TE19 Iberian Adventure

Autobiografia

as the immaterial, the beliefs filling it with breath. The body does not hold the ideas; it is the ideas that house the body, that allow it, that create the objective and subjective reasons for its existence. When he felt a silhouette approaching the sofa and the computer, José mustered his final impetuses and managed to throw himself in front of the machine, a resistant tatterdemalion, a miserable figure. However, the African’s spread hand was the size of José’s entire face, reaching from his chin up to his forehead, covering overhismouthand nosewith thepalm’sconcavesurface, stopping up his eyes with the base of the fingers; it was a massive volume, firm flesh. José collapsed helplessly; he was not granted the grace of being cushioned by the sofa, although he had reared in that direction, because he tripped with his heel over a stack of books and crumpled backwards over the floorboards speckled with assorted objects. The computer lay on a small wheeled metal desk, rickety and poorly screwed. With the same impulse, that same man ripped the monitor off its cables—a huge baby he held between his chest and his stomach, his chin sticking onto the plastic.Witha rough throw, he hurled thatweight inanexplosion, leaving it with disemboweled wires, the glass stomped on the center, crashed in an imperfect circle. The other, his scalp veins throbbing, did not want to be left behind and, holding onto one end of the keyboard, shattered its keys against the wall, making no distinction of vowels and consonants. Together, lastly, they kicked the remainder of the computer to smithereens.\

Even those bison-bodied men were tired, heaving amid an accumulation of objects that reached up to their ankles—the

21