Book 1, From the Other Side: Chapters 3, 84, 4, 71, 5, 81, 74 Summary

With Chapter 3, the point of view changes to third person omniscient. Horacio is in bed with La Maga, smoking as she sleeps. He is ruminating on the idea of choice, that every choice to do something contains in it the inverse choice not to do something else. He considers how easily he becomes caught up in these circular dialectical arguments with himself. He has always lived by Socrates dictum that all he knows is that he knows nothing. How, he wonders, can anyone take action if this is true? La Maga wakes, and he tells her what he has been thinking. She retorts that it is he who can never take action. He is forever, she says, observing life as though it were a painting.

In Chapter 84, Horacio pastes some leaves to a...