Il is now three o’clock in this twentieth Century. Nothing separates strollers’ shoes ...from corpses save a sheet of asphalt. I will recline in the middle of the street as the old bedouins do and refuse to rise till all prison bars, all records of suspects in the world, have been collected and set before me so I can chew them, like a camel by the roadside, till all policemen and demonstrator’s sticks top from their hands and become once more flowering branches in their forests. I laugh in the dark, I cry in the dark, I write in the dark. I can no longer distinguish mi pen from my fingers. Every time a doorbell rings or a curtain flutters, I hide my papers with my hands like a whore, during a police raid. Who willed me this dread, this blood dismayed like a mountain leopard? A printed from lying on the threshold, a cap glimpsed through the barely opened door, are enough to set my bones clattering with my tears while my frightened blood flees in all directions, as though the eternal squad of generations were chasing it, from artery to artery. O my beloved, it is useless to search for strength and courage. The tragedy is not here, in the whip or in the offices, or in warning sirens. It is over there, in the cradle…in the womb. For I was not tied to the womb with an umbilical cord, but with the hangman’s rope.