The girl’s cheeks have lost their deathly pallor and are already pink, sensual, ready to be kissed. He stands up and holds out his hands so she can take them and pull herself up. And then, while (always looking lovingly into his eyes) the girl (weak from spending so much time prostrate) stands up thanks to his strong male arms, the knight notices (twenty or thirty yards further on, long before the clearing gives way to the woods) another girl asleep, as beautiful as the one he’s just woken up, lying like her on a bed of oak branches and wrapped in flowers of every color.

  THE MONARCHY

  ALL THANKS TO THAT SHOE SHE LOST WHEN SHE HAD TO RUN FROM the ball because the spell ended at midnight, her dress turned back into rags, her carriage ceased to be a carriage and turned back into a pumpkin, the horse into mice, etc., she has always been astonished that the shoe only fitted her perfectly, because her foot (a size 36) wasn’t at all out of the ordinary and other girls in town must have worn the same size. She still remembers the shocked expressions on her stepsisters’ faces when they saw she was the one marrying the prince and (a few years later when the king and queen died) became the new queen.

  The king was an attentive, passionate husband. It was a dream life until the day she found a blotch of lipstick on the regal shirt. The earth gave way under her feet. How disappointing! How should she react, a woman who has always behaved honestly, unmaliciously, who is virtue personified?

  It’s obvious the king has a lover. A blotch of lipstick on a shirt has always been obvious proof of adultery. Who can her husband’s lover be? Should she tell him she has found out or should she pretend she hasn’t, as she knows that is a queen’s traditional response, in such cases, in order not to endanger the institution of the monarchy? And why has the king resorted to a lover? Doesn’t she leave him properly satisfied? Maybe it’s because she refuses practices she believes to be perverse (sodomy and golden showers, basically) that her husband now seeks elsewhere?

  She decides to say nothing. She also says nothing the day the king only reaches the royal bedchamber at 8 A.M., with big rings under his eyes and smelling of women. (Where do they meet? In a hotel, in her house, or even in the palace? There are so many rooms in the palace, he could easily allow himself to have his lover in any of those rooms she doesn’t know about.) Nor does she say anything when the carnal contact they once enjoyed with the regularity of a metronome (tonight yes, tomorrow no) becomes so infrequent that one day she realizes it’s been two months since the last time.

  Every night she cries silently in the royal bedroom, because the king no longer goes to bed with her on any night. Loneliness makes her angry. She’d have preferred never to have gone to that ball, or for some other girl’s foot to have fitted that shoe before hers. Thus, after accomplishing his task, the prince’s envoy would never have come to their house. And, if he had ever come, she’d even have preferred one of her stepsisters to have worn a size 36, instead of a 40 and 41, sizes that were too big for a girl. Then, the envoy wouldn’t have posed the question that now, feeling devastated by her husband’s infidelity, she judges to have been ill-omened: whether any other girl lived in the house, apart from her step-mother and step-sisters.

  What’s the point of being queen if the king doesn’t love her? She’d give everything to be the woman the king was laying extramaritally. She’d a thousand times prefer to be at the center of the monarch’s nights of adulterous love than to lie in the empty, conjugal bed. Better mistress than queen.

  A former servant, she decides to follow tradition and not tell the king what she has learned. She’ll act stealthily. The following night, when the king courteously says goodbye after dinner, she follows him at a distance. She follows him along passageways she doesn’t know, through unfamiliar wings of the palace, to rooms she didn’t even imagine existed. The king walks ahead of her with a torch. Finally he enters a room, shuts the door, and she is left in the passage, in the dark. She immediately hears voices from inside. Her husband’s, for sure. And a woman cackling. But above that laughter she hears another woman’s voice. Does he have two in there? Gradually, trying not to make a noise, she opens the door a crack. She stretches out on the floor so they can’t see her from the bed; she slips half her body inside. The light from the candelabra projects the shadows of three copulating bodies onto the walls. She’d have liked to lift herself up to see who’s in the bed, because she can’t identify the women from their laughter and whispers. From where she is stretched out on the floor, she can see barely anything; she can only see, thrown haphazardly at the foot of the bed, her husband’s shoes and two pairs of extremely high-heeled women’s shoes, one black, size 40, and the other red, size 41.

