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XII
I harbored serious fears. I looked outside, through the window of
the grand hall. The storm had worsened.
 My plans were exact: to have
my tea; to visit Emily before the police arrived; to meet with the
police. My cousin's useless delay in preparing, recipe in hand, a few
scones that aspired to measure up to the justly famous scones of my aunt
Charlotte would perhaps mean the defeat of my well-laid plans. I looked
again through the window. I felt assuaged. Sand like waves of black
water beat against the glass. Then, in lightning bolts of clarity, I
could make out an infernal landscape: the earth in disintegrating and
rapid movement, rising up in wrathful whirlwinds and waterspouts.
Finally the gong sounded. The typist struck it in
accompaniment to lethargic noddings of her head. All of us, save Emilia,
gathered in the dining hall around the tea tray. While I savored a
delectably golden scone I considered how the cardinal events -- births,
farewells, conspiracies, graduations, marriages, deaths -- brought us
together around the ironed linen and timeless table-service. I
remembered also that for the Persians a beautiful landscape was a
stimulus to the appetite and, expanding this idea, I concluded that, for
a perfect man, all the vicissitudes of life ought to serve as stimuli.
Lost in the venerable depths of meditation, I conflated
in my mind the conversation of my compatriots and the buzzing of the
flies. It should not have surprised me -- it should not have seemed
unusual -- to hear, suddenly, the dry snap of the typist¹s fly swatter.
. . (our friend Muscarius.) As someone reconstructs a jigsaw puzzle,
piece by piece, I joined together those fragments of conversation I
overheard and discovered a fearful group of people, trying to hide their
fear, secretly regretting the decision to call the police, admittedly
encouraged by the wall of sand the storm threw against the hotel.
I went down to comfort Emilia.
I
found her with that beautiful and peaceful face -- it recalled perhaps
that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpina -- leaning against the hand
that held a lilac handkerchief: the same pose in which I had left her
some hours earlier. Our conversation was not substantial. She declared
-- indeed so -- that Dr. Cornejo had insisted on spending some time
alone with the dead girl. Emilia had not consented.
I
returned to the grand hall. Cornejo, sitting like a ramrod in a modern
chair, was studying, with spectacles, paper and pencil, a large volume.
When I find someone reading, my first impulse is to seize the book in my
hands. I propose to the curious an investigation of this sentiment: love
of books, or displeasure at finding myself displaced from the center of
attention? I resigned myself to asking him what he was reading.
"A
work of nonfiction," he answered. "A railway guide. I carry in my head a
map of the country -- limited to the rail-lines, to be sure -- which
attempts to encompass even the most insignificant depots, with their
respective distances and times of departure. . ."
"The
fourth dimension must interest you. The space-time continuum," I said.
Manning observed enigmatically, "The literature of
evasion, I would say."
Atuel was looking out the window. He called to
us. In the middle of a livid sandy cyclone we saw the Rickenbacker
arrive. For the first time that day, I smiled. I confess it: the comedy
of the scene unfolding with cinematic diligence was compelling. From the
automobile stepped out one, two, three, four, finally six individuals.
They clustered around one of the rear doors, then laboriously withdrew a
long dark object. My eyes wet with laughter, I watched them, fighting
and swaggering in the wind, deformed by the effect of the glass on our
oblique glances, stumbling like those feeling their way by night,
tripping in the sand, as they approached the hotel. It was a coffin they
carried.
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