As a child, I was a zealous worshiper of the tiger: not the piebald "tiger" of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of verdure afloat on the Panará river, but the striped, Asiatic, royal tiger which can only be faced down by war-men fortified on elephantback.

I used to linger endlessly in front of one of the cages at the zoo; I judged the gigantic encyclopedias and natural history books according to the majesty of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations; I who cannot rightly recall a woman’s brow or smile.)

Childhood passed, the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but they endure in my dreams. In the submerged dimension, at that level of the chaotic, they persist. So, as I sleep, some dream distracts me and I know at once it is a dream. I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and now that my power is limitless, I am going to cause a tiger.

Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams bear forth the wild beast I yearn for. A tiger appears indeed, but autopsied or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or far too fleeting, or with something of the bird or the dog.