GRIGIA
21
hearing and seeing, were linked with
his
own?
As
the child grew older,
this had grown-as the secrets of the soil grow into a sapling-into
earthly cares and comforts. He loved his child, but just as the boy
would outlive them, so too the boy had earlier killed the otherworldly
part of them. And suddenly he flushed hot with a new certainty. He
'Was not a man inclined to religious belief, but at this moment he was
illumined within. Thoughts cast as little light as smoky candles in this
great radiance of emotion that he experienced; it was all simply one
glorious word blazing with the light of youth: Reunion. He was
taking her with him for all eternity, and in the moment when he
yielded to this thought, the little blemishes that the years had wrought
in
his beloved were taken from her and all was, eternally, the first
day of all. Every worldly consideration vanished, and every possibility
of tedium and of unfaithfulness, for no one will sacrifice eternity for
the sake of a quarter of an hour's frivolity. And for the first time he
experienced love beyond all doubt as a heavenly sacrament. He
recognized the Providence that had guided
his
life into this solitude
and felt the ground with its gold and jewels beneath his feet no
longer as an earthly treasure, but as an enchanted world ordained
for him alone.
From this day onward he was released from a bondage, as
though rid of a stiff knee or a heavy rucksack.
It
was the bondage of
wanting to be alive, the horror of dying. It did not happen to
him
as he had always thought it would, when in the fullness of one's
strength one seems to see one's end approaching, so that one drinks
more deeply of life, savors it more intensely.
It
was merely that he
felt no longer involved, felt himself buoyed up by a glorious lightness
that made him supreme lord of his own existence.
Although the mining operations had not progressed according
to plan it was indeed a gold-digger's life they were leading. A lad
had stolen wine, and that was a crime against the community, the
punishment of which could count on general approval. The lad was
brought in with his wrists bound. Mozart Amadeo Hoffingott gave
orders that he should constitute a warning to others by being tied
upright to a tree for a day and a night. But when the foreman came
with the rope,
in
jest portentously swinging it and then hanging
it
over a nail, the lad began to tremble all over in the belief that he was
about to be hanged. And it was always just the same-although this
