his claydepths, digging upward with his nails, his teeth, fleeing the cold that bit into his back, looking for the exit into the courtyard through that small tunnel where they had placed him along with the snails. In winter she would hear him weeping with his tiny sob, mud-covered, drenched with rain. She imagined him intact. Just as they had left him five years before in that water-filled hole. She couldn’tthink of him as having decomposed. On the contrary, he was probably most handsome sailing along in that thick water as on a voyage with no escape. Or she saw him alive but frightened, afraid of feeling himself alone, buried in such a somber courtyard. She herself had been against their leaving him there, under the orange tree, so close to the house. She was afraid of him. She knew that on nightswhen insomnia hounded her he would sense it. He would come back along the wide corridors to ask her to stay with him, ask her to defend him against those other insects, who were eating at the roots of his violets. He would come back to have her let him sleep beside her as he did when he was alive. She was afraid of feeling him beside her again after he had leaped over the wall of death. Shewas afraid of stealing those hands that the ‘boy’ would always keep closed to warm up his little piece of ice. She wished, after she saw him turned into cement, like the statue of fear fallen in the mud, she wished that they would take him far away so that she wouldn’t remember him at night. And yet they had left him there, where he was imperturbable now, wretched, feeding his blood with the mud ofearthworms. And she had to resign herself to seeing him return from the depths of his shadows. Because always, invariably, when she lay awake she began to think about the ‘boy,’ who must be calling her from his piece of earth to helphim flee that absurd death.
But now, in her new life, temporal and spaceless, she was more tranquil. She knew that outside her world there, everything would keepgoing on with the same rhythm as before; that her room would still be sunken in early-morning darkness, and her things, her furniture, her thirteen favorite books, all in place. And that on her unoccupied bed, the body aroma that filled the void of what had been a whole woman was only now beginning to evaporate. But how could ‘that’ happen? How could she, after being a beautiful woman, her bloodpeopled by insects, pursued by the fear of the total night, have the immense, wakeful nightmare now of entering a strange, unknown world where all dimensions had been eliminated? She remembered. That night – the night of her passage – had been colder than usual and she was alone in the house, martyrized by insomnia. No one disturbed the silence, and the smell that came from the garden was a smellof fear. Sweat broke out on her body as if the blood in her arteries were pouring out its cargo of insects. She wanted someone to pass by on the street, someone who would shout, would shatter that halted atmosphere. For something to move in nature, for the earth to move around the sun again. But it was useless. There was no waking up even for those imbecilic men who had fallen asleep under her ear,inside the pillow. She, too, was motionless. The walls gave off a strong smell of fresh paint, that thick, grand smell that you don’t smell with your nose but with your stomach. And on the table the single clock, pounding on the silence with its mortal machinery. ‘Time … oh, time!’ she sighed, remembering death. And there in the courtyard, under the orange tree, the ‘boy’ was still weeping withhis tiny sob from the other world.
She took refuge in all her beliefs. Why didn’t it dawn right then and there or why didn’t she die once and for all? She had never thought that beauty would cost her so many sacrifices. At that moment – as usual – it still pained her on top of her fear. And underneath her fear those implacable insects were still martyrizing her.