RUBIO Y MORENA
become even bonier than before and dreadfully sallow and the eyes
now glittered as
if
they looked into a room where a great light was.
She moved about with an odd stateliness which must have come from
the suffering caused by the movement. One hand was now always
pressed to the side that hurt her and she moved with exaggerated
uprightness in defiance of the temptation to ease her discomfort
by crouching. These details of her appearance he could not have
noticed at the time, not consciously, and yet they came to him vividly
in recollection. It was only afterwards, too, that he troubled himself
to wonder how she might have interpreted this disastrous change in
their way of living together. She must have thought that all affec–
tionate feeling for her was gone and that he was now enduring her
company out of pity only. She stopped stealing his money at night.
For a month she sat in the corner and watched him, watched
him
with the dumb, wanting look of .an animal in pain. Occasionally
she would dare to cross the room. When he seemed to be resting from
his
labor, she would come to his
sid~
and run her fingers enquiringly
down
his
body to see if he desired her, and finding out that he didn't,
she would retire again speechlessly to her side of the room.
Then
all
at once she left him. He had spent a night out with
his new blond mistress and returned to find that Amada had packed
her locker-tnmk and removed it from the apartment, this time in
grim
earnest. He made no attempt to find her. He believed that she would
necessarily return of her own accord, for he could not imagine her
being able to do otherwise. But she did not return to him, as the
days passed, nor did any word of her reach him. He was not certain
how he felt about this. He thought for a while that he might even
be somewhat relieved by the resulting simplification of
his
life and
the absence of that faint odor of disease which had lately hung sadly
over the bed they had slept in. There was still always the book,
sometimes loosening its grip now that the first draft was finished, but
still making him insensible as a paranoiac to everyday life. During
the intervals when the work dropped off, when there was discourage–
ment or .a stop for reflection, Kamrowski would take to the streets
and follow strange women. He glutted his appetite with a succession
of women and continually widened the latitude of his experience, till,
all at once, he was filled with disgust at himself and the circus-trapeze
of longing on which he had kicked himself senselessly back and forth
1301
