But Sílvio and Sílvia have not forgotten each other. While the canon concerns himself with other things, they continue to search for each other, without him suspecting a thing. Now, however, the path is dark. We pass from the conscious to the unconscious, where the confused elaboration of ideas takes place, where reminiscences sleep or doze. Here swarms formless life, the germs and the detritus, the rudiments and the sediments; it is the immense attic of the mind. Here they slip and slide, searching for each other, calling and whispering. Give me your hand, madam reader; you, too, sir, hold tight, and let us slip and slide with them.

Vast and alien, terra incognita. Sílvio and Sílvia rush onward past embryos and ruins. Groups of ideas, deducing themselves in the manner of syllogisms, lose themselves in the tumult of memories of childhood and the seminary. Other ideas, pregnant with more ideas, drag themselves still more heavily along, assisted by other, virgin ideas. Things and men merge; Plato brings the spectacles of a scribe from the ecclesiastical court; mandarins of all classes distribute Etruscan and Chilean coins, English books, and pale roses; so pale that they do not seem the same as the ones the canon’s mother planted when he was a child. Pious memories and family memories cross paths and commingle. Here are the distant voices of his first mass; here are the country rhymes he heard the black women sing at home; the tattered remnants of faded sensations, a fear here, a pleasure there, over there a distaste for things that arrived singly, but now lie in an obscure, impalpable heap.

“Come from Lebanon, my bride . . .”

“I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem . . .”

They could hear each other growing ever closer. Here they reach the deep strata of theology, philosophy, liturgy, geography, and history, of ancient lessons and modern notions, all mixed together, dogma and syntax. Here the secret, pantheistic hand of Spinoza; there the scratch mark left by the Angelic Doctor’s fingernail; but none of this is Sílvio or Sílvia. They plow on, carried along by an inner force, a secret affinity, through all the obstacles and over all the abysses. But sorrows will also come. Here are dark sorrows that did not linger in the canon’s heart, like moral stains, surrounded by the yellow or purple tints of universal pain, the pain of others, if such pain has a color. They slice through all of this with the speed of love and desire.

Do you sway and stumble, gentle reader? Fear not, the world is not collapsing; it is the canon sitting down again. Having cleared his head, he returns to his desk and rereads what he wrote; now he takes up his pen, dips it in the ink, and lowers it to the paper, to see which adjective he will attach to the noun.