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would be as violent as the color white. Angela is the color of hazelnut.
    I have a great need to live from much poverty of spirit and not have any luxury of soul. Angela is luxury and upsets me. I will move away from her and enter a monastery, which is to say, become poor. I chose today to wear some very old trousers and a torn shirt. I feel good dressed in rags, I am nostalgic for poverty. I ate only fruit and eggs, I refused the rich blood of meat, I wanted to eat only what’s born without agony, just blossoming naked like the egg, like the grape.
    I didn’t sleep with my wife last night because a woman is luxury and extravagance, and makes me into two, and I want to be only one in order not to be a number divisible by any other. I drank water while fasting. And slowly entered my own and immeasurable and infinite desert. When in this desert my penury becomes intolerable — I create Angela as a mirage, illusion of optics and spirit, but I must abstain from Angela because she is a richness of soul.
    Just now I wanted to make Angela paint.
    ANGELA: I’m painting a picture with the name “Meaningless.” They are random things — objects and beings without any connection, like a butterfly and a sewing machine.

[Author narrating the facts of Angela’s life]
    I’ll run through the facts as quickly as possible because I’m in a hurry. The most secret of meditations awaits me.
    To write I begin by stripping myself of words. I prefer the poor words left over.
    I’ll give a quick biographical sketch of Angela Pralini: quickly because facts and particulars bore me. So let’s see: born in Rio de Janeiro, 34 years old, five foot six and of good family though the daughter of poor parents. Married an industrialist, etc.
    ANGELA: I am as individual as a passport. I’ve got a police record. Should I be proud to be part of the world or does it discredit me?
    AUTHOR: There’s something sweet in Angela’s eyes, something reckless, a humid velvet, dull pearls but brown and sometimes hard like two chestnuts. Sometimes she has eyes like those of a cow being milked. Sweaty eyes. A glittering and mellifluous bee that hovers above me in search of my honey to hide it away as it was hidden in me. Angela is still a closed cocoon, as if I were not yet born, until I open myself in metamorphosis, Angela will be mine. When I am strong enough to be alone and mute — then I will free forever the butterfly from its cocoon. And even if it lives for only a day, that butterfly, it is already useful to me: may it flutter its bright colors above the green brightness of the plants in a garden on a summer’s morning. When the morning is still early, it looks just like a light butterfly. Whatever is even lighter than a butterfly. A butterfly is a petal that flies.
    ANGELA: The dancing of the guests.
    Ireland, never shalt thou see me. Malta, of Malta, thou art the prison. A bloody finger points upward. And I remember the future.
    Dutch — is what I am. And I am September too. So many fruits the lady has. The dog searching for its own tail. Help! fire! And I am chamber music.
    AUTHOR: Angela is a curve in an interminable sinuous spiral. I am upright, I write triangularly and pyramidally. But whatever is inside the pyramid — the untouchable, dangerous and inviolable secret — is Angela. What Angela writes can be read aloud: her words are voluptuous and give physical pleasure. I am geometric, Angela is a spiral, all finesse. She is intuitive, I am logical. She is not afraid to err in the use of words. And I do not err. I am well aware that she is the succulent grape and I am the raisin. I am balanced and sensible. She is free of balance which for her is unnecessary. I am controlled, she doesn’t repress herself — I suffer more than she does because I am imprisoned in a narrow cage of forced mental hygiene. I suffer more because I don’t say why I suffer.
    ANGELA: And I am no more than a promise.
    But I am a star. I feel that I am a star.