But now I am afraid. The signs pursue me and I pursue them patiently. They are bent on destroying me. Didn't I see, on my way to court, seven sailors on the terrace of a cafe, questioning the stars through seven mugs of light beer as they sat around a table that perhaps turned; then, a messenger boy on a bicycle who was carrying a message from god to god, holding between his teeth, by the metal handle, a round, lighted lantern, the flame of which, as it reddened his face, also heated it? So pure a marvel that he was unaware of being a marvel. Circles and globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers' hoops, the round ball of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy.
I learned to paint them, too. The cell was full of them. The tables, shelves, and floor were covered with these tiny warriors, who were as hard and cold as corpses, whose number and inhuman smallness created for them a peculiar kind of soul. At night, I would kick them aside, lay out my straw mattress, and fall asleep in their midst. Like the inhabitants of Lilliput, they tied me down, and to get loose I offered Divine to the Archangel Gabriel.
During the day, the Negro and I would work in silence. However, I was sure that one day he would tell me his story. I don't like stories of that kind. Despite myself, I can't keep from thinking how often the narrator must have told it, and I feel as if it reaches me like a dress that has been handed down until...And besides, I have my own stories. Those which spring from my eyes. Prisons have their silent stories, and so do the guards, and even the lead soldiers, which are hollow. Hollow! The foot of one of the lead soldiers broke, and the stump revealed a hole. This certainty of their inner emptiness delighted and distressed me.
When he walked by, Darling was smoking, and a slit of abandon in the woman's hardness of soul chanced just then to be open, a slit that catches the hook cast by innocent looking objects. If one of your openings happens to be loosely fastened or a flap of your softness to be showing, you're done for.