The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz

fact of this transparency dissolves or becomes motionless, ceasing to flow. Six o’clock in the afternoon turns into a transparent immobility that has no depth and no reverse side: there is nothing behind it.
     
    The notion that the very heart of time is a fixity that dissolves all images, all times, in a transparency with no depth or consistency, terrifies me. Because the present also becomes empty: it is a reflection suspended in another reflection. I search about for a reality that is less dizzying, a presence that will rescue me from this abysmal now, and I look at Splendor—but she is not looking at me: at this moment she is laughing at the gesticulations of a little monkey as it leaps from its mother’s shoulder to the balustrade, swings by its tail from one of the balusters, takes a leap, falls at our feet a few steps away from us, looks up at us in terror, leaps again and this time lands on the shoulder of its mother, who growls and bares her teeth at us. I look at Splendor and through her face and her laugh I am able to make my way to another moment of another time, and there on a Paris street corner, at the intersection of the rue du Bac and the rue de Montalembert, I hear the same laugh. And this laugh is superimposed on the laugh that I hear here, on this page, as I make my way inside six o’clock in the afternoon of a day that I am creating and that has stopped still on the terrace of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Galta.
     

     
    Hanumn flying over the mountains, Jaipur, 19th century.
     
    The times and the places are interchangeable: the face that I am now looking at, the one that, without seeing me, laughs at the monkey and its panic, is the one that I am looking at in another city, at another moment—on this same page. Never is the same when, the same laugh, the same stains on the wall, the same light of the same six o’clock in the afternoon. Each when goes by, changes, mingles with other whens, disappears and reappears. This laughter that scatters itself about here like the pearls of a broken necklace is the same laugh as always and always another, the laugh heard on a Paris street corner, the laugh of an afternoon that is drawing to a close and blending with the laugh that silently, like a purely visual cascade, or rather an absolutely mental one—not the idea of a cascade but a cascade become idea—plunges down onto my forehead and forces me to close my eyes because of the mute violence of its whiteness. Laughter: cascade: foam: unheard whiteness. Where do I hear this laughter, where do I see it? Having lost my way amid all these times and places, have I lost my past, am I living in a continuous present? Although I haven’t moved, I feel that I am coming loose from myself: I am where I am and at the same time I am not where I am. The strangeness of being here, as though here were somewhere else; the strangeness of being in my body, of the fact that my body is my body and that I think what I think, hear what I hear. I am wandering far, far away from myself, by way of here, journeying along this path to Galta that I am creating as I write and that dissipates on being read. I am journeying by way of this here that is not outside and yet is not inside either; I am walking across the uneven, dusty surface of the terrace as though I were walking inside myself, but this inside of myself is outside: I see it, I see myself walking in it. “I” is an outside. I am looking at Splendor and she is not looking at me: she is looking at the little monkey. She too is coming loose from her past, she too is in her outside. She is not looking at me, she is laughing, and with a toss of her head, she makes her way inside her own laughter.
     
    From the balustrade of the terrace I see the courtyard below. There is no one there, the light has stopped moving, the banyan tree has firmly planted itself in its immobility, Splendor is standing at my side laughing, the little monkey is terrified and runs to hide in