(Rango, your anger should not be directed against Sabina. Sabina is only behaving as all women do in their dreams, at night. I feel responsible for her acts, because when we walk together and I listen to her telling me about her adventures, a part of me is not listening to her telling me a story but recognizing scenes familiar to a secret part of myself. I recognize scenes I have dreamed and which therefore I have committed. What is dreamed is committed. In my dreams I have been Sabina. I have escaped from your tormenting love, caressed all the interchangeable lovers of the world. Sabina cannot be made alone responsible for acting the dreams of many women, just because the others sit back and participate with a secret part of their selves. Through secret and small vibrations of the flesh they admit being silent accomplices to Sabina's acts. At night we have all tossed with fever and desire for strangers. During the day we deride Sabina, and revile her. You're angry at Sabina because she lives out all her wishes overtly as you have done. To love Sabina's fever, Sabina's impatience, Sabina's evasion of traps in the games of love, was being Sabina. To be only at night what Sabina dared to be during the day, to bear the responsibility for one's secret dream of escape from the torments of one love into many loves.)

Sabina sat astride a chair, flinging her hair back with her hands and laughing.

She always gave at this moment the illusion that she was going to confess. She excelled in this preparation for unveiling, this setting of a mood for intimate revelations. She excelled equally in evasion. When she wished it, her life was like a blackboard on which she wrote swiftly and then erased almost before anyone could read what she had written. Her words then did not seem like words but like smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils, a heavy smoke screen against detection. But at other times, if she felt secure from judgment, then she opened a story of an incident with direct, stabbing thoroughness...

"Our affair lasted...lasted for the duration of an elevator ride! And I don't mean that symbolically either! We took such a violent fancy to each other, the kind that will not last, but will not wait either. It was cannibalistic, and of no importance, but it had to be fulfilled once. Circumstances were against us. We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets, we were ravenous for each other. We got into an elevator, and he began to kiss me... First floor, second floor, and he still kissing me, third floor, fourth floor, and when the elevator came to a standstill, it was too late...we could not stop, his hands were everywhere, his mouth... I pressed the button wildly and went on kissing as the elevator came down... When we got to the bottom it was worse... He pressed the button and we went up and down, up and down, madly, while people kept ringing for the elevator..."