole town unfolded at my
feet, grey and amorphous, till far away to the fields, where the minuscule trains were crossing
the brittle bridge like mechanic toys.
My secret wish was to reach a state of equilibrium equal with the one I had down there
on the ground. I wanted to lead my “normal” life on the roof and only there, to move in the
subtle and sharp air of the heights, fearless and without any particular fear of the void. I was
thinking that if I managed to do this, I would have felt inside my body weights more elastic
and more vaporous, which would have finally transformed me into a sort of man-bird.
I was convinced that only the care not to fall was the heaviest thing in me, and the
thought that I am at a big height was rowing over me like a pain which I would have liked to
wrest from its deepest roots. In order to avoid up there the feeling of out-of-commonness, I

36
always tried to do something precise and commonplace: to read, to eat or to sleep. I was
taking the cherries and the slices of bread given by my grandfather and I was going up on the
roof, I was sliding every cherry in four and I was eating them one by one, so that this
“normal” occupation of mine would last as long as possible. When I was finishing one, I was
striving to throw its stone down on the street, in a big bucket placed in front of a shop.
When I was going down, I would hurry there to see how many cherry stones had got
into it. There were always only three or four, but what mostly disappointed me was that,
around it, I could only find other three or four. That meant that I had eaten only few cherries,
while I had had the impression of having spent up there on the roof hours and hours… In my
grandfather’s room, on the clock’s green faience dial I could also see that only some minutes
passed since I had gotten up there. The time was probably becoming more concentrated on the
roof, and there was no point in my trying to prolong it by remaining there longer.
Back down I always had to face the fact that less time had passed than I thought. This
somehow strengthened my weird feeling, on the earth, of indefinite, of unfinished… time
down here was more sparse than in reality, it contained less matter than on the heights and
was thus participating to the fragility of all things, which seemed around me so dense and still
were so instable, always ready to leave aside their meaning and their temporary contour in
order o appear under the form of their exact existence…
The upper floor decomposed piece by piece and object by object after my
grandfather’s death. He died in the humid and petty little chamber built for him in the yard,
where he had made his old age’s refuge, and out of where he didn’t want to go but for his last
walk.
Before he died I used to go and visit him in that chamber every day; on the eve of his
death I was there as well, and I assisted to the dead’ prayer, which he recited by himself, with
a shivering but emotionless voice, after having dressed a new white shirt in order to make the
payer sound more solemn.
After some days I saw him dead in the same chamber, lying on a metal table for his
last toilet. My grandfather had a younger brother, but their resemblance was striking: they had
both the same round head as a small sphere, covered with shiny white hairs, the same looks in
their eyes, alive and penetrating, and the same rare beard, like hollowed foam.
This uncle requested from my family to wash the dead and, although old and crippled,
he begun his work with a lot of zeal.
He was shaking from head to toes, while bringing from the pump in the yard the big
buckets of water, to warm it in the kitchen. When this was done, he brought it in the chamber

37
and begun to wash the body with soap for linen and wisps of straws.
While rubbing, he was crying and –as if my grandfather heard what he was saying-
was talking to him in whispers, sobbing bitterly: “Look what I’ve become… look where my
black days brought me… you’re dead now and I’m washing you… poor me… why did I have
to live so long… until this miserable moment…”
With his coat’s sleeve he was wiping his cheeks, and his beard wet with tears and then
washed the body even more zealously.
The two old men, amazingly similar, one dead and the other one washing him, were
forming a quite hallucinating image. The workers in the cemetery, who were usually doing
this job, receiving for this tips from the whole family, were sitting in a corner, looking with
rancor at this intruder, who was taking away their job. They were talking between them in
whispers, smoking and spitting on the floor, in all directions. After about one hour my
grandfather’s brother finished.
The body was on the table, turned upside down.
“Did you finish?” asked someone from the group, a little man with a reddish goatee,
netting nervously and mischievously from his fingers.
“Yes, I finished, answered the dead man’s brother. Now let’s dress him…”
“Aha! You think you finished, said the little man again, ironically. You really think
you finished? You think this is how a dead man should be buried? In this state of filth?”
The poor old man remained bewildered in the middle of the room, with a wisp of
straws in his hand, looking at every one of us and begging us with his eyes to defend him. He
knew how carefully he had washed the body, and knew that he didn’t deserve any insult.
“Now I will learn you to mind your own business”, continued impudently the little
man and, wresting the wisp of straws from the old uncle’s hand, went to the table, introduced
it with a rapid move in the dead body’s anus and got out on it a bit piece of excrement…
“You see you have no idea how a dead body should be washed? said he. You wanted
to bury him with this dirt inside him?”
My grandfather’s brother was shaken by a violent shiver and burst into heavy tears…
The funeral took place during a very hot summer day: nothing sadder and more
impressive than a funeral in full warmth and sunshine, when people and things seem a little
bit bigger, in the vapors of the heat, as seen through a magnifying glass. What else could
people do in such a day other than burry their dead? In the heat and the torpor of the air, their
gestures were the same as hundreds of years ago, then and now, and always. The wet grave
aspired the dead man in its coolness and its darkness, and he probably sunk happily in it…The

38
clods fell heavy on the wooden boards, while the people in dusty clothes, sweaty and tired,
kept leading on the surface of the earth their imperious lives.

Paul Weber got married some days after the funeral.

He was a little tired during the wedding, but he had his usual smile; a sad, forced
smile, at the beginning of a sort of devotion.
Under the rigid collar, opened in the front, his red and hairless neck was moving
strangely; his trousers seemed longer and narrower than usual; the tails of his dress coat were
hanging grotesquely, as on a clown. Paul had concentrated in his person the whole grave
ridiculousness of the ceremony. I was containing its most secret and most intimate
ridiculousness. I was the small clown, unnoticed and insignificant.
At the back of the dark saloon, on a platform, the bride was waiting on her large
armchair. Her face was covered with white veils and only when she came back from under the
canopy did she raise them, and I saw Edda for the first time…
The tables for the guests were arranged one near the other, white, in the yard, on a
single line; all the town’s beggars and vagabonds were gathered in front of the gate; the sky
had an indefinite color of yellow clay; the pale young misses in dresses of blue and pink silk
were offering small silver candies to everyone. This was the wedding. The musicians were
creaking an old, sad waltz; from time to time, its rhythm was swallowing and growing and
seemed to cheer up, but then the tempo was becoming frail again, more and more, until it
dissolved into the unique metallic wire of the lonely flute.
It was a horribly long day; a whole day is too much for a wedding. At the back of the
yard nobody was coming, there were the hotel’s stables and a mound from where I was
looking towards far away, while around me some hens were pecking grains in the grass; from
the yard came the breeze of the sad waltz, mingled with the fresh smell of the wet hay in the
stable: there I saw Paul doing something extraordinary, he was talking with Ozy and it was
obvious he was saying something funny, maybe a joke, who knows, because the cripple begun
to laugh and he became violet, almost suffocating under the curved front of his starched shirt.
Finally, night came. The few trees in the yard became dark like Japanese silhouettes,
hollowing in the obscurity a mysterious and invisible park.
In the badly-illuminated hall, the bride was sitting always on the platform, near Paul,
tilting her head towards him when she wanted to whisper him something, leaving her soft arm
between his fingers and thus caressing him on the full length of his white glove.
Some wedding cakes were brought on the table. There was an especially monumental

39
one, with a petrified castle, with crenels and thousands of miniature buttresses of pink cream.
The petals of the sugar flowers covering it had a frosted and oily shine. The knife was thrust
deep in its core and a rose creaked with a soft sound under the cut, exploding like glass in
dozens of pieces. Old ladies were walking majestically in their remarkable velvet dresses,
with innumerable jewels on their chests and fingers, advancing slowly and solemnly, like
small itinerant church altars, richly ornamented.
Slowly, slowly, my sight grew blurred, everything in front of my eyes were growingly
vague and absurd… I fell asleep while looking at my red and hot hands.
The room in which I woke up smelled like morose smoke; in a mirror in front of me,
the window was reflecting the morning light, gradually growing, like a square of blue velvet. I
was lying on a rummaged bed, covered with pillows. A tiny noise was echoing in my ears,
like inside a shell; in the room, the thin smoke was flowing in multiple layers. I tried to wake
up and my hand got into the bed’s wooden sculptures; some of them filled my hands and
others were moving away from the bed, growing in the room’ pale light and ramifying in
thousands of crenels, holes and laced mildew; in only few seconds - no more - the room was
immaterially filled with all kinds of volutes, through which I had to squeeze to the door. I felt
my head still tingling, and all the air’s caverns kept repeating this murmur, in the corridor the
white light washed my cheeks and I woke up completely. I met on my way a gentleman in
long floss-silk night shirt, who looked at me with very upset eyes, as if reproaching me to be
dressed up so early in the morning.
I met nobody else. Down in the yard were still the tables for the guests, with
uncovered pine boards. The dawns were gloomy and cold. The wind had scattered all around
the yard the candies’ colored tinfoil wraps. How did the bride keep her head? How did she
bow it on Paul’s shoulder? In some panopticons, the wax woman had inside a strange
mechanism, which made her bow her head and close her eyes.
The town’s streets had lost all their meaning; he coldness entered under my coat; I was
cold and still sleepy. When I was closing my eyes, the wind was putting his wintry cheek on
mine; over my eyelids I could feel it like a mask inside which it was shady and cold like
inside a real metal mask. Which house on my way was about to explode? Which street lamp
would contort like a rubber stick, laughing at me? Nowhere in the world, and under no
circumstance, was something happening.
When I got in the market place, some men were discharging fresh meat for the
butcher’s booths. They were carrying in their arms halves of cows, red and dark blue, wet
with blood, tall and splendid like dead princesses; in the air floated a warm smell of

