Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

viewing him from the start as a straw man, a factotum in the service of some colonel in the intelligence services

The mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in Barcelona, a place he used to go when he needed medicine for Rosa. One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

That night, as young Guerra's grandiloquent words were still echoing in the depths of his brain, Amalfitano dreamed that he saw the last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century appear in a pink marble courtyard. He was speaking Russian. Or rather: he was singing a song in Russian as his big body went weaving toward a patch of red-streaked majolica that stood out on the flat plane of the courtyard like a kind of crater or latrine. The last Communist philosopher was dressed in a dark suit and sky-blue tie and had gray hair. Although he seemed about to collapse at any moment, he remained miraculously upright. The song wasn't always the same, since sometimes he mixed in words in English or French, words to other songs, pop ballads or tangos, tunes that celebrated drunkenness or love. And yet these interruptions were brief and sporadic and he soon returned to the original song, in Russian, the words of which Amalfitano didn't understand (although in dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues). Still, he sensed that the words were sad, the story or lament of a Volga boatman who sails all night and commiserates with the moon about the sad fate of men condemned to be born and to die. When the last Communist philosopher finally reached the crater or latrine, Amalfitano discovered in astonishment that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin. This is the last Communist philosopher? What kind of lunatic am I if this is the kind of nonsense I dream? And yet the dream was at peace with Amalfitano's soul. It wasn't a nightmare. And it also granted him a kind of feather-light sense of well-being. Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said: