The Last Night

The heavy shadows of night envelop the small shabby room. The little lamp on the writing table, covered in a very dark shade, casts only a pale glow. The paper blind pulled down over the window looks like a sad altar covering. A thick and heavy gloom mingled with apprehension fills the tiny space. Melancholy and angst interweave, turning about in the air in confused zigzags, crawling into the shadows on the walls. They fill up every cramped corner, raising alarms, screaming without sounds, as if hundreds of deadly snakes were laying siege outside, marking off the house, slithering in through the walls, shoving themselves through every crack, hissing through venomous fangs.

The old rusty bed is made but empty. The hard-resting place waits for its stingy bedfellow. The exertion and the exhaustion of the day have not brought him any nearer to sleep. The turmoil in his heart has hunted him down. Alert, a watchman, he sits by the little table, bent over a piece of paper, and guides his pen urgently over the sheet. He covers the white paper with fine dark markings, spilling out memories of times gone by, entrusting to them what he is now living through. Suddenly, his tired head jerks up. The pen falls from his hand. The watchman tears himself from the table, to which he seemed to have been grafted.

Emaciated and wasted, he looks like a sickly, scrawny youth. But above the exhausted, shrunken body, a high and clever brow proudly asserts itself,...