the window and, although I would have preferred that too, I always gave in on those occasions when there was only one of something. My character had largely consisted of giving in, and it still does now. I have only been able to reject things or to fight for them with my thoughts and, lately, as I say, I do not even think. Perhaps that is why I would be best off on my own, so that there is no possibility of my rejecting anyone or fighting with anyone. Nevertheless, there has almost always been someone near, and one of my last thoughts before closing my eyes used to be that no one, not even Berta who was lying beside me, would really be watching over my sleep, and that during that prolonged state of unguardedness and oblivion, I would be lost if anything bad were to happen to me. Not that Berta neglected me (she would say goodnight and give me a kiss), but she was incapable of understanding my sleep or of understanding me in my sleep. It is terrifying how people are simply abandoned with an absolutely easy conscience on the part of others, as if it were perfectly natural, to long, hazardous hours in which it is taken for granted that they do not need anything because they are sleeping, as if sleeping were in effect what so many literati have liked to say it was: a suspension of all vital needs, the closest analogy with death. People sometimes struggle to understand each other, not that anyone is really equipped to understand, that is, to see the totality of what exists or does not exist. But at least they pretend to be struggling to do so during the day. On the other hand, no one bothers or makes the slightest effort to understand our sleep, for although, in Spanish, the word for "sleep," "sueño," also means "dream," our sleep is not the same as our dreams, which have already been subjected to far too many explanations. Berta, at any rate, had not even paused to consider the idea that our mind and our body continue the same in the nocturnal realm, indeed for her—as I saw quite clearly from the first night we spent together—my whole person ended or was interrupted, ceased to exist, was cancelled out, the moment we fell asleep, especially the moment when she fell asleep; whereas I, conscious that Berta required as much attention and care asleep as awake, would lie for a long time with my eyes open, vaguely thinking about myself and staring at that wall decorated only by an enormous Italian calendar (febbraio, maggio, luglio), in order to accommodate as best I could her sleeping mind and body, and trying to accustom myself to the idea that my own sleeping thoughts should understand her sleep, that is, understand her as she slept. Sometimes, for that reason, I would lie awake for two or three hours, watching over Berta. The bedroom in our apartment in Barcelona in which I thought and watched and slept was rather on the small side, because, as I have heard so many other couples say, it's a shame to waste space in an apartment on the bedrooms, when they only need to be big enough to take a bed. I wasn't then as famous as I am now beginning to be, I didn't earn much money, the apartment was small too, at least in comparison with where I live now. Now my bedroom isn't small, nor am I faced, as I go to sleep, by a wall, because there are windows on three of the four walls. It is full of light and there is more than enough space. I sleep in a larger bed, in a vast bed with lion's feet carved in wood. Now I am the Lion of Naples, Léon de Nápoles, however ridiculous it is for me to say so, especially when I no longer know whether the sobriquet flatters or offends. And while I have been transformed into the famous Léon de Nápoles, Berta is dead and has been transformed into nothing. About three weeks ago, I heard from a man whom I do not know and who, as he explained in his letter (written in a neat, troubling, sloping hand), had married her and lived with her (that is, he had done almost the same as I had done for one year, five
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