Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads. Their faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight. Then a black, rotting bark began to cover everything in large putrid scabs of darkness. And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in that silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together into the enormous silvery infinite. Then suddenly night came—a vast night, growing vaster from the pressure of great gusts of wind. In its multiple labyrinths nests of brightness were hewn: the shops—large colored lanterns—filled with goods and the bustle of customers. Through the bright glass of these lanterns the noisy and strangely ceremonial rites of autumn shopping could be observed.

The great, undulating autumn night, with the shadows rising in it and the winds broadening it, hid in its folds pockets of brightness, the motley wares of street traders —chocolates, biscuits, exotic sweets. Their kiosks and barrows, made from empty boxes, papered with advertisements, full of soap, of gay trash, of gilded nothings, of tinfoil, trumpets, wafers and colored mints, were stations of lightheartedness, outposts of gaiety, scattered on the hangings of the enormous, labyrinthine, wind-shaken night.

The dense crowd sailed in darkness, in loud confusion, with the shuffle of a thousand feet, in the chatter of a thousand mouths—a disorderly, entangled migration proceeding along the arteries of the autumnal city. Thus flowed that river, full of noise, of dark looks, of sly winks, intersected by conversations, chopped up by laughter, an enormous babel of gossip, tumult, and chatter.

It seemed as if a mob of dry poppy-heads, scattering their seeds—rattleheads—was on the march.

My father, his cheeks flushed, his eyes shining, walked up and down his festively lit shop; excited, listening intently.

Through the glass panes of the shop window and of the door, the distant hubbub of the city, the drone of wandering crowds could be heard. Above the stillness of the shop, an oil lamp hung from the high ceiling, expelling the shadows from all the remote nooks and crannies. The empty floor cracked in the silence and added up in the light, crosswise and lengthwise, its shining parquet squares. The large tiles of this chessboard talked to each other in tiny dry crackles, and answered here and there with a louder knock. The pieces of cloth lay quiet and still in their felty fluffiness and exchanged looks along the walls behind my father's back, passing silent signs of agreement from cupboard to cupboard.

Father was listening. In the silence of the night his ear seemed to grow larger and to reach out beyond the window: a fantastic coral, a red polypus watching the chaos of the night.

He listened and heard with growing anxiety the distant tide of the approaching crowds. Fearfully he looked around the empty shop, searching for his assistants. Unfortunately those dark and red-haired administering angels had flown away somewhere. Father was alone, terrified of the crowd which was soon to flood the calm of the shop in a plundering, noisy mob; to divide among themselves and put up to auction the whole rich autumn which he had collected over the years and stored in his large secluded silo.

Where were the shop assistants? Where were those handsome cherubs who had been entrusted with the defense of the dark bastions of cloth? My father thought with painful suspicion that perhaps they were somewhere in the depths of the building with other men's daughters. Standing immobile and anxious, his eyes shining in the lamplit silence of the shop, he heard with his inner ear what was happening inside the house, in the back chambers of that large colored lantern. The house opened before him, room after room, chamber after chamber, like a house of cards, and he saw the shop assistants chasing Adela through all the empty brightly lit rooms, upstairs and downstairs, until she escaped them and reached the kitchen to barricade herself there behind the kitchen dresser.

There Adela stood, panting, amused, smiling to herself, her long lashes fluttering. The shop assistants were giggling, crouched behind the door. The kitchen window was open onto the black night, saturated with dreams and complications. The dark, half-opened panes shone with the reflections of a distant illumination. The gleaming saucepans and jars stood immobile on all sides and glinted with their thick glaze. Adela leaned cautiously from the window her bright, made-up face with the fluttering eyes. She looked for the shop assistants in the dark courtyard, sensing an ambush. And then she saw them, advancing slowly and carefully toward her in single file, along the narrow ledge under the window which ran the length of the wall, now red from the glare of distant lights. My father shouted in anger and desperation, but at that very moment the hubbub of voices drew much nearer and the shopwindow became peopled with faces crooked with laughter, with chattering mouths, with noses flattened on the shining panes. My father grew purple with anger and jumped on the counter.