The Trap

Translated by Giovanni R. Bussino

No, no, how can I resign myself? And why should I? If I had any responsibilities towards others, perhaps I would, but I don’t! So, why should I?

Listen to me. You can’t say I’m wrong. No one reasoning in the abstract like this can say I’m wrong. What I’m feeling, you and everyone else feels too.

Why are all of you so afraid of waking up at night? Because for you the reasons for living are strengthened by the light of day, by the illusions produced by that light.

Darkness and silence terrify you. You light a candle but the candlelight seems dismal to you because that’s not the kind of light you need, right? The sun! The sun! All of you desperately seek the sun because illusions no longer arise spontaneously with the artificial light you yourselves procure with a trembling hand.

Like your hand, all your reality trembles. It reveals itself to you to be fake and flimsy. Artificial like that candlelight. All your senses keep watch, painfully tense in the fear that beneath the reality that you discover to be flimsy and hollow, another reality may be revealed to you: an obscure and horrible one – the real one. A breath of air … What’s that? What’s that creaking sound?

Suspended in the horror of that uncertain wait, amid chills and sweat, you see your daytime illusions in that light. They move about the room with the appearance and gait of ghosts. Look at them carefully. They have the same puffy and watery bags under their eyes that you have, the same jaundiced look brought on by your insomnia, and your arthritic pains too. Yes, the same dull torment caused by the gout in the joints of your fingers.

What a strange appearance, what a strange appearance the pieces of furniture in your room assume! They too seem suspended in a bewildering stillness that troubles you.

You slept with them around you.

But they do not sleep. They remain there both day and night.

For now, it’s your hand that opens and closes them. But tomorrow it’ll be another hand. Who knows whose other hand! … But for them it’s all the same. For now they contain your clothes: empty forms that have been hung up and that have taken on the shape and wrinkles of your tired knees and bony elbows. Tomorrow they’ll contain someone else’s forms hanging there. The mirror on the wardrobe reflects your image now, but it doesn’t preserve a trace of it, nor will it preserve a trace of someone else’s image tomorrow.

The mirror itself cannot see. The mirror is like truth.

Do you think that I’m delirious, that I’m talking nonsense? Come on, you understand me, and you understand even what I am not saying since I find it very hard to express this obscure feeling that rules me and overwhelms me.

You know how I’ve lived up till now. You know that I’ve always felt revulsion and horror about giving myself some sort of form, becoming congealed and fixing myself even momentarily in it.