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LYING IN THE DARK

After clearing the table, Vida sits in the library to read Moby-Dick . In the comfort of the ship, having killed a leviathan, Stubb eats a slab of the flesh by the light of a whale-oil lamp. Meanwhile outside, frenzied sharks attack the carcass and are in turn attacked by harpooners. The whale is hoisted for the salvage of its blubber, while its rotting head, which is one-third of its length, hangs over the side of the ship until its valuable contents can be hauled out by the bucketful. These events are so vividly portrayed that the author’s horror—inspired by the arrogance, avarice, and cruelty of human beings—can be endured only for thirty pages in one sitting. Vida doesn’t enjoy the novel, but it offers a warning alike to the one that her uncle delivered. To compensate for the darkness of the prose, she plays Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, for the golden light of its ecstatic sound.

Before going to bed, she cranks shut the window in the kitchen and puts down the pleated shade. Lupo never comes while she sleeps.

Perhaps her intuitive expectation of a visitor was inspired not by him but by the watcher in the woods.

Lying in the dark, head pillowed, she ends her day by speaking the same words with which she has ended every day for years. “My life passes like a shadow. Yet a little while, and all will be consummated.”

She falls asleep as the last word issues through her lips.