Then the world stood motionless for a while, holding its breath, blinded, wanting to enter whole into that illusory picture, into that provisional eternity that opened up before it. But the enticing offer passed, the wind broke its mirror, and Time took us into his possession once again.

The Easter holidays came, long and opaque. Free from school, we young scholars wandered about the town without aim or necessity, not knowing how to make use of our empty, undefined leisure. Undefined ourselves, we expected something from Time, which was unable to provide a definition and wasted itself in a thousand subterfuges.

In front of the café, tables were already put out on the pavement. Ladies sat at them in brightly colored dresses, and in small gulps they swallowed the breezes as if they were ice cream. Their skirts rustled, the wind worried them from below like a small angry dog. The ladies became flushed, their faces burned from the dry wind, and their lips were parched. This was still an interval with its customary boredom, while the world moved slowly and tremulously toward some boundary.

In those days we all ate like wolves. Dried out by the wind, we rushed home to eat in dull silence enormous chunks of bread and butter, or else we would buy on street corners large cracknels smelling of freshness, or we would sit in a row without a single thought in our heads in the vast vaulted porch of a house in the market square. Through the low arcades we could see the white and clean expanse of the square. Empty, strong-smelling wine barrels stood under the walls of the hall. We sat on a long bench, on which colored peasants' kerchiefs were displayed on market days, and we thumped the planks with our heels in listlessness and boredom.

Suddenly Rudolph, his mouth still full of cracknel, produced from his pocket a stamp album and spread it before me.

IV

I realized in a flash why that spring had until then been so empty and dull. Not knowing why, it had been introverted and silent—retreating, melting into space, into an empty azure without meaning or definition—a questioning empty shell for the admission of an unknown content. Hence that blue (as if just awakened) neutrality, that great and indifferent readiness for everything. That spring was holding itself ready: deserted and roomy, it was simply awaiting a revelation. Who could foresee that this would emerge—ready, fully armed, and dazzling—from Rudolph's stamp album?

In it were strange abbreviations and formulae, recipes for civilizations, handy amulets that allowed one to hold his thumb and finger between the essence of climates and provinces. These were bank drafts on empires and republics, on archipelagoes and continents. Emperors and usurpers, conquerors and dictators could not possess anything greater. I suddenly anticipated the sweetness of domination over lands and peoples, the thorn of that frustration that can only be healed by power. With Alexander of Macedonia, I wanted to conquer the whole world and not a square inch of ground less.

V

Ignorant, eager, full of chafing desire, I took the march-past of creation, the parade of countries, shining processions I could see only at intervals, between crimson eclipses, caused by the rush of blood from my heart beating in time with the universal march of all the races. Rudolph paraded before my eyes those battalions and regiments; he took the salute fully absorbed and diligent. He, the owner of the album, degraded himself voluntarily to the role of an aide, reported to me solemnly, somewhat disoriented by his equivocal part. At last, very excited in a rush of fierce generosity, he pinned on me, like a medal, a pink Tasmania, glowing like May, and a Hyderabad swarming with a gypsy babble of entangled lettering.

VI

It is then that the revelation took place: the vision of the fiery beauty of the world suddenly appeared, the secret message of good tidings, the special announcement of the limitless possibilities of being. Bright, fierce, and breathtaking horizons opened wide, the world trembled and shook in its joints, leaning dangerously, threatening to break out from its rules and habits.

What attraction, dear reader, has a postage stamp for you? What do you make of the profile of Emperor Franz Joseph with his bald patch crowned by a laurel crown? Is it a symbol of ordinariness, or is it the ultimate within the bounds of possibility, the guarantee of unpassable frontiers within which the world is enclosed once and for all?

At that time, the world was totally encompassed by Franz Joseph I.

On all the horizons there loomed this omnipresent and inevitable profile, shutting the world off, like a prison. And just when we had given up hope and bitterly resigned ourselves inwardly to the uniformity of the world—the powerful guarantor of whose narrow immutability was Franz Joseph 1—then suddenly Oh God, unaware of the importance of it, you opened before me that stamp album, you allowed me to cast a look on its glimmering colors, on the pages that shed their treasures, one after another, ever more glaring and more frightening. . . . Who will hold it against me that I stood blinded, weak with emotion, and that tears flowed from my eyes? What a dazzling relativism, what a Copernican deed, what flux of all categories and concepts! Oh God, so there were uncounted varieties of existence, so your world was indeed vast and infinite! This was more than I had ever imagined in my boldest dreams. So my early anticipation that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, continued to nag at me and insist that the world was immeasurable in its variety had been proven right at last!

VII

The world at that time was circumscribed by Franz Joseph I.