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XXIX
Exhausted, wounded, covered with dried mud and sand, with burning eyes and a head plethoric and suffering, I reached the hotel. I had overcome the challenges of the journey, inspired by a single proposition: I would allow nothing or no one to delay my hot bath, a rubdown with Hamamelis virginica, a tray of fricandeau with eggs, salads, fruits and Palau water, which Andrea would bring to my bed.
 With such yearning I had desired the moment when I would find myself again before the hotel's door! I did not have to knock upon it to enter. It opened magically, although there stood the commissioner with his hand on the latch and Montes, hospitable and quite in the sway of alcohol. With such irrefutable and tranquil conviction that room and those objects took their part in one of the two wonders of which the poet speaks to us: the wonder of the domestic, the routine! I was arriving at that hotel like the castaway to the ship which rescues him or, better yet, like Ulysses to his beloved isle, to his Ithacan household spirits.
"And we were thinking that you had fled," Montes declared.
Once again the stretch of sand, the crabs, the mud: but now in the soul of my neighbor. The winter wind is not so inclement as the heart of one's brother.
"Atwell didn't come with you?" Aubry insisted.
"No," I said. "We were separated. And the boy?"
They had not found him. I asked about Manning.
"Here I am," the man himself responded.
He gestured with his pipe and smiled with good nature, amid a rain of ash.
I hurried to tell him, "I never doubted you."
These words, brilliant and pertinent in my dialogue with Montes, seemed unexpected by Manning. Hardly dissimulating, the latter arched his brows and looked happily at me.
"The storm will pass," the doctor said, approaching the window. "I see a gull."
Manning injected himself. "What are your plans?"
I believed that he was talking to me. I was disposed to declare, "A bath, a rubdown," and so forth, when the commissioner replied, "To recover the jewels."
While the others discussed this proposal -- they were dealing after all with their perplexity, their ignorance and their penury -- I received the inspiration, which presented me with a dilemma: pleasure or duty. I did not hesitate.
"I know where the jewels are," I said, emphasizing each syllable. "I know who the criminal is."
The effect of this declaration exceeded my most optimistic expectation. The commissioner lost his aplomb, Manning his impassibility, Montes his drunken aura. The three watched my mouth as if they were expecting it to articulate the judgment of God.
"The criminal is the boy," I announced at last. "He held an unhealthy passion for Mary, along with spite and the fear that someone might denounce him. . ."
"Do you have proof?" the commissioner asked.
"I know where the jewels are," I replied triumphally. "Follow me."
I strode with resolution, with a certain pomp. Now preceded, now followed by our shadows, we descended the stairs. We entered then the dark hallway and came to the room full of cages.
"A match," I demanded.
We lit the candle. I pointed with a resolute index finger. "There are the jewels."
My finger signaled the huge embalmed albatross.
The commissioner lifted the bird.
"It's too light," he stated, shaking his head. "Straw and feathers."
Before I could recover myself, an irrefutable pocket-knife opened the bird's breast. The commissioner was right.
I will always note with equanimity both my defeats and my victories. Let no one testify that I am an untrustworthy chronicler.
My error -- if one might call it an error -- does not offend me. A fool would not have committed it. I am a literato, a reader, and -- as if often the case with men of my class -- I had confused reality with a book. If a book tells us of an embalmed bird and, later, of the disappearance of several jewels, to what other hiding place can the author turn without heaping ridicule upon himself?
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