Such were the confused feelings with which I entered the china shop. It was dark, and inside the house there was less light, now that the windows into the courtyard were closed. In a corner of the dining room I saw the mother crying; at the door into the small bedroom two children were looking inside with a scared expression, their fingers in their mouths. The corpse was lying on the bed; the bed…
Let’s put the pen down for a while and come to the window to give the memory a breath of fresh air. In truth, it was an ugly picture, because of death itself, and the dead boy, who was horrible … Here and now, things are quite different. Everything I can see out there is living and breathing, the goat chewing next to a cart, the hen pecking about in the roadway, the train of the Central line that puffs, whistles, lets off steam and passes by, the palm tree that shoots up into the sky, and finally even the church tower, though it has neither muscles nor leaves. A boy, over there in the alleyway, is playing with a paper kite is not dead, nor is he dying, even though his name is Manduca too.
It is true that the other Manduca was older than this one, a little older. He would be about eighteen or nineteen, but you might have thought he was anything from fifteen to twenty-two, for his face did not reveal his age, which was hidden in the folds of… Well, I might as well say it all: he’s dead, his relatives are dead, and if there are any left none of them are important enough to be annoyed or hurt. To say it all, then; Manduca suffered from a cruel illness, leprosy, no less. When he was alive he was ugly; dead, he seemed hideous. When I saw, stretched out on the bed, the miserable body of my neighbor, I was appalled and turned my eyes away. I know not what hidden hand compelled me to look again, even fleetingly; I gave way, looked, looked again, until I backed away completely and came out of the room.
“He suffered such a lot!” sighed his father.
“Poor Manduca!” his mother sobbed.
I thought about how to get away, said that they were expecting me at home, and said goodbye. The father asked if I would do him the favor of going to the funeral; I replied with the truth, which was that I didn’t know, and would do what my mother wished. I came out quickly, went through the shop, and bounded into the street.