Literature
He could not sleep. He felt absolutely alone. Aloneness was like hunger in that it drove away sleep.
He remembered his wife. He had a fleeting thought of God. Then he remembered his wife again. Probably not his wife as herself, as a definite personality, but merely as a companion and a ministerer to his comfort. Not his wife, but a wife. His mind recreated a scene which had no reason at all for persisting as a memory. There was very little to it. He had waked one midnight to find his wife sitting up in the bed they shared. She had on her flannel camisa de chino, always more or less dingy, and she was telling her beads. “What are you doing?” he had asked. “I forgot to say my prayers,” she had answered.
He was oppressed by nostalgia. And because he did not know what it was he wanted his longing became keener. Not for his wife, nor for his life in the city. Not for his parents nor even for his lost childhood. What was there in these that could provoke anything remotely resembling this regret? What was not within the life span could not be memories. Something more remote even than race memory. His longing went farther back, to some age in Paradise maybe when the soul of man was limitless and unshackled: when it embraced the infinite and did not hunger because it had the inexhaustible at its command.
When he woke again the fire was smoldering. But there was a light in the forest, an eerie light. It was diffused and cold. He wondered what it was. There were noises now where before had seemed only the silence itself. There were a continuous trilling, strange night-calls and a peculiar, soft clinking which recurred at regular intervals. Forest noises. There was the noise, too, of nearby waters.
One of the men woke up and said something to another who was also evidently awake, Gerardo called out.
“What noise is that?”
“Which noise?”
“That queer, ringing noise.”
“That? That’s caused by tree worms, I have been told.”
He had a sudden vision...
View Full Essay