  THE FAUNA

  THE CAT CHASES THE MOUSE AROUND THE HOUSE AND KEEPS falling into the traps he himself sets for the rodent. He falls into a pot of tar, slips on a banana skin, and runs into a meat mincer that chops him into tiny pieces. When he’s still groggy, he touches the door handle not realizing the mouse has connected it to an electric current: his hair stands on end, he turns from black to white, to yellow, to purple, his eyes leap out of their sockets and spin round eighteen times, his zigzagging tongue lashes in and out; singed, he drops to the floor and turns into a heap of steaming black dust. Until his mistress comes with a brush and pan, sweeps him up, and tips him into the trashcan.

  But he’s immediately back on the alert. Oh! He’d give his all to be rid of that wretched mouse, which shouldn’t arouse anyone’s sympathy. Why does he never win out? Why does that little beast always escape? What’s more, the cat knows that most of humanity loathes mice. What most people remember in horror from the ups and downs of war, are not dumdum bullets, sleepless nights and starving days, or trekking unshod with their feet wrapped in rags, but the rats. Why then do some humans forget their loathing and come out on the side of mice? Is it simply because they are the tiniest of creatures?

  The cat returns to the charge. He swears yet again that the mouse won’t escape this time. He burns the house down; everything goes up in smoke, though the mouse survives. And when the master gets back from work, he beats the cat with a broom. The cat doesn’t relent. He chases the mouse yet again. Finally he catches it, throws it into a cement mixer, is about to switch it on, when the dog appears. As the result of a law that is as incomprehensible as it is atavistic, the dog is always a friend to the mouse. That dog is carrying a humongous hammer in one paw. He brings it down on the cat’s head, flattening it like a sheet of paper.

  But he revives straight away, receives a parcel in the mail and smiles. He fills the den where the mouse is hiding with gunpowder and puts a match to it. Everything explodes, but he has enough time to see that the mouse wasn’t inside and is now smirking repulsively at him from the front doorstep. Nothing ever changes.

  Until many episodes later, the astonishing day comes when the cat is victorious.

  After a chase down the hallway in the house (a chase like so many others), the cat catches the mouse. That has happened so often, but … The cat has held the mouse in his fist so often, like now, that not even the cat can believe this time he’s onto a winner. He spikes the mouse on a three-pronged fork, and blood spurts from each of the three wounds. The cat lights the burner. Puts a frying pan on top. Pours in oil. When the oil begins to spit, he throws in the mouse, which gradually fries, squeaking so frenziedly even the cat pops a cork into both of his ears. That’s when he begins to understand that on this occasion something strange is happening. This time it is for real. The mouse’s body stiffens, turns blacker and blacker, and gives off smoke. The mouse stares at the cat with a look the cat will never forget, and dies. The cat continues to fry the corpse. Then he removes it from the frying pan and burns it straight on the flames until it’s reduced to black, furrowed skin. He takes this from the flames, scrutinizes it closely, and touches it with his claws: the skin crumbles into a thousand incinerated flakes that the blustery wind scatters to the four points of the compass. For a moment the cat feels hugely happy.

  STRENGTH OF WILL

  THE STUBBORN MAN KNOWS THAT IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF HAVING (and sustaining for whatever time is necessary) the firmness of will to achieve his goal. There are no other factors or unknown quantities. He kneels down, lowers his torso until his face is a few inches from the stone (a rather elongated, smoothly rounded, gray stone), and vocalizes clearly: “Pa.”

  He stares at the stone for a while, focusing his eyes on every irregularity, trying to take it all in, to establish total communication, until the stone becomes an extension of himself, a few inches away. It’s high noon; the breeze makes up for the sun’s brightness. He re-opens his lips sparingly: “Pa.”

  He chose “pa” because he’d always been told that it’s the first thing children say, the burst of sound that surprises parents, the easiest syllable with which to start speaking.

  “Pa.”

