You know how things are there. For months I …” He suddenly fell silent and stood still.
Only now did he recognize the source of that feeling of rest and contentment which he had not been able to discover a few minutes before. It was suddenly revealed to him in its full depth and clarity; in fact, in some wonderful way it had broken down all the barriers of despondency that stood between him and the realization of it. Here was this feeling taking possession of him again with unparalleled force. The first thing he had done that morning, early, had been to write a long letter to his mother. Now he felt all the more relief because he had written that letter before seeing all his hopes dashed in the fat man’s shop, and losing the pure joy that he had poured into the letter. It had been wonderful to spend some time with his mother.
He’d got up early that morning. The servant had taken the bed up to the roof of the hotel, because sleeping in the room when it was as hot and damp as that was impossible. When the sun rose he opened his eyes. The weather was beautiful and calm, and the sky was still blue, with black pigeons hovering low in it. He could hear their wings fluttering when they flew over the hotel in a wide circle. A thick blanket of silence covered everything, and the air had a clean, moist scent of early morning. He stretched out his hand to the small case under the bed, took out a notebook and pen, and proceeded to write to his mother as he lay there.
It was the best thing he’d done for months. He was not obliged to do it, but he did it quite willingly. He was in an excellent mood, and the letter reflected the tranquillity of the sky above him. He didn’t know how he had allowed himself to describe his father as nothing but a depraved beast, but he was unwilling to cross the words out once he’d written them; he didn’t want to cross out anything in the whole letter—not only because his mother would see the crossed-out words as a bad omen, but also, quite simply, because he didn’t want to.
In any case, he didn’t hate his father so much. His father had certainly done something horrible, but which of us doesn’t from time to time? He could quite understand his father’s circumstances and he could forgive him. But could his father forgive himself for such a crime?
“To leave four children, to divorce you for no reason, then to marry that deformed woman. It is something for which he won’t forgive himself, when he wakes up one day and realizes what he’s done.
“I don’t want to hate anybody; it is beyond me to do so even if I wanted to. But why did he do that, to you? You don’t like any of us to talk about him, I know.