Inez: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

melancholy.
    He unbuttoned his fly, took out his cock, and urinated with a sigh of pleasure.
    A musical laugh made him turn and stop in midstream.
    She was looking at him with affection, with amusement, with attention. She was standing at the entry to the alleyway, laughing.
    Then she cried, “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!” with the terror of someone pursued by a beast, her face beaten by the wings of nocturnal birds, her eardrums pierced by the sound of hooves racing through skies raining down blood …
     
     
    She was afraid. London, with its underground stations, was undoubtedly safer than this open country.
    “Then why do they send children to the country?” Gabriel asked as they careened down the road in his yellow sports car, top down despite the cold and wind.
    She wasn’t complaining. She tied a silk kerchief around her head to keep her red hair from beating her face like the ominous birds in Berlioz’s opera. The maestro could say what he wanted, but, driving away from the capital and toward the sea, weren’t they inevitably getting closer to France, to the Europe occupied by Hitler?
    “Remember Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’? The best way to hide something is to leave it out in the open. If they come after us, thinking we’ve disappeared, they would never look for us in the most obvious place.”
    She didn’t have much faith in the chef d’orchestre , who was driving the little open car with the same vigor and unbridled concentration he devoted to conducting an orchestra, as if he
wanted to proclaim to the four winds that he was also a practical man and not just a long-haired musician, as men like him were called in Anglo-American circles, a synonym for an almost idiotically impractical person.
    She turned her attention from the speed, the roadway, her fear, to an appreciation of where she was, allowing herself to feel a plenitude that granted this round to Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara—nature endures as the city dies—and made herself focus on the gardens along the road, the woods and the smell of dead leaves, the fog dripping from the hedgerows. She was assaulted by the sensation that sap, an invincible and nurturing energy boundless as a great river with no beginning or end, was flowing without regard for the criminal madness only human beings introduce into nature.
    “Do you hear the owls?”
    “No, the car’s making too much noise.”
    Gabriel laughed. “The sign of a good musician is to know how to listen to many things at the same time, and to pay attention to them all.”
    She should listen to the owls. They were not only the night watchmen of the countryside but its scullery maids as well.
    “Did you know that owls catch more mice than a good mouser?” Gabriel made this more a pronouncement than a question.
    “Then why did Cleopatra bring her cats to Rome?” she asked, but not argumentatively.
    She thought that it might be nice to have owls around as zealous housekeepers. But who could sleep with that constant screeching?
    During the drive from London to the sea, she gave herself to the vision of a full moon so bright in the night sky that it seemed
it was there to aid the German planes in their raid. The moon was no longer an excuse for romance. It was the beacon for the Luftwaffe. The war changed the times of everything, but the moon insisted on counting the passing of the hours, and they, despite everything, continued to act like time, and perhaps even the time of time, mother of hours … Without the moon, the night would have been a void. Thanks to the moon, the night was defining its monumentality.
    A silver fox ran across the road, swifter than the automobile. Gabriel braked and was grateful for the darting fox and for the moonlight. A faint, whispering breeze floated across the heath of ancient Durnovaria and lightly stirred the straight, slender larches whose soft needles of brilliant green seemed to point toward the splendid moon-flooded amphitheater of Casterbridge.
    He told