"When I arrived, the island was breathing in silence. It was at night time and a thick and icy mist was rocking the beach porch and the pine forest that surrounded the old country house where I was born, where I learned of my father's death and where my mother gave in to her covardice and killed herself. That had been long time ago, but some things are never forgotten, no matter how much sand banks and sea tang you throw in between, despite the fact that, at that time, that was something I still ignored and out of a fit of youth I decided to leave the house and put it up for sale. Obviously, due to the far-off location and the absolute seclusion that cornered it nobody showed any interest in the old house, so I desisted from my speculative intention and I exiled myself to Capital City where, if streets where not paved with gold, at least there was plenty of choices to go round. I closed the windows of the house, I cut off the water, the gas and the light, I drew the curtains back, I pulled down the roller blinds and I left the place to its own devices without even picking out the scarce assets I was leaving behind to stuff them into the suitcase along with my clothes, my toilet requisites and my childhood memories. I wrote my name and my telephone number on a paper rag which I stuck on the wooden door should anyone want to live there and we had to talk over the issue of the most suitable terms."

(Del llibre Obansheë [traducció inèdita de Víctor Aldea]. Barcelona: Columna, 2002, p. 241)

* * *

"Nineteen days and eighteen nights passed by during which I merely slept through the day and pondered all night long. Nineteen days of underlying insomnia, unable to reach an agreement with the sound sleep to help me have some rest, to assist me in understanding, to help me forget. Nineteen days of insomniac nightmares, of recurrent stories and make-believe characters who appeared and disappeared along with the voracity of much-needed sleep. Monsters and hangmen, lamias and naiads bubbled in my sleeper mind at dawn, hour by hour, day by day, dream by dream, truceless, truthless, and with a patience befitting a lurking predator.
Sleepless nights and two only thoughts clinging on to my head: the song of the Night Mermaid who had charged at me on the open sea and who later had hushed and faded into the forum with the whisper of what I recalled of that geometric figure which Miörgey used during her talk at the Fine Arts Society.
Once I had retrieved the napkin that kept Siobhán’s telephone number as well as the address where the talk given by my publisher’s wife’s niece had been held and the drawing I had managed to doodle in the middle of her babble I took good care to reproduce the shape in pencil on a piece of paper I found in one of the kitchen’s drawers and I endeavoured to remember the story with which Miörgey had illustrated the geometric figure so that I could provide it with some significance. I couldn’t come up with any or rather those I could think of were much too preposterous to be taken seriously.
Did Obansheë’s Jewel read my fortunes? Did it bear any relation, no matter how obtuse it might be, to the restlessness which had taken hold of me from the very moment I had written the name of the mature woman on her copy of The Hierophant? If so, where did the connection lay? And, even more important, was it meant to have any? What resemblance did the name of Siobhán bear with that of Obansheë? Chance? Odds? Correspondence? What did the text that had been slipped down the mouth of my postbox back home on the eve of my departure from Capital City know about the mock-game I had been lured into? Little more than a pseudology game, at best, a jigsaw of quiet voices that swelled up and lost breath within a chorus of reasons I could not understand eagerly aiming to impersonate a discussion which proved grotesque to the ear.
Other voices took over from the previous ones; new voices, vicious and inexorable, which were impossible to be silenced, oblivious as they were, until all of a sudden they got their breath back and resumed their approach: the voices of history."

(Del llibre Obansheë [traducció inèdita de Víctor Aldea]. Barcelona: Columna, 2002, p. 246-248)