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    Happy drunk! If he’s gotten that far, he’s gotten to everything, he has no reason to worry anymore, because the idea on which he bases all his reasoning is correct, and there’s nothing else to say (even though it’s bad for your health). It’s true that he is singular, and it’s true that this is a process of simplification: everything goes toward a kind of happy nothing, and nothing is lost on the way.
    “Simplify, child, simplify.” For some reason, I can’t do it. I want to, but I can’t. It’s stronger than I am. It’s as if I were abstemious. Here in Paris I drink more than I should.
    As I am not much of a drinker, the effect is immediate, and exaggerated. It’s the effect and nothing but. Th e effect is to walk drunkenly, smiling stupidly past all those prestigious places, accumulating experiences, memories, for a time when I have nothing else to lean on. It’s a commonplace to say that a great city offers a continuous succession of different impressions, all in a magma of variable intensity. But shouldn’t it also be true for other people, not just for oneself? I see people pass, from café terraces where I write, and all without exception look compact, closed in on themselves, making it very clear that the city has had no effect on them.
    But what am I after? I don’t know. People disarmed by their own visions, like Picasso’s women, medusa-like and limping, thousand-armed goddesses, hollow people, fluid people?
    Maybe what I hope to see, at the end of a line of self-sustaining reasoning, is people who, like myself, have no life. In that, I am condemned to failure. It’s curious, but everyone has life, even the tourists, who by my reasoning shouldn’t. No one leaves life anywhere, all lives seem to be portable. Th ey are naturally so. To be practical about it and drop the metaphysics, having a life is equivalent to having business, affairs, interests. And how can anyone strip himself of all that? Very well. But then how did I do it?
    I don’t know.
    I’ve stood on the threshold of all the beauties, all the dangers. And the sums did not add up. Th e remainders did not remain, the multiplications were not multiplied, the divisions were not divided.

14
    LET’S SUPPOSE A man who, as a result of a mental disturbance (I can imagine this because yesterday I saw it), cannot walk, advance, or move at all, without the accompaniment or propulsion of very sonorous music, which he is obliged to provide for himself at the top of his lungs. Uncomfortable for other people, evidently; but maybe not as much as you’d think, at least for those who see him only briefly and think, quite reasonably, that the poor unhappy man isn’t doing it because he likes to. It’s curious, because I’d bet that anyone who has to put up with him every day would certainly have the right to think he does do it because he likes it, and surely they do think that. Because he could always choose immobility and keep quiet.
    He moves not in silence, but in song. It’s almost like opera: the song becomes gesture, and fate, and plot (incoherent, insane), and the people who surround him also become destiny and fate. He advances loaded down with signifiers, dragging the cart of his rhythm, which only he perceives. He opens a pathway by opening his life with the demented clumsiness of an angry man tearing the gift wrap off a present. But he doesn’t find a gift, and keeps on opening forever, singing forever. Th e perpetual melodrama. Th ere it is, what his accusers may wonder: Why does he insist? Actually, they wonder what comes first: movement or song? Does he sing to walk, or walk to sing? All right, there is no answer, as there is none for the puzzle of the opera. Because there is no anterior or posterior, there is no succession, only a kind of successive simultaneity.
    It was within this strange logic that Delia Siffoni walked through Patagonia that calamitous afternoon. But she didn’t walk with the obliviousness of the madman.