The Mountain
The mountain is three thousand feet high. I’ve resolved to eat it, bit by bit. It’s a mountain like any other: vegetation, rocks, earth, animals, even human beings climbing up and down its slopes.
Every morning I lie down against it and begin to chew the first thing I come to. I continue in this fashion for several hours. I return home, my body exhausted and my jaw destroyed. After a brief rest, I sit in the doorway to watch the mountain in the blue distance.
If I told my neighbor these things, he would surely burst out laughing or think I was crazy. But knowing what I have taken on, I can clearly see that the mountain is losing mass and height. Eventually they will speak of geological upheavals.
And that is my tragedy: no one will want to admit that I was the one who devoured the three-thousand-foot mountain.
—Virgilio Piñera, 1957. Translated by Mark Schafer. From Cold Tales.