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her to admire it. By the time she reached her mother, the cup was already halfway back to being a napkin again. Her mother, still chatting, spared her the briefest mechanical glance. After the first little figure, the first of what was beginning to look like an infinite series, she had immediately switched off, as adults do when their children are playing. Nobody loses out, because, from that moment on, the children enter a dimension of their own, composed of repetitions and intensities. Something like that had happened in the café. The girl had achieved a kind of invisibility, in which she was moving like a fish in water. The life of the café continued as normal. The waiters — there were six of them, each attending to his own group of tables — circulated with their trays, took orders, served, and collected money. The customers came and went, greeted one another, took their leave; those arriving late apologized and blamed the traffic. And even those who had made the ritual folded-napkin offering switched off after that and got on with their own lives. But the series, if that’s what it really was, did not come to a halt; it was as if the flow of ordinary time were yielding to the peremptory nature of childhood. A lady with dyed-red hair, who was drinking tea, wearing a violet and yellow tracksuit, caught the girl’s eye with a smile and presented her with what she had constructed from a little paper napkin. This new creation was a masterful, prize-worthy piece of work, which took the very concept of the qualitative leap to a whole new level. It was a bunch of flowers, a profusion of tiny roses, arum lilies, gladioli, daisies, and carnations, crowned by a chrysanthemum, and filled out with ferns. All this had sprung from half a dozen folds in the miserable little napkin, and expert unfolding to fluff it into shape. All the flowers, with their almost microscopic details, were recognizable. The only thing they lacked was color; the white of the paper made them ghostly. The qualitative leap wasn’t necessary in itself, since the only thing that mattered from the girl’s point of view was the continuation of the game, regardless of crescendos or decrescendos, but the leap’s own necessities favored subtle forms; as a result, one had to look at this bouquet twice, or three times, to make out the flowers, otherwise it might have been mistaken for a ball of crumpled paper. This escalation was inevitable; other kinds of gift-objects — birthday or wedding presents, offerings made to a bountiful god — could also evolve toward ever-greater subtlety and ultimately assume the appearance of trinkets, or of nothing at all. When that happens, people say, with a condescending smile: “It’s the intention that counts.” But it’s true: the intention counts so much it disappears into the gift, just as a smaller number, 843, say, disappears into a bigger one like 1,000 and, lying hidden there, is extremely hard to find, as hard as winning the lottery. Brandishing the bouquet of paper flowers, the girl set off, spinning like a bee, as if she were sending a coded message to all the little girls in the world, indicating the direction of the garden. Her handling accentuated the ephemeral nature of flowers: before she had finished transmitting her message, the delicate posy, bouncing crazily as she leaped about, had totally lost its shape. If anyone regretted the rapid destruction of these fugitive playthings, it certainly wasn’t her. She was riding the succession of novelties, which, in turn, because they were novelties, were riding on time, which was emitting speed and unpredictability, like sparks streaming off in two different directions. The late bouquet lay on the floor, where countless shoes would step on it, while, with her winning smile, the girl laid claim to what was already coming her way from a table occupied by four men, not all that young but “still young” all the same, rock fans or bikers, one of whom had folded and refolded a paper napkin (who knows where and how he’d learned to do this) to make a quivering replica of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with all its bold intersecting planes, every single one. Trills and laughter from the recipient, the squealing of a happy little creature: she was delighted, although she had no idea what it represented — but that might have been, and no doubt it was, precisely what delighted her. Children have a very special attachment to the incomprehensible; there’s so much they don’t understand at that age, they have no choice but to love it, blindly, like an enigma, but also like a world. It teaches them what love is. It traces out the vacant shape of their lives, heralding the marvelous variety of forms. Incomprehensible objects are keys to the word