Chapter Ten
As the days wore on—as wear on inexorably, you won’t be very surprised to learn, they did—the coronel moved into Pluck’s room, and, through the accumulation of objects belonging to or known or suspected to have been touched by Pluck, handwritten testimonials sourced from other guests, and his own childish drawings, set up a shrine to his late friend. He devoted all his attentions to the candle he was sure not to let go out: he would spend hours staring at it, clearing his mind of everything but the sight, the subtle sounds of the dribble of wax and minutely enervating wick, the stale, cupboard-immured smell, and the discernible heat upon his face. The image the candle presented to his mind was that of an erect penis, quivering under the miraculously, divinely animated feather of pre-cum dancing without cease upon its tip. It was in the mercifully insoluble mystery of the afterlife that the coronel was content to wrap himself, like a heavy, unyielding yet sympathetic cloak round his bare shoulders, rather than seek to penetrate with logic.
Pride of place amongst the relics was Pluck’s photographic album, which the coronel, in his thorough ransacking of the room, had discovered and broke open. Bent over the book, straining his muggy eyes to trace the same lines and curves as had Pluck’s, the coronel felt closer to the man than ever; for they were inhabiting, aesthetically, the same fantasy realm; as a painter must feel, before a masterpiece in a museum, knowing not only that his heroes had stood on this wood and gazed at the same square inches of consecrated paint, but that his heroes’ heroes had done so, and, if you regress far enough, the first hero had dragged his brush across his canvas, in imitation of, it would seem, the natural engravings into primaeval matter made flesh and plant and rock by God. So the coronel was, as it were, luging through the same grooves as Pluck’s innermost erotic being whilst he followed along the arc of a fat model’s bum, and in this process not only came to know Pluck, the real Pluck, but came, in a sense, to replicate him, and thus become him. When this occurred, whole new vistas, mountainous facets, of Pluck’s character came into view for him, and he sensed the pointlessness of isolating matter into arbitrary conglomerations and labelling them with ultimately meaningless blends of phonemes. There, just there, on the page, a few sparse lines burnt by iodine and mercury vapour had resulted in the revivification of a large naked woman bending over her flower bed, face twisted up and around so that she might, in what appeared a painfully unnatural contortion, smile invitingly at her fellow hortiphile, that is, the viewer. The barest implication of her labia could be inferred by peering into her own God-given goldkissen, as Moses might once, not so near here, have gazed into a bush he was certain, deep within himself, would suddenly, at any instant, ignite.
He (the coronel, not Moses) slept at the foot of the shrine, so that he might be close to the things that had meant so much to his hero, and so the dripping wax would fall upon his brow and wake him when time decreed a new candle must be lit, so that whatever misfortunes might be fated to befall man without the hotel, within, the light might never snuff out.