EMMA ZUNZ
939
that she would feel satisfaction in victory and justice. Suddenly,
alanned, she rose and ran to the drawer. She opened it; underneath
the portr.ait of Milton Sills, where she had left it the night before,
was the letter from Fain. No one could have seen it; she began to
read it and then tore it up.
To tell with some accuracy the events of that afternoon would
be difficult and almost improper. Unreality is an attribute of evil, an
attribute which seems to mitigate its terrors and which, perhaps,
aggravates them. How can one make believable an act in which the
perpetrator herself almost did not believe? How can one recapture
that momentary chaos which even today the memory of Emma Zunz
repudiates and confuses? Emma lived near Almagro, on Liniers street;
we know that that afternoon she went to the pier. Perhaps on Paseo
de Julio she saw herself multiplied in the mirrors, felt publicized by
the lights and undressed by hungry eyes; but it is more reasonable
to suppose that at first, because of her inexperience, she wandered
through the indifferent market place.... She went into two or three
bars, she watched the routine of the other women. At last, she came
upon the men from the Nordstjarnen. She passed up a very young
one, who, she feared, would arouse in her feelings of tenderness,
and she decided upon another, smaller than herself and crude, so
that the purity of the horror might not be mitigated. The man led
her to a door, through a dark corridor, up a winding stairway, to
a vestibule (which had window panes with flowers like those at the
house at LantIs), and then through a passage-way to a door which
closed behind them. These grave events are outside of time, either
because the immediate past is cut off from the future by them, or
because the parts which form them do not seem to be continuous.
At such a time, outside of time, in that perplexing disorder of
disconnected and odious sensations, did Emma Zunz think at least
once of the dead man who motivated such sacrifice? I am of the
opinion that she did think of him once, and that in that moment her
desperate object was endangered. She thought (she could not help
but think) that her father had done this terrible thing to her mother,
this thing that she was suffering now. She thought this with weak
astonishment and at once took refuge in dizziness. The man, a Swiss
or a Finn, did not speak Spanish ; he was .a tool to her just as she was
a tool to him, but she served for pleasure, and he for justice.