40
unblemished flesh and urine; the butchers were hanging all beasts with their heads down, their
globular and black eyes turned towards the floor. They were aligned now in front of the white
porcelain walls like red sculptures cut in the most various and delicate matter, having the
watery and rainbow-hued reflection of the oriental silk and the milky and turbid limpidity of
the gelatin; at the edge of their opened bellies hanged the muscles’ lace and the heavy
necklaces of the pearls of animal lard. The butchers were wedging their large hands inside
that rippled crimson velvet and were then getting out the precious entrails, putting them on the
table: round, broad, elastic and warm objects of flesh and blood. The fresh meat was shining
smoothly like the petals of some monstrous and hypertrophied roses.
The downs were now blue like the vinegar; the freezing morning was singing with an
organ’s profound echo.
The harnessed horses were looking at people with their eyes always in tears; a mare
released on the pavement a hot stream of urine; in the newly-formed puddle, partly foamy,
partly clear, the sky was mirroring itself, black and bottomless.
Everything became distant and desolated. It was early in the morning, people were
discharging meat, wind was entering under my clothes, I was shivering of cold and
sleeplessness, in what kind of world was I living?
I began to run like crazy on the streets. The sun appeared again, huge and red, at the
margins of the roofs, but on the narrow streets with tall houses it was still dark, and only at the
crossroads light was bursting, wild and shimmering, like through some open doors along a
deserted corridor.
I passed through the back of the Weber house, the heavy shutters at the first floor were
closed, everything was sad and forsaken, the wedding was over.
The upper floor of the Weber house was illuminated by Edda’s arrival with shadows
and coolness, just like certain clearings in the deep forests become further lighted by a green
brightness filtered by the leaves.
First, Edda covered the windows with curtains and put on the floors soft carpets, in
which all the deserted echoes of the upper floor lost their voice.
Every morning I would be up on the terrace, inventorying the multitude of contorted
and artificial objects from the dusty shelves of the china-closets.
Together with Ozy, I was cleaning them conscientiously, and then throwing them one
by one in the garbage bin.
Edda was coming and going to the terrace, dressed in a blue gown, wearing a pair of
high-heeled slippers, which were banging at every step. Sometimes I remained for a long time

41
leaned on the banister, half closing the eyelids and looking through the narrow opening at the
pearly sky.
The upper floor got an ineffable perfume which changed its content like a heavy
essence combined with alcohol.
Thus all events destined to appear in my life gradually and all of a sudden, out of my
power of understanding, isolated in their contour from any possible past. Edda became
another object in my personal menagerie, a simple object whose existence was torturing and
annoying me, like a word endlessly repeated, which becomes increasingly obscure as its
understanding becomes more and more necessary. The world’s perfection was about to
emerge from somewhere like a flower bud which still needs to pierce its last peel in order to
get to the light.
During the summer mornings, on the upper floor’s terrace, something was going on,
and my whole body struggled to understand what.
I was armed to meet Edda with all the grieves, all the humiliations and all the ridicule
necessary in a new adventure.
She kept the curtain of pearls between the two rooms, she adorned the china-closets
with white cloths with big bows of colored ribbons, and the Weber house changed
completely. Around Edda began a pantomimic ballet with four participants: Paul became
grave and faithful; old Weber bought a new cap and gold framed glasses; Ozy was waiting all
the time gasping with thrill for Edda to call him upstairs and I was staying on the terrace
staring into vacancy.
Every Saturday afternoon we were gathering in the front room transformed into
saloon, where the gramophone was playing oriental arias from “Kismet, and Edda was serving
us sweet/bitter cookies baked with honey and almonds. In a fruit bowl there were peanuts,
eaten mainly by the old Samuel Weber, who was chewing them rarely and firmly, and this
made his Adam’s apple dance like an elastic doll. He was sitting cross-legged, which
constituted a resting position out of his business with cereals, looking like an artist on the
theater stage, and, while he was speaking, he was shooting out his lips in order to hide his
gold teeth.
He was afraid to touch any object and while passing through the curtain of pearls, he
was turning around to unite the two halves, so that his passage would be inaudible.
All of Ozy’s deformities sharpened and curved in a position of intense concentration.
His hunch grew even more, as if it, too, tried to take notice of Edda’s slightest word and
gesture and meet them one second before.

42
 Paul was the only one stepping on the carpets calm and sure of himself. He had full
gestures, to which there was nothing to add, and when he was hugging Edda, we were finally
all of us three happy that he does it better than any of us.
As for me, I have no idea what was happening those days.
In one of those afternoons, being comfortably engrossed in an armchair, I pushed my
head into the plush, without any particular reason. The small pricks entered my cheek’s skin,
which made me feel a quite vivid pain. In only one second grew in me, ridiculous and
splendid, an imperative desire to be heroic; it was one of those numerous absurd thoughts
which can only be produced on a Saturday afternoon, on the boring music of a gramophone.
I begun to push even more strongly my head into the plush and as my pain grew more
and more violent, my will to endure it became increasingly tenacious.
Maybe inside us there are hidden a hunger and thirst other than the organic ones, and
something inside me needed in that precise instant to satisfy a simple and keen pain. I was
pushing my head deeper and deeper in the sharp pricks, being tortured by a suffering which
was rending me inside.
All of a sudden Edda remained still with a gramophone record in her hand, looking at
me in deep stupefaction. Around me grew an embarrassing silence. “What happened to him?”
asked Edda. I saw myself in a mirror, I was utterly ridiculous. On my cheek I had a violet spot
oozing with drops of blood from place to place.
With eyes wide open and bleeding cheek, looking at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t
stop thinking that I was the incarnated allegory of the front cover of a very fashionable novel,
which presented the Russian tsar bleeding and covering his jaw with one hand, after an
attempt to his life.
More than the pain in my cheek, I was tortured now by the miserable destiny of my
heroism, which ended by incarnating an episode from “The Court of Petrograd”.
Edda dipped a handkerchief in alcohol and wiped my cheek, I felt a vivid pain on my
skin, which was burned like by a flame.
I descended the stairs dizzily; the greedy streets received me again in their dust and
monotony.

The summer had swollen chaotically the park, the trees and the air, like in a madman’s
drawing. All her burning and abundant breath had exploded monstrously in an abundant,
luxurios, fleshy vegetation. The park had overflown like lava; the stones were burning; my
hands were always red and heavy.

43
 In that soft and warm wilderness, all I could do was to carry Edda’s image inside me,
sometimes multiplied in tens of copies, in hundreds, in thousands of Eddas, one near the other
under the summer’s heat, statuary, identical and obsessive.
There was in all this a cruel and lucid despair, propagated in all I could see or feel.
Simultaneously with my straightforward and undemanding life, other intimacies were
growing apace in me, warm, beloved and secret, like a terrible and fantastic inner leprosy.
I was composing the details of the imaginary scenes with the most punctilious
accuracy. I could see myself in sordid hotel rooms, with Edda sleeping near me, while the
light of the crepuscule was coming into the room through the thick curtains, and their delicate
shadow was impregnating on her tranquil face. I could see the model of the carpet on which
were thrown her shoes and her bag opened on the table, the corner of a handkerchief was
going out of it. Also, the big wardrobe with mirror doors in which was reflected half of the
bed and the painting with flowers on the walls…
Quite a bitter taste lingered after these thoughts…
I was following unknown women in the garden, walking on their steps until they got at
their homes, and I was remaining in front of their doors, crushed, desperate.
One evening I walked a woman until the gateway of her dwelling.
The house had a small garden in front, illuminated by an electric light.
With a swift impetuousness, unsuspected in me, I opened the small gate and sneaked
inside the yard, after the woman, while she entered her house without noticing me, and I
remained alone on the alley. A strange idea came suddenly to me…
In the middle of the garden was a round of flowers, in only one second I was in its
middle, I kneeled and, with my hand to the heart, bare-headed, took a position of prayer. I
wanted to stay like this as long as possible, immobile, turned to stone in the middle of the
round of flowers. I had been tormented for a long time by this desire to commit an absurd act
in a totally unknown place, and now I had the possibility to fulfill it, spontaneously, without
any effort, almost like a joy. The evening was vibrating, warm, around me, and in the first
seconds I felt enormously grateful towards myself, for the courage to have taken this decision.
I decided to remain completely motionless even though nobody would have chased me and I
should have remained like this until the following morning. Slowly, slowly, my hands and my
feet became rigid, and my position got an interior shell of limitless calm and immobility.
For how long did I stay like this? All of a sudden I heard voices inside the house and
the light in the garden was turned off.
In the dark I felt better the night breeze and my isolation, in the garden of some

44
unknown house.
Some minutes later the light was turned on and then again turned off. Somebody
inside the house was turning it on and off in order to see what effect it had on me.
I continued to stay immobile, decided to face experiences more serious than this game
with the light. I kept my hand on my heart and my knee on the ground.
The door opened and somebody got out in the garden, while a deep voice inside
shouted: “ Leave him alone, just let me, he will leave by himself.” The woman I had followed
came near me. She was now wearing a dressing gown and slippers, and her hair was
disheveled. She looked deep into my eyes and didn’t say a word for a time. We both kept
silent, and she finally put her hand on my shoulder and said, tenderly: “Come on… it’s over
now”, as if she wanted to make me understand that she had understood my gesture and had
kept silent for a while just to make it become accomplished in its own way.
I was disarmed by this sudden understanding. I got up and wiped off the dust on my
knee. “Don’t your feet ache? She asked. I could have not remained immobile for so long…” I
wanted to say something, but I only managed to murmur a poor “Good night” and left in a
rush.
All my despairs were painfully screaming again in me.

