Several days passed. Monsalvat was frightened by a rapid change for the worse in his nervous condition. One afternoon as he was drinking some coffee in a pastry shop near the business centre of the town, the mental blankness he knew and dreaded came upon him. His hands trembled, and he broke into a cold sweat. A waiter helped him into a cab. When he reached his room he found he could neither read nor write. His mind seemed scattered, broken into bits. All his strength was gone. From day to day his organism seemed to lose coordination, as if all the parts of his being had escaped the control of his will. Different men seemed to manifest themselves within him; as he wonderingly observed them, he found the acts and thoughts of these other Monsalvats quite inexplicable.
Finally, one December morning, Amiral told him that Arnedo knew nothing about Nacha. After keeping her several days locked up in a certain house, he had taken her to another, from which, after a week or two, she had run away.
Monsalvat believed her lost forever. At the same time he was astonished at the slight impression Amiral's words seemed to make on him. He stood motionless for a long time gazing blankly into the distance, but he felt so ill that he yielded to a desire to go to some friend. He called on de Castro, preferring not to see Torres, who might think him either sick or insane. Ruiz was profoundly distressed at sight of him. Monsalvat noticed his friend's pitying expression and stammered some incoherent words. Then he collapsed.
A deep, painful night had settled on him, body and soul, nor could his mind see in that sudden darkness. His whole being had become insensible. For him now there was no longer either Nacha or Monsalvat; nor struggling nor rest; for him there was neither truth or beauty; the world had been blotted out.
CHAPTER XXII
The storm had passed. Calm had returned to the world.
Monsalvat was living in a sanatorium at Almagro, to which his friends had taken him. Tranquil and silent, he spent nearly the entire day in the small park, with its lofty eucalyptus groves, thinking of nothing, trying not to think. He was new-born. What did the past matter? He was going to look ahead! Life lay before, not behind, him! Even Nacha no longer existed; or rather, had ceased to exist for him! With her, a whole universe—all that he knew and loved, all that his feelings and thought had created in him—had vanished from his heart and mind. Not that he denied the reality of the past year; but, the storm weathered, he found himself looking at a new world, and he could not live in its presence with the same opinions and feelings as before.
Peace had come to him; but he lacked something that he loved even more than peace: freedom; and now that he felt sane and sound, he wanted to escape from his present surroundings. Moreover, two inoffensive maniacs had recently come to the sanatorium. Their presence annoyed Monsalvat, for he could not see that they differed very much from himself. At times he wondered if his attempts to reform the world might not become a mania also, and bring him down to the level of these harmless lunatics.
His friends came but rarely to see him, for the sanatorium was a little distance out of town. Their consciences were clear since they were paying Monsalvat's expenses.