The Lives of Things Read Online Free Page A

head, as foreseen and in accordance with the laws of physics, hit the ground before bouncing a little, let me say about two centimetres up and to one side; now that we are at the scene and have taken other measurements. From now on the chair no longer matters. Not even the rest of the fall is of any further consequence for it is now irrelevant. Buck Jones’s plan included, as we have already mentioned, a trajectory, it had a goal in mind. There it is.
    Whatever may happen now is on the inside. First let it be said, however, that the body fell again, and the accompanying chair, of which no more will be said or only in passing. It is indifferent to the fact that the speed of sound should suddenly equal the speed of light. What had to be, happened. Eve might frantically rush to help, muttering prayers as one does on these occasions, or perhaps not on this occasion, if it is true that catastrophes leave their victims speechless, although they can still scream. Which explains why domesticated Eve, such martyrdom, kneels and asks questions now that the catastrophe is over and all that remains are the consequences. It will not be long before the Cains appear from everywhere if it is not unfair to call them by the name of the wretched fellow on whom the Lord turned his back, thereby taking human revenge on an obsequious and scheming brother. Nor shall we call them vultures, even though they move like this, or don’t, or do: much more accurate under the dual heading of morphology and characterology, to include them in the chapter of hyenas, and this is a great discovery. With the important exception that hyenas, just like vultures, are useful animals who clear dead flesh from the landscapes of the living, and for this we should be grateful to them, while they continue to be the hyena and its own dead flesh, and this, in the final analysis, is the great discovery we mentioned earlier. The perpetuum mobile, contrary to what amateur inventors and enlightened wonder-workers of carpentry ingenuously imagine, is not mechanical. Rather it is biological, it is this hyena feeding on its dead and putrefied body, thereby constantly reconstituting itself in death and putrefaction. To interrupt the cycle, not everything would suffice, yet the slightest thing would be ample. At times, were Buck Jones not away on the other side of the mountain in pursuit of some simple and honest cattle-rustlers, a chair would serve, both as a fulcrum to lever the earth, as Archimedes said to Heron of Syracuse, and to burst the blood vessels which the bones of the cranium judged they were protecting, and judged is used here literally, for it seemed unlikely that bones so near to the brain could be incapable of carrying out, by means of osmosis or symbiosis, a mental operation as simple as passing judgment. And even so, should this cycle be interrupted, we must pay attention to what might graft itself on at the moment of rupture, for it could turn out to be, not through grafting this time, another hyena emerging from that festering flank, like Mercury from Jupiter’s thigh, if I might be permitted this comparison with ancient mythology. But that is another story which has probably been told before.
    Domesticated Eve ran from this place, calling out and uttering words not worth repeating, so similar as to make little difference, although scarcely mediaeval, to those spoken by Leonor Teles when they murdered Andeiro, and, besides, she was a queen. This old man is not dead. He has simply fainted, and we can sit cross-legged on the floor at our ease, for a second is a century, and before the doctors and stretcher-bearers and hyenas in striped trousers arrive weeping their eyes out, an eternity will have passed. Let us take a closer look. Deathly pale, but not cold. His heart is beating, his pulse steady, the old man appears to be asleep, and I’ll be damned if this has not been one great blunder, a monstrous ruse to separate good from evil, wheat from the chaff,