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Music which was intended to flow, but which instead jolted and halted, music which this person should not have been allowed to play. But who would? Someone with two glass eyes, or someone with an unhealthy, grey skin, or a small man with a soft, brown skin. Someone different.
    "We'll go for a stroll," said his aunt, but he soon found that she was not up to it. On the other side of the avenue lay a wood. A scent of honeysuckle and young pine trees. His Aunt Therese kept twisting her ankles in the soft sand of the path. She bumped into trees, stumbled over a fallen branch, became entangled in a bramble bush. For the first time that afternoon he felt fear. What did it all mean? He had not asked for this. Dragged from the quiet universe of his room, hustled into a family which, admittedly, was his but for which he had never cared in the least, having a door shut in his face by a man who should really have been two people. And a chauffeur. Leaning against the preposterously big car and probably laughing, he stood watching his employer stumbling a hundred metres and then gave a soft clarion call on the horn to announce that the ten minutes were up.
    *       *
    Da capo. The man was standing in the doorway again. Everyone had grown ten minutes older. This has already happened, thought Inni. The same formation, the eternal Second Coming. His aunt was in front of him, a little to one side, so that the man could see him. But the man did not look. Nor did he glance at his watch this time, for everyone knew what the time was anyway. The straight grey beam of the one eye roved like a searchlight over the person of Therese Donders. Of the three men present, only the chauffeur knew that her white two-piece suit, covered with pine needles and hairy thorny twigs, was handmade by Coco Chanel.
    "Hello, Therese, what a sight you look."
    Only then did the man look at Inni. Perhaps it was because of that single eye that the target had a feeling of being photographed by a camera whose aim could not miss, which sucked him up, swallowed him, developed him, and then put him away for good in an archive that would cease to exist only when the camera died.
    "This is a nephew of mine."
    "I see. My name is Arnold Taads." The hand closed around his like a vice.
    "What is his name?"
    "Inni."
    "Inni . . ." the man let the ridiculous name hover in the air for a moment, then flicked it away. Inni told him the origin of his name.
    "In your family everyone is mad," said Arnold Taads. "Come in."
    The orderliness that reigned in the room was frightening. The only form of accident was the dog, because he moved. It was, thought Inni, a room like a mathematical problem. Everything was in equilibrium, each thing fitted in with the other. A bunch of flowers, a child, a disobedient dog, or a visitor arriving ten minutes early would wreak inconceivable havoc here. All the furniture was gleaming white, of a vindictive, Calvinist modernity. The irresponsible sunlight drew geometric shadows on the linoleum. For the second time that afternoon he felt fear. What kind? As if, just for a moment, you are someone else, someone who cannot get used to being inside your body, so that it hurts.
    "Sit down. Therese, you'll want a manzanilla. And what will your nephew drink?"
    And then, directly to Inni, "Will you have a whisky?"
    "I've never tried it," said Inni.
    "Good. Then I will pour you a whisky. You will taste it carefully and then you will tell me what you think of it."
    Memory. The mysterious ways thereof. For what happened in the following five minutes? First, there was literally the very first, material whisky - the glass of whisky that he would never drink again. Second, there was the man he would so often think of, later in his life, when he saw, drank, and tasted whisky. Of that man, and therefore of his aunt, and therefore of himself. In this way the whisky had become his madeleine, the handle on the trapdoor that has to be lifted for the great descent into the shadow