It was not when I first started reading Marquis de Sade that something changed.
That is what I remember now.
Not then.
Later.
In an interval I could not reconstruct even if I tried to retrace every page.
For a long time, I thought I was following Sade.
Then I understood it was the other way around.
It was not a figure moving through the reading.
It was the way I held it that began to shift.
At first everything was stable.
Open books.
Margin notes.
Cross-references.
The 120 Days of Sodom.
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue.
Everything had an academic edge.
A safe distance.
But there was a point I cannot locate.
A minimal gesture.
I closed the book.
Left it on the table.
And did something else.
Nothing important.
Nothing that should have left a trace.
Yet when I returned, the book was still there.
Open.
Not just open.
On the same page.
The one I had decided not to finish.
The one I had avoided without noticing.
There was no immediate shock.
Only a delay in understanding.
As if the mind needed more time than usual to accept that something did not fit.
After that, I began noticing something else.
Small.
Persistent.
Not in the content.
In the way the content remained.
Sade was not an idea.
He was inertia.
Something that continued operating even when it was no longer being directly observed.
And the strangest part was not that.
It was that it started happening outside reading.
One afternoon, for no clear reason, I found myself looking at a flat surface.
A table.
Nothing important.
But the gaze did not fully leave.
As if it was waiting for something to appear there.
Something minimal.
A confirmation.
I do not know exactly when it started.
Only that it stopped being reading.
And became waiting.
And then checking.
As if looking a little longer could produce an answer that had failed to arrive simply because I had not insisted enough.
And that is where the crack appeared.
Not in Sade.
But in the need to keep returning to him.
Not out of curiosity.
But out of the increasingly difficult suspicion that understanding was always one step further.
And that step, inevitably, was the next one.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
