— Silence, everyone! Here begins the Book of Don Ecuménico’s Transformations. A hurrah for Being, and two more for Non-Being! Hip-hip-hurrah! Would anyone care for a cup of ambrosia bottled and zealously sealed by the Eternal?
He paused again, as if disoriented. Clearly, Don Ecuménico was raving and he knew it. With an effort of human will, he restored order to his agitated insectoid physique. Then he spoke thus:
— We come now, gentlemen, to the hardest part of my story. It’s no big deal to recount the metamorphosis of a soul, but to describe a body’s transformation is a monstrous task, and thankless to boot, for the narrator must deviate from the usual laws that govern the famous human biped and thus risk foundering on the reefs of his listeners’ incredulity.
”I’d be lying if I claimed to know at just what point my metamorphosis began, though I sometimes wonder if the transformation both in body and soul didn’t start at the same time and develop in tandem. My first clue that something was out of the ordinary was in the behaviour of the Librarian, about whose true identity — man or demon — I was beginning to have my doubts. He’d been in the habit of suddenly showing up in Room Number Three, slipping in stealthily with some excuse that poorly concealed his intent to spy on me; we would sneak oblique glances at one another, then he’d leave shrouded in his eternal air of indifference. But later I noticed that my man, upon entering, would stand there looking perplexed, his eyes searching the entire room until they located me. And yet, there I was, right in front of his nose, sitting as always in the same chair under the skylight! What was wrong with him? Was he going blind? Things came to such a pass that one morning, facing the Librarian, I had to shout to get him to notice my presence. I immediately questioned him about his eyesight — and I’ll never forget the needling irony in his voice when he assured me that it was excellent! I got worried. If there was nothing wrong with the man’s vision, it was logical to suppose that the cause of his optical aberrations wasn’t in him but in me. At once, a clear suspicion, an unutterable fear invaded me. I used to carry around this little mirror for the purpose of inspecting my teeth; well, I spent the better part of the morning fending off the temptation to look at my face in the mirror. Finally, half frightened, half curious, I overcame my qualms and took a look. At first, I couldn’t see my face at all. Straining my sight, I eventually picked out my eyes, nose, mouth, and hair, but they were faded and ghost-like. Then I observed my bottle-green suit, my blue overcoat, my chestnut shoes, and realized they too had lost their factory-made colours and had taken on the unique, indefinable, dead tone characteristic of all things in Room Number Three. No doubt about it! It was a case of mimetic adaptation, comparable to the way certain varmints adopt the ambient colour of the foliage, stones, or stagnant water of their habitat.
”Far from alarming me, the phenomenon redoubled my sense of security and so my confidence. By this point I was spending the whole day in Room Number Three, minus a fifteen-minute break to go out for a glass of milk with vanilla biscuits. My life had organized itself into two isochronic phases: one of metaphysical voracity, which inevitably declined into another of profound lethargy. The truth is, at first, under cover of my recently discovered invisibility, I had fun startling the Librarian, sneaking up on him and blowing a raspberry right in his ear. But finally that little game got boring, and I ended up giving myself over entirely to reading and sleeping. When night fell, I went home to the rooming house, my last link to the realm of men. But one day that link broke, too. It happened like this:
”After one of my spells of post-reading lethargy, I woke up as usual in Room Number Three, curled up in the leather armchair in the light of the green lamp. I stood up, went over to the skylight, and was surprised to discover that outside it was as dark and still as midnight. I opened the famous little door, went into the second room and then on to the children’s room: I roamed through the entire mansion. All was dark and empty, the doors locked, the balconies bolted. No doubt about it: the Librarian, at closing time, hadn’t found me in Room Number Three and, assuming I’d left, had inadvertently shut me up in the big deserted house. Midnight! Alone! The whole mansion was mine! You can’t imagine the dark rapture that came over me at this realization, the intellectual orgy to which I then abandoned myself throughout that night of nights. What legendary proportions, what mythological hues graced the poor little insurance broker called Don Ecuménico!
”From then on, I didn’t go back to my rooming house. I don’t know whether my definitive eclipse alarmed Doña Consuelo, whether she reported it to the police, or whether they looked for me in morgues and hospitals. Henceforth, day and night, Room Number Three was my only residence, the place of my banquets and fits of lassitude. I still went out for fifteen minutes a day to the dairy bar. But later I managed to do without those outings by stocking the pockets of my blue overcoat with enough chocolate, biscuits, and caramels to last me two weeks. Whether negligently or wisely, the Librarian almost never looked in on the room. Moreover, a hard winter had arrived and not many readers were coming to the library. Settled deep in my armchair, I listened to the pitter-patter of the rain on the panes of the skylight. My periods of being awake were growing shorter, my lethargies longer and deeper.
”One night I awoke with a start: in my soul I felt more lucid than ever before. But my body felt a tremendous weakness. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, and with increasing alarm I noticed my clothes were ridiculously big on me, my bottle-green suit was falling off my shoulders, my extremities were either no longer there or had shrunk prodigiously within their sleeves and trouser cuffs. Was it a nightmare or not? Careful! My intelligence was wide awake, my eyes registered no other reality than the very reassuring presence of Room Number Three, with its reading table, green lamp, familiar bookshelves, and the skylight drummed by the rain. And yet, it was as though I were tied to the armchair; something held me in place, an inertia dominating my little bit of a physique and prudently warning it against any attempt to stir! But I had no intention of staying stuck there like an oyster; come what may, I had to snap out of it and get back to my studies. Up you get, then, Ecuménico! Back to work! And when I tried to get up, the second revelation of the night occurred. I attempted to place my hands on the table and my feet on the floor, like any creature trying to stand up from a sitting position. But my arms and legs wouldn’t obey the order. Actually, it wasn’t just that my limbs weren’t responding; it felt as if they were no longer even there. As my body attempted to right itself, I lost my balance, tumbled out of the leather armchair, and fell in a muffled, insignificant little heap, the softness of my landing due, I thought, to the ample padding of my clothes. And what a pile of clothes! I felt trapped and suffocated inside them, as if a tent had fallen on top of me. Twisting and turning with a rather disconcerting flexibility, I clambered my way through the stack of familiar garments until I emerged into the light and saw myself naked on the carpet. And what I saw was certainly curious: Don Ecuménico, former insurance broker, had been transformed into a beautiful little creature with a vermiform body, a worm with plump rings gazing in wonder at his new structure!
”For you mustn’t think that the discovery of such an uncommon metamorphosis caused me the slightest hint of panic. True, I was concerned at first about what I imagined to be the awkward aspects of my new constitution. But when I crawled comfortably, and not without elegance, across the carpet; when I dared scale the walls with the same aplomb; when I crawled across the ceiling upside down, disdaining the daunting old laws of gravity; when I looked at things from hitherto unknown perspectives and measured the wealth of my new possibilities, then a joyous exultation came over me, lasting throughout the night until the break of day. But then, seeing daylight filtering through the skylight, I remembered the Librarian: would the blind man notice my scandalous transformation? There lay my clothing in a heap on the floor, the discarded garments recovering their original colours now that they’d left me. Inevitably, the Librarian would have to see them when he came to Room Number Three! Fortunately, I had a renewed attack of what I described earlier as infinite voracity, except that now it wasn’t for intellectual substances: I hungered for material solids, stuff I could gnaw on and swallow. So I ate up all my clothes. Then, returning to my leather armchair, I watched for the Librarian’s arrival. He came in at last, looked around vacantly, and left. Deo gratias!