Excerpt from Chapter 1

We left our bicycles in the street and went in slowly, stopping from time to time to look at the sky, because this is one of the few places in Paris where the sky is more beautiful than the earth. Sitting on a pile of rubbish, we smoked a cigarette, and Maga stroked my hair or softly hummed melodies that no one had yet composed, some erratic tunes interrupted by sighs and memories.

I seized the opportunity to recall useless things—a method I had first tried years earlier, in a hospital, and which each time seemed to me more and more fruitful and necessary. Making an enormous effort, connecting auxiliary images, summoning smells and faces to mind, I managed to retrieve from the chaos a pair of brown shoes I had worn in 1940 in Olavarría: they had rubber heels and very thin soles, and whenever it rained the water chilled me to the bone. With this pair of shoes held in the hand of memory, everything else came on its own: the face of Doña Manuela, for instance, or the poet Ernesto Moroni.

But I pushed them away, because the supposed purpose of the game was to recreate the insignificant, the unimportant, the lost. Trembling with fear that I might be unable to remember, feeling gnawed by the worm of procrastination, feeling foolish for indulging in the passage of time, I would end up seeing, instead of the shoes, a tin of Sol tea that my mother had given me in Buenos Aires, and the little tea strainer, the trap-like strainer in which little black mice burned alive in the cup of water that bubbled and squealed.

Convinced that memory retains everything, and not only Albertines and the great calamities of the heart and the kidneys, I insisted on reconstructing the contents of my desk in Floresta, the face of an unmemorable girl named Gekrepten, how many fountain pens there had been in my pencil case when I was in fifth grade. In the end I would begin to tremble with anguish and despair (because I had never managed to remember the fountain pens; I know they were there, in a special compartment, but I cannot remember how many there were, nor can I determine exactly when there must have been two or six), until Maga, kissing me and breathing cigarette smoke and her warm breath into my face, brought me back to myself. Then we would burst out laughing and resume our walks through the rubbish, looking for the members of the Club. And then I would realize that the search was my emblem, the emblem of those who go out at night without a definite purpose, murderers of compasses.

Maga and I would talk about pataphysics until we were exhausted, because the same thing happened to her (and this was what our relationship was, as were so many other things as dark as the phosphorescence of a match): she was constantly stumbling upon exceptions, finding herself shut away in miserable little houses, and all this without despising anyone, without believing ourselves to be any kind of second-rate Maldorors or privileged wanderers like Melmoth.

I don't think the firefly feels any particular pride in the undeniable fact that it is one of the most spectacular wonders of this circus, but all you have to do is give it a consciousness to understand that whenever the light comes on in its little belly, it must feel a privileged little thrill. In the same way, Maga was fascinated by the unimaginable situations she would go and get herself into, simply because all the laws governing her life were overturned. She was one of those who demolish bridges simply by crossing them, or who remember, weeping bitterly, that they had seen in a shop window the lottery ticket that had just won five million. As for me, I had become accustomed to things of moderately impressive nature happening to me, and I no longer considered it so extraordinary to enter a pitch-dark room to retrieve an album and feel the living body of a giant centipede crawling over my hand, having chosen the spine of the album as its sleeping place.

That, or finding grey or green fluff inside a packet of cigarettes, or hearing the whistle of a steam locomotive at exactly the same moment and in exactly the same pitch that allowed it to be incorporated, ex officio, into a passage from a symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven; or the time I entered a pissotière on the Rue Médicis and a man who was urinating, absorbed in his task, suddenly noticed me, took two steps back, turned towards me and showed me, resting in his palm like a precious relic, an organ of incredible dimensions and colours. At that same moment I realized that this man was identical to another man (although he was not that man) who, twenty-four hours earlier, at the Salle de Géographie, had given a lecture on totems and taboos and had shown his audience, carefully holding them in the palm of his hand, ivory rods, feathers of the miná, ritual coins, magical fossils, starfish, dried fish, photographs of royal concubines, hunters' votive offerings, and enormous embalmed scarabs that made the inevitable ladies in the audience shudder with pleasurable terror.

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Excerpt from Chapter 7

I touch your mouth, with my finger I touch the outline of your body, I draw it as though my hand were creating it, as though your mouth were opening slightly for the first time, and all I need to do is close my eyes to erase it and begin drawing it again. And each time I bring forth the mouth I desire, the mouth my hand chooses and draws upon your face, a mouth chosen from among so many others, chosen with sovereign freedom by me for my hand to draw upon your face, and which, by a turn of fate I make no attempt to understand, coincides exactly with your mouth smiling beneath the one my hand is drawing.

You look at me, you look at me closely, closer and closer each time, and then we play at being cyclopes. We look at each other ever more closely, our eyes grow larger, they draw nearer to one another, they cling together, and the cyclopes gaze at each other; their breaths mingle, their mouths meet and struggle reluctantly, lips bite lips, tongues barely touching the teeth, playing within their enclosure where a heavy air, carrying an old fragrance and a silence, moves back and forth.

Then my hands want to sink into your hair, to caress slowly the depths of your hair while we kiss as though our mouths were filled with flowers or fish, with living movements, with a dark fragrance. And when we bite each other, the pain is sweet; and when we choke on a brief and terrible simultaneous intake of breath, that instantaneous death is beautiful. And there is only one saliva, one single taste of ripe fruit, and I feel you trembling against me like the moon upon the water.