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crossed the living room breathing heavily. Th ere was no one there nor in the little vestibule. He went back to
the bedroom, then into the kitchen . . . No one, unless the intruder was hiding
behind a piece of furniture or a curtain. But there wouldn’t have been time to
find a hiding place, and anyway, if that had been the intruder’s intention, he
wouldn’t have slammed the door like that, so loudly that the bang was still
echoing. Th e house was small and there was only
so much it could hold in the way of secrets. It was too dark to see, so all
Varamo could do was bounce off the walls, using the bumps to punctuate the
melody of his jagged breathing. Th ere were two
ways a door could be slammed; the intruder could end up on either side. Th e secret might be shut out. And, in fact, the
noises he could hear were not coming from inside the house.
    He went to the front door. As soon as he opened it,
he was deafened by shouting. He winced, half closing his eyes. It was hard to
believe that a creature as tiny and as ancient as his mother could make such a
racket, but there was no one else in sight. She was yelling in the middle of the
street. Th e afternoon light had taken on its
last and definitive shade, and the solitary, multicolored figure of his mother
was sunken in that dusky gold. Her shouting was completely incomprehensible, of
course, and yet it was perfectly clear. Th e
different forms that madness and senility can take all have a common effect,
which is to bring intentions to the surface, and it is with intentions that
understanding begins and ends. Th e old lady’s
furious ranting at the closed doors and windows of the neighborhood was due in
part to her volatile temper, and in part to the fact that all she had to go on
were the intentions of others, which she presumed to be malevolent and
inscrutable to all but a single, hidden consciousness. Th e content of the ranting was, in a way, a coded message. It was
humiliating for Varamo to have a paranoid mother, but he knew it was something
that could happen to others, since it was within the range of human
possibilities. So he accepted it philosophically. He walked out to the middle of
the street, bent over (her head was level with his waist — she’d almost become a
dwarf), took her arm and led her to the open door, meeting with little
resistance.
    Although his mother let herself be taken into the house,
her agitation didn’t subside; on the contrary, it intensified and became more
focused, now that she had an interlocutor. Before crossing the threshold, she
turned back to the street and screamed a last threat, brandishing a clenched
fist the size of a hazelnut. Varamo guided her toward an armchair, turned her
around and made her sit, then sat beside her and took both her hands as a way to
start calming her down. But as he took her left hand, he noticed that she was
gripping a piece of paper and guessed that it was the cause of her outburst. All
things considered, it was better to have something concrete to talk about, so he
got straight to the point and asked her what it was, touching the paper with the
tip of his finger. But she was suddenly distracted; she lifted her chin and
sniffed. Varamo couldn’t help noticing an unpleasant odor that made the air
almost unbreathable. He started explaining that he had been doing an experiment;
it was the smell of the chemicals he’d used. But he found it hard to talk: the
stench made his throat seize up and his eyes burn; tears began to stream down
his face. And what he was saying or trying to say was drowned out by the
splashing of the fish in the washbowl. Under those conditions, it was impossible
to have a rational conversation, let alone calm a hysteric. With gestures that
indicated, “I’ll be right back,” he ran to open the windows. Th en he returned to the armchair, picked up his
mother, carried her briskly through the kitchen (while she fanned herself with
the piece of paper), and went out onto the patio. On