The discourse, then, has been filling up with the story of the dog. It’s false content, or perhaps semi-false, since, like all things, it could easily be seen as symbolic of other, deeper things. In fact, I think it would be difficult for the content of anyone’s words—unless that person is a politician—for the content of any ordinary, honestly spoken words, to be false.

This doesn’t mean that the abstract form of my discourse, its rhythm and flow, is determined by the story of the dog. It’s more that the story of the dog could be a symbol of the real contents of the discourse, which for some reason it’s impossible to see directly.

For example, it could be that the gap in the wire fence I’m gradually widening in the story corresponds to another, psychological gap, which I’m also gradually widening with some kind of freedom in mind, not the dog’s freedom this time but my own. In other words, something within me is working away, secretly and slowly, to penetrate defenses that have long been erected inside me, a wall built just as secretly and slowly to protect me from something—and that may be why I’m writing this now. Though of course, even if these walls are fairly useful at the time, they eventually end up imprisoning the spirit.

And now that I think, and write, about all this, I remember an example from a few years ago, a time when I put up a defensive wall not at all secretly or slowly, but rather entirely deliberately. Or at least I think it was deliberate. I was conscious of doing it, I mean, but perhaps I didn’t have a choice. Perhaps that thing hidden inside me gave the command, and the command reached my consciousness, which then acted upon it as if it had originated there. I’m thinking of the day—March 5, 1985, to be precise—when I left my old apartment in the center of Montevideo and got into the car of some friends, which was going to take me to Buenos Aires. I was moving there permanently, or so I thought. The permanence of the change may not have been definite or absolute when it came to Buenos Aires, but it was when it came to leaving my apartment, on which an eviction notice had been served. As I shut the door for the last time, I knew I would never live there again. And I’d lived there, for better or worse, for 80 percent of the forty-five years I’d been alive at the time I got into the car.

November 29