Everything in me can be summed up as an urge to be immediately something else; an impatience of the soul with itself, like an importunate child; a disquiet which is always on the increase and always identitical. Everything interests me and nothing retains my attention. I apply myself to everything by continually dreaming; I pin down the slightest details of the facial expressions of the person I am talking to. I register the intonations down to the last millimetre of what he expresses; but, even listening, I do not hear him, since I am in the process of thinking about something else, and what I remember least about our conversation is precisely what is said – by one or the other.

So, very often, I repeat to people what I have already told them, I ask over again a question to which they have already replied; but I can describe, in four photographic words, the facile expression which they employed to say what I no longer remember, or this tendency to listen only with the eyes to the story which I do not remember having told them. I am two – and both of them keep their distance, Siamese twins linked by nothing.

Soares