Every day, sometimes even three times a day, the nameless man in that story visits the Jardin des Plantes to stare at the strange little animals in their cramped aquarium, at their translucent milky bodies and delicate lizard's tails, their pink, flat, triangular Aztec faces and tiny feet with nearly humanlike fingers, the
odd reddish sprigs that sprout from their gills, the golden glow of their
eyes, the way they hardly ever move, only now and then
twitching their gills, or abruptly swimming with a single undulation of their bodies.