that violent rush flooding my veins, ‘an epileptic,’ I yelled and sobbed to myself, well aware that, at extreme risk, and cutting away at my palms, I was throwing the jug of my former identity to the ground, the jug worked from the clay of my own hands, and hurling myself flat on my face onto that shard-ridden floor, I kept shouting insanely, ‘Your brother is an epileptic, let it be known, go home now and make this revelation, go now and you will see the doors and windows of the house banging shut with the wind of this knowledge, and you, the men of the family, wearing hoods and carrying our father’s heavy toolbox, will surround the house outside, violently hammering and nailing planks into crosses against the shutters, and our sisters dressed in black, true to their Mediterranean background, will rush around the house in a flurry of mourning, and the dance of this imprisoned family will be accompanied by a chorus of howling, whimpering and sighing, and finally, our sisters, sobbing wearily, in a flight of handkerchiefs to hide their faces, will go off and huddle in the corner and you will scream at them ever more loudly, “Our brother is a convulsive, possessed epileptic!” and go ahead and tell them that I chose a boarding-house room for my fits and also say, “We lived with him and never knew, never ever suspected,” then you can all call out at once, “He tricked us! He tricked us!” and yell as much as you want, gorge yourselves on this renewed knowledge, even if you aren’t aware of the sinister web in which I was caught, and you, as the eldest brother, can howl in a desperate moan, “It’s so sad that he has our blood,” then cry out, “He’s been possessed by cursed pestilence,” and scream, “Such disgrace has befallen our household,” and ask furiously, as if saying the rosary, “What makes him different?” and you’ll hear the sombre, hoarse chorus from the shapeless mass huddled in the corner, “He’s possessed by the devil,” and go ahead and say, “His eyes are sombre,” and you’ll keep hearing, “He’s possessed by the devil,” and you’ll continue mouthing those gutter beads and then say in amazement and fear, “What a heinous crime he’s committed! He’s possessed by the devil,” and then say, “He’s tainted the family, condemned us to burn up in flaming shame,” and you’ll keep hearing the same cavernous, hollow sound, “He’s possessed by the devil! He’s possessed by the devil!” and in a clamour, as if in blasphemy, raise your arms and cry out to heaven in unison, “He has abandoned us, he has abandoned us,” and afterwards, after so much lamentation, so much sobbing and grinding of teeth, and after flaunting the hair on your chest and your arms, right afterwards, go directly to the linen closet, and check quickly behind the doors, take up the finely woven old sheets, and even these, like everything else in our house, even those carefully washed, folded, white cloths, everything, Pedro, everything in our house is morbidly soaked with Father’s words; Father always said, he always said, Pedro, “We must begin with the truth and finish the same way,” he was always saying things like that, those family sermons were heavy, but he always laid the foundations in the same way, with the same blocks of words, those were the rocks we tripped over as children, the stones that forever grazed us, that’s where our thrashings and these marks on our bodies came from, look, Pedro, look at my arms; but he also said, probably unaware of what he was saying and certainly not realizing how one of us would use it one day, he also said carelessly, in an aside, “Look at the strength of the tree growing in isolation and the shade it provides for the herd, and the troughs, the long troughs emerging in isolation from the immense fields, so smooth from so many tongues, where the cattle come to feed on the salt provided to purify their meat and hides,” he was always saying things like that, in his unique syntax, hard and stiffened by the sun and rain, he was the toughened farmer tilling the earth, ploughing up the shapeless rock he did not realize was so malleable in each of our hands; Pedro, the hallways of our house were confused, but that was how he wanted it, to injure the family’s hands with coarse rocks, to scrape our blood as you would limestone, but did it ever occur to you, did it ever cross your mind, for even a second, to lift the lid of the bathroom hamper? Did you ever think of delving in with precarious hands and carefully removing each and every article thrown inside? I would drag up a piece of each one of us when I dug in there, no one heard all of our cries better than I did, I can assure you, the exasperation of the family was laid to rest in the guarded silence of the intimate articles thrown in there, but you had only to look, to lift the lid and stick your hands in, it was enough to plunge your hands inside to realize how ambivalently they were used, the men’s handkerchiefs, which had been extended like trays to protect the purity of the sheets, all you had to do was put your hands in to gather up the wrinkled sleep of the nightgowns and pyjamas and to discover, lost in their folds, the coiled, repressed energy of the most tender pubic hair, you didn’t even need to rummage very much to find the periodic, walnut-coloured