Chapter Thirty-Six
Senhor Eli La Paiva stood, hands cupped over his abdomen, studying the paintings slathered across the corridor wall, nodding. Gangakanta happened by, and stopped to look himself.
“Senhor. Do we know who has done us the honour of painting these symbols?” he asked the Iberian gentleman.
“Mister Alan Sanns,” answered La Paiva.
“Ah.” Gangakanta pursed his lips, eyeing the strange designs which sprawled in fresh paint all down the wall. “I’ve noticed that you have spent a significant amount of time studying them,” he observed.
“That is true.”
“To me,” Gangakanta opined, “they hold no meaning whatever.”
“Very good.”
“Yes. . . .Forgive my intrusion, senhor—but what do you see in them?”
La Paiva smiled, and, finally, turned to him. “Do you consider yourself a rational man, sir?”
Gangakanta was taken aback. “I don’t recall ever being asked that, senhor.”
“Perhaps,” La Paiva suggested, “no one has ever thought to ask it, seeing how you present yourself as so faultlessly rational.”
“Then I thank you for not taking the façade at face value.”
“So you would, in fact, tag a picture of your person with the label ‘rational’? You are a rational man?”
“I like to think so. At least—I try.”
“Ah.”
“May I ask why you ask?”
“Because you asked me what I see in these symbols.”
“Yes.”
“And I can only answer this: that only when the monocle of the rational is discarded may one see the world as it truly is.”