I’m physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is. And sometimes I wilfully aggravate the nausea, like someone who induces vomiting to be relieved of the urge to vomit.

One of my favourite strolls, on mornings when I dread the banality of the approaching day as if I were dreading jail, is to walk slowly past the still unopened shops and stores, listening to the scraps of conversation that groups of young women or young men, or women with men, let fall – like ironic alms – in the invisible school of my open-air meditation.

And it’s always the same succession of the same old phrases… ‘And then she said…,’ and the tone foreshadows the intrigue to follow. ‘If it wasn’t him, it was you…,’ and the voice that answers bristles in a protest already out of my hearing range. ‘You said it, yes sir, I heard you…,’ and the seamstress’s shrill voice declares ‘My mother says she’s not interested…’ ‘Me?’, and the astonishment of the fellow carrying a lunch wrapped in white paper doesn’t convince me, and probably not the dirty blonde either. ‘It must have been…,’ and the giggling of three of the four girls drowns out the obscenity that ..... ‘And then I walked straight up to the guy, and right in his face, but I mean right in his face, José, just imagine…,’ and the poor devil is lying, because the office supervisor – I can tell by the voice that the other contender was the supervisor of the office in question – wouldn’t receive the straw gladiator’s challenge in the arena surrounded by desks. ‘And then I went and smoked in the bathroom…’ laughs the little boy with dark patches on his trouser-seat.

Others, passing by singly or together, don’t speak, or they speak and I don’t hear, but I can discern their voices, transparent to my penetrating intuition. I dare not say – not even to myself in writing, even though I could rip it up instantly – what I have seen in casually glancing eyes, in their involuntary lowering, in their sordid shifting. I dare not say, because when vomiting is induced, one heave is enough.

‘The guy was so soused he couldn’t even see the stairs.’ I raise my head. At least this young man describes. These people are more bearable when they describe, since in describing they forget themselves. My nausea subsides. I see the guy. I see him photographically. Even the innocuous slang heartens me. Blessed breeze across my forehead – the guy so soused he couldn’t see the steps of the staircase – perhaps the staircase where humanity stumbles, gropes and shoves its way up the corrugated illusion which only a wall separates from the sharp drop behind the building.

Intrigue, gossip, the loud boasting over what one didn’t have the guts to do, the contentment of each miserable creature dressed in the unconscious consciousness of his own soul, sweaty and smelly sexuality, the jokes they tell like monkeys tickling each other, their appalling ignorance of their utter unimportance… All of this leaves me with the impression of a monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of desires’ soggy crusts, out of sensations’ chewed-up leftovers.