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horrified by this encounter with myself.
    As I've already said, the girl from the North-east did not believe in death. She couldn't believe in death — after all — was she not alive? She had long since forgotten the names of her father and mother, for her aunt had never mentioned them. (I am exploiting the written word with the utmost ease. This alarms me, for I am afraid of losing my sense of order and of plunging into an abyss resounding with cries and shrieks: the Hell of human freedom. But I shall continue.)
    To continue:
    Every morning she switched on the transistor radio loaned by one of her room-mates, Maria da Penha. She switched it on as low as possible so as not to disturb the others, and she invariably tuned into Radio Clock, a channel that broadcast the correct time and educational programmes.
    There was no music, only a constant ping like drops of falling rain — a drop for every minute that passed. This channel took advantage of the pauses between each ping to broadcast commercials. She adored commercials.
    It was the ideal programme for between each ping the announcer gave snippets of information that one day might stand her in good stead. This was how the girl learned, for example, that the Emperor Charlemagne was known as Carolus in his native land. Admittedly, she had never had any opportunity to make use of this information. But you never know. Patience always pays off in the end. Listening to the same programme, she also learned that the only animal that doesn't crossbreed with its own offspring, is the horse.
    — That's filth! she muttered to the transistor radio.
    On another occasion, she heard the message: 'Repent in Christ and He will give you great joy.' So she decided to repent. Not quite knowing what she had to repent of, the girl from the North-east repented of everything. The preacher added that vengeance is a deadly sin. So she sought no revenge.
    Yes, patience always pays off in the end. Seriously? The girl possessed what is known as inner life without knowing that she possessed it. She was nourished by her own entity, as if she were feeding off her own entrails. When she travelled to work, she behaved like a harmless lunatic. As the bus sped along, she daydreamed aloud and voiced the most extravagant dreams. Her dreams were empty on account of all that inner life, because they lacked the essential nucleus of any prior experience of— of ecstasy, let's say. Most of the time, she possessed, without knowing it, the emptiness that replenishes the souls of saints. Was she a saint? It would seem so. The girl didn't know that she was meditating, for the word meditation was unknown to her. I get the impression that her life was one long meditation about nothingness. Except that she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she would become lost in the continuous, spiralling vacuum inside her. She tended to meditate while she typed, and this caused her to make even more mistakes than usual.
    She indulged in certain little pleasures. On wintry nights, shivering from head to foot under a thin cotton sheet, she would read by candle-light the advertisements that she had cut out of old newspapers lying around the office. She collected newspaper advertisements, and pasted them into an album. The advertisement she treasured most of all was in colour: it advertised a face cream for women with complexions so very different from her own sallow skin. Blinking furiously (a fatal tic that she had recently acquired), she imagined the pleasure of possessing such luxuries. The cream looked so appetizing that, were she to find enough money to buy it, she wouldn't be foolish. Never mind her skin! She would eat the cream, she would, in large spoonfuls straight from the jar. She was needing to put on some flesh, for her body was drier than a half-empty sack of toasted breadcrumbs. With time, she had become transformed into mere living matter in its primary state. Perhaps this was her protection from the