We liked the house because, apart from its being old and spacious (in a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials ), it kept the memories of great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our parents and the whole of childhood.
Irene and I got used to staying in the house by ourselves, which was crazy, eight people could have lived in that place and not have gotten in each other's way. We rose at seven in the morning and got the cleaning done, and about eleven I left Irene to finish off whatever rooms and went to the kitchen. We lunched at noon precisely; then there was nothing left to do but a few dirty plates. It was pleasant to take lunch and commune with the great hollow, silent house, and it was enough for us just to keep it clean. We ended up thinking, at times, that that was what had kept us from marrying. Irene turned down two suitors for no particular reason, and Maria Esther went and died on me before we could manage to get engaged. We were easing into our fortiés with the unvoiced concept that the quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable end to a line established in this house by our grandparents. We would die here someday, obscure and distant cousins would inherit the place, have it torn down, sell the bricks and get rich on the building plot; or more justly and better yet, we would topple it ourselves before it was too late.
from: "House Taken Over"
There was a time. when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I
went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for
hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements.
Now I am an axolotl.
I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading
its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard
Port-Royal, then I took Saint Marcel and L'Hôpital and saw green
among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions
and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was
the aquarium. I left my bike against the gratings and went to look at the
tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided
on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I
hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left,
unable to think of anything else.
from: “Axolotl”
He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity.
