Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature) by Salvador Espriu Page A

Havana to say that she awaits me and thinks so much about me. I have not seen her in well over a year. Will she deceive me? I ’ ll die, because I love her, I love her, » Joan Vulgar cried. « Everything is permitted you, » Ecolampadi said to calm him. « You are not a man. The laws of nature obey you, you can trespass them or transform them as you will. And when I visited Tula a couple of moths ago we talked   .   .   .   » « Don ’ t add any more, » interjected Joan Vulgar, the god. « You have lifted a weight from me. I just find it strange, a little strange. » And he moved away. « If I am not permitted this third indisputable proposition, which is the first! » murmured Ecolampadi Miravitlles with a worried air, and during an excusably jittery moment. And on the other hand, faith, including the most substantive theocentric beliefs — and the faith of Miravitlles, rock-solid, generative, Pauline, was certainly such — is a gift that no merit can buy or conquer, always as fragile as the finest crystal, thin as a cat ’ s ear at its most erect.

Hildebrand
    That disastrous-looking man said:
    « You want to know my past? Here ’ s to not breaking up this illustrious gathering: I am a new murderer of shadow, and my shadow was named Hildebrand. I met him in the French Legion, where I ended up due to romantic circumstances. One wretched afternoon, in Le Houga, in the middle of the desert, he set out to find me. We were fifty lost souls, depression was driving us mad; we hardly had water. I ’ d never paid attention to him before. At least not in any particular way, and he emerged suddenly, as if he were arriving in the capacity of my protector. He offered me his ration of liquid, and the blues and gratitude made me accept it. Great evil that he was, he knew the power of an opportunely compassionate attitude. He dominated me, he enslaved me, he turned me into an automaton. He mocked me; he took pleasure in irritating me so that I ’ d feel my impotence. I hated him and I couldn ’ t free myself from him. He dragged me beyond the bounds of the law, and under his orders I had to commit low crimes, repugnant offenses. At times I ask myself why he chose me as his victim. Did he suppose I was weak? I don ’ t know, but he tortured me with refinement. He made me learn in a year and a half — by heart and in Chinese — without my understanding a word of it, Li-Ping ’ s The Abridged Commentaries of Lao-Tse , a work of a mere forty-seven volumes, and he obliged me to recite it whenever he had insomnia. On another occasion, at a cannibal festival, he demanded I devour the gall bladder and rib of a leprous old sorcerer from a tribe of the Balolo, dead from the bite of a bluebottle fly. I can ’ t look at turtles, they make me nauseous: Hildebrand amused himself, for two months, with the contemplation of the trembling provoked in me each day — once I ’ d been tied up so that I couldn ’ t move — by the slow stroll of the most abominable exemplar of that species across my exposed belly. Why tell of my horrors? He hypnotized me, he enslaved me, and he was slight in build, while I, as you can see, am quite corpulent. We wandered the streets, for years and years, an eternity. He was the devil, my shadow, a blue nightmare. Until I murdered him in Lav í nia, at the doors of Santa Maria Liberal. »
    He paused to breathe and to smoke. The man continued:
    « Hildebrand, or the spirit of contradiction: connoisseur of antithings. If I affirmed any historical date, because I ’ m college-educated, he would correct me, hunkered down in voguish German research, and he would underline an error to me for ten hours. If I exalted Caesar or Alexander, he would bring up the existence of a tremendous (and of course unmatched) Incan, Sioux, or Macanese-Portuguese captain. He restrained my enthusiasm for a grand literary figure with the bitterness of his precise erudition: the grand figure plagiarized an obscure author who was the