Toward
morning, having entered the room earlier than he, I waited for him. In the silence,
I heard the mysterious rustling of the sheet of yellow newspaper that replaced
the missing windowpane.
"That's subtle," I said to myself.
I was discovering a lot of new words. In the silence of the room and of my heart, in the waiting for Stilitano, this slight noise disturbed me, for before I came to understand its meaning, there elapsed a brief period of anxiety. Who--or what--is calling such fleeting attention to itself in a poor man's room?
"It's a newspaper printed in Spanish," I said to myself again. "It's only natural that I don't understand the sound it's making."
Then I really felt I was in exile, and my nervousness was going to make me permeable to what--for want of other words--I shall call poetry.
--from The Thief's Journal