I was a tall, slim, pale boy, with a thin neck getting out boldly from the large tunic
collar. My too long hands were hanging out of the sleeves like animals freshly skinned. My
pockets were exploding with papers and different objects. I could hardly find at their bottom
my handkerchief, to wipe off the dust on my shoes, when coming back from the streets in the
“centre” of the town.
The simple and elementary facts of life were evaluating around me according to their
own laws. A pig was scratching of a fence and I was stopping for whole minutes to look at it.
Nothing was more perfect than the squeak of the harsh hairs on the wood; I could find in it
something immensely satisfying and an appeasing assurance that the world still exists…
On a street on the town’s outskirts there was a studio of folk sculpture, where I was
also spending a lot of time.
Inside the studio were thousands of white, smooth things, in the middle of the
chubby wooden stripes which were falling from the scraper and filling the room with their
rigid foam, smelling like resin.
Under the scraper, the wood piece was becoming more delicate, more silky,
more pale, and her small veins appeared clear and well written, like under a woman’s skin.

45
Near by, on a table, the wooden balls were lying, the calm and heavy balls which filled my
hand on all the skin’s surface, with a sleek, ineffable weight.
And then, the chess men, smelling like fresh varnish, and a whole wall covered
with flowers and angels.
Delirious eczemas with tatting suppurations, painted or sculptured, came out
from the matter’s flesh.
During the winter they grew from the cold ice fringes in the delimited forms of the
heavy water, and during the summer the numerous flowers sprang in small explosions, with
red, blue, orange petals of blaze.
During the whole year the sculptor, his glasses missing a lentil, was extracting from
the wood smoke wreaths and Indian arrows, shells and ferns, peacock feathers and human
ears.
In vain was I attentive to his slow wok in order to intercept the exact moment when
the ragged and wet piece of wood was expired in a stoned rose.
In vain did I try to accomplish the miracle as well. Of course, I was holding in my
hands the shaggy, hairy and solid pine, and all of a sudden the scraper’s scratch was leaving
behind an elusive and slippery trace, like a faint.
Maybe that, the moment when I was beginning to caress the wooden board, I was
filled with a deep sleep, and extraordinary powers were growing like tentacles from my
hands, then spread in the air, entered the wood and produced the cataclysm.
Maybe that the world was stopping its motion in those moments and nobody knew
how munch time had elapsed, and the master had sculptured all the lilies on the walls and all
the violins with spirals in a very deep sleep.
When I was waking up, the board was showing me the intimate lines of its age, just
like the lines of fate in an opened palm.
I was holding one object after another and I was amazed by their diversity, in vain was
I using the file, sliding my fingers on its surface and touching my cheek with it, I was rotating
it and then letting it roll… in vain, in vain, there was nothing understandable in its mere
existence.
Around me, the tough and immobile matter surrounded me from all parts, here in front
of wooden balls and sculptures, on the street in the form of trees, houses, stones, it sorrounded
me from every possible direction, immense and futile, closing me in itself, starting with the
clothes I was wearing and ending with the springs in the forests passing through walls,
through trees, through rocks, through glass…

46
 In the tiniest corner, the matter’s lava had gone out of the earth, transfixing in the
empty air, in the form of houses with windows, of trees with tall branches stinging the void,
of flowers which were filling, softly and colorfully, small curved volumes in the space, of
churches with domes growing higher and higher and stopping at the thin cross on the very top,
where the matter had stopped its flowing into the heights, unable to climb further.
It had infested the air everywhere, irrupting into it, filling it with the closed abscesses
of the rocks, with the wounded hollows of the old trees…
I was wandering around, maddened by the things I had seen, bound to be their slave
forever.
But sometimes I could find some isolated place where my head could rest for a while.
There, for an instant, all the vertigos were quiet, and I was feeling better.
Once I found refuge in one of the strangest and most unsuspected places in town.
It was indeed so outlandish, that not even myself could have imagined that it might
turn up to be such a lonely and admirable burrow.
I believe that only that burning desire to fill the void of my days, anyhow and
anywhere, had pushed me towards this new exploit.
…One day, when passing in front of the town’s music hall, I finally dared to enter.
It was a calm, shiny afternoon. I crossed a dirty yard with many closed doors, I found
one open at the back, then followed some stairs.
In the vestibule a woman was doing laundry. The corridor smelled like lye. I got up
the stairs, the woman didn’t tell me anything at first, then, when I got at the middle of the
stairs, she turned her head towards me and murmured, more for herself: “Oh… you finally
came!”, probably taking me for someone she already knew.
Long time after this unbelievable voyage I remembered this apparently
inconsequential detail, and I didn’t find her words that innocent anymore: maybe it was
hidden in them the announcement of the fatality of my struggles and the washerwoman was
just trying to show me that the places of my adventures were established in advance, that I
was bound to fall in them like in well-disguised fox-traps. “Oh, you finally came, said my
destiny’s voice, you came because you had to come, because you couldn’t possibly escape…”
I got to a long corridor, heated by the sun that entered through all the windows facing
the yard. All the doors were open; no noise could be heard; in a corner, a faucet was dripping
unceasingly. The corridor was balmy and deserted, and the canal’s aperture sucked up every
drop of water, as if it were sipping too cold a liquid.
At the end of the corridor there was a door opening towards an attic, where clothes

47
were drying on ropes. I crossed the attic and got to a small hall with clean little rooms, freshly
painted, in every one of them there was only one chest and one mirror; these were probably
the cabinets of the music hall artists.
On one side, a staircase was going down towards the theater’s stage. I descended it
and all of a sudden I found myself on the empty stage, in front of the deserted auditorium. My
steps had an outlandish sonority. All chairs and tables were arranged correctly, as for a show.
I was alone on the stage, in front of them, in the middle of the theatrical scenery of a forest.
I wanted to open my mouth, feeling that I should say something out loud, but I was
petrified by that deep silence. Then I saw the blower’s cage. I bowed and looked inside.
In the first few seconds I couldn’t distinguish anything, then gradually I began to see
the under stage, full with broken chairs and old property objects.
Very cautiously I got into the cage and descended down there. There were thick layers
of dust everywhere. On the one side there was a pile of golden pasteboard stars and crowns,
which had surely served for some sort of a fairy play, and on the other side, a piece of Rococo
furniture, a table and some chairs with broken legs, and in the middle, a solemn and huge
armchair, resembling a royal throne. I let myself fall into it, crushed, I was finally in a neutral
space, where nobody knew about my presence. I put my arms on the golden ones of the throne
and let myself be jiggled by the most pleasant feeling of solitude.
The darkness around me dissolved a little bit as the daylight begun to enter, dirty and
dusty, through the double windows. I was far from the world, from its hot and exasperating
streets, hidden in a shady and secret cell, under the surface of the earth. The silence was
flowing in the air, old and moldy.
Who could have guessed where I was? It was the most unexpected place in the whole
town, I felt a calm joy knowing myself there.
Around me there were broken chairs, dusty boards, abandoned objects: the place of all
my dreams incarnated in that very spot.
I remained like this for some hours, quiet, in perfect ecstasy.
Finally I left my hideout, following back the same itinerary. Strangely enough, I didn’t
meet anyone this time neither.
The corridor seemed enflamed by the sunset’s blaze. The canal’s aperture kept sucking
up the water with tiny, regular sips.
Back on the street, I had for one moment the impression that none of these things had
really happened. But my trousers were covered with dust, and I let them like this, as a proof of
the distant and admirable intimacy which I had left under that stage.

48
 The following day, at about the same afternoon hour, I was suddenly invaded by the
nostalgia of the isolated basement. I was absolutely certain that this time I would meet
someone, on the corridor or in the hall. For a while I tried to ignore the temptation to return
there, but I was too tired and too heated by the day’s warmth, and no possible risk could
frighten me. I had to go back there no matter what.
I entered through the same door in the yard and I ascended the same staircase. The
corridor was equally deserted and nobody was in the attic or under the stage. In only few
minutes I was back at my place, in the theatrical throne, surrounded by my delicious
loneliness. My heart was beating fast, I was extremely thrilled by the astonishing triumph of
my exploit.
I began to caress in yawning elation the throne’s golden arms. I would have wanted to
be infiltrated as deeply as possible by this heavenly situation, to be burdened and touched by
it in the most invisible cell, so that I could feel it real.
I stayed there for a long time, and didn’t meet anyone…
I began to come back there regularly, every afternoon.
The corridors were always empty. I was falling in my throne, crushed by bliss.
Through the dirty windows, the same blue and breezy cavern light would enter. The
atmosphere there was impregnated by a complete and secret solitude, and I couldn’t possibly
have enough of it.
These daily expeditions in the music hall’s basement ended one afternoon as strangely
as they started.
When I got out on the corridor, at dusk, a woman was taking water from the faucet.
I passed quietly near her, facing the risk to be asked what I was doing there. But she
continued her occupation, with that indifferent and defensive air which women display when
they suspect that a stranger wants to talk to them.
I stopped at the bottom of the staircase, willing to talk to her. My hesitation was facing
her scowling certitude that I would talk to her. The water’s gurgle from the faucet was
splitting the cold silence in two very well delimited and distinct domains.
I turned back and got close to her. I asked her if she didn’t know some person who
could be my model for some drawings. I pronounced the word “person” with a perfectly
natural voice, so that it wouldn’t let guess the trivial desire to see a naked woman, but only
the purely artistic and abstract preoccupation to draw a human body.
Some days before, a student, in order to impress me of course, had told me that in the
capital, where he was studying, he would bring home with him young girls with the pretext of

