"Thirty-five, I believe."
"So young!"
I felt a strange desire to laugh, a puerile desire to laugh in the albino's face, and to leave him. It was a very singular excitation, rather convulsive, never before felt, indefinable. My mind was shaken by something similar to the strange and uncontrollable hilarity that seizes one at times in the surprising incoherences of a dream. The book was still open and lay on the bench, and I bent over it to examine a vignette that represented a human face contorted by a grimace, atrocious and grotesque: "Hemiatrophy of the left face." The implacable flies still buzzed ceaselessly.
"Have you not received the manuscript of Turris Eburnea yet?" I asked.
"No, signor. We have announced the book; but the title is all that exists."
"Only the title?"
"Yes, signor. And, in fact, we have stopped announcing the book."
"Thank you. Please send these books to my house sometime to-day."
I gave my address and left.
On the pavement, I felt a strange sensation of bewilderment. It seemed to me as if I had left behind me a fragment of an artificial, false, factitious life. What I had done, what I had said, what I had felt, and the albino's face, his voice, his gestures, all seemed unreal, took on the appearance of a dream, the character of an impression, received, not from contact with the reality, but from a book recently read. I entered the cab again and returned home. The vague sensation faded away. I began to calmly reflect. I assured myself that all was real, indisputable. Spontaneously visions of the sick man formed before me, copied on those furnished me by my recollections of poor Spinelli. And I was seized by new curiosity. "Suppose I go to Naples to see him?" I pictured to myself the pitiful spectacle of that intellectual man, degraded by disease, stammering like an idiot. I no longer felt any joy; all the exaltation of my hate had fallen; a profound sadness overwhelmed me. In fact, the ruin of this man had no influence on my own position, did not repair my own ruin. There was nothing changed, neither in me, nor in my actual situation, nor in my previsions of the future.