She was speaking between her teeth, with emotional pauses, admiring the ferocity of the cuttlefish, grieving that she did not possess their vigor and their cruelty.
"If I could only be like them!… To be able to go through the streets … through the world, stretching out my talons!… To devour!… to devour! They would struggle uselessly to free themselves from the winding of my tentacles…. To absorb them!… To eat them!… To cause them to disappear!…"
Ulysses beheld her as on that first day near the temple of the poet, possessed with a fierce wrath against men, longing extravagantly for their extermination.
Their digestion finished, the polypi had begun to swim around, and were now horizontal skeins, fluting the tank with elegance. They appeared like torpedo boats with a conical prow, dragging along the heavy, thick and long hair of their tentacles. Their excited appetite made them glide through the water in all directions, seeking new victims.
Freya protested. The guard had only brought them dead bodies. What she wanted was the struggle, the sacrifice, the death. The bits of sardine were a meal without substance for these bandits that had zest only for food seasoned with assassination.
As though the pulps had understood her complaints, they had fallen on the sandy bottom, flaccid, inert, breathing through their funnels.
A little crab began to descend at the end of a thread desperately moving its claws.
Freya pressed still closer to Ulysses, excited at the thought of the approaching spectacle. One of the bags, transformed into a star, suddenly leaped forward. Its arms writhed like serpents seeking the recent arrival. In vain the guard pulled the thread up, wishing to prolong the chase. The tentacles clamped their irresistible openings upon the body of the victim, pulling upon the line with such force that it broke, the octopus falling on the bottom with his prey.
Freya clapped her hands in applause.
"Bravo!…" She was exceedingly pale, though a feverish heat was coursing through her body.