49
drawing them, and then sleep with them. I was sure that not a word was true, because I could
feel in his narration the obvious clumsiness of the appropriating and the re-telling of a story
he had heard before. Still, it had inlayed deep into my memory, and now it was a good
occasion to use it. This occurrence of an unknown stranger, after it had passed through the
infertile ground of some other narrator, was now mature enough to fall again into reality.
The woman did not seem to understand, or she simply pretended not to understand,
even though I had tried to be as clear as possible.
While I was talking a door opened and another woman came.
They begun to whisper, and then one of them said: “Let’s take him to Elvira then, she
has nothing to do anyway”.
They walked me into a low, dark chamber, which I had never noticed, near the attic.
Inside, instead of a window, there was a hole in the wall, through which a cold air current
entered. It was the cinematographic cabin, from which movies were projected in the summer,
in the garden of the music hall. On the ground were still visible the traces of the pedestal on
which the projector had been placed. In a corner, a woman was lying on a bed, completely
covered with a blanket, chattering her teeth. The other women left and let me alone in the
middle of the room.
I got close to the bed. The sick woman got a hand out from the blanket and pushed it
towards me. It was a long, delicate, icy hand, I told her in few words that it had been a
confusion, that I was brought to her by mistake. I tried to apologize, telling her vaguely what
was all about: some drawing for an artistic competition.
From everything I said she only retained the word “competition”, and answered with
extinct voice: “Sure… sure… I will let you compete… when I’ll be healthy again… now I
have nothing… nothing…”
She probably understood that I needed some sort of a financial help, and for some
seconds I felt bewildered and embarrassed, not knowing how to escape from there. During
this time she begun to lament with a very natural voice, as if she wanted to apologize for not
giving me anything: “You see, I have ice on my belly… I’m hot… I’m sick…”
I left sad, very sad, and never came back there.

Autumn came, with its red sun and steamy mornings. The little houses in the slums,
clustered in the light, smelled like fresh lime. The days were dull and colorless and the sky
cloudy like a dirty canvas. The rain was pelting infinitely in the solitary park. The heavy
curtains of water were agitated by the wind on the alleys, like in an immense empty hall. I

50
would walk in the wet grass, and the water poured on my hands and hair.
On the dirty lanes at the outskirts of the town, when the rain stopped, the doors were
opened and the houses inhaled the fresh air into their humble interiors filled with wooden
cupboards, bouquets of artificial roses carefully arranged on the drawers, their small statues of
bronzed plaster and their photographs from America. Lives totally unknown to me, lost in the
slightly moldy rooms with low ceilings, sublime in their resigned indifference.
I would have liked to live in one of those houses, to become impregnated by their
intimacy, letting all my dreams and all my sorrows dissolve in them like in a strong acid.
I would have given anything just to be allowed to enter certain rooms, stepping with
familiarity and letting myself fall on the old sofa, between the feminine pillows covered with
flourished fabric. To gain there a new interior intimacy, to breathe another air and to become
another person… Lying on my sofa, I could contemplate the street on which I was walking
just now, from inside the house and through the curtains (and I very honestly tried to imagine
the street’s aspect seen from the sofa, through the opened door), to be able to find in me, all of
a sudden, memories of things I had never experienced, memories foreign to the life I was
always carrying in myself, over and over again, memories belonging to the intimacy of the
bronzed statue and to the old lamp globe, with blue and violet butterflies.
I would have felt so protected at the limit of that cheap and indifferent background,
which completely ignored my existence…
In front of me, the dirty street was stretching its muddy paste. The houses were
displayed like an oriental fan, some white like huge blocks of sugar, others undersized, with
roofs covering their eyes, and clenching their teeth like immobile boxers. I would meet in my
way ordinary wagons with hay, or, all of a sudden, extraordinary things: a man walking in the
rain, carrying on his back a chandelier with crystal ornaments, a magnificent glass work
sounding like bells on the man’s shoulders, while heavy drops of water were breaking on the
multiple shiny facets… What was the secret of the world’s magnitude, and where was it
hiding?
The rain washed in the garden the withered flowers and plants. The autumn was
lighting in them scarlet, ruby and purplish-blue fires, like small blazes shining more
powerfully in the seconds before burning out. In the market place, the water and the mud were
flowing disheveled from the enormous piles of vegetables. In the beetroots’ cut could be seen,
all of a sudden, the earth’s dark red blood; at one side lingered the kind-hearted, mild
potatoes, near the heaps of the decapitated heads of engorged cabbages; somewhere else was
the pile of exasperating beauty of the swollen and hideous pumpkins, their stretched rinds

51
exploding from the plenitude of the light they drank the whole summer.
In the middle of the sky the clouds were grouping and then scattering around, leaving
between them rare spaces, like narrow corridors lost in the infinity, or, on the contrary,
immense empty spaces, much more beautiful than the devastating void floating all the time
above the town.
Rain was falling from afar, from a distant and limitless sky, and I liked the changed
color of the wet wood and the rusty lattice surrounding the domestic and wise little gardens,
through which the wind was passing wildly, mingled with streams of water, like the immense
mane of a fantastic horse.
Sometime I would have liked to be a dog, to look at that wet world from the animals’
oblique perspective, from down up and slightly inclining my head, to walk closer to the earth,
with my eyes fixed on its surface covered with livid mud…
This odd desire hidden deep inside me slithered frenetically into the reality on an
autumn day, on the waste ground…
On that day I had walked purposelessly till the town’s margins, in the field of the
cattle market, now soaked by the rain and transformed into an immense mud slop. The dung
was exhaling an acid smell of animal urine. The sun was setting above, in an embellishment
of ragged gold and purple; in front of me the warm, tender mud was stretching to the
horizons. What else could have filled my heart with such and unbearable joy, than this clean
and sublime mass of filth?
I hesitated for some seconds, inside me were fighting, with forces of moribund
gladiator, the last traces of education, but in one second they were sunk in an opaque
obscurity, and I knew nothing of myself.
I entered the mud first with one leg, then with the other. My boots slithered pleasantly
in the elastic, sticky leaven. Now I was grown from the mud and a part of it, as if I had
spouted from it.
Now I was sure that trees also were nothing but curdled mud, grown from the earth’s
crust. Their color was the sufficient proof. But only the trees? What about the houses, or the
people? Especially the people. All the people. Of course, I’m not referring to that dull legend
“from earth you came unto earth you’ll return”, this was a too vague thing, too abstract, too
inconsistent in front of that field of mud. All people and things had sprung from this very
dung and urine in which I was dishing a pair of very concrete boots.
In vain had the people covered themselves in silky white skin, and dressed in stylish
suits, in vain, in vain… the mud was hidden inside them, implacable, authoritative and

52
elementary, fat, warm and lethargic… Another evidence was the stupidity with which they
were filling their boring lives. I was a special creation of the mud as well, a missionary sent
by it in this world. I could very well feel in those moments how its memory comes back to
me and I remembered my past long nights of struggle and hot darkness, when my essential
mud was uselessly remounting to the surface; I was then closing my eyes and it continued to
boil in abstruse mutterings…
Around me the muddy field was stretching, this was my real body, stripped by its
clothes, its skin and its muscles, till its very flesh.
Its elastic humidity and its unripe smell were receiving me in their depths, because I
had belonged to them since forever. Some apparent and purely accidental features, like, for
example, the few gestures I was capable of doing, my delicate hair, and my dark glassy eyes
were separating me from its immemorial serenity and dirt. It was not enough in front of the
immense majesty of the mud…
I walked around, in all possible directions. My feet sunk in the mud to my ankles. It
was raining slowly, and far away, the sun was setting behind the curtain of bloody and
purulent clouds.
Suddenly I bowed and I thrust my hands in the dung. I wanted to scream: Why not?
Why not? That paste was warm and tender; my hands were wandering through it easily. When
I would clench my fists, the mud would get out through my fingers in beautiful black, shiny
slices.
What had my hands done until then? Where had they lost their time and energy? I was
moving them hither and thither, at their will’s sake. What had they been until then but poor
prisoner birds, tied with a terrible chain to the skin and to the muscles and to the shoulders.
Poor birds destined to fly only at the length of some stupid gestures of good education,
learned by heart and repeated religiously.
Slowly, slowly, they became wild again and regained their ancient freedom. Now they
were rolling their head in the dug, were prattling like a dove, were spreading their wings in
complete happiness…
I began, delighted, to flutter them in the air, making them fly again. Heavy drops of
mud were falling on my face and on my clothes. Why should have I cleaned myself? Why?
This was only the beginning, no severe consequence followed my actions, no trembling of the
skies, no terrific earthquake… I touched my cheeks with my dirty hands, and I was
overwhelmed by an immense joy, it was a long time since I had last been so happy, I began to
rub with my dirty hands my cheeks, my neck, my hair.

