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I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have the veil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly by everything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek the source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has almost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of frothy polish.
The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with an effort, I said aloud:
"Why don't they wash his hands?"
My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear me, and shakes his head.
My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By night he was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with yellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles sighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan his ochreous face.
His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where his wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy lungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in the settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantly examining his bed-bottle, and I see his face in that yellow reflection. All day I watched the torture and punishment of that body. His cap and tunic, no longer in the least like him, hang from a nail.
Once, when he lay engulfed and choking, he pointed to the negro, perpetually oscillating, and said:
"He wanted to kill himself because he was homesick."
The doctor has said to me—to me: "You're going on nicely." I wanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time to ask him!