Taking a moment so that you could think things through more calmly, you told me that “you’ll see it’s for the best” and “I’ll call you in a week from now” and “it’s not as if I’m going to vanish completely” and “in the end you’ll see I’m right”, your enormous cubist eyes were looking at me with a keen determination, and I remained silent, knowing then that it was no longer possible to make you turn back, ever since that afternoon, it was a Sunday and all the other people were enjoying themselves by parading their happiness through the tedium of a day that was neither very hot nor very cold, since that afternoon there has been a silence as large as a mountain, three hundred and thirteen times twenty-four, the result is the number of hours that I have waited until today for a word from you. In vain. In the house built a little like an island, in the middle of the nothingness of the paper I write, closing the pattern, that its end is once again the sea.

from Para averiguar do seu grau de pureza [To ascertain its degree of purity”