stains on the women’s intimate cloth-pads, nor to hear the mute, scrotum-flowing cries that starched the men’s soft white cotton underwear, you had to know the body of the entire family, to hold the red-dust-covered sanitary napkins in your hands, as if they were an assassin’s rags, to know the family’s every mood mouldering away in the vinegary, rotten smell of the cold, vein-ridden walls of a dirty clothes hamper; no one stuck their hands inside there more than I did, Pedro, no one felt the stains of loneliness more than I did, many of them aborted, greased by the imagination, you had to catch the charnel-house off guard, when it was snoring, leave your bed and venture through the hallways, listen to the throbbing behind all the doors, the trembling, the moaning and the soft voluptuousness of our homicidal plans, no one heard each of us at home better than I did, Pedro, no one loved each of us more, nor better knew the pathway to our union, the pathway along which we were led steadily by the image of our grandfather, the tall, slender old man carved from the wood of the family furniture; he was the one, Pedro, the truth is, he was the one running through our ancestral veins, always in the same black suit, bulky on his thin, skeletal body, depravedly baring the dry, white skin of his face; the truth is, he led us, forever locked up inside his own vest, his pocket-watch chain tracing an enormous, shiny golden hook on his dark chest, the old ascetic, the farmer worked from ancestral hay, who on drowsy afternoons of days gone by would store his dehydrated sleep inside the hampers and carefully lined drawers of our bureaus, and who would allow himself no more than the gentle, lyrical mystery of a memory-filled, dream-laden jasmine tucked into his lapel on hot, humid evenings, he was the one who directed the steps we took in unison, it was always Grandfather, Pedro, he was forever inside the silence of the china cupboards, the lost promise of the hallways, making us hide our childhood fears behind doors, never allowing us, except in contained gulps, to absorb the funereal perfume of our pain which emanated from his solemn wanderings through the old house; he was a plaster-carved guide, that eyeless grandfather of ours, Pedro, nothing more than two deep, hollow, sombre cavities in his face, nothing more, Pedro, nothing else shone on that bony stalk besides the chain of his terrible, golden, oriental hook,’ I said, screaming and shaking, and reading the surprise, fear, terror and absolute whiteness all over his face, I still managed to cry out, ‘Plug your ears, stick your fingers in the holes,’ and, having run from one corner of the room to the other in possessed frenzy, I suddenly dropped to my knees, sat back on my heels and, seeing his trembling hand, he himself now filling our glasses, I was overcome with doubt whether to bash him in the face or kiss his cheeks; and for a moment, we fell into a taut silence in order that nothing disturb the current of my trance; between massive gulps of wine, contemplating both the ceiling of my room and the dark things I could see inside my brother’s mouth, I noticed how carefully he was trying to compose a look and a stance conducive to my carrying on; I wanted to say, ‘Don’t worry, brother, don’t worry, because I am able to resume my fit,’ after all, what was the point of talking further? For me, the world had already been laid bare, I had only to take in a deep breath, take up the wine from the depth of the bottle, and bathe all my words in that sweet indolence, feel each drop all the way to the back of my tongue, each crushed grape from that wine, from that divine spirit; ‘It is my delirium, Pedro,’ I said in a warm wave, ‘It’s my delirium,’ I repeated, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was already in communion with the oily saliva of that word, but in fact, I was only feeling the first reverberations of my own red blood, salty and thick as it circulated in my head, inflating the formerly feeble flower, transforming that pile of worms into a sacred pillow, stripped of trimmings, on which I could rest my thoughts; at that foamy moment, only I knew the waters, the waves on which I was sailing, only I knew the salty vertigo causing my oscillation, ‘It’s my delirium,’ I said, on a still darker wave, tired of soothing thoughts, affectionate eyes and gentle contortions; would that everything burn, my feet, the thorns in my arms, the leaves that covered my wooden body, my forehead and lips, so long as at the same time my useless tongue be spared; the rest, later, it mattered very little that later the rest be lost among the family’s tears, sobbing and trembling; ‘Pedro, my brother, our father’s sermons were inconsistent,’ I said suddenly with a rebel’s frivolity, sensing, if only for a fleeting moment, his hand in awkward preparation for a reproachful gesture: instead it was withdrawn, anxiously and silently, the frightened hands of the family leaving the sermon-fed table; the faces surrounding that table of our adolescence were so curdled: Father, at the head of it, the wall clock behind him, each and every one of his words weighed by the pendulum, with nothing distracting us more at that time than the deep bells marking the passing of the hours.