Day after day, in my ignoble and profound soul, I register the impressions that form the external substance of my self-awareness. I put them in vagabond words that desert me as soon as they’re written, wandering on their own over slopes and meadows of images, along avenues of concepts, down footpaths of confusions. None of this is of any use to me, because nothing is of use to me. But writing makes me calmer, as when a sick man breathes easier without the sickness having passed.

Some people absent-mindedly scribble lines and absurd names on their desk blotter. These pages are the scribbles of my intellectual self-unawareness. I trace them in a stupor of feeling whatever I feel, like a cat in the sun, and I sometimes reread them with a vague, belated astonishment, as when I remember something I forgot ages ago.

When I write, I pay myself a solemn visit. I have special chambers, remembered by someone else in the interstices of my imagining, where I take delight in analysing what I don’t feel, and I examine myself like a picture in a dark corner.

I lost my ancient castle before I was born. The tapestries of my ancestral palace were sold before I existed. My manor house from before I had life fell into ruins, and only in certain moments, when the moon shines in me over the river’s reeds, do I shiver with nostalgia for the place where the toothless remains of the walls blackly stand out against the dark-blue sky made less dark by a milky yellow tinge.

I sphinxly discern myself. And from the lap of the queen I’m missing falls the forgotten ball of thread that’s my soul – a little mishap of her useless embroidery. It rolls under the inlaid chest of drawers, where part of me follows it like a pair of eyes, until it vanishes in a nameless, mortuary horror.