“What are you doing here?”

“You can see for yourself. I’m going by.”

“You’re going by? Where are you going? . . . And besides, I don’t like your tone. Take your hands out of your belt.”

I was on a horse.

Even when I am very calm, I feel as if I were being swept by a storm. This may be due to my mind’s stumbling over every unevenness of surface because of its rapid pace, or to my desires, which are violent because they are almost always repressed, and when I live my inner scenes, I have the exhilaration that comes from always living them on horseback, on a rearing and galloping steed. I am a horseman. It is since I have known Bulkaen that I live on horseback, and I enter the lives of others on horseback as a Spanish grandee enters the Cathedral of Seville. My thighs grip the flanks. I spur my mount, my hands tighten on the reins.

Not that it happens quite that way, I mean not that I really know I’m on horseback, but rather I make the gestures and have the spirit of a man on horseback: my hand tightens, I toss back my head, my voice is arrogant. The sensation of riding a noble, whinnying animal overflowed into my daily life and gave me what is called a cavalier look and what I considered a victorious tone and bearing.

The guard reported me, and I was brought up before the warden, in the prison court. He hardly looked at me. He read the charge, put a pair of dark glasses over his pince-nez and pronounced sentence:

“Twenty days in the hole.”

A guard took me there, without letting go of my wrist, which he had held all through the hearing.

When a man in prison does all he can to make trouble for his friends who have remained free and is responsible for their being caught, he is called malicious, whereas the fact is that in such a case the malice is composed of love, for he lures his friends to prison in order to sanctify it by their presence. I tried to have Bulkaen punished, to have him sent to the disciplinary cell, not in order to be near him, but because it was essential that we both be doubly outcast at the same time, for people can love each other only on the same moral level. It was thus one of the usual mechanisms of love that made me a rat.

Bulkaen was never sent to the disciplinary cell. He died—shot—without getting there.