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Updated: June 19, 2025
"Where is Mallare who fancied himself a madman? Who sought to climb over his senses and found himself impaled by a tower of Babel? Where are his angers, his disgusts that were the noble shadows thrown by his egoism to blot out a world? Ballad of rhetorical questions. My vanity preens itself with reminiscences. I smile. I am depressed and content. Answers whisper. Mallare is on his feet.
'My senses that fancy they have killed a woman have given birth to an illusion of guilt. And you are that illusion. My madness dresses itself in logic like a fishwife hanging rhinestones in her hair. "'Be calm, I said, 'Mallare has slain only a phantom, and the murder of illusions is a highly respectable privilege whose exercise is rewarded on earth as well as in heaven.
He had accomplished an annihilation. Three months had passed since he had written in his Journal the command to find a woman. She was waiting for him now as he returned to his home. In the three months he had devoted himself to her transformation. Mallare no longer raged. In the lucidity of his thought was a strange lapse.
In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an impotent disgust for, whatever was contemporary. When his normality abandoned him, he avoided a greater tragedy. In a manner it was not Mallare who became insane. It was his point of view that went mad. Although there are passages in the Journal that escape coherence, the greater part of the entries are simple almost to naiveté.
"It snows, snows," he murmured after a pause. "And I remember something. What is it I think! Rita ... Yes, there would be blood if Rita were ... Hm, the murdered one. There was something I didn't remember while I walked. "I can't. Not that way. Careful, Mallare. Be careful. There are thoughts impossible to think. Yes, impossible." Again silence filled him. His drawn eyes widened.
A parental pride excites me. Like Mallare, her father, she rises above herself. I have breathed the soul of hate into her. My hatred alive with a cleverness of its own speaks to itself. "'It says, 'I am the hatred of Mallare. I desire to murder him. I am his phantom, but the suffering and insult he has heaped upon me grow unbearable. His cruelty and coldness have filled me with fury.
She was like a curtain fluttering before the door of enchantments. Her breasts were like little blind faces raised in prayer. Yes, Rita, my radiant one. The phantom I constructed. The Phoenix that arose in my soul. And that I slew again. I am in love. But my magic no longer works. She does not return. "I will whisper. I kneel with Goliath beside the couch. Ah, Mallare, Mallare I am mad with love.
But for this I will have to find a woman." It was autumn. The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically against a denuded sky. Fantazius Mallare walked slowly toward his home.
The writing on them seems at a glance part of a decoration in black and white. The letters are beautifully formed and shaded. They resemble laboring serpents, dainty pagodas, vines bearing strange fruits and capricious bits of sculpture. To the end Mallare fancied himself aware of the drift and nuance of his madness. Its convolutions seemed neither incomprehensible nor mysterious to him.
"But this creature was not to be diverted from himself. "'He is another one of them, I thought. 'He walks and implores and wrings his hand and babbles, 'blood, blood that was real. And there is nothing to be done with him. Another pathologic symptom asks the hospitality of Mallare, and I must make the proper pretense of graciousness and cordiality. "'But first I must identify my guest.
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