Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Seven
The report came not from an individual, but anonymously, out of the collective air; no one could be sure where they’d heard it, how they’d been informed, or even that they hadn’t deciphered it, unconsciously, from a gathering mood, like an armada of dark clouds encroaching with questionable intent over the mountains. All the guests seemed to intuit it, simultaneously, somehow or other, with an eschatological exactitude:
There’d been another murder.
Enid and Gangakanta met, by accident, by the ballroom door, each coming from another direction. They entered, without knowing why, to be greeted by the residue of a primal, erotic cry of consummated wisdom—the tail end of a cut-off, verily, circumcised, scream. There, casual in a chair by the dance floor, sat Senhor Eli La Paiva, his skull smashed open, his brain torn out and mashed up upon the floor before him like an apple premasticated for a baby. No trace of another person could be found; and, standing above him, watching the pallor creep like dripped wax across his face, neither Enid nor Gangakanta could have possibly deduced the dead man’s final realisation: that the whole of his wasted life had transpired between the covers of this book.
“Surely,” Gangakanta reasoned, “he must have seen it coming?”
“Maybe he did nothing to prevent it,” Enid replied. “Maybe he’d foreseen all along he would welcome it with open arms.”