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 All of a sudden, the rain became thicker and sharper. The sun was still illuminating the
field, like an immense lamp from the back of a room of ashy marble. It was raining in the
sun’s light, a golden rain smelling like clean laundry.
The waste ground was deserted. Here and there ware piles of well-seasoned corn, from
which the cattle had eaten. I took one corn stem in my hands and began to open it carefully. I
was shivering from the cold and my hands were dirty of mud, but I was absorbed with the
unwrapping of the corn leaves. Much was to be seen in a dry corn stem. Far away there was a
shack with thatch roof. I ran to it and hid under its eaves. The roof was so low that the top of
my head was hitting it. The ground near the wall was completely dry. I lied down, I leaned my
head on some old gunnies and, cross-legged, I could now continue my meticulous
examination of the stem.
I was glad in this mundane occupation of mine, really glad. The canals and the holes
in the stem filled me with real enthusiasm, thus I pricked it with my teeth and found inside it a
soft, sweet fluff, a very unexpected and wonderful lining for a plant; if people’s arteries were
also sheathed with mellow ruffle, I’m sure that the darkness inside them would be infinitely
easier to live with.
I was looking at the stem and the silence in me was smiling calmly, as if inside me
someone was continuously making soapsuds.
It was raining but sunny, and far away, in the fog, the town was fuming like a mound
of garbage. Some roofs and church towers were shining weirdly in that humid crepuscule. I
was so happy that I did not know what absurd action to perform first: to analyze the corn
stem, to stretch my bones or to look at the distant town…
A little bit further from my feet soles, where the mud’s territory was starting, a small
frog suddenly began to jump, first she came close to me but then changed its mind and headed
towards the fields. “Farewell, my little frog, I cried after it, farewell…” My heart was broken
by its sudden departure. “Farewell, my beauty…” I began to improvise a long hymn for the
little frog, and when I finished, I threw towards it the disintegrated stem, to hit the
ungrateful…
Finally, after a long gazing at the locust beams above me, I closed my eyes and a deep
sleep entered deep into my bone marrow.
…I dreamed that I was wandering on the streets of a dusty town, with white houses
shining under a heavy sun, maybe an oriental town. Near me walked a woman dressed in
black mourning veils, strangely, she didn’t have a head. The veils were very well arranged in
the place where her head should have been, but instead of it was an open hole, an empty

54
sphere… We were both in a hurry, following a cart with a sanitary cross on it, in which lied
the dead body of the woman’s husband.
I understood that it was during the war, and soon we arrived at a railway station and
descended some stairs to a basement vaguely illuminated by an electric bulb. A convoy of
wounded had just arrived, and the nurses were bustling in great agitation on the platform,
holding in their hands small baskets full with cherries and pretzel, which they were offering to
the wounded in the train.
From a first class coach descended a fat man, well dressed, with a decoration at his
tab; he was wearing monocle and white leather shoes. His baldness was hidden under some
silver hairs, in his arms he was holding a small white Pekinese dog, his eyes were like two
agates floating on oil. For a few seconds he walked around, searching for something. He
finally found it, it was the flower seller. He chose from her basket some small bouquets of red
carnations and paid for them, taking his money from an elegant wallet, with a silver
monogram. He then went up in his coach again; a few seconds after I could see how he put
the dog on the table near the window and began to give feed to it, one by one, the red
carnations, which the animal would swallow with an obvious pleasure…
I was awoken by an awful quiver.
Now it was raining really hard, the huge drops were pelting near me and I had to draw
myself near the wall. The sky was now black and I could no longer see the town.
I was cold and still my cheeks were burning. I could very well feel their heat under the
scab of curdled mud. I wanted to rise but an electric drift fulminated in my legs. They were
completely numb and I had to unfold them very carefully, fist one, then the other. My socks
were cold and wet.
I thought about searching refuge in that miserable kennel, but its door was closed and,
instead of a window, the small house only had a hole in its wooden wall. The wind was
cluttering the rain and I could not stay away from it.
It was almost evening, very soon after the field was dark. At its very margin, in the
direction where I had come from, a pub turned its lights on. In only one second I was there. I
would have liked to enter, to drink something, to stay at warmth, surrounded by people and by
the alcohol fetidness. I fumbled in my pockets for money but I couldn’t find any. In front of
the pub, the rain was falling merrily, through a curtain of smoke and steams egressing from
inside.
I had to decide something, anything, for example, to go home, but how?
It was impossible to do it, dirty as I was, and, at the same time, I didn’t want to give

55
up my filth. My soul was enveloped in a thick sadness, like when one realizes that in front of
him there is nothing but emptiness and purposelessness, and nothing left to live and nothing
left to achieve.
I began to run in the streets, in the dark, jumping over slops and sometimes sinking to
my knees in them. Despair grew in me, massive and excruciating, and made me feel an urgent
need to scream and to hit my head on the trees and on the walls, but then it writhed in a
tranquil, tender thought. I knew what I had to do: because I couldn’t go any further, all I had
to do was to finish with everything, in that exact moment and place. What was I leaving
behind? Just a humid, ugly world, in which it was raining softly…
I entered the house on the back door. I sneaked through the rooms, avoiding looking in
the mirrors. I was searching for something efficacious and quick which could have thrown in
the dark everything I was feeling and seeing, just as a wagon of rocks when one discards its
bottom plank.
I began to search all the drawers for some violent poison, devoid of any thought
except for the one that all this must finish as soon as possible. It was a duty like any other one.
I found all sorts of objects which couldn’t have served me for anything: buttons,
twine, colored thread, little prayer books with a weighty smell of naphthalene. None of these
useless things could help a man die. This is what the world contained in its most tragic
moments: buttons, twine, colored thread, little prayer books…
At the bottom of a drawer I found a box with white pills, they could have been a
poison or just an inoffensive medicine, but I thought that anyway, in a big quantity, they
should certainly be poisoning.
I put one on my tongue, my whole mouth was filled with a vaguely salty and fade
taste. I crushed it between my teeth and its dust absorbed all my saliva. My mouth became
dry. There were many tablets in the little box, more than thirty. I went to the faucet in the yard
and I begun to swallow them, one by one, steadily and patiently.
I would drink some water with every pill, I needed a lot of time to finish them all. The
last ones couldn’t slither down my neck, which felt like swollen.
It was completely dark in the yard. I sat on a step and I waited. In my stomach began a
terrifying boiling, but I was filling good in the rest of my body, and the rain was now my
intimate friend, understanding my state and surrounding me with its care.
The yard became a sort of saloon, and I was filling more and more feathery in it. All
things were desperately trying not be to drawn in the deep obscurity. All of a sudden I
realized I was sweating terribly. I put my hand under my skirt, I was all wet. Around me the

56
void was growing vertiginously. I entered the house and fell on a bed, completely wet...

It was a beautiful head, extraordinarily beautiful.

Maybe three times bigger than a human head, spinning slowly on a brass axis which
was sweeping it from the top, through the neck.
First I could only see its nape. Out of what was it built? It had a pale shine of old
faience, with tusk glitters. All of its surface was printed with small blue drawings, all sorts of
filigrees repeated geometrically, like on a carpet. From afar they looked like a delicate writing
on an ivory paper; it was incredibly beautiful.
All of a sudden, the head begun to move, spinning on its axis, and I was overwhelmed
by a deep vertigo. I knew that in some seconds would appear, in front of the skull, the
frightening, horrible face.
It was a well-formed face, with all its normal human sets: dished eyes, very prominent
chin, and two excavated triangles under every cheekbone, like in a thin person.
But its skin was fantastic: formed out of delicate spangles of delicate flesh, one near
the other, like the brownish foils on the back of the mushrooms.
There were so many foils, and so tight, that, if you were looking at that head by
closing the eyelids for a bit, nothing seemed abnormal, and the minuscule lines looked like the
hachured shadows of some copper engraving.
Sometimes, during the summer, looking far away at the chestnut trees, charged with
leaves, they looked like enormous heads stuck in trunks, with the cheeks holed in depth, like
my own head.
When the wind was blowing through the leaves, this face would undulate like a field
of wheat. In the same way was quivering the head, when the pedestal was moving.
In order to discover that the head was made out of spangles, it was enough to dish my
finger a little in its flesh: it would enter without any resistance, like in a humid, soft paste.
When I took it out, the spangles were returning to their original position, and no trace was left
behind.
Once, in my childhood, I was present during the exhumation and inhumation of the
body of a girl who had died very young, and had been buried dressed in a white wedding
dress.
The silk bodice had disentangled in long, dirty strips, and from place to place, the
traces of embroidery had mingled with soil. Only her face looked intact, and had kept entirely
its traces. Its color was dark-blue, so that the head seemed made out of humid pasteboard.

57
 When the coffin was taken out, someone passed his hand over the dead girl’s face, and
we all had a terrible surprise: what we had thought to be a very well preserved cheek was only
a two-fingers thick layer of moldiness, which had replaced the skin’s depth and forms.
Underneath this illusion was the empty skull.
My head was exactly like this, but instead of moldiness it was covered with layers of
flesh, but I could traverse them to the bones with my finger.
The head, although hideous, was a secure refuge against the air.
Why against the air? In my room the air was in continuous movement, viscous, sticky,
heavy, flowing from everywhere and trying to curdle in ugly, black stalactites.
In this air appeared the head for the first time, and around it began to grow gradually a
void, like an aureole.
I was so happy and pleased with its apparition that I felt like laughing. But how was it
possible to laugh in the middle of the night, in the dark?
I began to love the head passionately. It was my most precious and intimate
possession. It had come to me from the mysterious world of darkness, from where only an
inaudible buzz would arrive to me, like a continuous boil under my skull. What other things
could be found there? I’d open my eyes wide open and I scrutinize in vain the obscurity but,
except for the ivory head, nothing else came.
I wondered with some sort of fear if this head would not become in my future life the
centre of all my preoccupations, replacing them all, one by one, so that at he end I would only
remain with it and with the darkness. Life appeared at that moment in a precise, true light. For
a very short instant, it had grown in the air like a complete, matured fruit. The head was my
rest and my felicity, uniquely my possession. Maybe if it had belonged to the whole world, a
terrible catastrophe would have taken place. Only one moment of full happiness could have
petrified the world forever.
Against the power of the head fought continuously, more and more powerless, the
air’s dirty flow. Sometimes near it appeared my father, vague and indirect, like a mass of
whitish steams. I knew he would put his hand on my forehead; his hand was cold. I would try
to explain to him the useless fight between the head and the air, while he was unbuttoning my
shirt and sliding under the thermometer my armpit, like a thin glass lizard.
Around the head would begin a troublesome movement, like a flag’s flutter.
It was impossible to stop it, the flag was fluttering evermore.
I remembered the day when, at tea time, upstairs, in the Weber family, Paul had let his
hand hang down the chair, and Edda, from the bed, raising her shoe a little, began to scratch

