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pride on other people admiring my ability to turn somersaults. Those were the days when I had a pair of balls. Then it occurred to me that it’s not good for man to live alone, and I asked myself whether it was right to stay on the margins of what the rest of the world, or at least all those who could, were doing. And I felt as capable as anyone else. I gave myself permission to jump through that fucking flaming ring so as not to end up in the gutter and without benefits. I accepted it as a temporary solution until the outlook brightened and I could get my act together. Ten years have passed, give or take. Now I am a cocksucker and I’m more alone than ever.
    When I think about these things I always remember Friedrich Nietzsche. I had a religious studies teacher who always took great delight whenever he managed to mention that this atheist had died mad. I was never a fan of good old Friedrich, except when he got his hammer out, but it doesn’t seem fair to me that the prize for advocating pride in being a man is having your brains turn to mush and a hundred years later an anthropoid in a dog collar laughs himself silly at your expense in front of a handful of doomed brats.

I might not yet have mentioned that it was summer. This fact is relevant for various other reasons that will become clear, but also because during the summer, banking working hours are shorter and employees leave at noon. Although we cocksuckers almost never take advantage of this perk, it is more or less tolerated that three or four days each summer, on a whim, one can leave the office at the same time as the others, step outside and discover that there is a whole world out there. A world full of parks, birds, children with their mothers and heaps of babes flaunting their navels or wearing skin-tight T-shirts.
    So that was exactly what I did the following Thursday: I took the afternoon off, not to go and stare at belly-buttons, but to pursue my strategy of stalking Sonsoles and bringing about her moral downfall. To be more specific, I was interested in carrying out a personal stakeout that would enlighten me as to her habits. This would lead to a series of disconcerting actions that would in turn prompt my chosen victim’s fall into disrepute. I would combine slander with several traps until that slut would regret ever meeting me. Now, as I’m writing this, I realize I can barely remember exactly what dirty tricks I had in store for her.
    The fact is it doesn’t matter a jot. Because that afternoon something happened that screwed everything up and all my best laid plans went to hell. Until that afternoon I had been messing around with Sonsoles in the same way I might have grabbed a handful of silkworms and roasted them in a teaspoon over a Bunsen burner to while away the time. I don’t know if I’ve managed to explain myself. Nothing about what I was doing was essential or particularly appealed to me. And if I’d continued being a spineless motherfucker, probably nothing irreversible would have happened. But that afternoon, betraying all my principles and ignoring the overwhelming teachings of a life of disappointment and lesson-learning, I committed the insane act of allowing myself to fall passionately in love with another human being.
    When I was eighteen I wrote a lucid essay entitled “In Praise of Impotence, Cowardice and Other Disqualifications from Transforming Reality”, which led to my expulsion from a Maoist literary circle I’d joined without realizing it. Now I have a lot of time on my hands and I’ve been able to re-read those pages. On one of them is forcefully stated:

    In a universe of merciless symmetry, the species seeks the annihilation of the individual to improve his own lot, and the individual can only avoid his misfortune by disregarding the possible fate of the species. Anyone who deigns to pay attention to his fellow human beings, beyond the strictly necessary one to avoid colliding with them, is undoubtedly on the