The Enchanted Night by Miklos Banffy

Author:Miklos Banffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE DYING LION

1

Father gospelda paced up and down his room, as he did every day after lunch. He did this to escape his oppressive dreams, as his stomach, his cruel sluggish stomach, refused to function properly if he tried to sleep after a meal. Hence this routine of walking up and down, back and forth. For years now he had gone from the same side of the room to the other and back, to the same point before each wall, where his broad, workaday shoes had worn a patch on the floor, as under a spinning top. One of these bald patches, the one on the right-hand side of the room, was under the window. From there his route took him past the writing desk that stood in a corner next to the stove, across to the opposite corner with its statue of St Mary of Lourdes and the eternal flame burning before it, where he would turn back again, at a second worn patch, and retrace his steps past the stove and back to the window, as he had done so many times, over and over again, without end, pacing back and forth in this methodical way. In the gathering dusk his balding head was the only object that reflected any light. His broad, pale, puffy face put one in mind of a large orangutan.

His was a simple abode. Two windows separated by a bookcase looked out onto the street. On it were neatly arranged works of devotion and Church history. Below it was an old armchair in which the reverend father sat to read. On the left-hand wall two woodcuts – cheap modern images of saints – hung on either side of the bedroom door. They were not framed but surrounded by broad strips of perforated imitation-lace paper such as you see around the sides of cakes, neatly oversewn with a pattern of alternating crosses and burning hearts of silk. These images had been the gift of an admirer, an elderly spinster, recently deceased, who had worked on them with much love and care. They were stiff with dust, the lacy paper included; the stitched-on patches of colour (the crosses had once been as blue as the sky, and the burning hearts the red of love itself) had faded long ago. On the right-hand side of the room, where he was now standing, everything, perhaps even the air itself, was a dull grey. Only two objects showed any colour now: the rosy-faced Mary of Lourdes in her blue and white robes, standing on the gold-tiled pedestal beside him, and, across the room, a large map above the desk: a map of East Asia.

These two objects represented two sides of Father Gospelda’s life: the first, his great ambition, his ardent, fanatical, ecstatic vision; the other, the less glorious outcome of a life of tranquility and consolation.

The map of East Asia dated back to his youth. As a young priest he had acquired a knowledge of medicine and the sciences

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.