passengers strangled one another clawing their way to the lifeboats, I managed to reach an inflatable raft, dove under its tarpaulin cover and, already in the sea, surveyed—with the impassiveness of a cork—the unfolding spectacle.
It was a horrible sight! The ship pitched, shuddered, nosed under at the prow and slipped beneath the waves.
Did I have to convince myself one more time that I was the only survivor?
So as to be sure, I inspected the site of the shipwreck. Here was a lifesaver, a wicker chair... there a school of sharks, a bobbing cadaver...
I calculated the distance, set a course and, after beating all world records, entered, on the eighth day, the port of disembarkation.
My friends, those who knew how many similar debacles I had been spared before, surmised at first that what had happened was a simple accident, but, having to admit that these accidents happened so often, to the point of seeming routine, finally had to treat it as a case of authentic predestination.
Just as there are men whose presence exerts an unerring abortive efficacy, my special faculty is for provoking accidents at every turn, for helping along unforeseen calamity and upsetting the unstable equilibrium on which all existence depends.
With what anguish, with what anxiety did I confront, in those first days, this propensity for cataclysm!... Life gets complicated when it trips over wreckage at every step!... But the force of habit is invincible... Without noticing, one eventually becomes accustomed to living among disintegrating cadavers andshattered glass, even to the point of discovering the enchantments of floods, the delights of structural collapses, and soon one feels that life acquires color only in the midst of desolation and disaster.
Note that our mere appearance on the scene is enough to cause caryatids to weary of holding up public edifices and thus to cause the downfall—among their crumbling columns of figures, among their portfolios—of hundreds of moneylenders, who feed on the body politic... and on garbanzo beans!
Learn to relish—as if they were delicious plates of boiled maize—the temblors that fill us with awe, earthquakes in which bathtubs sprinkle from the eighth floor while dozens of salesgirls are trapped and perish in the elevators, and though blonde are still called Esther!
Who can deny that before the magnificence of such spectacles mountain landscapes lose all their appeal, even if they are better shaped than the buttocks of the Venus de Milo?
The exoticism of moths or mastodons, the rites of masonry or mastication—at least as far as I’m concerned—hold not the slightest interest. I need pulverized skeletons, railroad decapitations, unidentifiable corpses drawn-and-quartered, and so great is my love for the spectacular that the day on which it doesn’t produce in me a short circuit, I will expire from sheer disillusionment.
Under such conditions, my company would be as uncertain as uncertain can be.
Am I to blame if I prefer conflagrations to third-grade schoolgirls?
Although most men satisfy themselves with musing on their dreams and waking with the submissiveness of a cuckold, he who has pernoctated among vagabond cadavers will comprehend that the rest seems so much molasses, nothing but molasses.
I am—and what can I do?—a catastrophic man, and I cannot sleep unless I can hear the rumblings above my bed of the bodies and the belongings of those living on the floors above, and I’m not interested in any woman, if I haven’t already made this clear, unless, as she lies outstretched in my arms, she sets herself on fire in a blazing conflagration in which she is carbonized to ash... poor thing!
TWENTY-ONE: CURSES
MAY NOISES bore into your teeth like a dentist’s drill, and may memory fill you with rust, broken words and the stench of decay.
May a spider’s foot sprout from each of your pores, may you find nourishment only in packs of worn cards and may sleep reduce you,
It was a horrible sight! The ship pitched, shuddered, nosed under at the prow and slipped beneath the waves.
Did I have to convince myself one more time that I was the only survivor?
So as to be sure, I inspected the site of the shipwreck. Here was a lifesaver, a wicker chair... there a school of sharks, a bobbing cadaver...
I calculated the distance, set a course and, after beating all world records, entered, on the eighth day, the port of disembarkation.
My friends, those who knew how many similar debacles I had been spared before, surmised at first that what had happened was a simple accident, but, having to admit that these accidents happened so often, to the point of seeming routine, finally had to treat it as a case of authentic predestination.
Just as there are men whose presence exerts an unerring abortive efficacy, my special faculty is for provoking accidents at every turn, for helping along unforeseen calamity and upsetting the unstable equilibrium on which all existence depends.
With what anguish, with what anxiety did I confront, in those first days, this propensity for cataclysm!... Life gets complicated when it trips over wreckage at every step!... But the force of habit is invincible... Without noticing, one eventually becomes accustomed to living among disintegrating cadavers andshattered glass, even to the point of discovering the enchantments of floods, the delights of structural collapses, and soon one feels that life acquires color only in the midst of desolation and disaster.
Note that our mere appearance on the scene is enough to cause caryatids to weary of holding up public edifices and thus to cause the downfall—among their crumbling columns of figures, among their portfolios—of hundreds of moneylenders, who feed on the body politic... and on garbanzo beans!
Learn to relish—as if they were delicious plates of boiled maize—the temblors that fill us with awe, earthquakes in which bathtubs sprinkle from the eighth floor while dozens of salesgirls are trapped and perish in the elevators, and though blonde are still called Esther!
Who can deny that before the magnificence of such spectacles mountain landscapes lose all their appeal, even if they are better shaped than the buttocks of the Venus de Milo?
The exoticism of moths or mastodons, the rites of masonry or mastication—at least as far as I’m concerned—hold not the slightest interest. I need pulverized skeletons, railroad decapitations, unidentifiable corpses drawn-and-quartered, and so great is my love for the spectacular that the day on which it doesn’t produce in me a short circuit, I will expire from sheer disillusionment.
Under such conditions, my company would be as uncertain as uncertain can be.
Am I to blame if I prefer conflagrations to third-grade schoolgirls?
Although most men satisfy themselves with musing on their dreams and waking with the submissiveness of a cuckold, he who has pernoctated among vagabond cadavers will comprehend that the rest seems so much molasses, nothing but molasses.
I am—and what can I do?—a catastrophic man, and I cannot sleep unless I can hear the rumblings above my bed of the bodies and the belongings of those living on the floors above, and I’m not interested in any woman, if I haven’t already made this clear, unless, as she lies outstretched in my arms, she sets herself on fire in a blazing conflagration in which she is carbonized to ash... poor thing!
TWENTY-ONE: CURSES
MAY NOISES bore into your teeth like a dentist’s drill, and may memory fill you with rust, broken words and the stench of decay.
May a spider’s foot sprout from each of your pores, may you find nourishment only in packs of worn cards and may sleep reduce you,
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