She may have been less conscious of the impropriety of the deed than surprised at what it consisted of.

I myself was in fact more surprised at the outcome of the adventure, which took place a few days later in the marketplace. Some masons were slaking a batch of lime in a vat, and I was watching it bubble when all of a sudden I heard my name called out and a loud voice saying, “A feather, was it? Is that what you used?”

It came from a sturdy red-haired fellow of about twenty, a loathsome character. I think he lived in a house in that dark alley. I caught sight of him shouting at me from behind the vat through the steam of the quicklime, a ghost-like figure, an infernal apparition holding forth amidst fire and brimstone. Perhaps he said something else and I gave his words a meaning close to my preoccupations of the previous few days: it was hard for me to believe he could have seen anything in the pitch darkness of the alleyway (though the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether it had been as dark as it seemed, whether I hadn’t been standing in a patch of light). I concluded that during the sexual act I had been possessed by a dream that muddled my sight and senses. I determined to be more circumspect in the future. Who knew what aberrations I was capable of? Under the spell of arousal I might well react unconsciously, like a sleepwalker, even in broad daylight.

Closely connected with the feather is another memory, that of a book—small, black, and highly disturbing. I came across it one day on a desk and leafed through it with great interest. It was a banal novel by André Theuriet. Frida was the title. It was profusely illustrated with drawings of the two main characters: a boy sporting curly blond locks and a velvet jacket and a plump girl in a flounced dress. The boy looked like Walter. Sometimes they appeared together, sometimes separately. Their encounters always seemed to take place in the nooks and crannies of a park or beneath the walls of a ruin. What did they do there? That is what I wanted to know. Did the boy have a feather like mine in his jacket pocket? I didn’t see anything like it in the drawings, nor did I have time to read the book, and in a few days it vanished without a trace. I began to look for it everywhere. I asked for it in the bookshops, but no one seemed to have heard of it. It must have been full of secrets because it was nowhere to be found.

One day I took the bull by the horns and went to the public library. Standing on a chair in the back of the room, a tall, pale man wearing spectacles that seemed to tremble ever so slightly saw me coming. There was no turning back, nothing left but to proceed to the table and pronounce the sensational word clearly and distinctly—Frid-da—thereby confessing to the myopic gentleman all my secret vices. But by the time I reached him I could muster no more than a mumble. The librarian’s spectacles started trembling more noticeably, and he closed his eyes the better to search his memory. Then he told me he had “never heard of it.” To my mind, however, the trembling spectacles betrayed a certain inner turmoil, and I was now certain that Frida contained mysterious and sensational revelations.

Many years later I ran across it again on a bookshop shelf. It was not the black cloth edition I had seen; it had a humble, dreary paper binding and yellow covers. My first impulse was to buy it, but I changed my mind and placed it back on the shelf: I wanted to keep its image intact, the image of a small black book with a whiff of the authentic perfume of my youth.

Chapter Four

In small insignificant objects—a black feather, a banal little book, an old snapshot of frail, long-forgotten figures with the suffering that comes of serious internal ailments written all over them, a dainty ashtray made of green porcelain in the form of an oak leaf and forever smelling of dead ashes—in the plain, simple memory of old man Samuel Weber’s thick spectacles, in such domestic gewgaws and trifles I find the melancholy of my childhood and the nostalgia of the futility of a world that engulfed me like a sea with petrified waves. Brute matter—in the deep, heavy masses of earth, stone, sky, or water, or in its least understood forms: mirrors, paper flowers, painted statues, glass marbles with their enigmatic internal spirals—has always kept me a prisoner bumping painfully against its walls, yet spurred me on to share in the strange and senseless adventure of being human.

Wherever my thought turned, it ran into rampart-like objects and inertias that brought me to my knees. Contemplating the infinite forms of matter, terrorized by their diversity, I twisted and turned for nights on end, distressed by the endless series of objects filing through my memory like an escalator with thousands upon thousands of unremitting steps.

To keep the flow of things and colors inundating my brain, I would picture the evolution of a single object or even no more than its contour, or, attempting to inventory the world, imagine a chain of all the shadows on earth, the strange, uncanny, gray realm that lies sleeping at the feet of life, a black man stretched veil-like over the earth, his spindly legs poured out like water and arms of dark iron, or wandering through the downcast branches of horizontal trees: The shadows of ships skimming the sea, shadows unstable and aqueous, brief intimations of sadness, here now, then gone, racing the foam.

The shadows of birds in flight, jet black, as if out of the depths of the earth and into a darkling aquarium.

And the lone shadow, lost somewhere in space, of our sphere of a planet.

At other times I thought of vertiginous mountain chasms, of caves and grottos, and of the warm, supple, ineffable cavern that is the cavern of sex. I had somehow managed to procure a small flashlight and, crazed with insomnia and the onslaught of objects filling the room, I would plunge under the covers and conduct an intimate, intricate, yet arbitrary study of the creases in the sheets and the miniature valleys they formed. Without a precise, demanding occupation of the sort I would never have been able to calm down. My father once came in at midnight and caught me poking my flashlight under the pillow.