Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 9. CHAPTER NINE (continued)

The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness turned to
grey, and on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn the jagged sierra
stood out flat and opaque, as if cut out of paper.

The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor,
champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace
of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour, had descended
into the open abyss of desolation amongst the shattered vestiges
of his past. He remembered his wooing between two campaigns, a
single short week in the season of gathering olives. Nothing
approached the grave passion of that time but the deep,
passionate sense of his bereavement. He discovered all the extent
of his dependence upon the silenced voice of that woman. It was
her voice that he missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward
contemplation, he seldom looked at his wife in those later years.
The thought of his girls was a matter of concern, not of
consolation. It was her voice that he would miss. And he
remembered the other child--the little boy who died at sea. Ah! a
man would have been something to lean upon. And, alas! even Gian'
Battista--he of whom, and of Linda, his wife had spoken to him so
anxiously before she dropped off into her last sleep on earth, he
on whom she had called aloud to save the children, just before
she died--even he was dead!

And the old man, bent forward, his head in his hand, sat through
the day in immobility and solitude. He never heard the brazen
roar of the bells in town. When it ceased the earthenware filter
in the corner of the kitchen kept on its swift musical drip, drip
into the great porous jar below.

Towards sunset he got up, and with slow movements disappeared up
the narrow staircase. His bulk filled it; and the rubbing of his
shoulders made a small noise as of a mouse running behind the
plaster of a wall. While he remained up there the house was as
dumb as a grave. Then, with the same faint rubbing noise, he
descended. He had to catch at the chairs and tables to regain
his seat. He seized his pipe off the high mantel of the
fire-place--but made no attempt to reach the tobacco--thrust it
empty into the corner of his mouth, and sat down again in the
same staring pose. The sun of Pedrito's entry into Sulaco, the
last sun of Senor Hirsch's life, the first of Decoud's solitude
on the Great Isabel, passed over the Albergo d'ltalia Una on its
way to the west. The tinkling drip, drip of the filter had
ceased, the lamp upstairs had burnt itself out, and the night
beset Giorgio Viola and his dead wife with its obscurity and
silence that seemed invincible till the Capataz de Cargadores,
returning from the dead, put them to flight with the splutter and
flare of a match.