The murdered Poet became for him the gash in the center of the sun, the model and the justification for being misunderstood. From the audience, during academic conferences, he hurled passionate and senseless accusations at the speakers, which were met with chuckles and mild feelings of guilt. Even though he had a stable relationship and many occasional lovers, more and more it seemed to him that the double seduction left unfulfilled on that far-off day was the one true memorable event in his life.
At every meeting I raise the amount, first one hundred and fifty, then two hundred, then two hundred and fifty—to erase his apathy, to wrest from him a jolt of interest or at least greed; but after just a few days he gets comfortable with the new state of affairs (which is destroying me economically, and much more quickly than I had foreseen), he mentally registers that he’ll make more from me and he takes it for granted from that moment on.
