And once they get it, goodness and beauty are out the window: cold disdain is the meat of marriage. Or I’ll see women who seem happy, who even I could befriend, and I see them devoured by brutes as sensitive as butchers …’

“I listen to him turning infamy into glory, cruelty into charm. ‘I am a member of a long-lost race: my forefathers were Scandinavian: they pierced their own sides, drank their own blood. —I’ll gash myself everywhere, tattoo myself, make myself as grotesque as a Mongol: you’ll see: I’ll be screaming in the streets. I want to go mad with rage. Don’t show me jewels; I’ll cringe and writhe on the rug. I’d stain any wealth that came my way with blood. I’ll never work …’ Many nights, this demon would grab me, and we would wrestle and fight! —Nights, usually drunk, he’d wait in the street or a house, waiting to frighten me to death. —’You’ll see: I’ll get my throat cut. It’ll be disgusting.’ By day, he struts around like he’s some sort of criminal!

“And then, occasionally, he’d speak a tender kind of talk, about remorse engendered by death; about miserable wretches who are everywhere; about backbreaking toil; about farewells that break hearts. In the dives where we’d drink, he’d cry while watching the people around us: misery’s cattle. He’d prop up drunks in dark streets. He had compassion for the little children of mean mothers. —He’d conduct himself with all the kindness of a girl going to Sunday school. He’d pretend to be enlightened about everything—business, art, medicine. —I followed him, how couldn’t I?

“I learned the spiritual landscape he surrounded himself with: clothes, drapes, furniture: I lent him weapons … and a second face. I saw everything that moved him, exactly as he did. Whenever he grew dissipated, I followed him nonetheless, me, executing strange tasks, far away, good or bad: I knew I would never really become a part of his world. Next to his sweetly sleeping body, I spent so many sleepless hours trying to figure out why he wanted to escape from reality. No man before him had wished for such a thing. I was aware —without being afraid of him—that he could be a menace to society. Maybe he had found a way to change life as we know it? No, he was only searching, or so he said. His charity is bewitching, and I am its prisoner. No other soul was strong enough—the strength of despair! —to have withstood his protection and love. And anyway, I couldn’t imagine him with anyone else: we know only the Angel we’re given, never another, or so I believe. I inhabited his heart as one might a palace: it was empty, precisely so no one would learn that a person as ignoble as you were there: and there it is. Alas! I needed him. But what did he want with me, drab and lifeless as I was? He didn’t make me a better person, and he didn’t manage to kill me! Sad, angry, I would occasionally say, ‘I understand you.’ He’d just shrug his shoulders.

“And so my sorrow was endlessly renewed, and seeing myself drifting further out to sea—as anyone would have noticed, had I not already been condemned to be forgotten by everyone—I grew more and more hungry for some measure of kindness from him. His kisses and his warm embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind. I got used to it.