The blades of the fan suspended from the ceiling remove the passage of time. I am alone. On the bed my wet body goes numb, resigned to a life not too busy, to the gossip of the neighbors and the monotonous rudeness of work. I have become incapable not of being another, but of the same will to be another.

Nothing happens without a plan, but with an end and with necessity. It is possible that he did not know exactly what he wanted to do. Who of us knows? I did not care about one woman than another, winter than summer, I refused to make distinctions between second-order details: every night was the same. Determined to forget that loneliness can only serve us when it is impossible for us to suffer it and we fight and pray to end it, I carried a burden on my shoulders that I could not even imagine.

She was looking at me, moved, dumbfounded. Never had a look like this rested on me. The air seemed shorter and more carefree. I bet she thinks in how many languages ​​she can play the game, I thought and smiled at her. She also smiled and a smile filled me with a heightened feeling of pleasure, as if wings had grown on my back.

I know that in this world everything is temporary, and that made me take advantage of that moment of communion. I walked over to her and took her arm. We walked through Alsina. We went into a cafe. Amid the noise and smoke I discovered a free table. We sat there. The waiter served something, which she gladly took. While I played to measure my sweat by examining the misty surface of the glass. Something fell off.

I am aware again that I breathe the air in the room, the inefficiency of dead memories, their traces transformed. The heat is suffocating and my hand rushes to bring the fan to a higher speed.

“Because I am happy to be with you. Because I'm happy that you exist. He may love you a lot, but for that reason it would be better if we stay as we are. A man and a woman may be closer to each other when they do not live together and when they simply know that they exist and that they are grateful to exist and to know about each other. And this alone is enough for them to be happy. I thank you, I thank you that you exist ”. He almost sang when he spoke, almost immersed what he was saying in the music of a children's tune.

I anticipated living for a body that no longer serves, for sudden, bland tears. Any passion or faith serves happiness to the extent that they are capable of distracting us, to the extent of the unconsciousness that they can give us.

The gale thrown by the fan blades compresses the beads of sweat against my skin. I get used to not being myself anymore, to being just a shadow of myself.

How to explain my tiredness, this aspect of an anonymous and groped thing that only objects condemned to the worst humiliations know? It was me when we took advantage of a pause and turned it into a silence that was finished off by the noise of her breathing. I lived again when, away from the everyday, the hustle and bustle and the never dominated professional cordiality, I felt my body rejuvenate, my eyes pierced the glasses of my glasses and the window to let me caress my back by the waves of a remote past, abandoned, look at the garden and the street, the sunlight or the bad weather.

I stroked her cheek with a single monotonous finger. Sensibly I understood that I was knowing for weeks that I and my life were nothing more than empty molds, mere representations of an old meaning kept indolently, of a being dragged without faith between people and routines, between streets and hours, through the city. I'm really nobody: one name, three words.

People believe that they are condemned to a life, until death, and they are only condemned to a soul, to a way of being. You can live many times, many more or less long lives. And while those spend their lives hanging by a rope or punching the table, I am constantly transmigrating from one body to another, from one place to another, I never tire of transmigrating.

I pity her for her bondage to happiness and deception, I admire her ability to be god for every inconsequential, dirty moment of her life; I envy that gift that condemns her to create and direct each circumstance through mythical beings, fabulous memories, characters that turn to dust at the threat of any gaze.

From the half-open doors comes the spring breeze. I no longer have a nose to smell it; I only reach the memory, the useless sensation of the old springs in which perhaps I was sniffing others already past, promising to achieve intimacy with the next October. I had never thought that in there, in my head, I could contain a loneliness as great as that offered by the Pacific Ocean. I am for a moment the conceited absurdity, the intellectualist nothing. I invoke the peace and joy of being almost alive that had always descended towards me from the ceiling of the room. I am inundated by the old impossibility of acting, the automatic postponement of events. I convince myself that I am not here. I am left empty, forced to admit that I do not exist. Everything is fine and nothing matters to me.