The rabbits never ate their litters outside the tent. They seemed to know that they would be transgressing some law. And although the sight of the wretched beasts feeding on their babies was enough to shrivel his soul, when they were quiet it was evident that there was something hypnotic, majestic about them that increased with each passing day, and perhaps had to do with acting against nature. Maybe they have stopped being rabbits, he thought, or in some way know that they are caught up in a situation that is absolutely new to their species. From time to time the non-inventor mourned their mutation, and then he would manage to forget the circumstances surrounding their cannibalism. The whole thing would appear to be simple fact, without underlying causes; a fact that was inaugurating a new world. All this was happening in silence because there was still no language for a reality that was just taking its first steps. The non-inventor continued to visit the river island but did nothing more than cautiously respond to the pleas of the children for a ride in his canoe. At night, in the large house he’d inherited from his grandmother, he dreamed of the parents of those children, heard their voices like a mob crushing him, while the rooms of his home filled with water and the blue of swimming pools. He told himself it was a common obsession that would disappear once he’d made the decision to forget about the creatures; only a certain way of standing in a form of ecstasy when he was near the rabbits indicated that he was beginning to feel like one of them. Perhaps his rapidly graying hair would achieve the amazing whiteness of those now sacred animals, and his bloodshot eyes—the ophthalmologist said that the slight bleeds were due to chronic conjunctivitis—would be healed when they became completely red.

One day the non-inventor took down the tent and left the island. The people living in the apartments along the riverbank wondered what had happened to the crazy man who used to breed rabbits, all of which died a few weeks after his disappearance, their bodies forming a pretty white blanket over the island.

Regression

REGRESSION

The memory gushes in: She and Tamara at the age of ten with some dollhouses, several floors high, which could be opened down the middle. They were playing The Colbys or Falcon Crest, throwing dice to decide who got which clan and which mansion was going to be theirs. They used the slightly pompous word “mansion,” which they had learned from the American series. In her hometown, no one referred to a house that way, no matter how luxurious it was. Although they had never seen anything even remotely similar to the mansions on The Colbys and Falcon Crest, when they imagined themselves as grown-ups they were always the owners of beautiful palaces standing by lakes and surrounded by wineries.