The snow, ugly and grey as it was in the city of Electric Fans, was still snow.
The snow, cast in my illiterate fantasies as the perfect image of love, and not without reason.
The snow, totally without innocence beneath its guileless beatitude.
The snow, wherein I read things that made me very hot and then very cold.
The snow, hard and dirty, which I ended up eating in the vain hope of finding an answer.
The snow, exploded water, frozen sand, salt without sodium born not of earth but of sky, flinty-tasting, sap-textured, cold-smelling, white-pigmented, the only color that falls from the clouds.
The snow, that deadens everything—noises, tumbles, time—and thereby calls into question all that is eternal and immutable, like blood and light and illusions.
The snow, History’s original parchment, on which so many paths, so many merciless pursuits have been written; the snow that was therefore the first literary genre, an immense book set at ground-level, filled with nothing but hunting spoors and enemy itineraries, a sort of geographic epic in which even the most minor markings become enigmas—is this my brother’s footprint, or his murderer’s?
There remains not one fragment of this unending, unfinished book, which might be called The Biggest Book in the World—unlike those of the Library of Alexandria, all of its texts have melted. But something must have remained with us, a distant memory that reappears with each new snowfall, the vague anguish of a blank page that sparks the terrible urge to tread its virgin spaces, the instinctive urge for explanation that arises the moment one discovers the trace of an Other.
When you get right down to it, snow invented mystery. And in doing so, it invented poetry, the woodcut, the question mark—and that great foot-race that is love.
The snow, that false shroud, that great empty ideogram in which I deciphered the infinity of sensations that I wanted to offer my beloved.
I did not care whether my desire was pure or impure. I knew only that the snow made Elena more irresistible, my beautiful secret more breathtaking, and my battle plan more unbearable.
LISTEN | 
