I HARBORED SERIOUS MISGIVINGS. I LOOKED outside, through the window in the grand hall. The storm had taken a turn for the worse.
My plan was precise: take tea; visit Emilia before the police arrived; receive the police. Yet I feared that my cousin’s inexplicable delay in preparing, recipe in hand, some scones that aspired to equal Aunt Carlota’s justifiably famous ones, might perhaps signal the downfall of this most reasonable plan. I looked out of the window again. I felt reassured. Waves of black water lashed the glass; the sand encroached. Then, in the brightness of the lightning flashes, I glimpsed an infernal landscape, the ground roiling and breaking apart, whipped into wrathful whirlwinds and waterspouts.
The dinner bell rang at last. The typist struck it in time to a gentle swaying of her head. Everyone, with the exception of Emilia, gathered in the dining room, around the tea tray. While I savored a judiciously golden scone, I thought of how the cardinal events—births, farewells, conspiracies, graduations, weddings, deaths—bring us together around pressed linen and timeless china; I remembered also that, for the Persians, a beautiful landscape served to stimulate the appetite and, expanding this idea, I decided that for the perfect man, all of life’s vagaries should serve as stimuli.
In the deepest veins of thought, I heard the conversations around me merge with the buzzing of flies. It would not have surprised me—nor disturbed me—to hear the dry slap of the typist’s (our friend Muscarius’) swatter. Like one who reconstructs a jigsaw puzzle piece-by-piece, in putting those fragments of conversation together I discovered that there was, among us, a fearful cohort of people who, while masking their fear, secretly regretted having called the police, and who found hope in the wall of sand the storm was raising around the hotel.
I went downstairs to comfort Emilia.
I found her with her beautiful and placid face—the face of Dante’s Proserpina came to mind—resting on her hand, clutching a lilac-colored handkerchief; the same posture in which I had left her hours earlier. Our conversation was insubstantial, though she did declare that Doctor Cornejo had insisted upon spending a few minutes alone with the body. Emilia had not allowed it.
I returned to the grand hall. Cornejo, seated rigidly on a modern chair and equipped with eyeglasses, paper and pencil, was studying an enormous tome. Whenever I come across someone reading, my first impulse is to snatch the book from his hands. I offer, for the curious, an exploration of this impulse: could it be an attraction to books, or impatience at finding myself displaced from the center of attention? I resigned myself to asking him what he was reading.
“A book of non-fiction,” he replied. “A guide to locomotives. I carry in my mind a map of the country (limited to the railway lines, of course) in which I endeavor to include even the most insignificant of locations, with their respective distances and hours of departure …”
“You are interested in the fourth dimension, the space-time continuum,” I declared.
“The literature of evasion, I’d call it,” Manning observed, enigmatically.
Atuel was looking out the window. He called us over. Engulfed in a furious cyclone of sand, we saw the Rickenbacker. For the first time all day, I laughed. I confess: the absurdity of the scene unfolding with cinematic diligence was quite compelling. Out of the car emerged one, two, three, four, six people in all. They huddled against one of the car’s rear doors. Laboriously, they extracted a large, darkly colored object. I watched them—my eyes tearing with laughter—as they approached the hotel, tripping blindly in the sand, as though it were the dark of night, struggling and knocking about in the wind, their forms misshapen by the oblique effect of the windowpane. They were bringing the coffin.