“The Street of Crocodiles” - “The Street of Crocodiles”
“The Street of Crocodiles” is suffused with grayness which exemplifies superficiality: “Through the corridors of books, from between the long shelves filled with magazines and prints, we make our way out of the shop and find ourselves in that part of the Street of Crocodiles where from the higher level one can see almost its whole length down to the distant, as yet unfinished building of the railway stations. It is, as usual in that district a gray day, and the whole scene seems like a photograph in an illustrated magazine, so gray, so-one-dimension are the houses, the people, and the vehicles.” This imagery sums up the street’s atmosphere, which is principally disconsolate. All the streets’ constituents are posturing, which makes the situation repellent.
“Condor” - “Cockroaches”
The condor is an animated pictogram in the narrator’s home. The narrator explicates, “From the bird estate only one specimen remained, the stuffed condor that now stood on a shelf in the living room. In the cool twilight of drawn curtains, it stood there as it did when it was alive, on one foot, in the pose of a Buddhist sage, its bitter dried-up ascetic face petrified in an expression of extreme indifference and abnegation. Its eyes had fallen out and sawdust scattered from the washed-out tear-stained sockets. Only the pale blue horny Egyptian protuberances on the powerful beak and the bald neck gave that senile head a solemnly hieratic air.” Although the condor is non-existent it personifies the intersection between actuality and departure. It depicts a life-like presence which provokes the narrator to equate it to his defunct father. Besides, it personifies the enduring acrimony and tears that eclipsed the father’s lifespan.
