Such was life. A frenzy, some saint or poet had said: with two whiskeys of even the worst make, any poet was a saint, or vice versa. She didn’t seem too disconcerted. Not all men start from the same place, although they always end up in the same position.

Our intuitions have as much weight as hard evidence, and while there may be occasions when those intuitions turn out to be right, there are, on the other hand, many others when we can’t distinguish what we really know from what we’ve simply imagined, where we see silhouetted figures when there’s really only a wall, a shadow, and a plant swaying in the wind.

Without anyone taking note, I killed all of the girls at school with the same name as me. I couldn’t bear so many. I did it for their own good, so that the nuns wouldn’t go crazy shouting our names through the halls, so that we didn’t mix ourselves up and become one another without our realizing it.

As the speed of his strokes diminishes, his consciousness likewise grows calm, his perception broadens, and it is then that he remembers that this afternoon he will go to his parents’ apartment—only his mother’s for some time now—to look for any kind of clue as to her whereabouts: whether she’s taken off on some sort of journey of initiation as secret as it is belated, or whether she’s just vanished.