‘Are you feeling bad?’ she asked me in a whisper.

She wasn’t sure she had heard and didn’t want to wake me up. I speculated a bit, but I attributed to her the odd intention of rejoicing in that suffering of mine, which was none other than proof that she had been right. I did without the water and lay back down very quietly. She immediately fell back into that light slumber of hers that enabled her to keep an eye on me.

In short, if I didn’t want to put up with that fight with my wife, I was going to have to sleep. I closed my eyes and curled up on one side. Right away, I had to change position. But I was determined and didn’t open my eyes. But every position sacrificed a part of my body. With a body made this way, I thought, there won’t be any sleeping. I was all movement, all wakefulness. A person who is running cannot imagine sleep. I was out of breath, as if from running, and in my ears was the pounding of my feet: of heavy boots. I thought I was perhaps moving too gently in bed to be able to get into the right position and with all of my limbs all at once. Better not to seek it. Better to let everything find the spot that suited its form. I turned over with complete violence. ‘Are you OK?’ my wife immediately muttered. But I didn’t want to respond to those words that alluded offensively to our argument.

Keeping still had to be really easy. What could be so hard about lying, really lying, in bed? I reviewed all of the great difficulties we bump into in this world and found that, by comparison, lying without moving was a trifle. Every swine is able to keep still. My determination came up with a complicated but unbelievably tenacious position. I put my teeth in the upper part of the pillow and twisted around in such a way that my chest was resting on the pillow too, while my right leg hung off the bed and was nearly touching the floor and my left leg went stiff in the bed, chaining me to it. Yes. I had discovered a new system. I wasn’t clinging to the bed; it was the bed that was clinging to me. And this firm belief in my inertia meant that even when my feeling of oppression increased I didn’t give in. When, later, I did have to yield, I consoled myself with the thought that a part of that horrendous night had gone by, and I also had the recompense that, freed from the bed, I felt relieved like a wrestler who has freed himself from his rival’s hold.

I don’t know how long I stayed still for then. I was tired. Surprised, I noticed a strange glow in my closed eyes, a whirling of flames I imagined caused by the fire I felt in me. They weren’t real flames, but colours that simulated them. And then they died out, little by little, and became roundish forms, which soon went all blue, soft, but ringed by a bright red band. They were falling from a high spot, lengthening, and, once they dropped off, disappearing below. It was I who first thought those drops could see me. At once, to see me better, they turned into a lot of little eyes. As they lengthened, falling, a small circle formed in their centre, a circle that, doing without the blue layer, revealed a real eye, malicious and malevolent. I was being chased by a throng that wished me ill. I rebelled in bed, moaning and crying out: ‘My God!’