670
RAMON SENDER
with the flowers. She did not read them. She gave them to the
sanatorium library and they wrote her name inside the cover.
"What a calm night!" said Arner.
The moon was now rising over the television antenna and
was no longer yellow but blue.
"Don't think that our beautiful sanatorium is always so
calm.
If
there were only women, maybe, but there are men and
once in a while something unexpected and terrible happens. For
instance, last year a madman escaped. A friend of mine. Well,
although I consider him a friend of mine, I have never talked
to
him.
Dr. Smith, who is a little pedantic, says that our friend–
ship is a case of telesympathy. The madman escaped, misbehaved
in some way, and seeing himself pursued hid in the factory you
see yonder. Don't you see the smokestack? To flee from
the
orderlies and police he started climbing up the spikes in the
smokestack until he reached the very top, over two hundred feet
high. When he got up there he stripped and there he was, cool
as a cucumber, sometimes seated, sometimes standing. Leaning
on the lightning rod. The poor fellow could not flee horizontally
as they would have caught
him
at once with their automobiles
and motorcycles, and so he tried to escape vertically by climbing
up the smokestack. But vertical flight isn't for living beings, is
it? It's only for the dead. He stayed on top of that smokestack
for three days. Meanwhile the factory couldn't operate because
they didn' t want to suffocate him with the smoke. And the whole
city talked about the case, in the streets, restaurants, churches.
Yes, in the churches, too. They photographed
him
and published
the pictures in the papers."
She had one of the pictures, but only the negative. And
suddenly she decided to show it to Arner. "You'll see." She took
Ol,lt of her purse a sheet of dark film and handed it to him.
Arner held it against the light. The chimney top was visible and
on top a small nude man leaning on the lightning
rod.
Naked,
up so high, the madmen looked like the statue of Neptune with
his trident. "It's like the counterfigure of Bob," she said.
"See?
