Sixteen, Twenty-one, Twenty-eight and Thirty-seven from Centuria

Translated by Henry Martin

Sixteen

The gentleman dressed in a linen suit, with loafers and short socks, looks at the clock. It is two minutes to eight. He is at home, seated, slightly uneasy, on the edge of a stiff and demanding chair. He is alone. In two minutes – by now no more than ninety seconds – he will have to begin. He got up a little early in order to be truly ready. He washed carefully, attentively urinated, patiently evacuated, meticulously shaved. All of his underwear is new, never worn before, and this suit was tailored more than a year ago for this morning. For a whole year he has not dared. He has frequently got up very early – in general, moreover, he’s an early riser – but at the moment when all preparations were completed and he took his place on the chair, his courage had always failed him. But now he is about to begin. Fifty seconds remain before eight o’clock. Properly speaking, there is absolutely nothing he must begin. From another point of view, he stands at the beginning of absolutely everything. In any case, there is nothing he must ‘do’. He must simply go from eight o’clock to nine o’clock. Nothing more: traverse the space of an hour, a space he has traversed innumerable times, but now he must traverse it as pure and simple time, nothing else, absolutely. Eight o’clock has already passed, by a little more than a minute. He is calm, but feels a slight tremor gather within his body. At the seventh minute, his heart begins little by little to accelerate. At the tenth minute, his throat begins to close, while his heart pulses at the brink of panic. With the fifteenth minute, his whole body douses itself in sweat, almost instantaneously; three minutes later, the saliva in his mouth begins to dry; his lips grow white. At the twenty-first minute, his teeth begin to chatter, as though he were laughing; his eyes dilate, their lids cease to beat. He feels his sphincter open, and all his body hairs erect, immobile in a chill. Suddenly, his heart slows, his vision clouds. At the twenty-fifth minute, a furious tremor shakes him through and through for twenty seconds; when it stops, his diaphragm begins to move: his diaphragm now grips his heart. Tears flow, though he does not cry. A roar deafens his ears. The gentleman dressed in a linen suit would like to explain, but the twenty-eighth minute deals him a blow on the temple, and he falls from the chair; upon striking the floor, absolutely without a sound, he disintegrates.