She lay down and right away the fatigue of the poorly slept night weighed upon her. Ah, how horribly happy she was to be exhausted. A vague lament took shape in her entrails and she told herself feeling agitated and painfully contrite: it’s fatigue, nothing more. She fell asleep falling falling falling through the darkness. She halted: the metallic city. The metallic city. The Metallic City. Everything was sparkling excessively clean and inside her was the fear of being unable to reach the same great sparkle and of extinguishing herself humble and dirty. The women were blonde and with a movement of the head would get new hairdos; fine, straight, and silky, almost fleeting and irritating hair flowing like rivers from their round heads. Someone could reach the city’s highest dome, see the metals shining below and shout: I want to die, I want to die — she interrupted herself: it was the first time she’d wanted to die since she’d been alive. And some thing was also saying: my God, with infinite tenderness, almost with shame, almost with mischief: my little God. At that point the pillow was a heap in which you’d sink your head and find warmth, warmth of feathers smelling of your own body that was inhaling the perfume; a warm and persistent power was slowly sucking the person toward the center of the bed and of sleep, and you were falling, falling, no use to try to free yourself from the dream and head toward the whitish and sickly sunlight that was existing atop the eyelids like a wobbly weight. Escape the dream, escape the dream. But the director of the city, with eyeglasses and a smile, how painful it was to stand before her, she was coming and forcing her to eat eggs cracked in frying pans hot with lard, to eat them one after the other, dozens, Vicente, dozens, feeling her stomach crying with disgust. Then the “I want to die” was coming again — it was the first time since she’d been alive — but now so strong and serious that she was thinking that up till then it had just been a rehearsal. With a sigh she was finding a job as a washerwoman of the tubs of the blonde women of the city of the director — how quick and whirling it was. They were great smooth bathtubs and the women were so beautiful, their thighs so big that she was ending up being one of them. They were seeking eggs in vain; how rare they were, how rare they were! When they’d find them they’d eat them raw and naked, thin as silk, entering the bath. Then the thing she feared most — brown, shining, and agonizing — was growing slowly, growing growing growing until simply somebody was forced to laugh to belie the tragedy; it was increasing until being too much for the ears and for the eyes and for the taste in the mouth and to annihilate any idea of grandeur you could have, the oceans invading and covering the earth; then at last diminished. But how much? tell me how much? enough, enough! she was arguing with her hand outstretched — tapering in such a way that one thread was penetrating the other as the thread pierces the needle and the sensitive fabric. You could understand that one more little effort and it would be possible to wake up. With an extra-human thrust she lifted her body from the shifting mud with the panting power of her own desire alone and was violently flung into the void of the yellow day that was buzzing; the smell of the room erected by the heat revived her consciousness and she realized with a light sigh that she’d awoken — a light hand was surfacing upon the water and the dream was growing clouded. In a powerful migraine her stomach was writhing, her head pulsing. With the slip hitched up she sat almost unconscious upon the bed and as in the first surges of sleep gave herself over for a long time. She’d sometimes open her eyes still
