‘Are you feeling bad?’ my wife immediately asked.

Some time must have gone by before the response. But then I happened to notice that I was now clinging to the bed, not lying in it, and that it had become a steep slope I was sliding down.

‘I feel bad,’ I shouted, ‘very bad.’

My wife had lit a candle and was by my side in her pinkish nightgown. The light reassured me and in fact I had the clear feeling of having slept and of having awoken only then. The bed had straightened back out, and I was lying effortlessly in it. I looked at my wife in surprise, because now, since I had realized I had slept, I was no longer sure of having called for her help.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

Sleepy, fatigued, she looked at me. My cry had been enough to have her leap out of bed, not to take from her desire for rest, next to which not even being right mattered to her any longer.

‘Do you want some of those drops the doctor prescribed for sleeping?’ she asked to hurry up and be done.

I hesitated, even though the desire to feel better was nearly overpowering.

‘If you like,’ I said, trying to appear only resigned. Taking drops is hardly tantamount to a confession of feeling bad.

Then there was an instant in which I enjoyed great peace. It lasted as long as my wife, in her pinkish nightgown, in the dim light of that candle, was by my side counting the drops. The bed was a real horizontal bed, and my eyelids, if I closed them, were enough to shut any light whatsoever out of my eyes. But I opened them now and then, and that light and the pink of that nightgown gave me as much relief as total darkness. But she didn’t want her help to last an instant longer, and I was dropped back into the night to struggle for peace on my own. I remembered that, as a youth, to bring on sleep more quickly, I would force myself to think of a dreadfully ugly old woman who would make me forget the beautiful visions that were obsessing me. Here it was then that now, by contrast, it was granted me to call without danger upon beauty, which would of course help me. It was the advantage – the only one – of old age. And I imagined, calling them by name, several beautiful women, desires of my youth, of a time in which beautiful women had abounded in an unbelievable way. But they didn’t come. They didn’t yield then, either. And I went on evoking, evoking, until a single beautiful figure emerged from the night: Anna, she of all people, as she was so many years earlier, but with her face, her lovely rosy face, wearing an expression of distress and reproach. Because she wanted to bring me not peace, but remorse. That was clear. And seeing as she was present, I spoke with her. I had left her, but she had immediately married another man, which was altogether fair. But then she had brought into the world a girl who was now fifteen years old and who looked like her mother in her soft colours, the gold of her head and the blue in her eyes, but her face was affected by the intervention of the father who had been chosen for her: the gentle waves of the hair turned into a mass of frizzy curls, big cheeks, a wide mouth and overly thick lips. But her mother’s colouring in her father’s features ended up being a shameless kiss, a kiss in public. What did she want from me now, after she had so often shown herself to me fascinated by her husband?