58
his palm, as a joke. In time, her gesture reached an unusual virulence. When I thought about
about it, the shoe was scratching Paul’s palm with an incredible virulence, until it produced a
small wound, and than a deep hole in his flesh. The show never stopped its annoying
mechanism: it was continually holing the wounded hand, and then the whole arm, and then
the whole body… In the same way began the movement of the flag. It could have destroyed
everything, and then devour me…
I screamed in great pain and despair, all sweaty.
“How much?” asked a voice in the shadow.
“39”, answered my father, leaving me prey to the storm growing inside me.
The convalescence announced itself one morning as an extreme fragility of the world,
in the room in which I was sleeping; it was entering through the window on the roof, and the
room’s volume diminished gradually its density. The things’ clearness was lighter now, and,
no matter how deeply I would breathe, a wide void remained in my chest, like the
disappearance of an important quantity of myself. In the warm sheets, the crumbs of bread
were sliding from under my legs. My leg was searching the bed’s metal and the metal was
stabbing it with a cold knife.
I tried to get down from the bed. Everything was just as I suspected: the too
inconsistent air could not sustain me. I was walking through it abruptly and without any
coordination, as if I was trying to cross a vaporous and warm river.
I sat on a chair, under the window on the roof, around me the light was relegating the
things’ exactitude as if it were washing them thoroughly, in order to deprive them of their
glitter.
The bed, in a corner of the room, was dipped in darkness. How did I manage, in that
obscurity, to distinguish, during the fever, every grain of lime?
I began to get dressed; my clothes were lighter than usual, hanging on my body like
blotting paper, and smelling as lye after having been ironed.
Flowing in gradually rare waters, I got out into the street. I was instantly stunned by
the sun. Immense stains of yellow and greenish brilliancies were partly covering the houses
and the passers-by. The street itself looked thin and fresh, like having surpassed the fever of a
serious disease.
The carriage horses, grey and loose, had abnormal movements, now they were
walking very slowly, with difficulty, and the next moment they were running wildly,
breathing powerfully on their nostrils so that they would not fall too weak on the asphalt.
The long corridor of houses was slightly rocking under the wind’s blow. From afar

59
came the strong smell of autumn. “A beautiful autumn day”, I said to myself, “A splendid
autumn day!”…
I was walking very slowly near the dusty houses, and in a bookshop’s window I saw
an agitated clock-work toy.
It was a small clown, in red and blue outfit, which was patting with two minuscule
copper cymbals. He was very comfortably closed in this kingdom of his, in his Window,
surrounded by books, balls and inkwells, and he was patting his cymbals thoughtless and
happy. My heart was touched by its purity, my eyes were filled with tears, it was so clean and
so shady in that window corner! Indeed, an ideal place in this world, where one could pat
appeased his cymbals, dressed in beautiful colored clothes.
After so much fever, I could perceive a simple, clear thing, there in the window, in the
intimate autumn light, which was falling down on earth in lovely beams. Oh, how I would
have liked to replace the small, happy clown, there, in the middle of all those books and balls
and clean objects, correctly arranged on a blue paper. Bang! Bang! Bang! How it’s good to be
in this window! Bang! Bang! Bang! Red, green, blue; balls, books and inks! Bang! Bang!
Bang! What a beautiful autumn day!...
Slowly, slowly, stealthily, stealthily, the clown’s movements slowed down. First, the
cymbals didn’t touch anymore, then his arms remained numb in the air.
I realized with great terror that the clown had stopped his playing. Something deep
inside me was painfully petrified. A beautiful moment lost in the heavens…
I left quickly from that window and headed towards a small public garden in the centre
of the town. The chestnut trees had already lost their yellow leaves. The old wooden
restaurant was closed and in front of it was an upside-down pile of broken benches.
I let myself fall on one of them, I don’t know what form it had but all of a sudden I
found myself almost lying on my back, staring at the sky. The sun was sending through the
branches a divided light, filled with crystals.
I stood like this for some time, eyes lost in the heights, weak, unbearably weak.
All of a sudden, a stalwart boy stood next to me, with the sleeves of his shirt tucked
up, with red, strong neck, with big, dirty hands. He scratched his head for a few seconds with
all his ten fingers, and then took out from his trousers’ pocket a book, and began to read. He
held tight in his palms the pages, so that the wind would not turn them over, and he muttered
aloud; from time to time he would pass his hand through his hair, to understand better.
I coughed suggestively and asked him, while capsized on that bench, eyes lost in the
tree’s branches: “What are you reading?” The boy put the book in my hands as if I were blind.

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It was a long story, in verses, about adventurous brigands, a dirty book with oily pages: it was
obvious it had passed through many hands. While I was inspecting it, he rised to his feet and
stood in front of me, powerful, sure of himself, with sleeves tucked up and a bare neck.
Beautiful and calm as the clown patting cymbals in a bookshop’s window.
“And… your head doesn’t hurt when you read?” I asked him while giving him his
book back.
He didn’t seem to understand what I meant.
“Why would it hurt? No, it doesn’t hurt at all!” he replied, and stood back on the
bench, to continue his reading.
Thus there is a certain category of things in this world to which I would never belong,
mechanical, careless clowns, string young boys, who never suffer of headache… Around me,
through the trees, in daylight, a spirited, ample current was flowing, carrying along vigorous
life and untouched purity. I was cursed to remain forever at its margins, stuffed by darkness
and weakness and faint.

I stretched my feet on the bench and, leaning against the tree, I found a very
comfortable position. After all, what kept me from being strong and careless? To feel
circulating in me a vigorous, fresh pith, like the one flowing through the thousands of
branches and leaves of the tree, to remain vertical and irrational under the sunlight, straight,
sober, leading a secure, well-defined life, closed under my skin like in a trap…
For this I had to try first of all to breathe deeper and more rarely: I was breathing
badly, my chest was always either too full or too empty. After some minutes I felt better. A
weak fluid of perfection, which was bloating with every second, began to stream in my veins.
The street noises reminded me that somewhere far away the town was spinning around me,
unhastily, like an old gramophone record. I had become the main center of the world, its very
axis, its nucleus. It was vital now not to lose my brittle equilibrium.
One morning, in a circus, while the artists were rehearsing, I assisted a scene
which came to my mind all of a sudden, hearty and unsullied. A volunteer from the public, a
simple bystander without any training, climbed, courageously, on the pyramid of chairs and
tables from which had descended a moment before the circus’ main acrobat. We all admired
the precision with which he was escalating the dangerous construction; the frenzy to have
managed to defeated the first obstacles intoxicated that amateur with a sort of irresponsible
and unwise wisdom of the equilibrium, which made him know exactly where to put his hand
or his foot and what was the minimum weight he had to assume in order to conquer a new

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step. Bewildered by the perfection of his gestures, he got in only few seconds to the top. But
there something strange happened: all of a sudden he became aware of the fragility of his
position, as well as of his extraordinary bravery. Trembling and sweating with fear, he asked,
with a low voice, for a ladder, and recommended many times to the others to hold it tight and
not to move it. The audacious amateur descended with infinite prudence, step by step, all
sweaty and frightened, disorientated by the senseless idea he just had and angry with himself.
My position now in the garden was similar to the one on the top of the fragile
pyramid. I could feel in me the circulation of the strong pith, but I had to make efforts not to
fall from the height of my admirable certitudes.
A thought passed through my head, that this was the state in which I should
meet Edda, calm, sure of myself, illuminated; I hadn’t visited her in a long time…
I wanted to appear in front of someone, once in my life, comprehensive and
unflinching, silent and superb as a tree.
Yes, a tree, so I filled my chest with air and, lying comfortably on my back, I greeted
warmly the branches above me. There was something rough and simple in that tree,
organically and wonderfully related to my new forces. I caressed the trunk as if it were an old
friend. “My friend, my fellow tree!”…
The more I was looking at the infinitely spread wreath of branches, the more I felt my
flesh dividing itself and air circulating alive through its gaps. My blood was flowing in me
majestically and rich, foamy of the simple life’s bubbling.
I stood up. For a moment my knees bent, as if they wanted to compare in a single
hesitation all my force and all my feebleness. With large steps I headed towards Edda’s house.
The heavy wooden door facing the terrace was closed. I was bewildered by its
immobility. All my thoughts disappeared. I pushed the door handle. “Courage!” I said to
myself, but then I stopped to correct myself. Why courage? Only shy people need courage in
order to achieve something, the normal, strong ones don’t feel courage or cowardice, they just
open doors…
The fresh darkness of the first room received me with a calm, blissful air, as if it had
waited for me for long.
This time, the curtain of pearls, when uniting after me, had a strange tinkling, which
made me feel alone in a deserted house, at the edge of the world. Was this the sensation of
extreme equilibrium in the top of the pyramid of chairs?
I knocked violently at Edda’s door.
She answered with a frightened voice to come in. Why were my steps so soft?

