Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Three
Frau Hühnerbeinstein had lost weight; this is what happens when one ceases to eat. (Go on, Reader—try it and see.) When she grabbed our morose friend Sri Gangakanta by his elbow, not long after he’d concluded his conversation with Miss Trojczakowski, and pinched until he deigned to turn round and face her, he was struck by her saggy, wattle-like stalactites of skin hanging from her bones where sturdy, ample flesh had once rosily bloomed.
“I must speak with you, monsieur.”
“What?”
“I said that I must speak with you.”
“Another conversation—so soon? Madame, I implore you. . .my mind, you see. . .is so very weak. . .”
“Oh, don’t be such an idiot.” She dragged him to her room, threw him into an armchair, shoved a cup of tea into his hands and ignored all his mumbled protestations.
“Monsieur,” she began, sitting on the settee and fixing him with a humourless eye, “given Senhor La Paiva’s refusal to entertain my concerns with any seriousness, I turn to you, as the only other feeling occupant of this hotel.”
He would rather die, he realised; rather die, than sit listening to this.
She leant closer: “None of us can be blind, monsieur, to the deluge of depravity with which we have been inundated! I trust you won’t deny that. I trust you won’t require an enumeration of sins I have witnessed or heard speak of.”
He stared at his tea. The particles swirled according to a dynamic which he couldn’t begin to calculate. And yet, it was just tea. It was hot. He could dump it over his head and scald himself. What was the calculation for that?
“Very well then: adultery, sodomy, assault, murder, theft, neglect, and covetousness. And probably many more of which I’m ignorant, or whose names I’ve never encountered, or whose iniquity is so unparalleled that words have not yet been invented which would satisfactorily describe them.”
How much longer until the end?, he thought (in tandem, very likely, with my loyal reader). This world cannot be allowed to go on like this, can it? Every farce must face its end. We must all burn, and I with them, and it cannot come too soon.
“But you—you, monsieur, are an apostate, I think? You once felt the sun on your brow, but now only a chill? Hm? I had taken you, when first I saw you, for a man of faith. A worshipper of God—perhaps not the same God I worship, but close enough. And now, I beg you to face God once more—to renew your allegiance, in whatever form it takes—and help me save us all, before it’s too late!”
“It’s too late,” he averred. “You’ve said it. You’ve hit the nail on the head, madame. It’s too, too late.”
“I must disagree, monsieur. I believe it will never be too late until we’re all goggling terror-eyed at one another in the fires of Hell!”
With an inarticulate scream, Gangakanta seized his teacup and smashed it against the side of his head. Pain, blood, scalding hair and a look of bewilderment from the direction of Gilda were the immediate results.
“You are such an ass!” she declared. “What did you do that for?!”
He answered with a wordless wail which obliged Frau Hühnerbeinstein to cover her ears with her hands.
“Get out of here, you cretin! I can see my hopes in you were tragically misplaced.”
He left her room and skipped down the corridor, raving about a universal end which would shortly consume them all.