Why was everything nice he did for me a bribe or a favor, while my kindnesses to him were my duty? Now he was going to try to stall off my revelations with sausages, buy my silence with anemones. [...]
I have learned to mistrust symmetry and the decimal system. There was once a time when I would do anything I chose for which I had ten good reasons, or again, anything for which I could find no reason not to, a time when I would not resist a dare.
I am more cautious now. I have children and resp…
[...] . I thought how one opaque action generates others of increasingly pronounced opacity, and so the problem is to break the chain. Elena would be happy to have her doll again, I said to myself. Or no, a child never wants only what it’s asking for, in fact a satisfied demand makes even more unbe…
I was already unhappy, but I didn’t know it. It seemed to me that little Bianca, right after her beautiful birth, had suddenly changed and treacherously taken for herself all my energy, all my strength, all my capacity for imagination. It seemed to me that my husband, too caught up in his fury of a…
“Today they have everything, people go into debt to buy stupid things. My wife didn’t waste a cent, the women of today throw money out the window.”
Even that way of complaining about the present and the recent past, and idealizing the distant past, didn’t annoy me as it usually does. It seemed, …
