The House of Asterion Quotes

“Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear
their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find
them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having
to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one
gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them
prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come. Since
then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will
finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should
hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries fewer doors. What
will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a
bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The House of Asterion