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 “Did I step softly?” I felt that the presence of a person like me or, better said, of a tree,
must have been felt from afar.
But no wonder awakened in the room, no fever, not the slightest emotion.
For some seconds my thought preceded me in an ideal manner, with a great perfection
and sobriety of my gestures. I saw myself stepping forward natural and sure of myself and
taking a seat at Edda’s feet, on the bed where she was lying. But my real person remained
somewhere behind all these beautiful projects, like a villain and broken trailer.
Edda asked to sit down and I sat on a chair, at a large distance from her.
The clock was ticking between us its very sonorous, annoying seconds. Strangely, the
tick-tock was growing and decreasing like the sea’s ebb and high tide, advancing in waves
towards Edda, until I could hardly hear it, and then coming back to me, swollen and violent…
“Edda, I told her, interrupting our silence, allow me to tell you something very
simple…”
She did not answer.
“Edda, do you know what I am?”
“What?”
“A tree, Edda, a tree…”
Of course, this short conversation took place entirely inside me, no word had been
uttered.
Edda snuggled on the bed, gripping her knees and covering them with the blanket.
Then she put her hands under her head and looked at me attentively. I would have given
anything for her to look anywhere else.
All of a sudden I saw on a shelf a big bunch of flowers in a vase. This saved me.
How come that I hadn’t seen them before? I kept looking in that direction since I had
entered there. In order to verify their sudden apparition I looked for a second somewhere else
and then glanced back at them. They were there, real, big, red, immobile… How come that I
hadn’t seen them? I began to doubt my certitude of being a tree. An object appeared in the
room, out of nothing, I wondered if my sight was always clear, maybe in my body there were
still some traces of impotence and darkness, which were circulating through my new
luminosity like clouds on a shiny sky, covering my sight when mingling with my eyes’ fluids,
just like the clouds cover the sun and sink in darkness a part of the landscape.
“How beautiful are those flowers, Edda…”
“What flowers?”
“Those on the shelf…”

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 “What flowers?”
“Those rod, big dahlias…”
“What dahlias?”
“What do you mean? Those dahlias…”
I got up and ran to the shelf. On a pile of books there was a red scarf, and the moment
I touched it I understood it was really a scarf, but something was still hesitating in me, like the
wavering of the amateur acrobat’s courage on the top of the pyramid, between genius
equilibrium and pure dilettantism. I had got to my limit, to my highest point… Now all I
could do was to go back and sit on the chair. What could I do or say next?
For some moments I was so bewildered by this problem that I was incapable of doing
the slightest movement. Like the very big speed of a motor’s propeller, which makes it look
immobile, my profoundly desperate hesitation imposed on me a statue’s noble rigidity. The
tick-tock was stronger with every second, fastening me with tiny audible nails. I wrested from
my immobility with difficulty.
Edda was in the same position on the bed, looking at me with the same calm wonder; I
had the impression that a mean and perfidious power was making things glitter in their most
common aspect, in order to confuse me.
This is what was implacably fighting against me: the common aspect of all things.
In a world so accurate, any initiative was ineffectual, or even unattainable.
And what was driving me crazy was the fact that Edda couldn’t have been different
from this woman with perfect hairdo, with blue-violet eyes and an imperceptible smile at the
corner of her delicate mouth. What could I do against such a bitter exactitude? How could I
make her understand that I was a tree? This could only be transmitted through immaterial,
uniform words, through the air, like a wreath of branches and leaves, superb and enormous,
just as I felt it growing inside me. How could I possibly do this?
I got close to the bed and leaned upon the wooden elbow rest. In my hands irradiated a
sort of certitude, as if in them descended, all of a sudden, the core of my uneasiness. And
now? Between me and Edda was still lingering that petrified transparent air, untouchable and
apparently inconsistent, in which had accumulated all my forces unable to achieve anything.
Heavy hesitations, elongated silences, troubles and vertigos of flesh and blood, all these
things could enter that miserable space without the appearance of the black color and the
sticky matter containing them, and in the world the distances were not just those which could
be covered with the eyes, infinitesimal and permeable, but also the invisible ones, populated
with monsters of shyness, of fantastic projects and sudden gestures… If all these would had

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coagulated all of a sudden in the matter towards which they were heading to be composed of,
they would have transformed the world’s aspect in a horrifying cataclysm, in an astonishing
chaos of atrocious misfortunes and ecstatic beatitudes.
In that moment, looking at Edda, the materialization of my thought could have
resulted in that simple gesture screaming in my head: to take the press-paper from the table (I
was looking at it with the corner of my eye, it was a noble medieval treasury pressing the
papers), and throw it towards Edda, and then be the witness of its immediate result, a
formidable spring of blood from her chest, vigorous like the steam flowing from a broken
faucet, filling gradually the room, until I would have felt my feet lapping in the clammy,
warm liquid, then my knees and then, like in those American sensational movies in which one
character is condemned to remain in an hermetically-closed room in which water is gradually
raising, to feel the blood touching my lips, and then to be drowned in its salty, pleasant
taste…
I begun to move my lips and swallow my saliva.
“Are you hungry?” Edda asked me.
“Look, Edda, I said out of the blue, it is something very simple, maybe too simple…
I’m sorry to tell it to you, but I…
I wanted to add “I am a tree”, but this phrase had no value at all, since I had that desire
to drink blood, and was loitering, pale and faded, at the bottom of my soul, and I wondered
that it had once been so important… I tried to speak again.
“Edda, I felt sick, I felt weak and lost, but I am always healed by your presence, only
seeing you makes me feel healthy again… does this upset you?”
“No, not at all”, she answered, and then begun to laugh.
Now I was definitely ready to commit something absurd and bloody, so I took quickly
my hat, uttered “I must leave now”, and in only one second I was downstairs.
Now I had the certitude that the world was stoned in its common aspect and that I had
fallen in it by pure mistake, and that I would never become a tree, I would never kill anyone,
and the blood would never spring in waves.
All objects and all people were closed in their sad obligation to remain accurate,
nothing else but accurate, in vain would I see dahlias in a vase, when in reality on that shelf
was only a red scarf… the world didn’t have the power to change, it was so niggardly closed
in its exactitude that it could not allow itself to see scarves instead of flowers.
For the first time in my life I felt my head powerfully enclosed in my head’s skeleton,
in a terribly painful captivity…

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 That autumn, Edda got sick and died. All the previous days, all my aimless
wanderings, all my tiresome and painful questions gathered themselves in the pain and the
trouble of a single week, like in those liquids where the mixture of more substances condenses
suddenly the violence of a deadly poison.
At the first floor, the silence became even deeper. Paul found, in some wardrobe, an
old topcoat and a stale tie, which he knotted around his neck like a rope. His skin was now
dark-blue, like covered with the delicate gloomy veil the sleepless nights envelop the cheeks
in.
“She suffered all night, he said. I asked the doctor yesterday what he thinks and he
told me the whole truth. It was like an explosion in her kidneys, the doctor said. Very rarely
does this disease manifest itself so brutally, and so swiftly. Usually it appears slowly, and
shows different symptoms long before it gets serious. An explosion in her kidneys, an
explosion, yes, an explosion in her kidneys…
Paul was talking quickly, but with long interruptions, as if between the words he
wanted to allow the heavy pain inside him to swarm and to mature.
In the office downstairs it was now dark like in a cave; the old Weber, his head sunk in
a register, gave the impression of being busy…
Every morning the doctor was coming, and, with quiet steps, was gathering the three
Webers. I was going after them, speaking with Ozy. We hadn’t played in a long time our
imaginary game, and now it was a wonderful occasion to start again. It would have been so
good to be able to speak about Edda’s disease, as if nothing ever happened! Climbing the
stairs, I was thinking of the extraordinary possibility to belong to a game coordinated by Ozy,
to which the doctor, Paul and the old man could have also participated … Once in his lifetime,
the unfortunate hunchback could have conducted an imaginary, inexistent play. The more we
climbed, the more urgent was in me the desire to yell: “It’s enough now, it’s over, you all
played magnificently, Paul’s mask was really impressive, it was obvious that old Weber was
in big pain, but now it’s enough, it’s over, please, Ozy, tell them to give up the rest…” But
everything was too well set to finish on the stairs…
While the doctor entered Edda’s room, we remained in the room, old Weber, Ozy and
me. It was maybe the first time in his life when old Weber tried to choke back an unbearable
pain. With his head leaned on the armchair, he was looking somewhere outside, his gaze
impersonal and vague, as if he didn’t know and didn’t expect anything, and in the end, as the
big actors who bring to perfection their role with an astonishing detail, he raised and got

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closer to a painting on the wall, to see it better. But just as a big actor whose voice, thickened
to its limit in order to sustain a tragic monologue, turns into a ridiculous scream provoking
heavy laughers in the audience, old Weber, trying to play his role too calmly, mistook its
effect: while he was standing and watching the painting, his irritated fingers were rapping into
a chair…
Paul took my hand:
“Edda wants to see you, come with me.”
On the bed with white sheets was lying Edda, her head turned towards the window.
Her hair was rummaged on the pillows, blonder and frailer as usual, as a result of her
disease’s subtlety and refinement. In the room the things were whitely decomposing in the too
powerful light, and Edda’s face was melting in it, inconsistent.
Suddenly she turned her head towards me.
It was true… That moment something happened in me, something indistinct, clear and
surprising, as an evident truth received from outside… I realized that Edda’s head was exactly
like the ivory head appearing in my feverish nights. This evidence was so overwhelming that I
almost thought that I had invented in that exact moment the exact form of the old faience
head, with the dreams’ surprising speed of composition, which form an entire episode the
moment one hears a gun’s shot.
I was now sure that something violent and bad will happen to Edda soon. Maybe later
I imagined this as well; as for Edda, I don’t distinguish now what was the true her.
She tried to look deep in my eyes, but had to close her eyelids, tired. Her hair was
distinguishing her yellow forehead like a wax block. I was again hermetically closed in
Edda’s presence, in what she was now and in my delirious nights, during none of my
wanderings and none of my meetings had I thought seriously of someone else except for
myself, it was impossible for me to imagine a foreign interior pain, or simply someone else’s
existence. The persons around me were just as decorative, ephemeral and material like any
other object, like the houses, or the trees, only in front of Edda, for the first time in my life,
did I feel that my question can evade, and, resonating with another profoundness and another
form of existence, come back to me in enigmatic and troubling echoes.
Who was Edda? What was Edda? I could see myself for the first time from the
exterior, and, in her presence, these questions were the true meaning of my life. In the
moment of her death did she shake me most profoundly and most authentically; her death was
also my death, and in everything I did ever since and in everything I lived, was projected the
immobility of my future death, cold and obscure, as I had seen on Edda’s face.

