Accounting
From my balcony, I see a man with a large, gray overcoat seated on a bench. A man lost in thought staring fixedly at the ground while he counts the stones in the pathway. He has been there for two days. Every once in a while he looks at his watch. On the third day I went down to the street, stopped in front of him and asked, “Are you waiting for someone? Is something wrong?” He raised his eyes, looked at me, and with a calm yet firm voice he answered, “No, sir, I am just waiting to be able to count the next stone.”
“But if they are always the same, and you have been here for three days, you must have already counted them a thousand times!”
“No, sir, they are not the same. Do you see that one on the left that is a little broken? Okay, yesterday it was the 12,301st, and now it is the 14,567th. And that one at the end that is next to the tree? A couple of hours ago it was the 14,020th; at this very moment it is the 14,550th.”
“Now I see, no two stones are the same!”
With that, the man with the large, gray overcoat finished his conversation with me, and oblivious to everything, immersed himself again into his own little world of accounting.
--Julia Otxoa. Translated by Clare Frantz
I'm not sure I completely understand. Are the stones breaking apart into more stones or is he just counting them in a different order making each stone a different number? Anyways I thought the language of the short story was good!
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