The day when the bank auditor, who worked at the local newspaper, commissioned Robert, due to his origins in the cultured classes of London, to write a small piece about the activities of the English colonists who came to the shores of the Americas in the sixteenth century, what they survived on, how many of them there might have been, the religious cults they practiced, how it was that in the first moment of history they came to domesticate the savage American wilderness, and how it was that after this initial phase they moved inland to Nevada and founded, with the use of a little mud and four pieces of timber, what is today Carson City, that day, we said, nobody imagined that Robert would go and shut himself in the cockpit of his plane for three days and three nights, motionless in the metal silence of the hangar, his hands resting on the controls and his gaze fixed on the artificial horizon of the control panel, going without food and virtually not drinking anything, either, refusing to see anyone, and refusing all suggestions, too, finally taking the following to the printer’s:
We have to free the fluids, all the fluids, whether they be liquid or gas, that we humans have been compressing here on earth. We have to allow them to expand. We have to turn on all the taps in our houses at once, and the taps on our pools and in the wells, the whole supply network. All gas cylinders must be unscrewed, all air supplies that have been compressed inside all sorts of mechanisms, in refrigerators, in air-conditioning units, and the gases used medicinally in hospitals, too, the wind in our stomachs, everything. They’ll do it themselves anyway, sooner or later. It makes no sense to carry on hindering that which the cosmologists call the Expansion of the Universe.