Sensación de lo subconsciente

Half propped up on a sofa, his arms crossed and his top hat pulled down over his forehead, the Astrologer brooded that night over his worries, in the darkness of the study.

The rain beat against the windowpanes, but he did not hear it, lost in himself amid countless schemes.

Besides, something strange was happening to him.

He thus received the sensation of existing, made acutely aware, in two times at once.

One natural to every state of ordinary life, the other fleeting in the extreme yet heavy in the beats of his heart, slipping through his fingers — locked together in meditation — like water through a basket.

So much so that when he looked at the clock, striking a match, he confirmed that the time elapsed was only minutes, while in his understanding those mechanical minutes, accelerated by his anxiety, had another length that no clock could measure.

He understood that any error made in such a state could prove fatal to him later on.

And although he meant to prepare an alibi, that was a difficult thing.

He had the feeling that the one who brooded thus in the gloom was not himself, but that he was watching his double — a double forged out of emotion, with his exact appearance: the rhomboid face, crossed arms, and the top hat pulled down over the forehead.

And yet he could not make out the nature of the thoughts of that double, so intimately bound to him and yet so far beyond his understanding.

For he judged that his sense of existing was, in those instants, more real than the existence of his body.

Later on, explaining the phenomenon, he said it was the awareness of the differing speed of the time his emotions lasted, inside that other, mechanical time — like those who say, 'that minute felt like a century to me.'

Since so grave a problem would not leave the Astrologer, he felt himself, within the clock's mechanical time, to be the physical man, while in the slow speed of that other time which no clock could control there dwelt his double — pensive, enigmatic, genuinely mysterious — perhaps preparing who knows what alibis that would later astonish the intelligent man.

Because there is no doubt that killing a man is the same as slitting a lamb's throat — but it is not so for the others, and although they are far off and my conduct is a mystery to them, this abnormal time brings them close to me, and I can scarcely move, as if they were there, in the shadow, spying on me.

It must be the time of nervousness that disables me, or the subconscious Astrologer who keeps his ideas to himself and leaves me squeezed like an orange, unable to conceive the thoughts I now need.

And yet, with Barsut dead, life will go on as though nothing had happened... and the truth is that nothing has happened, if this is never found out.'

The room was left shot through with the points of shifting shadows.

Not a minute had passed.

His thoughts were simultaneous and held, in the nothingness of time, events that to be present in the time gathering them would, in other circumstances, have needed months and years.

Thus he had been born forty-three years and seven days ago, and that past was forever annihilating itself in the present — a present so fleeting that he was always the Astrologer of the following minute, in the time of the minute or second yet to come.

Now his life, aimed toward a deed that did not yet exist but that would be consummated within a few hours, stretched itself inside mechanical time like a bow, whose pent-up violence gave clock time the extraordinary tension of that other time of unease.

Then he leapt from there to imagining a dictatorship, one that would sustain itself through the terror imposed by numerous executions; and the means of canceling that momentary repugnant impression was to picture the executed as horizontal men.

Indeed, he pictured at the center of the plain the small body of a man stretched out, and on comparing the length of the dead man with that of the thousands of kilometers the land he tyrannized measured, he seized upon the certainty that a man's life had no value at all.

How can we make the revolution without shooting anyone? — And this gladdened the Astrologer's heart.

He would establish that principle in his society.

The future patriarchs of races would be raised with an inexorable homicidal outlook; and once again his hopes broadened.

Time ran through his fingers, locked together by brooding.

He rose, enraged.

It was still raining.

He went out as far as the front steps, where he stopped, scrutinizing the wild darkness, shuddering under the water that fell thick and slow.

The gloom there seemed to form part of the existence of a monster that panted heavily in the dark.

The wet earth had turned ocher... And he was a firm man in the night, an instigator of grandiose events, and yet no phantom rose from the thicket to sanction his stance.

Now he wondered whether the men of other ages had suffered his indecisions, or whether they had marched toward the achievement of their ends, satisfied that Death lent a thickness of armor to their resolves.

But did death have any importance?

He said to himself that, as a philosophical being, the only thing that could interest him was the species, not the individual; but what besieged him with scruples were his feelings, which, against his will, split the time he needed into two strange times.