The beatings wore me out. There wasn’t a single spot on my body that hadn’t been damaged. I had to stop for a while to recover and regain my strength in the apartment before getting back out there. But I began feeling cramped at home, and the walls pressed in on me. I was thirsty for the bowels of the city again. Then a new idea came to me. I would go out and scatter my writings. Lyrical lines, excerpts of prose, words written out by hand or else typed. I chose small white envelopes and colorful slips of paper that would attract attention: yellow, pistachio, pink, blue, and so on. I prepared my slips with care, and then went out to drop them here and there. I stood nearby and watched as a passerby decided to bend down to pick one up. If I saw someone open the envelope and slowly read the words inside, I felt for a moment that I possessed his mind, that what I had written was now toying with him and making him believe he had received a sign sent by fate.

I was that fate. Packaged into just a few words: pithy, spontaneous, poetic, unusual, appropriate, impertinent, harsh, crazy, dirty, emotional, clever, stupid … anything, really. Whoever picked up the envelope would read the contents and be driven mad. He would begin searching out the meaning hidden behind its lines, the idea, the prophecy, the message that would solve the riddle and give his life purpose. A line was all it took. A fragment, or just a few words. The reader would turn over the page like a treasure he had stumbled upon, even if he had never picked up a novel in his entire life.

A man picked up one of my small envelopes and sat on the sidewalk across from me to open it and read what was inside. I stared intently. It was a piece of paper with some words in my handwriting. The man raised his eyes. He was crying. He folded the paper back up and pressed it to his heart, head bowed, before breaking down in bitter sobs.

Curiosity was eating me up. What was on that paper to touch his heart like that? I, who had written dozens of pages and a number of books, had never succeeded in touching anyone so deeply before. I approached and said apologetically that the small envelope he was holding had fallen out of my pocket. Without looking at me, the man extended his hand to give it back. Other people were just as curious. Pedestrians gathered in a circle around him. They began asking questions about why he wept. He explained that his family had drowned in the sea in the attempt to emigrate to a safe country. His wife and two children had died. He had escaped, but they had not. Escaped? I whispered to myself. No, they are the ones who escaped. It is he who has died.