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and black birds dance around softly in a little chunk of air, slow cold birds. We would look at them, trying to bring our eyes up to the glass, touching it with our noses, annoying the old women who sell them, as they go about with their nets to hunt aquatic butterflies, and we understood less and less what a fish is. We went along that path of not understanding and getting closer to those creatures that could not understand each other. We walked through the fishbowls and were as close as our friend, the woman in the second shop as you come from the Pont Neuf, who told you: “Cold water kills them, cold water is a sad thing …” And I remember the maid in the hotel who told me about a fern: “Don’t water it, put a plate of water under the pot, then when it wants to drink it can, and when it doesn’t want to, it doesn’t …” And I thought about that unbelievable bit that we had read, that a single fish will get sad in its bowland that all one has to do is put a mirror next to it and the fish is happy again…
    We used to go into the shops where the more delicate species would have special tanks with thermometers and red worms. We would find out along with exclamations which used to infuriate the saleswomen—they were so sure that we were not going to buy anything at
550 fr. pièce
—all about the behavior, the love, and the shape of the fish. The moment was delicately delicious, something like very thin chocolate or orange paste from Martinique, and we were getting drunk on metaphors and analogies, always trying to get into it. And that perfectly Giotto fish, do you remember, and those two that played about like jade dogs, or a fish which was the exact shadow of a violet cloud … We found out how life goes on in shapes without a third dimension, that they disappear when they face you, or at most leave a thin motionless pink line in the water. A flick of a fin and there he is miraculously again with eyes, whiskers, fins, and from his belly sometimes coming out and floating a transparent ribbon of excrement which has not come loose, ballast which suddenly puts them amongst us, which plucks them out from the perfection of their pure imagery, which compromises them, to use one of those fine words we so much liked to use around there in those days.
    (– 93 )

9
    THEY came into the Rue Vaneau from the Rue de Varennes. It was drizzling and La Maga clutched Oliveira’s arm even tighter, pressing herself against his raincoat, which smelled like cold soup. Étienne and Perico were arguing over the possibility of explaining the world through painting and words. Oliveira put his arm carelessly around La Maga’s waist. That might be an explanation too, an arm squeezing a thin, warm waist. As they walked he could feel the light play of her muscles, a sort of monotonous and persistent speech, an insistent Berlitz, I-love-you, I-love-you. Not an explanation: a pure verb, to-love, to-love. “And always following the verb, the copulative,” Oliveira thought grammatically. If La Maga could only have understood how suddenly he was bothered by obedience to desire, “useless solitary obedience,” as a poet had once called it, a waist so warm, wet hair against his cheek, the Toulouse-Lautrec way that La Maga used to walk snuggled up to him. In the beginning was the copulative, to rape is to explain, but not always the other way around. To discover the anti-explanatory method, so that this I-love-you, I-love-you would be the hub of the wheel. And Time? Everything begins again, there is no absolute. Then there must be feed or feces, everything becomes critical again. Desire every so often, never too different and always something else: a trick of time to create illusions. “A love like a fire which burns eternally in the contemplation of Totality. But suddenly one breaks out into wild babble.”
    “Explain, explain,” grumbled Étienne. “If you people can’t name something you’re incapable of seeing it. And this is