I looked at the façade of the clinic through the slightly fogged window of the taxi and understood that what lay behind it, more than anything, even more than madness, was solitude, which is perhaps the subtlest or at least the most lucid of the forms that madness can take.

It was seven in the evening on the seventh of April, and Madame Vallejo, Madame Reynaud and I had just arrived at the Clinique Arago. I had barely spoken during the taxi ride. The women seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, and in any case my thoughts had strayed into nebulous regions that were hardly compatible with chatting.

“You seem miles away,” remarked Madame Reynaud, while at the other of the lobby, her friend exchanged a few words with the nurse in charges of reception.

“Not at all,” I replied with a smile.

Then we followed Madame Vallejo down grey and white corridors, with a metallic, phosphorescent sheen, blemished here and there by unexpected black rectangles.

“It’s like a modern art gallery…”

That night — the last hours of the seventh of April, and the early hours of the eighth — had the ambivalent honor of being one of the worst nights of my life. I can’t remember what it was when I went to bed, nor in what state I climbed the stairs. I slept, if that shivering can be counted as sleep, in a low-roofed, gray-and-white labyrinth, architecturally reminiscent of the Clinique Arago with its circular corridors; sometimes the dream-corridors were broader and stretched off endlessly, something they were narrower, like twisted vestibules, and the starts and groans with which I woke and fell asleep again were not the worst of it. What was I doing there? Was I there of my own free well, or was some external force holding me in that place? Was I looking for Vallejo, or for someone else? I believe that if the company of nightmares conspired to visit me all at once, the result would be similar to what I experienced that night.

Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain