He dreamed of a woman’s voice, not Professor Pérez’s but a Frenchwoman’s, talking to him about signs and numbers and something Amalfitano didn’t understand, something the voice in the dream called “history broken down” or “history taken apart and put back together,” although clearly the reassembled history became something else, a scribble in the margin, a clever footnote, a laugh slow to fade that leaped from an andesite rock to a rhyolite and then a tufa, and from that collection of prehistoric rocks there arose a kind of quicksilver, the American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain. (2666)