During every spring night, whatever might happen in it, that story unfolds itself above the croaking of frogs and the endless working of mills. A man walks under the milky stars strewn by the handmills of night; he walks hugging a child in the folds of his cloak; he walks across the sky, constantly on his way, a perpetual wanderer through the endless spaces. Oh, the sadness of loneliness, the pathos of orphanhood in the vastness of night. Oh, glare of distant stars! In that story time can never change anything. The story appears on the starry horizons and will do so forever, always afresh, for once derailed from the tracks of time, it has become unfathomable, never to be exhausted by repetition. There goes that man who hugs the child in his arms—we are repeating on purpose that refrain, that pitiful motto of the night, in order to express the intermittent continuity of walking, sometimes obstructed by the tangle of stars, sometimes completely invisible during long, silent intervals in which one can feel the breeze of eternity. The distant worlds come within reach, glaring frighteningly, they send violent signals through eternity in an unspoken, mute language—while he walks on and on and soothes the little girl endlessly, monotonously, and without hope, helpless against the whispers and sweet persuasions of the night, against the only word formed on the lips of silence, when no one is listening to it. . . .

The story is about a princess kidnapped and changed for another child.

XVIII

When late at night they return to the spacious villa among gardens, to a low white room where a black shining piano stands with all its strings silent, when through the wide glass wall, as if through the panes of a greenhouse, the spring night looks in, pale and blinking with stars, and the scent of cherry blossom floats from bottles and containers over the cool white bedding—the anxious listening fills the sleepless night and the heart speaks in sleep, sobs, races, and stumbles through the long, dewy, moth-swarming night, luminous and scented with bird cherry. . . . Ah, it is the bird cherry that gives depth to the limitless night; hearts aching from flights, tired from happy pursuits, would like to rest awhile on some airy narrow ridge, but from that endless pale night a new night is born, even paler and more disembodied, cut into luminous lines and zigzags, into spirals of stars and pale flights, pierced a thousand times by the suckers of invisible gnats bloated with the blood of maidens; the tireless heart must again stumble through sleep, mad, engaged in starry and complex affairs, in breathless hurry, in moonlit panics, ascending and enlarged, entangled in pale fascinations, in comatose lunar dreams and lethargic shivers.

Ah, all these rapes and pursuits of that night, the treacheries and whispers, Negroes and helmsmen, balcony railings and night-blinds, muslin frocks and veils trailing behind hurried escapes! . . . Until at last, after a sudden blackout, a dull black pause, a moment comes when all the puppets are back in their boxes, all the curtains are drawn, and all the bated breaths are quietly exhaled, while on the vast calm sky drawn is building noiselessly its distant pink and white cities, its delicate, lofty pagodas and minarets.

XIX

Only now will the nature of that spring become clear and legible to an attentive reader of the Book. All these morning preparations, all the day's early ablutions, all its hesitations, doubts, and difficulties of choice will disclose their meaning to one who is familiar with stamps. Stamps introduce one to the complex game of morning diplomacy, to the prolonged negotiations and atmospheric deceits that precede the final version of any day. From the reddish mists of the ninth hour, the motley and spotted Mexico with a serpent wriggling in a condor's beak is trying to emerge, hot and parched by a bright rash, while in a gap of azure amid the greenery oftall trees, a parrot is stubbornly repeating "Guatemala, Guatemala" at even intervals, with the same intonation, and that green word infects things that suddenly become fresh and leafy. Slowly, among difficulties and conflicts, a voting takes place, the order of ceremonies is established, the list of parades, the diplomatic protocol of the day.

In May the days were pink like Egyptian stamps. In the market square brightness shone and undulated. On the sky billows of summery clouds—volcanic, sharply outlined—folded under chinks of light [Barbados, Labrador, Trinidad], and everything was running with redness, as if seen through ruby glasses or the color of blood rushing to the head. There sailed across the sky the great corvette of Guiana, exploding with all its sails. Its bulging canvas towered amid taut ropes and the noise of tugboats, amid storms of gulls and the red glare of the sea. Then there rose to the sky and spread wide an enormous, tangled rigging of ropes, ladders, and masts and, with a full spread of canvas, a manifold, many-storied aerial spectacle of sails, yards, and braces, of holds from which small agile Negro boys shot out for a moment and were lost again in the labyrinths of canvas, among the signs and figures of the fantastic tropical sky.

Then the scenery changed in the sky: in massed clouds three simultaneous pink eclipses occurred, shiny lava began to smolder, outlining luminously the fierce contours of clouds [Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica] and the center of the world receded, its glaring colors became deeper. Roaring tropical oceans, with their azure archipelagos, happy currents and tides and equatorial and salty monsoons made their appearance. With the stamp album in my hand, I was studying the spring. Was it not a great commentary on the times, the grammar of its days and nights?

The main thing was not to forget, like Alexander the Great, that no Mexico is final, that it is a point of passage which the world will cross, that beyond each Mexico there opens another, even brighter one, a Mexico of super-colors and hyper-aromas. .