"I have been telling you that everything is held back, tamed, walled in by boredom, unliberated! And now look at that flood, at that flowering, at that bliss. . . ."

And I shed tears of happiness and helplessness.

"Wake up," I shouted, "come and help me! How can I face this flood alone, how can I deal with this inundation? How can I, all alone, answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?"

And as they remained silent, I cried in anger: "Hurry up, collect bucketfuls of these riches, store them up!"

But nobody could assist me; bewildered, they looked over their shoulders, hiding behind the backs of neighbors.

Then I realized what I had to do; I began to pull from the cupboards old Bibles and my father's half-filled and disintegrating ledgers, throwing them on the floor under that column of fire that glowed and brightened the air. I wanted more and more sheaves of paper. My mother and brother rushed in with ever new handfuls of old newspapers and magazines and threw them in stacks on the floor. And I sat among the piles of paper, blinded by the glare, my eyes full of explosions, rockets, and colors, and I drew wildly, feverishly, across the paper, over the printed or figure-covered pages. My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.

Oh, those luminous drawings, made as if by a foreign hand. Oh, those transparent colors and shadows. How often, now, do I dream about them, then rediscover them after so many years at the bottom of old drawers, glimmering and fresh like dawn—still damp from the first dew of the day: figures, landscapes, faces!

Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear. Oh, those greens greener than wonder. Oh, those preludes of anticipated colors waiting to be given a name!

Why did I squander them at the time with such wanton carelessness in the richness of surfeit? I allowed the neighbors to rummage about and plunder these stacks of drawings. They carried away whole sheaves of them. In what houses did they finally land, which rubbish heaps did they fill? Adela hung them up in the kitchen like wallpaper until the room became light and bright as if snow had fallen during the night.

The drawings were full of cruelty, pitfalls, and aggression. While I sat on the floor taut as a bow, immobile and lurking, the papers around me glowed brightly in the sun. It was enough if a drawing, pinned down by the tip of my pencil, made the slightest move toward escape, for my hand, trembling with new impulses and ideas, to attack it like a cat. Fierce and rapacious, I would, with lightning bites, savage the creation that tried to escape from under my crayon. And that crayon only left the paper when the now dead and immobile corpse displayed its colorful and fantastic anatomy on the page, like a plant in a herbal.

It was a murderous pursuit, a fight to the death. Who could tell the attacker from the attacked in that tangle that spluttered with rage, with squeaks and fears? At times my hand would start to attack twice or three times in vain, only to reach its victim on the fourth or fifth attempt. Often it winced in pain and fear in the fangs and pincers of the monsters writhing under my scalpel.

From hour to hour the visions became more crowded, bottlenecks arose, until one day all roads and byways swarmed with processions and the whole land was divided by meandering or marching columns— endless pilgrimages of beasts and animals.

As in Noah's day, colorful processions would flow, rivers of hair and manes, of wavy backs and tails, of heads nodding monotonously in time with their steps.

My room was the frontier and the tollgate. Here they stopped, tightly packed, bleating imploringly. They wriggled, shuffling their feet anxiously: humped and horned creatures, encased in the varied costumes and armors of zoology and frightened of each other, scared by their own disguises, looking with fearful and astonished eyes through the camouflage of their hairy hides and mooing mournfully, as if gagged under their attires.

Did they expect me to name them and solve their riddle? Or did they ask to be christened so that they could enter into their names and fill them with their being? Strange monsters, question-mark apparitions, blue-print creatures appeared, and I had to scream and wave my hands to chase them away.

They withdrew backward, lowering their heads, looking askance, lost within themselves; then they returned, dissolving into chaos, a rubbish dump of forms. How many straight or humped backs passed at that time under my hand, how many heads did my hand touch with a velvety caress!

I understood then why animals have horns: perhaps to introduce an element of strangeness into their lives, a whimsical or irrational joke. An idée fixe, transgressing the limits of their being, reaching high above their heads and emerging suddenly into light, frozen into matter palpable and hard. It then acquired a wild, incredible, and unpredictable shape, an arabesque, invisible to their eyes yet frightening, an unknown cypher under the threat of which they are forced to live. I understood why these animals are given to irrational and wild panic, to the frenzy of a stampede: pushed into madness, they are unable to extricate themselves from the tangle of these horns, between which— when they lower their heads—they peer wildly or sadly, as if trying to find a passage between the branches. These horned animals have no hope of deliverance and carry on their heads the stigma of their sin with sadness and resignation.

The cats were even further removed from light. Their perfection was frightening. Enclosed in the precision and efficiency of their bodies, they did not know either fault or deviation. They would descend for a moment into the depths of their being, then become immobile within their soft fur, solemnly and threateningly serious, while their eyes became round like moons, sucking the visible into their fiery craters.