Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar

a stopping to look at some object, a slight discoloration in the carpet, and again the desire to ask me something, but then I’m whistling Franck’s
Symphonic Variations
in a way that always prevents her. How can I tell you about it, Andrea, the minute mishaps of this soundless and vegetal dawn, half-asleep on what staggered path picking up butt-ends of clover, individual leaves, white hunks of fur, falling against the furniture, crazy from lack of sleep, and I’m behind in my Gide, Troyat I haven’t gotten to translating, and my reply to a distant young lady who will be asking herself already if … why go on with all this, why go on with this letter I keep trying to write between telephone calls and interviews.
    Andrea, dear Andrea, my consolation is that there are ten of them and no more. It’s been fifteen days since I held the last bunny in the palm of my hand, since then nothing, only the ten of them with me, their diurnal night and growing, ugly already and getting long hair, adolescentsnow and full of urgent needs and crazy whims, leaping on top of the bust of Antinoös (it is Antinoös, isn’t it, that boy who looks blindly?) or losing themselves in the living room where their movements make resounding thumps, so much so that I ought to chase them out of there for fear that Sara will hear them and appear before me in a fright and probably in her nightgown—it would have to be like that with Sara, she’d be in her nightgown—and then … Only ten, think of that little happiness I have in the middle of it all, the growing calm with which, on my return home, I cut past the rigid ceilings of the first and second floors.
    I was interrupted because I had to attend a committee meeting. I’m continuing the letter here at your house, Andrea, under the soundless grey light of another dawn. Is it really the next day, Andrea? A bit of white on the page will be all you’ll have to represent the bridge, hardly a period on a page between yesterday’s letter and today’s. How tell you that in that interval everything has gone smash? Where you see that simple period I hear the circling belt of water break the dam in its fury, this side of the paper for me, this side of my letter to you I can’t write with the same calm which I was sitting in when I had to put it aside to go to the committee meeting. Wrapped in their cube of night, sleeping without a worry in the world, eleven bunnies; perhaps even now, but no, not now— In the elevator then, or coming into the building; it’s not important now where, if the when is now, if it can happen in any now of those that are left to me.
    Enough now, I’ve written this because it’s important to me to let you know that I was not all that responsible for the unavoidable and helpless destruction of your home. I’llleave this letter here for you, it would be indecent if the mailman should deliver it some fine clear morning in Paris. Last night I turned the books on the second shelf in the other direction; they were already reaching that high, standing up on their hind legs or jumping, they gnawed off the backs to sharpen their teeth—not that they were hungry, they had all the clover I had bought for them, I store it in the drawers of the writing desk. They tore the curtains, the coverings on the easy chairs, the edge of Augusta Torres’ self-portrait, they got fluff all over the rug and besides they yipped, there’s no word for it, they stood in a circle under the light of the lamp, in a circle as though they were adoring me, and suddenly they were yipping, they were crying like I never believed rabbits could cry.
    I tried in vain to pick up all the hair that was ruining the rug, to smooth out the edges of the fabric they’d chewed on, to shut them up again in the wardrobe. Day is coming, maybe Sara’s getting up early. It’s almost queer, I’m not disturbed so much about Sara. It’s almost queer, I’m not disturbed to see them gamboling about looking for something