Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Two
Gangakanta stood alone in the patio, staring outside. He was thin, thinner than he’d ever been, his suit was torn and soiled, his eyes were ringed with black, like a swirl of scum round an ankle emerged from a swamp, and his mouth hung open, stupidly. He was wrong, he realised, about the end of the world. It would not come; it would not ever come; and that, far more than an apocalypse, would be man’s tragedy. And what did that make him? More of the same: a total failure who knows nothing.
“And yet,” he soliloquised, feeling somehow as if he’d been written, “with this cruel reprieve, I may now accept Senhor La Paiva’s advice. I vow to start my life again. However short, however long, however glorious, however debased, my new life is to be, it will be mine, and proceed solely from my impulses, not from the gnarled, meddlesome, sculpting fingers of society, nor from so-called rational deliberation. I shall find myself, I shall know myself, the only way man can: by watching myself act, and wondering why I did.”
He turned round and strode out of the patio, into the proving ground, the jousting lists, of the hotel, like a knight of old in quest of no greater treasure than himself.
Only something caught his attention, out of the corner of his eye.
Was he seeing things, or had the snow outside begun to clear?