A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs

A few years ago, when I was young and hadn’t yet read Siegfried Lenz or Arno Schmidt – and neither, as it happens, Kurt Tucholsky, Karl Valentin or Georg C. Lichtenberg; moreover, I hadn’t read Jakob van Hoddis, Kurt Schwitters or Georg Heym, the sad, unfortunate Georg Heym – and when in spite of everything I wanted to become a writer, I lived beneath the living Argentine writer. Fortunately, this statement isn’t metaphorical. I didn’t live under the living Argentine writer in the same way that some Argentine writers live under the influence of others and all under the influence of Jorge Luis Borges; rather, I really lived under the living Argentine writer and was his neighbour and the depositary of a puerile mystery that would interest only me but would change everything.