All Souls by Javier Marías

Author:Javier Marías [Marías, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141973609
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve also seen a photo of his death mask. When they made it, he had just renounced both age and the passage of time but only the moment before he had been a man of fifty-eight. The mask was made by Hugh Oloff de Wet on 23 September 1970, the same day or the day after Gawsworth died in London, in the Borough of Kensington where he was born. His old friend from Cairo, Sir John Waller, donated it to the Poetry Society, but such courtesies came posthumously or simply too late. The man who was John Gawsworth and Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong and Orpheus Scrannel and Juan I, King of Redonda and also at times plain Fytton Armstrong or J.G. or even just G, has his eyes closed now, with no expression visible in them. The folds of skin beneath them are now unmistakably bags, the lines across his forehead are muddled (his cranium grown convex) and he looks as though he had thicker eyelashes now, perhaps just the effect of those sealed shut eyelids. His hair appears white – but that might just be because the mask is of white plaster – and his hairline has receded a little since the 1940s, the boundary of his youth, since the war against the Afrika Korps. The moustache looks thicker but more flaccid, it’s simultaneously bristling and limp, that of a retired soldier grown weary now of grooming it. His nose has grown larger and broader, his cheeks flabby, the whole face is puffy, with a false plumpness, with despair. He has a double chin. There’s not the slightest doubt that he is dead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.