Na mesa de cabeceira ( I )

Já aqui referi o livro "Collected Stories" de Saul Bellow , da Penguin. É um livro com 13 histórias em 437 páginas seguidas de um "Afterword " notável de 4 páginas. Algumas foram publicadas inicialmente em revistas como a "Esquire", "The New Yorker", "Playboy" e outras. Iniciam-se em 1951 e vão até 1990.

"The Old System" ( pág. 90 ) começa assim :

"It was a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. Winter. Saturday. The short end of December. He was alone in his apartment and woke late, lying in bed until noon, in the room kept very dark, working with a thought - a feeling : Now you see it, now you don't. Now a content, now a vacancy. Now an important individual, a force, a necessary existence; suddenly nothing. A frame without a picture, a mirror with missing glass. The feeling of necessary existence might be the aggressive, instinctive vitality we share with a dog or an ape. The difference being in the power of the mind or spirit to declare I am. Plus the inevitable inference I am not. Dr. Braun was no more pleased with being than with its opposite. For him an age of equilibrium seemed to be coming in. How nice! Anyway, he had no project for putting the world in rational order, and for no special reason he got up. Washed his wrinkled but not elderly face with freezing tap water, which changed the nighttime white to a more agreable color. He brushed his teeth. Standing upright, scubbing the teeth as if he were looking after an idol. He then ran the big old-fashioned tub to sponge himself, backing into the thick stream of the Roman faucet, soaping beneath with the same cake of soap he would apply later to his beard. Under the swell of his belly, the tip of his parts, somewhere between his heels. His heels needed scubbing. He dried himself with yesterday's shirt, an economy. It was going to the laundry anyway. Yes, with the self-respecting expression human beings inherit from ancestors for whom bathing was a solemnity. A sadness."