This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is "The Murder." And also "How to Kill Cockroaches." I will then do at least three stories, true because none of them lie to another. Although a single one, it would be a thousand and one, if a thousand and one nights would give it to me.

The first, "How to Kill Cockroaches," begins like this: I complained about cockroaches. A lady heard my complaint. She gave me a recipe on how to kill them. That I should mix in equal parts sugar, flour and plaster. The flour and sugar would attract them, the gypsum would sturge them. So I did. They died.

The other story is the very first one and is called "The Murder". It starts like this: I complained about cockroaches. A lady listened to me. The recipe follows. And then the murder comes in. The truth is that I had complained only in the abstract about cockroaches, which were not even mine: they belonged to the first floor and climbed up the pipes of the building to our home. Only when it was time to prepare the mixture did they become mine too. On our behalf, then, I began to measure and weigh ingredients in a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had seized me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible, and no one would believe the secret evil that gnawed at such a quiet house. But if they, like secret evils, slept during the day, there I was preparing their nightly poison. Meticulous, ardent, I poured the elixir of long death. An excited fear and my own secret evil guided me. Now I only wanted one thing gelidamente: to kill every cockroach there is. Cockroaches crawl up the pipes while we are tired and dreaming. And lo and behold, the recipe was ready, so white. As for smart cockroaches like me, I skillfully spread the powder until it seemed to be part of nature. From my bed, in the silence of the apartment, I imagined them climbing one by one to the service area where the dark slept, just an alert towel on the clothesline. I woke up hours later in a startled delay. It was already dawn. I crossed the kitchen. On the floor of the area there they were, hard, large. During the night I had killed them. In our name, it was dawn. On the hill a rooster crowed.

The third story that now begins is that of the "Statues". It begins by saying that I had complained about cockroaches. Then the same lady comes. It goes up to the point where, at dawn, I wake up and, still sleepy, walk through the kitchen. More sleepy than me is the area in its tiled perspective. And in the darkness of dawn, a purplishness that distances everything, I distinguish at my feet shadows and whites: dozens of statues spread rigidly. The cockroaches that had hardened from the inside out. Some on their bellies. Others in the middle of a gesture that would never be completed. In the mouths of some a bit of the white food. I am the first witness of the dawn in Pompeii. I know what this last night was like, I know the orgy in the dark. In some, the plaster will have hardened as slowly as in a vital process, and they, with ever more painful movements, will have painfully intensified the joys of the night, trying to escape from within themselves. Until they become stone-like, in awe of innocence, and with such, such a look of hurtful reproach. Others - suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even having had the intuition of an internal mold that was petrifying! - they suddenly crystallize, just as the word is cut from the mouth: I love you... They who, using the name love in vain, in the summer night sang. While the one over there, the one with the brown antenna dirty with white, will have guessed too late that she had mummified herself precisely because she had not known how to use things with the free grace of in vain: "I have looked too much into myself! I have looked too much into..." - from my cold human height I look at the collapse of a world. It is dawning. One or another dead cockroach antennae rustles dry in the breeze. The cockerel crows from the previous story.

The fourth narrative inaugurates a new era in the home. It begins as you know: I complained about cockroaches. It goes up to the moment when I see the plaster monuments. Dead, yes. But I look at the pipes, through which this very night will renew a slow, living population in single file. Would I then renew every night the lethal sugar? - Like one who no longer sleeps without the eagerness of a rite. And every night I would sleepwalk to the pavilion? - in the habit of going to meet the statues that my sweaty night erected. I shuddered with bad pleasure at the sight of that double life of a sorceress. And I also shuddered at the warning of the drying plaster: the vice of living that would burst my internal mold. A rough moment of choice between two paths that, I thought, say "goodbye", and certain that any choice would be a sacrifice: me or my soul. I chose. And today I secretly bear in my heart a virtue sign: "This house has been fumigated".

The fifth story is called "Leibniz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia". It begins like this: I complained about cockroaches.


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) (yes I used DeepL, not typing all of that out.)