Читаем Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке полностью

Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

I knelt down and felt for the pulse in the heart. There was no life in the black body, and my hand was wet from the wound I couldn’t see. “Poor Wordsworth,” I said aloud with some idea of showing to his murderer if he were anywhere near by that Wordsworth had a friend. I thought how his bizarre love for an old woman had taken him from the doors of the Grenada cinema, where he used to stand so proudly in his uniform, to die on the wet grass near the Paraguay river, but I knew that if this was the price he had to pay, he would have paid it gladly. He was a romantic, and in the only form of poetry he knew, the poetry which he had learnt at St. George’s Cathedral, Freetown, he would have found the right words to express his love and his death. I could imagine him at the last, refusing to admit that she had dismissed him forever, reciting a hymn to keep his courage up as he walked towards the house through the hollow in the little wood:

“If I ask Her to receive me,Will she say me nay?Not till earth and not till heav’nPass away.”

The sentiment had always been sincere even if the changes in the words were unliturgical.

There was no sound except my own breathing. I closed the knife and put it in my pocket. Had he drawn it when he first entered the grounds with the intention of attacking Visconti? I preferred to think otherwise – that he had come with the simple purpose of appealing to his love once more before abandoning hope and that when he heard someone move among the trees he had drawn the knife hurriedly in self-defence, pointing at his unseen enemy the useless tool for horses’ hoofs.

I went slowly back towards the house to break the news as gently as I might to Aunt Augusta. The musicians were still playing on the terrace, they were tired out and almost falling asleep over their instruments, but when I entered the sala there remained only one couple – my aunt and Mr. Visconti. I was reminded of the house behind the Messaggero where they had met after a long separation and danced together between the sofas while the prostitutes watched with amazement. They were dancing a slow waltz now and they never saw me enter, two old people bound in the deep incurable egotism of passion. They had turned off the lights, and in the big room illumined only from the terrace there rested pools of darkness between the windows. As they moved I lost their faces and found them again. At one moment the shadows gave my aunt a deceptive air of youth: she looked like the young woman in my father’s photograph pregnant with happiness, and at another I recognized the old woman who had faced Miss Paterson with such merciless cruelty and jealousy.

I called out to her as she went by, “Aunt Augusta,” but she didn’t answer to the name; there was no sign that she even heard me. They danced on in their tireless passion into the shadows.

I took a few steps farther into the room as they returned towards me, calling to her a second time, “Mother, Wordsworth’s dead.” She only looked over her partner’s shoulder and said, “Yes, dear, all in good time, but can’t you see that now I am dancing with Mr. Visconti?”

A flashbulb broke the shadows up. I have the photograph still – all three of us are petrified by the lightning flash into a family group: you can see the great gap in Visconti’s teeth as he smiles towards me like an accomplice. I have my hand thrown out in a frozen appeal, and my mother is regarding me with an expression of tenderness and reproof. I have cut from the print another face which I hadn’t realized was in the room with us, the face of a little old man with long moustaches. He had been first with the news, and Mr. Visconti sacked him later at my insistence (my mother took no part in the dispute, which she said was a matter to be settled between men), so Wordsworth did not go entirely unavenged.

Not that I have time to think of the poor fellow very much. Mr. Visconti has not yet made a fortune, and our import-export business takes more and more of my time. We have had our ups and downs, and the photographs of what we call the great party and of our distinguished guests have proved useful more than once. We own a complete Dakota now, for our partner was accidentally shot dead by a policeman because he couldn’t make himself understood in Guaraní, and most of my spare time is spent in learning that language. Next year, when she is sixteen, I am to marry the daughter of the chief of customs, a union which has the approval of Mr. Visconti and her father. There is, of course, a considerable difference in our ages, but she is a gentle and obedient child, and often in the warm scented evenings we read Browning together.

God’s in his heaven —All’s right with the world!