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stratum deeper. But they can console themselves with the thought that
after a while evasion becomes a phenomenon to confront, and a
phenomenon more virulent than most. I flattered myself my sentences
had a multiplicity of meaning, they deviated from allegory precisely
when they seemed least alert to its pitfalls. Anointed with ambiguity,
no nook refractory to dazzle, like boles at sunset. But she was deaf, she
did not hear the countless variations I played on the theme of tender–
ness.
It
was indictment and indictment only, indictment of her tormen–
tors, even more unforgiveable. I did say they were sucking her dry but
as she was undone by her saps there was no liability. She became very
protective of them. Or perhaps only of their anonymity with regard to
me. Perhaps she was protecting me from dreams of vengeance. Seeing
them daily she might very well become attached to them. She gave me
no warmth. She was drying up. I was vigilance unending against her
attacks. No more guided tours of my caves, no more inspection of their
denizens in the halflight. I pumped her for the details of those
meetings. What were they saying about me.
She told me they called me a schmuck. Sometimes they fastened on
putz as more expressive. She was bad at transitions. How were they able
to go from schmuck to putz, what led them into more rarefied realms. I
was best at describing not the state of things, I am no apologist for
things as they are, but the almost imperceptible transitions from one
state to another, when the sun is about to rend a pelt of clouds, for
example, or is it the moon, when the bus rises to the challenge of a
diminutive hummock and skirts the frontier of sentiency, when a man
is on the verge of becoming a woman. She and her reports of those
meetings were beginning to paralyze me. Before, when the townspeo–
ple accepted us and we basked in their warmth, I spoke, made
sentences, at my leisure. There was no intention with a sentence of
warding off sentences to come. Let them come as they may. And I was
not in search of the sentence to bring an end to all sentences, the
sentence of the future to summarize all previous sentences and all they
netted and all that eluded them, all I missed while I was busy making
them, lowering my head to the ground to drink in the words undis–
turbed rather than let things brew before my eyes. Now I craved and
dreaded that final sentence, admitting of no reprieve, my only protec–
tion against it more and more sentences. Now, in my solitude, every–
thing around me impinged and had to be done away with. Her
presence no longer softened the contour of things. Where was the
sentence that would exorcise away all these impingements. Sentence
after sentence, one more side to the polygon forever in search of its
