A bizarre feeling of futility hovered over the clearing, which existed “somewhere on earth,” a place where I myself would end up quite by chance on a summer afternoon with no rhyme or reason of its own, an afternoon that had lost its chaotic way in the heat of the sun amidst bushes fixed in space “somewhere on earth.” At that time I felt more deeply and painfully that I had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do but saunter through parks, through dusty clearings burnt by the sun, desolate and wild. But the saunter would turn into a heart-rending experience.

There was another cursed place at the other end of town on the high, loose banks of the river where my friends and I would go to bathe. At one point the bank had caved in. Just above it there was a factory that made oil from sunflower seeds. The workers would throw the discarded seed husks into the section of the bank that had caved in, and over time, the pile grew so high that it formed a slope of dry husks extending from the top of the bank to the water’s edge.

My playmates would descend to the water along that slope, cautiously, holding one another by the hand, sinking their feet deep into the carpet of rotten matter. The walls of the high bank on either side of the slope were steep and full of outlandish irregularities—long, fine channels sculpted by the rain, arabesque-like but as hideous as poorly healed scars, veritable tatters of the clay’s flesh, horrible gaping wounds. It was between these walls, which made such an impression on me, that I too climbed down to the water.

Long before I reached the riverbank, my nostrils would fill with the odor of rotten husks. It would prepare me for the crisis like a brief period of incubation. It was an unpleasant smell, yet sweet. Like the crises.

Somewhere inside me my olfactory perception would split and the effluvia of putrefaction would reach different destinations: the gelatinous odor of decomposing husks was separate, quite distinct from—yet concomitant with—its pleasant perfume, the warm and homely scent of toasted hazelnuts. The moment I smelled it, the perfume would transform me, circulating throughout my body, dissolving, as it were, my inner fibers and replacing them with a more airy, less uncertain material. From that moment, the end was inevitable. A pleasant, heady feeling would arise in my chest, a dizziness pushing me toward the riverbank, the place of my ultimate defeat.

I would race down the husk pile to the water at breakneck speed, the air setting up a fierce opposition, cutting into me like a sharp blade, and space collapsing chaotically into an immense hole with an unexpectedly strong force of attraction. My playmates would watch my wildly precipitous descent in horror. The pebble beach below was very narrow, and the slightest misstep would have sent me sprawling into the water, whose surface whirlpools betokened great depths.

But I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Having reached the water, I would run past the husk pile at the same speed and continue downstream to a hollow in the bank. The hollow formed a small cave, a cool, shaded grotto like a room carved out in the rock. I would go in and fall to the ground, drenched in sweat, dead tired, and trembling from head to toe.

Having recovered a bit, I would enjoy the grotto’s familiar and enormously pleasant decor. There was a spring bubbling forth from the rock, running along the ground, and forming a pool of perfectly limpid water in the middle of the pebbles. I would never tire of leaning over the pool and gazing at the delightful lace of green moss on the bottom, the worms caught on slivers of wood, the scraps of rusty old ooze-covered metal, the myriad animate and inanimate objects in the fantastically beautiful water.

Outside those two cursed places, the town sank into a uniform and banal mass of houses easily interchangeable and trees exasperatingly immobile, of dogs, vacant lots, and dust.

In closed rooms, however, crises took place with greater ease and frequency. I could not tolerate being alone in a strange room. When forced to do so, I would, within a very few minutes, fall into a sweet but terrible swoon. The room itself prepared the way: a warm, welcoming sense of intimacy would filter down from the walls and spread over all the furniture, every object. All at once the room was sublime and I felt happy there. Yet that was nothing but a ruse on the part of the crisis: a subtle, perverse little trick it played. After this moment of bliss things went topsy-turvy and confusion reigned. I would peer around me wide-eyed, but things had lost their usual meaning: they were awash with their new existence. It was as if someone had removed the fine, transparent paper they had been wrapped in till then, and suddenly they looked new beyond words. They seemed destined to be put to new, superior, fantastic uses beyond my power to divine.

But there was more: the objects were seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom, and the independence they declared of one another went far beyond simple isolation to exultation, ecstasy. Their enthusiasm for living in a new light encompassed me as well: I felt powerful bonds linking me to them, invisible networks making me every bit as much of an object, a part of the room, as they were, the way an organ grafted onto a living organism goes through subtle physical metamorphoses until it becomes one with the body once foreign to it.

Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass.