"Here you are, my dear... I'll be back in two hours," said Adel as he opened the car door; and I hurried into the office without answering his words with a single word. I was in a state of great agitation, my head in a whirl of doubt and obscurity; nothing before me was clear, and my thoughts were confused, paralyzed...
I sat down before the typewriter, the last echo of the roar of Adel's car in my ears, and paid no attention to the bundles of letters, all waiting to be copied or typed anew; and I fell to contemplating a letter I had begun before lunch. I tried to finish it, but I could not, and the confusion grew, and the letters blurred away into a distant horizon; I had two hours before me in which to decide my fate... And I went back in my thoughts to the beginning; for I like to begin from the first in all my affairs. But where was the beginning of my subject? Was it my coming into this world? That is a long tale, beginning on the evening of a certain day, when
I set foot upon the threshold of existence, furnished with my mother's screams and the cries of alarm from those around her. I was the messenger of death to my mother, who died before she could set eyes on me; and my father lost his reason and never came back to the house, and to this day I know nothing of what became of him... And so there was no one to take me in but my mother's parents, and with them I lived a life of loneliness and hardship, for they had no abundance of money, and all they left me was the intermediate certificate, which I struggled, with the help of a little money, to obtain; and not long afterward my grandparents passed on to the other world, and I remained, wrestling with loneliness and its pains...
Was I right, do you think, to go back to the beginning of my story with life? Or shall I leave it, and tell the tale that caused my bewilderment and daze?..
My certificate was the means to a simple livelihood. I found a position with a company that imported electrical machines, and I worked as a secretary for five years, and still do. Life is ever the same... I work six hours a day, and return in the evening to a room I had rented in a modest flat; I prepare my supper myself, read a few papers or books, and then sleep, awaiting the next day..
I had no friends, and I did not look for friendship, for it was, to me, a silly thing; I would think so when I heard the girls at the office talking of their friends and recounting their adventures with them; and I would ask myself how anyone could think of wasting time for nothing in the company of a passing friend instead of the company of a book?.. It seems to me now that books are not all the pleasures in this world that the human soul requires — nor food and drink and outings... There are important things that we ignore, and they return our disregard: our feelings; yet often they rise in revolt, and with their revolts they shake our very being. My revolts were of the quiet, silent kind, though many a time their storm grew so fierce that I was powerless to bridle