Except I’m unavoidably annoyed because I don’t manage to meet the person who was supposed to be waiting for me, and then an importuner cuts me off and traps me, and I flee from another notorious busybody, stumbling over people covered in fleas to clamber onto a bus that takes me away but the bus is a lethal cauldron or gas chamber, so I seek some air in a plaza and the cool waters of the fountain but there, from a bench, I’m assailed by the lamentable debris of a woman.

I pull myself together and seek beauty. It’s there, it exists, it’s all around. It abounds, almost. The slender bodies and high-held heads of youth, a face, a pair of eyes, the colors that spill down through the air onto people, a mature forehead, a delicate hand in flight . . . they emerge, pass by. . . and are lost in the torrent of human ugliness.

Some days are like that.

•

Evening has settled onto the neighborhood.

A man lying in his hammock along the sidewalk undoubtedly got up very early and has worked all day; he yawns. It sounds like a lion or a solitary wolf, I’m not sure which. His dog looks up at him but is used to it. I’m not, and I stop. Over there, a group of ladies are observing him discreetly from the corner of their eyes, they huddle closer to one another—they’re walking arm in arm—and quicken their step.

We ape men exist, too, that is known: horse men, amphibious men, men whose earlobes are unattached or free.

All of us, upon reaching a certain age, have the right to retire.

•

In a film or novel, if the protagonist kills himself, the story ends.

If he kills himself at the start, it’s because we’ll go backward, and the story will be told after a leap into the past.

•

If I kill myself, I don’t only kill myself, I kill my death wish, too.

I’d like to kill others, also, but no one in particular. Some because they’re cruel swine who make the world an ugly place, and King, who’s suffering.

My death wish is also a wish to kill others.

I can’t kill them, at least not all of them. But I can do away with all of them: If I do away with myself, they’ll no longer exist for me.

•

I go home in the morning and Mamá doesn’t ask me anything, though of course she’s sad and jealous because she realizes what’s happening.