Page 556 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. Nos-
tromo was dead. Everything had failed ignominiously. He
no longer dared to think of Antonia. She had not survived.
But if she survived he could not face her. And all exertion
seemed senseless.
On the tenth day, after a night spent without even doz-
ing off once (it had occurred to him that Antonia could not
possibly have ever loved a being so impalpable as himself),
the solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of
the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended
by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without any
sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the
comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this
cord would snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as
of a pistol—a sharp, full crack. And that would be the end
of him. He contemplated that eventuality with pleasure, be-
cause he dreaded the sleepless nights in which the silence,
remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he hung
with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, always
the same but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo,
Antonia, Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironi-
cal and senseless buzzing. In the daytime he could look at
the silence like a still cord stretched to breakingpoint, with
his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a weight.
‘I wonder whether I would hear it snap before I fell,’ he
asked himself.
The sun was two hours above the horizon when he got
up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced, and looked at it with his red-
rimmed eyes. His limbs obeyed him slowly, as if full of lead,