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support it.
    I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to carry on or to stop and stroke the great head of that injured animal. But its absolute silence frightened me. No complaint, no whimper, not the slightest sound came from the body of that tortured animal. Only that deep, rasping breath as it continued to follow me on its shattered bones. I had no idea what would happen if I held my hand out toward its head, toward its drooling mouth and teeth. What it was thinking. Perhaps, in its mute anger, its hatred, it might have thought I wanted to approach it to hurt it, and it might have sunk its teeth into me out of despair, out of distress.
    And so I carried on walking for more than half an hour with that large maimed dog behind me, in that immense vegetal solitude. When I came across some sudden upward slopes or, immediately after, some steep descent, I thought the dog wouldn’t be able to follow me, that its body would be too heavy for its legs to cope with such gradients. But it didn’t give up, it was always there, without complaint, without a sound, always at the same distance, relentless as a machine.
    “But how does it manage to walk for so long on those shattered bones?” I asked. “How is it possible that no sound comes from its body racked by such tremendous pain?”
    At certain moments I lost the sound of its steps behind me. “It can’t manage it!” I said to myself. “It must have stopped!” And yet, a few seconds later, passing round another bend, once again I could see its limping body, still there behind me, its eyes continuing to watch me silently in its great drooling head.
    At a certain point, all of a sudden, I felt something pressing against my legs from behind. It was the head of the dog that had caught up with me on a downward slope and was nudging me with its wet nose.
    I speeded up without giving the idea that I was doing so, so as not to trigger his suppressed anger, gradually tightening the muscles throughout my body and not just my legs, a short distance away from the mighty muscle fibers of that other body, its shoulders, its neck, its great legs that bound and held its shattered bones, preventing them from protruding.
    At last I got back to the small village. I walked a little further along the deserted lane and could hear the relentless sound of its steps behind me and its claws as they struck the cobbles. When I stopped in front of my small house, as I opened the gate I could hear that the dog had also stopped. It sat down on the ground behind me, waiting to come in.
    I took a few steps forward. The dog started walking silently behind me. I suddenly then moved back. We caught each other’s eyes as I reached the open gate and went in, closing it behind me.
    The dog also moved back. It sat down again on the ground, on the other side of the gate. It watched me in silence, without a groan, silent, with the black marks of its eyes in its great muscular head full of bones and teeth.
    “Now it’s going to stay there, holding me hostage!” I thought. “It won’t move until I open the gate and let it come in.”
    And yet when night fell and I went out once again to walk in the dark, the dog had gone.

5
    Sometimes I stop and I talk to animals, insects, trees, all the mighty vegetation that springs up everywhere as far as the skyline.
    To wasps that drop angrily onto the gaping cracks in the figs rotting on the trees, thrusting their rostrate heads into the crevices full of putrefying seeds and juice. Going up close, perhaps too close, so that one day I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I felt its barbed sting penetrating the tender flesh between one finger and the next.
    “But why are you always so angry” I ask. “Why do you drop headfirst into the pulp of unpicked fruit that’s rotting on the trees in this deserted unearthly place? So that sometimes, when I split one open to eat it, I find one of you inside, and you fly off in a rage, covered all over with dead liquids and