At some points it reads like a nightmare:

When he seemed totally unmoved by my getting out the bakery box from my bag and told me again to leave, I returned to the gate. I explained that I had climbed the gate to get in, but when he didn’t react at all, I thought (nonsensically, I now realize) that he wanted me to climb back over the gate to prove to him that this was indeed how I entered his yard. But, the ground under the gate was sloped so that the fence was significantly higher from the inside, and I was shaking from the huge influx of adrenaline that I was experiencing. After a few horribly embarrassing failed attempts at pushing myself back over the gate, during which all I could think, over and over, was “Alexander Grothendieck is watching me” (which he was, with what I might describe, in retrospect, as detached bemusement), I asked him to unlock the gate. However, he stood totally still and silent, like my own personal Ghost of Christmas Future, and then told me, once more, to get out.