Night by Edna O’Brien

your bathroom.” I thought to hell with repugnance, we will wend our way upstairs, and do something, yoga if necessary. I poured toddies of a spirit made fromSwedish grain, oats as far as I can remember. I smiled, pursed lips, dilated the pupils, all that. But the nails intervened, the yellowing nails and the one black soft one. His savoir-faire decreased as his life story unfurled. It is ever thus. He spoke of his father, deceased. He said not to have a father was a lonesome thing. I could have contested that but didn’t. He had come with one set of thoughts and intentions and suddenly, hark, his father’s death loomed. I could strangle myself for inducing sentiment. It was all so predictable, the rigmarole, how his father had grown thin throughout his long illness but that immediately after his death his cheeks puffed out so that as a corpse he was a credit to them. Peasants. The more he talked the more I felt myself turning into a sponge, no, not a sponge, but a stone, dry, hard, obdurate; a pumice stone through which nothing seeped, not even a scrap of pity. His life, his tatty little life was taking shape on me as it was told. I got fidgety. I saw his dangle drop into the dust. I gave voice to sympathy but the thing I couldn’t endure was the third finger of his right hand. The nail was not only soft, not only black, but it seemed to be sprouting, elongating, before my very eyes. First the nail repelled me, then the finger, then the hand, then the wrist and gradually the repulsion spread and his farts filled the room, putrefied the atmosphere, brought on my customary choking. His farts were the deadliest of all, made up one had to ask, of what things; what roots, plants, gristles, and victuals had gone into him? Other people’s dishes, sampled on the way in, other people’s leavings gobbled on the way out. Suddenly Ileapt up, offered him money, a forfeit, restitution, told him that he had to go, vamoose, skip it, that he was endangered, that a lover, a gangster, hovered with cuttle bones, that his young wife was in danger, to go, to please go, to go, and have the sacrament of the mass offered for his dead father, to find a young girl, a Tuscany girl, one of his own. It was not as easy as that, the very rebuffs he relished. I tried to drive him from the place, this place. He knelt, he crawled, he imprecated, he dribbled, he slobbered. Kneeling he nuzzled. How identical our debasements are. He begged for me to just hold it, said he would come and that would be that. Alas for that prognostication. A small emission followed, not very gravant, and with a most spattery sound. It could not have been ghastlier. I cleaned and scoured and with a hairdryer attended to the Moroccan pouffe.
    *

I expect someone died in this room.
    I expect someone died in this room. I heard hymns once. I have parted the curtains in order to be a watchdog. To see the moon if it should saunter by. Another of my slaveries, even though it be a mere secondary planet, another of my fixations, on a par with my liking for the shadows and the birds and the hermits. I understand there are bird squads, commandos with fumes and searchlights to send them back into the wilderness. May God wither up their hearts, may their blood cease to flow . . .
    It is still dark, inside and out, but the hour willcome when the black light will stubbornly give way to a grey and then to a greyish blue and maybe at last, towards morning, near the aurorate, a pink or orange light will invade the heavens and it will for a moment or a series of moments disseminate itself and I will see a lit-up pane, burnished, and say to myself all is not lost, all is not bleak, and the heavens and the earth can still spring their little surprises on me and flood the world with radiance. Tower of ivory, house of gold. And the pigeons under the eaves will coo. And I will laugh or I will cry. There is little difference. What more do I want.
    I am here in the capacity of a