The nails

Oskar Serti had always had the greatest difficulty getting up in the morning. The whirling mists of the night made him feel so groggy that in order to make his head conscious of the use of his body, he had to stretch out full length until he could hear even the smallest joint creak. Limb for limb, vertebra for vertebra, he rose up gradually to the surface of the day.
Under the weight of the years, though, Serti finally lost all courage to begin a new day. As soon as he was on his feet, an uncontrollable force sent him creeping back under the blanket. There he spent long hours captivated by memories conjuring his dreams back into the present, and then he only left his bed to nail a picture of Catherine at the age of twenty on the wall, or a rose chafer found in the woods of childhood, or an article from the "Aurore", in which his first novel was praised Then one morning as Serti wanted to stretch out in his room crowded with a thousand and one memories, he brushed against one of them and was caught up in the thousand and one nails embedded in the wall like a hedgehog. They dug into his back like Catherine's fingernails once; they tormented his fingers like his first typewriter and stung his legs like brambles in the woods
Despite the pain, Serti no longer wanted to leave the four walls of his room. And then, when nail for nail, year for year had brought his whole body to memory, for the first time in his life he had the feeling that he was completely awake. Then he wisely returned to bed, though, as anyone would do, if he suddenly awoke in the skin of an old man of a thousand and one years.