A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!” Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a candied moon.
“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said.
Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre—he was a facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.
“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years. Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and walking to an ultimate trysting-place.”
The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.
“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.
“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly.
Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting the throat of his mistress.
They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat.
“A cat never eats a cat—goldfish and dead lions are more to his taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues them in turn.”