I am living in the Villa Borghese.  There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced.  We are all alone here and we are dead.
    Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy.  I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop.  How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this?  But no matter.  We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.  
    Boris had just given a summary of his views.  He is a weather prophet.  The weather  will continue bad, he says.  There will be more calamities, more death, more despair.  Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere.  The cancer of time is eating us away.  Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.  The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness.  We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death.  There is no escape.  The weather will not change.

    It is now the fall of my second year in Paris.  I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.  I have no money, no resources, no hopes.  I am the happiest man alive.  A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist.  I no longer think about it, I am.  Everything that was literature has fallen from me.  There are no more books to be writen, thank God.
    This then?  This is not a book.  This is libel, slander, defamation of character.  This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word.  No, this is a prolonged insult,a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will.  I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.  I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...  
    To sing you must first open your mouth.  You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music.  It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar.  The essential thing is to want to sing.  This then is a song.  I am singing.

    It is to you , Tania, that I am singing.  I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me.  You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold.  They sang, too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
    It is the twenty-something of October.  I no longer keep track of the date. Would you say-my dream of the 14th November last?   There are intervals but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left.  The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time.  The world is a cancer eating itself away...I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph.  When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.  You, Tania, are my chaos.  It is why I sing.  It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time.  I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.