  The stone is still silent. The stubborn man smiles. He doesn’t yield easily to adversity. He decided to teach the stone to speak knowing it would be no easy task. He knows that, over the centuries, humanity has thought little of the verbal potential of the mineral kingdom, which means that, perhaps for the first time in many a year, a sober man is cheek by jowl with a stone, trying to make it speak. If we add to that the traditional idleness of learners, the difficulty of the enterprise is self-evident.

  “Pa,” persists the stubborn man.

  The stone is quiet. The man throws his head back for a moment, then immediately brings his face in close, some five inches from the stone: “Pa pa pa pa pa pa. Pa!”

  No response. The man smiles again, strokes his chin, straightens his torso, stands up, takes a cigarette packet from his pocket, extracts a cigarette, and lights it. He smokes while he contemplates the rock. How can he establish contact? How can he communicate with it? He uses his fingers to flick the cigarette against a tree, and (like a wrestler to his opponent) sways over the stone shouting: “PAAA!”

  The stone’s apparent indifference endears him. He caresses it with his fingertips. Now he tries to speak seductively: “Stone. Hello, stone. Stone? Sto-one. S t o n e. Stone …”

  He caresses it nonstop. First slowly, then quickly. First gently, then frantically.

  “Come on, say it: pa.”

  The stone says nothing. The stubborn man gives it a kiss.

  “I know you can, I don’t know if you’re listening, but I know you understand. Do you understand? Do you get me? I know you can say it. I know you can say ‘pa.’ I know you can speak, if only a very little. I also know you find it difficult, because maybe nobody has ever spoken to you or asked you to speak to them, and these things are an effort, initially, if you’re not accustomed. I’m aware of all that. That’s why I’m understanding; I’m not asking you to do anything you can’t do by making a minimal effort. Now I’ll repeat it again. And, you, right away, will repeat it with me. Agreed? Hey, come on. It isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. Come on, say it: pa. Pa. Pa.”

  He places his ear up against the surface of the stone, to see if the efforts it is making translate into a whisper. But they don’t: silence. Total silence. The stubborn man breathes in deeply and returns to the charge. He gives the stone new arguments, he tells it why it must be such an effort to speak and what it must do to succeed. When night falls, he takes it in his hands and wipes off the earth stuck underneath. He takes the stone home. He puts it on the dining-room table, ensures it’s comfortable. He lets it rest the whole night. The next morning he wishes it a good day, washes it carefully, under the stream of water from the tap, with lukewarm water: not too cold, not too hot. Then takes it out on to his balcony. From the balcony you can see the whole valley, summer vacationers’ chalets scattered around, one end of the lake, and, in the distance, the lights from the highway. He leaves the stone on the table and sits on a chair.

  “Come on, say it: pa.”

  Three days later the stubborn man makes it clear that he is angry: “Very well, don’t speak. Don’t think I haven’t registered your tacit contempt. You don’t need to say anything to make your contempt obvious. I’ll only say one thing: nobody makes fun of me.”

  The stubborn man takes the stone in his right hand, squeezes it (so much so his face turns a bright red), and finally hurls it energetically. The stone describes an arc in the sky: over the valley, over the chalets and swimming pools of the summer holiday-makers, over the man pushing the lawn mower, over the road being repaired, over the highway with little traffic, over the industrial development area, over the soccer field where a team in green shirts and white shorts and another in yellow shirts and blue shorts are tied, over the buildings in the provincial city, until it falls right in the middle of a square, at the feet of German tourists who are so focused on photographing the cathedral they don’t notice the stone fall, crash against the paving stones, and, as it breaks, emit a sharp sound quite like “pa!”

