2666

by Roberto Bolaño

he didn’t like it there, and he dawdled on his way, finding the path neither flat nor flat with hills nor flat with switchbacks, but vertical, a prolonged fall toward the bottom of the sea where everything, trees, grass, swamps, animals, fences, was transformed into marine insects or crustaceans, into suspended and remote forms of life, into starfish and sea spiders, whose bodies, the young Reiter knew, were so tiny that the animal’s stomach didn’t fit inside and extended into its legs, which were themselves enormous and mysterious, or in other words contained an enigma (or at least for him they did), because the sea spider has eight legs, four on each side, plus another pair, much smaller, in fact infinitely smaller and useless, at the end nearest its head, and those legs or tiny appendages struck Reiter not as legs but as hands, as if the sea spider, over a long process of evolution, had finally developed two arms and therefore two hands but didn’t know yet that it had them. How long would the sea spider be unaware that it had hands?