I couldn't expect anything from anyone. Other people served me as much as closed doors, abandoned houses. I watched them crumble, disappear into dust, smoke, shadow, nothing.

The isolated beach, the immense and dead sea: there I built my house. I lived alone for years; longer than anywhere else.

Nobody came to see me. There was no way to measure time. Perhaps in old farewells and meetings, in deaths and abandoned cigarettes, in hospitals with empty beds. Not in minutes or seconds or years.

The mirrors showed me a wrinkled face, sparse white hair and sunken lips. At times. At other times I saw a long forgotten face, hard and sullen and somewhat sad. Other times the mirrors remained dead like quicksilver lakes.

Ships pass by far, far away. I have seen them transform into inconceivable forms.
One morning someone came. His feet were sinking in the sand and he stumbled. He was clumsy. A big, clumsy insect. Up close he was a small, thin man. He talked as if he knew me, and he probably did. He stayed to live in the house, in silence, without altering my existence.

I hardly ever saw him. One afternoon he came and sat down next to me on the sand. He spoke of transformations and transits, of distant and unlikely lives, of impossible guilts. I listened to him without believing him. He was fulfilling his mission: he was drawing forgotten signs in the sand like an ancient sorcerer waiting for me to interpret them.

I knew that everything was true and that the next morning time would run again and my sentence would be resumed. I prepared myself for the new face and the new life.