it had an unpleasant and nonetheless delicate smell, as did the crises.
Somewhere within me, my olfactory sense would split in two, and the effluvia of the odour of putrefaction would reach different regions of sensation. The gelatinous smell of the decomposing husks was separated and very distinct from, although concomitant to, their pleasant, warm, domestic aroma of toasted nuts.
As soon as I sensed it, that aroma would, in but a few moments, transform me, permeating all my inner fibres, which it would seemingly dissolve, only to replace them with a more ethereal, indefinite matter. From that moment I would no longer be able to avoid it. A pleasant and dizzying faintness would begin in my chest, hastening my steps towards the riverbank, towards the place of my definitive defeat.
I would descend to the water in mad flight, down the mound of husks. The air would resist me with a density as sharp and hard as a knife’s blade. The world’s space would tumble chaotically into an immense hole with unimagined powers of attraction.
My mates would gaze frightened at my mad flight. The shingly bank at the bottom was very narrow and at the slightest wrong step I would have been hurled into the river, at a spot where eddies at the surface of the water hinted at great depths.
But I was unaware of what I was doing. Reaching the water, at the same speed, I would skirt the mound of husks and run along the river’s edge to a certain spot where there was a hollow in the bank.
At the bottom of the hollow a small grotto had formed, a cool and shady cavern, like a chamber excavated from a rock. I would enter and fall to the ground sweating, exhausted and trembling from head to foot.
When I began to come to my senses, I would discover next to me the intimate and ineffably pleasant décor of a grotto with a spring that spurted sluggishly from the rock and trickled over the ground, forming in the middle of the shingly bank a basin of very limpid water, above which I would bend to gaze, without ever wearying of the wonderful lacework of the green moss at the bottom, the worms clinging to spelks of wood, the slivers of old iron covered in rust and mud, the various animals and things at the bottom of the fantastically beautiful water.
*
Apart from these two cursed places, the rest of the town dissolved into a mush of uniform banality, with buildings that were interchangeable, with exasperatingly immobile trees, with dogs, vacant lots, and dust.
Indoors, however, the crises occurred more readily and more often. As a rule, I could never bear solitude in an unfamiliar room. Should I be made to wait, the delicate and terrible swoon would come within moments. The room itself made ready for it: a warm and welcoming intimacy would seep from the walls, oozing over all the furniture and all the objects. All of a sudden, the room would become sublime and I would feel very happy within its space. But this was nothing more than a deception produced by the crisis; its delicate and gentle perversity. In the following moment of my beatitude, everything would be turned upside down and thrown into confusion. I used to peer wide-eyed at everything that was around me, but the objects would lose their usual meaning: they would be bathed in a new existence.
As if suddenly unpackaged from the thin transparent paper in which they had hitherto been wrapped, their appearance would become ineffably new. They seemed intended for some new, higher, and fantastical use, and in vain did I wrack myself to discover it.
But this was not all: the objects would be seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom. They became independent of one another, but they were of an independence that meant not only their isolation, but also an ecstatic exaltation.
Their enthusiasm to exist in a new aureole would overwhelm me, too: powerful attractions bound me to them, their invisible interconnecting ducts transformed me into an object in the room like the others, in the same way that an organ grafted to raw flesh becomes one with the unfamiliar body by means of subtle exchanges of substance.
Once, during a crisis, the sun shed a tiny cascade of rays onto the wall: a golden, unreal water marbled with luminous ripples. I could also see the corner of a bookcase, with thick leather-bound tomes behind its glass pane, and these real details, which I could perceive from the distances of my swoon, managed to dizzy me and topple me, like a final gasp of chloroform. It was what was ordinary and familiar in objects that disturbed me the most. The habitude of seeing them so many times probably ended up wearing away their external membrane and thereby they appeared to me from time to time as having been flayed down to the flesh: raw, unspeakably raw.
The supreme moment of the crisis would consume itself in a floating outside of any world, pleasant and painful at the same time. Should the sound of footfalls be heard, the room would quickly regain its former appearance. Between the walls there would then take place a dwindling, an extremely small, almost imperceptible diminution of its exaltation; this gave me the conviction that the certitude in which we live is separated from the world of uncertainties by but a fine pellicle.
I would awake in the all too familiar room, perspiring, weary and overcome with a sensation of the pointlessness of the objects that surrounded me. I would notice in them new details, just as it can happen that we discover some unusual detail in an object that has served us daily for years in a row.
The room would preserve a vague memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of gunpowder in a place where there has been an explosion. I would look at the leather-bound books in the cabinet with its panes of glass and in their motionlessness I would detect, I do not know how, a perfidious air of secrecy and complicity. The objects around me never gave up their mysterious attitude, one they ferociously preserved in their stern immobility.
*
Familiar words are invalid at certain depths of the soul. I try to define my crises precisely and all I can find are images. The magic word that might express them ought to borrow something from the essences of other sensibilities in life, distilling from them a new odour in a scholarly composition of perfumes.
In order to exist, it ought to contain something of the stupefaction that overwhelms me when I see a person in reality and then closely follow his gestures in a mirror: then, there is something of the disequilibrium of plummeting in a dream, with the whistle of rushing terror that runs up the spine in an unforgettable instant; or something of the mist and the transparency inhabited by bizarre scenes in glass balls.
*
I envied the people around me, hermetically enclosed in their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They lived as prisoners beneath raincoats and overcoats, but nothing from without could terrorise or conquer them, nothing penetrated into their wonderful gaols. Between the world and me there was no separation. All that enveloped me permeated me from head to foot, as if my skin were porous. The otherwise highly distracted attention with which I gazed around was not a mere act of will. The world extended its tentacles into me in a natural way; I was riddled with the thousand-fold arms of the hydra. I was forced to ascertain, to the point of exasperation, that I lived in the world I could see. There was nothing to be done against this.
The crises belonged to an equal extent both to me and to the places where they occurred. It is true that some of these places contained a “personal” malevolence of their own, but all the others themselves lay in a trance long before my arrival. And so it was with certain rooms, where I used to feel that my crises crystallised from the melancholy of their immobility and boundless solitude.
Like a kind of equity, however, between the world and me (an equity that plunged me even more irremediably into the uniformity of raw matter) the conviction that objects could be innocuous became equal to the terror that they sometimes inflicted upon me. Their innocuousness came from a universal lack of powers.
I
