Eve.

• Author: Arreola, Juan Jose
• Position: Short story

He pursued her all through the library between tables, chairs, and lecterns. She escaped, while speaking of women's rights, which had been grossly violated. Five thousand absurd years separated them. For five thousand years she had been pursued inexorably, held back, reduced to slavery. He tried to justify himself by praising his virtues rapidly and in a fragmentary fashion, uttering broken, incomplete sentences with tremulous gestures.

He searched vainly for the texts that could support his theories. The library, specializing in Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was a great enemy arsenal bolstering the concept of honor and similar atrocious ideas.

The young man tirelessly cited J. J. Bachofen, the wise man all women should read, because he has restored to them the grandeur of their role in prehistoric times. If the savant's books were at hand, he would have confronted her with the portrait of that obscure civilization, ruled over by women when the earth had a hidden, womb-like humidity in all its parts and man was trying to raise himself out of it by building lake dwellings.

But the girl was left cold by all this. That matriarchal period, unfortunately belonging to prehistoric times and scarcely provable, seemed to increase her resentment. She always got away, fleeing from one bookshelf to another; sometimes she climbed up the ladders and overwhelmed the young man with a rain of abuse. Fortunately, in his defeat something came to his aid. He suddenly remembered Heinz Wolpe. Citing this author, his voice acquired a new and powerful accent.

"In the beginning there was only one sex, evidently feminine, which reproduced itself automatically. A mediocre being began to take form...