  PHYSIOGNOMIES

  THE EGGHEAD IS INCAPABLE OF REMEMBERING A SINGLE FACE. When he meets someone who says hello in the street, he never knows who he is or why he knows him. Maybe the odd face rings a bell, but he never manages to assign a name, or work out where he made their acquaintance. He has become so expert at avoiding the stressful scenes his poor recall inevitably creates, that (so people don’t notice he doesn’t know them) he says hello to whoever says hello to him. So impassively and so naturally that nobody realizes he in fact doesn’t recognize them. He’s even capable of sustaining conversations on general (and not so general) topics and, when they finally say goodbye, with a pat on the back or a handshake, the stranger walks off convinced the egghead hasn’t doubted who he was for a moment. Above all, you must show huge pleasure from the start. So the other person doesn’t have time to formulate doubts. Immediately he sees he’s been recognized, he exclaims loudly: “How are you? How’s life treating you?” There’s nothing worse than to seem at a loss, or say hello in hushed tones, because the stranger would eye him suspiciously and ask the fateful question: “You don’t remember me, do you?” A question you can’t answer with a lie, because it means it’s quite obvious the person questioned doesn’t have the slightest clue about the individual standing in front of him.

  He has never remembered a face. Not even as a child. At school he deduced who the teacher was because he was taller and bigger than other people in the classroom. And he couldn’t identify his classmates, as they were all smallish (more or less his height). Each had a different face; how could they expect him to remember them all and know which belonged to whom? Fortunately, at home he knew his father was his father because he was the tall, grown-up person in the house. And, although he shaved daily, he felt his beard, especially when he kissed him. His mother, on the other hand, didn’t have a beard, and her skin was very soft. She generally wore a skirt, which meant it was even easier to recognize her. Perhaps that was why, when she wore trousers, he could feel disconcerted for a moment, until he honed in on her slender hands and soft cheeks. He easily identified his brother: he was the other boy, the other shorty in the house. If there’d been more adults or siblings, he’d have started to have problems. And the same happened every morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a face he didn’t recognize. Obviously, it was his, but if it had been among five others, he wouldn’t have recognized it.

  Consequently he is astonished years later when he goes into the subway by his house and sees a girl coming out and recognizes her. They aren’t at all acquainted and they’ve never spoken, but he remembers precisely that he saw her, only for a second, thirty-eight years ago, on the day he went to collect his degree certificate. She was leaving the office, wearing a blue cardigan, white blouse, and gray skirt.

  For the first time in his life he has recognized a face, a face he has only seen once, many years ago. He is stunned. (Should he have reconsidered? Should he have turned round, followed the woman, and told her he has remembered her from years back, from a day when she was leaving the faculty office? It would have made no sense. Most likely the young woman would have seen it as a cheap ploy to accost her and would have ignored him.) He can’t get over it: the only face he has recognized to this point, from throughout his life, is precisely the face of woman he’d only seen once thirty-eight years ago. This, he deduces, should indicate something about his own personality, his way of being, the reasons for the lack of physiognomy indicators that has accompanied him through life. He is convinced this riddle must contain the key to what gives meaning to his life—a successful life but one marked implacably by his inability to remember a single face. It can be no chance thing that the only time he saw that woman again he’d not found it at all difficult to remember and pinpoint her. Nevertheless, however much he ruminates, he can’t discern any key. Days, weeks, years pass by. He remains unable to remember any face for the rest of his life. He often ruminates on that. She demonstrates he is able to remember a face; he definitely remembered her, that time when he saw her coming out of the subway, he thinks, full of hope; blissfully unaware she’s always lived in the same street as him (precisely two houses from his) and that he has seen her hundreds of times, before and after that day when he recognized her in the subway.

  DIVINE PROVIDENCE

  ONE MORNING, THE SCHOLAR WHO IN A PATIENT, DISCIPLINED manner has dedicated fifty of his sixty-eight years to writing the Great Work (of which he has currently completed seventy-two volumes) notices that the ink of the letters on the first pages of the first volume is beginning to fade. The black is no longer so distinct and is turning grayish. As he has become used to frequently revisiting all the volumes he has written to date, when he notices the deterioration, only the first two pages have been affected, the first that he wrote fifty years ago. And, into the bargain, the letters on the bottom lines of the second page are also rather illegible. He painstakingly restores the erased letters one by one. He diligently follows their traces until he has restored words, lines and paragraphs with Indian ink. But just as he is finishing, he notices that the words on the last lines of page 2 and the whole of page 3 (when he began the restoration process, some were in a good state and others were in a relatively good state) have also faded. Confirmation that the disease is degenerative.