Selected Cronicas

ONLY AN INSECT

It took me some time to make out what I was seeing, it was so unexpected and subtle. I was seeing a pale green insect with long legs, which was resting. It was a grasshopper, which people were always assuring me is an omen of good fortune. Then the grasshopper began to move very gently across the counterpane. It was a transparent green, with legs supporting its body on a higher and freer plane, a plane as fragile as the grasshopper’s own legs, which seemed to consist only of the colour of their outer shell. There was nothing inside those threadlike legs: the inside layer was so thin that it was indistinguishable from the outer layer. The grasshopper looked like a transparency which had come off the paper and was crawling about in green. But however somnambulant, it moved with determination. Somnambulant: the tiniest leaf of a tree which had achieved the solitary independence of those who pursue the blurred traces of a destiny. And it crawled with the determination of someone tracing a line which was simply invisible to the naked eye. It crawled without a tremor. Its inner mechanism was not tremulous, but it had the regular oscillation of the most delicate clock. What could love be like between two grasshoppers? Green and green, and then the same green, which, suddenly, because of a vibration of greens, turns green. Love predestined by its own semi-aerial mechanism. But where were the glands of its destiny and the adrenalines of its parched, green entrails? For it was a hollow creature, a splintered grafting, a simple attraction of green lines. Like me? Me. Us? Us. In that slender grasshopper with its tall legs, which are capable of crawling over a woman’s bosom without arousing the rest of her body; in that grasshopper which cannot be hollow because a hollow line does not exist; in that grasshopper, atomic energy is conducted in silence without any drama. Us? Us.