The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui Quotes

“Thus the maid went from illness to illness until, one day, she died. Alfanhui and his master buried her in the garden with a headstone etched in vinegar saying: Selfless and Silent.”

“Alfanhui would have been unable to say whether there was a dark solitude in his eyes and an unfathomable silence in his ears because the music and the colors came from that other place from which concrete knowledge never comes, a place abandoned on the very first day behind the farthermost wall of memory where that other memory is born;”

“In the middle of the ring of birds on the ceiling, a circle seemed to open up to which all the primitive colors were returning. The thousand greens of the jungles, the white of waterfalls and, from the land of wading birds, the pink and grey of the wetlands, with a red sun trembling on the muddy, bloodshot surface.”

“The fog of silence and solitude vanished, and forgotten visions awoke as the music of the wind and the rain met the dead colors of the birds.”

“You have yellow eyes like a stone curlew’s, so I’ll name you Alfanhui because that is the name the stone curlews call to each other.”

“Alfanhui knew about firewood. He knew which kinds of wood gave off sad flames and which gave off joyful flames, those that made strong, dark fires or those that made bright, dancing fires, those that left female embers to warm the dreams of cats or others that left male embers to bring repose to hunting dogs.”

“All his classmates envied him his ink because it was so bright and pretty, with sepia tone none of them had ever seen before. However, the boy learned a strange alphabet that no one else understood and he had to leave the school because the teacher said he was setting a bad example.”

“The lizards, though freshly dead, were nonetheless embarrassed, because the little gland that secretes the red of blushes or rather the yellow of embarrassment- for lizards turn cold and yellow when embarrassed- had not yet dried up.”

“The master used to tell stories long into the night. When he began to tell them, the maid would light the fire. The maid knew all the stories and would stoke up the fire as the story began to build. When it became monotonous, she would let the fire die down and, at moments of excitement, she would put on more wood until the story ended and she allowed the fire to go out.”