Explore "Nietzsche on his Balcony" by Carlos Fuentes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I was in the room this morning. Was I wasting my time? It only seemed that way. Nothing happened, but perhaps it was necessary that nothing happen at first. Perhaps that was the ticket I had to pay for in advance.
When we were kids, we made up a game called the darkroom. Because my father, Zacarías, locked us in the room as punishment and gave the servants orders not to feed us for the rest of the day, we turned our prison into a new place-even an extreme place-to play in. We didn't tell anyone how we felt about the place, and no one guessed, not even my father who probably admired how docile we were in accepting the punishment and appreciated the barely-concealed joy with which we exited the dark-room, five or six hours later, when my mother, Charlotte's, murmur of protest reached us, indistinct, like a mist of complaints that climbed the stairway, passed through walls and curtains, and greeted us with a slight smell of onions and thyme from the distant kitchen.