Walking Into the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

wand, and said with a smile:
    “There you are, dear.”
    Kristjan hurried away, past the musicians who had begun to play in front of a statue of the Three Graces, and the guests who were dancing on the terrace, looking neither to right nor left but quickening his pace until he reached the doorway of the tent. There he stopped, at last to catch his breath and wipe the pearls of sweat from his brow. Pursuing him into the tent, the music would have seemed sweet and uplifting under different circumstances—“I only have eyes for you . . .”
    There was hardly anything left of the pig on the long trestle table but the apple was still gripped in its jaw. When the waiters replaced it with a slightly smaller pig, Kristjan made sure they put parsley eyelashes and cranberry eyes where the pig’s own eyes had once been.

10
    The guests had gone to bed.
    I was the only one left downstairs; the staff had finally retired to their rooms, the kitchen maids last of all. I had turned off all the lights and was making a last tour of the ground-floor rooms to make sure that all the candles had been blown out and no cigarettes had been left smoldering. The logs had burned down in the great hearth in the assembly room, though the embers still sent up the occasional spark. Through the window I saw that a lamp was still shining in Casa del Mar. I felt better knowing that someone else was still awake. I don’t know why.
    All the lights were out, yet it was bright where I stood in the middle of the reception room. The moon was now high in the sky and laid a long strip of light across the mirror-like ocean, up the hillside, across the floor—to my feet. I walked towards it, opening the terrace door. Everything was quiet. I hoped the antelope, leopard, and puma would be able to sleep tonight. I didn’t like them being locked up in cages in this place; they didn’t belong here. None of them belonged here.
    The air still held the fragrance of woodsmoke and the pungent smell of pine, which I never notice except in the evenings. A reverberation came and went, a distant echo which I tried to concentrate on. But the evening’s songs got in the way—“I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright, ’cause I only have eyes for you . . .” I stepped inadvertently backwards, first two steps, then another. The moonlight pursued me, surrounded me, as if I were standing in shallow water. I looked down and stared at my feet for a while, the refrain in my ears slowly changing, the evening’s songs falling silent and the echo growing clearer in my mind.
    I was walking in through the door of our house in Eyrarbakki. It was after midnight, the servants had gone to bed, little Einar was long since fast asleep. You were sitting in your chair in the living room, just finishing breast-feeding Maria. You looked up and smiled when I came in; I put down my suitcases and quietly removed my coat and hung it up. You slipped your nipple from her mouth. She was asleep, so you got up and laid her in her cradle before coming over to me. I had just returned from a month in Denmark. I put my arms round you in the middle of the room and pulled you against me, neither of us saying a word. All of a sudden you began to hum. I recognized the tune immediately— “Bei Männern,” from
The Magic Flute
—you used to play it so often when we first met. I began to move to the rhythm and you followed. I pressed you against me, couldn’t let you go, didn’t want to let you go. There was a lantern burning on top of a cupboard, shedding a faint light.
    I began to dance in the moonlit reception room. How silly I must have looked! But I felt as if you were with me. It was as if nothing had changed, everything was as it had been before I lost my way. Because that’s what happened. I lost my way. But now, for a moment, I had found my way back and I shut my eyes and held on tight to your memory. You hadn’t buttoned up your blouse after feeding Maria and I undid it even further as we