IN GREAT GOLD LETTERS Comments

You, since you still have blood and speech, tell me the story I deserve. Write it for me in great gold letters. I came back late that night and in the empty street, barely lit by the lamps' pink light and their reflections in the puddles, there was a woman. I've always been unable to remember her precisely. She changes faces in my memory, and dresses; only her icy neck remains. I don't know why I did it, either. I suppose we all live by trailing some kind of brilliance, and when at last we trip across it, we simply go insane. It must have been that way for me. I woke the next morning with my face covered in scratches and a gold chain clinging to my hands as if it had been sewn there.

I don't consider myself a common thief. I am a gold-seeker. A miner who no longer parts the flesh of earth, who'd rather dig his tunnels in the solitude of streets. It isn't easy. Obtaining gold, I realize, means producing pain. I've slashed ears, hacked fingers so I could claim some strange ring, I've broken necks, uprooted lustrous teeth. Forgive me, my dear victims, and console yourselves if it does any good, because in all this time I'm still unhardened.

I've never sold the gold I gather. I have hundreds of rings, necklaces, bracelets, lockets, scapulars; charms that are flowers, volutes, lips, eyes, insects. Gold is my pain on the side I can only satisfy when I behold it. Gold is my air, my solitary dance, the golden age that I regain each night.


Sometimes I think about my treasure's fate. At the end, when I've amassed enough, I think I'll make a statue of myself from pure, resplendent gold, and I'll set off by boat to throw it in the sea.

It doesn't bother me that nobody will see it.

It is enough to know that there, deep down, beloved by the waters, it will last forever.
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