Instantaneously the sun-flooded morning was born, a morning that lost
its freshness, its pearly iridescence, immediately. He closed the slats
of the balcony doors: Savina at last was sleeping, with her
countenance, utterly spent, turned to him. The sharp cries of the
newsboys, the street vendors, were drowned in the full sweep of a
traffic moving to the blasts of multitudinous horns. When she woke,
past ten, drinking the small cup of black coffee which locally
accompanied dressing, she was still shaken. "That's the most cursed
racket anyone ever had to endure!" A growing irritation made harsh his
voice. "You couldn't torment a worse sound out of a thousand cats." She
smiled wanly. "If we were like that in the past," he added, "I'm glad
we changed, even if we are worse in other ways."
"I could hear myself screaming and screaming," Savina said. In the
heated room she had an uncontrollable chill. "Lee, I can't bring myself
to tell you: something black and dreadful ... had me. There was no one
else. It was like a woods. The hands ripping at me--" With her face
buried in her embroidered pillow, half clothed in web-like garments
threaded with black ribbons, she cowered in an abject and pitiful
agony.
Later, he discovered that, within the scope of his possible knowledge,
his conjecture had been right: a danzon, a native Cuban ball--not, the
director of the Inglaterra gave him to understand, entirely
respectable--had been held in the Opera House.
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