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 At that day’s dawn I woke up heavy and rigid, disturbed by a foreign presence on my
bed.
It was my father, who had waited in silence for me to wake up. When I opened my
eyes, he made some steps in the room and brought me a white wash-bowl and a cup of water
for me to rinse my hands.
With a painful convulsion, which pricked my heart, I understood what that meant.
“Wash your hands, said my father, Edda has died.”
Outside it was raining softly, and it kept raining for three whole days.
The day of the funeral, the mud was dirtier and more aggressive than ever, the wind
was blowing in waves of water in the roof and in the windows. All night a window was lit
upstairs in the Weber house, in the room where candles were burning.
In old Weber’s office everything was put aside to let the coffin pass; mud entered the
rooms; I could very well see it, triumphant and insinuating, like a hydra with numerous
protoplasmic prolongations, stretching on the walls, going up on the people and on the stairs
and trying to climb the coffin.
The wooden floor appeared downstairs, in the office, from under the oil cloth covering
it, and which was thrown away: long lines of dirt appeared, like the black lines deepened in
Samuel Weber’s old face.
Around his shoes ascended the mud, slowly but tenaciously, penetrating his skin and
going up to his heart, dirty, heavy, sticky. It was mud and nothing else, it was the floor and
nothing else, candles and nothing else, “My funeral will be a string of objects”, Edda once
told me…
Something in me was struggling somewhere far away, as if wanting to prove to me the
existence of a truth superior to all this mud, something different from it, something useless…
My identity had become true long time before and now, in a very normal way, it was only
verifying itself: in the world nothing exists except the mud. What I thought to be pain in me
was only its weak boiling, a protoplasmic prolongation modeled in words and reasons.
In Paul drops were falling like in a bottomless recipient. Clothes were flowing on him
and on his hands, hanging heavily and bowing his back. His tears were flowing down his
cheeks, dirty and elongated, like water on the windows.
Slowly, balancing on the people’s shoulders, the coffin passed near Samuel Weber’s
boat, near the old registers and the dozens of little bottles of ink and medicines, discovered
during the whole operation of cleaning the office, because her funeral was just a long line of
objects…

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 Some other details happened, beyond life itself: in the cemetery, when the body was
taken out from the coffin, coated in white sheets, on these could be seen a large stain of blood.
It was the last and the most insignificant detail before descending in the cemetery’s
warm, moldy basement, filled with bodies soft as jelly, yellow, purulent…
From time to time I am thinking of these things, trying to combine them into
something I could call my true person; when I remember them, old Weber’s office becomes
suddenly the room in which I feel the smell of old registers and mould, but then it disappears
and it becomes the real place I’m in, and I am again put in front of the same painful question,
that is, how do people spend their lives, making use of, for example, rooms, and feeling that
inside them grows a strange body, ramified like a fern and inconsistent like a smoke, a strange
smell, like the profoundly enigmatic odor of the mould; when the events and the people open
and close inside me like fans; when my hand tried to describe this weird and mysterious
simplicity, then I feel, for a second no more, like a convict who realizes in just one second
that death is approaching (and would like his struggle to be different from all the other
struggles in the world, thus liberating him), and I hope that, from all these adventures, a new
and authentic event will appear, warm and intimate, which could sound in me clear and
unique as a name, a name never heard before, the true meaning of my life, its true
understanding…
For this purpose, and not another, there still persists in me that intimate -and so hostile
in the same time- fluid, so close but still so rebellious in its catching, which transforms by
itself, in Edda’s vision, or in Paul Weber’s bowed shoulders, or in the excessively precise
detail of the water faucet, in the corridor of an anonymous hotel.
Why does the memory of Edda’s last days come back to me, so clear? Why, asking in
another sense (and questions can grow chaotically in thousands of different directions, like in
that childhood game when I was folding a paper stained with ink and I was pressing it so that
the ink to effuse as much as possible, revealing, when I was unfurling the paper, the most
fantastic and most unexpected contortions of a bizarre drawing) this memory and not another
comes into my mind?
With every misunderstood and exact memory, I must realize, once more, -like a sick
person’s violent pain, which shadows all his others pinches, like, for example, the bad
position of the pillows, or the bitterness of the last medicine- that all my other troublesome
and niggardly memories are unique, in the poorest sense of this term, and they had their exact
place in my linear life, contributing towards one single exactitude, unalterable from its own
precision.

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 “Your life was like this and not different”, she says, and in this phrase can be felt the
immense nostalgia of a world closed in its hermetical lights and colors, in which nothing is
permitted to any individual destiny, but to extract from itself the aspect of an exact
commonplace.
Here, in this inimitable and arid world, can the melancholy of being unique and
limited be found.
Sometimes during the night I wake up from a horrible nightmare, my most simple and
most frightening dream. I dream that I am sleeping in the same bed where I lied in the
evening. Around me is the same room and it’s exactly the same time of the night which
should be. If, for example, my nightmare begins in the middle of the night, it places me with
exactitude in the darkness of that hour. I can feel the position in which I am, and I can also
see, I know exactly in what room and in what bed am I sleeping, my dream fits closely, like a
delicate skin, over my real position and over my sleep, so one might say that I am in a way
awake: well, I am awake, but I’m dreaming, and I’m dreaming of me being awake. I am
dreaming about my sleep in that precise moment.
Suddenly I feel that my sleep becomes deeper and heavier, and carries me after it.
I want to wake up, but my sleep weighs heavy on my eyelids and on my hands. I
dream that I am stirring, that I move my hands, but my sleep is more powerful than me, and
after a second of struggle, it holds me even more ferociously, and I begin to scream, I want to
resist the sleep, I want to be awaken, I want somebody to slap my face violently, I am afraid
that my sleep will sink me deeper and deeper, to a place from where I will never be able to
come back, I am begging for someone to help me, I want to be shaken…
Then comes my last scream, the most powerful, which wakes me up in my real room,
identical to that in the dream, in the position in which I was dreaming myself to be, at the hour
when I was struggling in my nightmare.
What I see now around me differs very little from what I was seeing a second before,
but it is enveloped in some sordid air of authenticity, flowing through objects and through my
being, like a sudden coldness in the winter, which enlarges all sonorities…
What is the real sense of my reality?
Around me grew the life I will lead until the next dream. Memories and present pains
will weigh heavy in me, and I want to resist, I don’t want to fall into their sleep, from where I
will never come back…
Now I struggle in this reality, I scream, I beg to be awaken, awaken to another life, to
my real life. It’s clear it’s daylight, I know where I am and what I live, but something is

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missing from all this scenery, like in my terrible nightmare.
I struggle, I scream, I fret. Who will wake me up?
All around me, the exact reality carries me down, trying to sink me forever.
Who will wake me up?
It has always been like this, always, always, always…

Translated by Alina Savin

Long time ignored by the literary critique because of his minority status and his
unconventional prose, the Romanian Jewish writer Max Blecher (1909–1938) was recently discovered
by a new generation of enthusiastic readers and researchers. One of the ambassadors of the European
surrealist in the Romanian literature, Max Blecher belongs to the so-called golden generation of this
country’s culture, together with Eugene Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Tristan Tzara or Benjamin
Fundoianu.
Compared with Brunos Schulz or Franz Kafka, Max Blecher, is a unique phenomenon in the
Romanian literature, trying to describe the coherence of a fantastic and yet prosaic world, the one of
the shtetl, of the provincial town somewhere at the margins of the reality and of the civilization,
functioning on its own masochist rules and under the continuous terror of a brutal, painful death.
Born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Botosani, Romania, Max Blecher contracted tuberculosis of the
spine at the age of 19 and spent the rest of his life in hospitals and sanatoria. Before his death at 29 he
wrote two novels, Adventures in the Immediate Unreality (1936), to which Eugene Ionesco refers to as
being a masterpiece, and which is now translated for the first time into English, and Scarred Hearts
(1939), which narrates the life of Emmanuel, a young man with spinal tuberculosis and confined to a
sanatorium outside Paris, where he and his fellow patients attempt to live life to the fullest as their
bodies slowly atrophy and die.
Adventures in the Immediate Unreality is an exceptional novel, highly personal and, in the
same time, universal, describing the fall into maturity of a young man with exacerbated sensibility.
The small, insignificant town is the scenery of incredible encounters with different characters, who
populate a world far away from the natural rules of the universe. The discovery of the sexuality has in
itself the power of the primitive initiations, but also the perversity of the surrealist paintings. The laws
of friendship rely on the capacity of the two parts to built around them a world without meaning or
history. The nature is overwhelming, miraculous, troublesome. The houses live their own lives, being
true bodies that breathe, suffer, transform. The final, senseless death of a young, beautiful, mysterious
young woman, brings with it a deep understanding of life as a long series of sufferings and
illuminations, administered by fear, nightmares, pain, but also by esthetical ecstasies and intellectual
crisis.

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