Free The Great Weaver From Kashmir by Halldór Laxness Page B

before, and long sleepless nights. The noise here is absolutely dreadful: all the livelong night a clattering of carriages and cracking of whips, and all during the later part of the day the city hums with the endless shouts and calls of the street vendors, packs of gypsies, and madmen. If a man braves the traffic he is surrounded by those lazzaroni 15 who bully foreigners with all kinds of gotaterri. 16 It must have been a wretched idiot who invented this idiom: “Vedi Napoli e poi muori.” 17
    Oh, I saw everything there was to see of this life in huge hotels a long, long time ago: servants practically kowtowing from courtesy and pretense; orchestras as cold and spiritless as barrel organs; Americans with diamond rings mollycoddling European mistresses without having the slightest clue concerning civilized customs; English mummies with bulldog snouts, their hands stuck in their pants pockets, brooding over their wives or escorts while Italians wait on them with precisely the same vain gusto that was in fashion five hundred years ago; oh, those Italians live in an entirely different century than other races!
    And when I come home in the evening with my English maid, having been disappointed at the San Carlo Opera or the Teatro Bellini, or having watched some cinematic rigmarole until I was half dead, there is no one that I can talk to, because I’m bored with this poor English maid, and then maybe I sit alone long into the night, and my thoughts revolve only around me, my whole life, about all the wild vitality of youth and all my hunger for the fulfillment of life,which was assuaged by nothing but banality and apathy, discouragement, boredom, fear, nervousness, ruefulness, and sickness. The pantomime of my memories passes through my conscience: I yearn for one thing and one thing only, and what I yearn for is the one thing that I’ve never gotten, but everything else I have gotten, both what I didn’t desire and also what I feared. I never found my own life.
    My final disappointment occurred when my boy turned his back on me and forsook me. I had decided not to go with Grímúlfur in the hope that Steinn and I could be together, since as long as we, mother and son, were together, it was possible for us to have something resembling a home even if Grímúlfur was always fluttering about. But even the sturdiest knot can come undone. Steinn commended me to the dreariness of exile one October night last fall. I was left standing alone in the railway station, and his train vanished into the darkness.
    As you know, we, mother and son, as well as my English maid, stayed during the two hottest summer months in Brighton, since I was reluctant to come here to the south in the worst of the heat. Grímúlfur continued on without stopping in England; he doesn’t notice the difference between warm and cold.
    During our first days in Brighton, Steinn was like a considerate and good son: in the mornings he went with me on walks by the sea, along King’s Road and Marine Parade, and we often went together to the Regent Palais de Dance in the afternoons, and he was still a good boy, courteous and delightful, and often danced with me a bit. But what do you think it is that took him away from me? What do you think captivated my boy so in the most splendid city in England, and made him turn his back on his mother? What but a decrepit oldfellow in a white linen suit, rust brown in the face. It’s incredible but true: several days after Steinn met this detestable ghost at the Hotel Metropole, where we were staying, he became an entirely different child. Imagine it, when I went out alone with my maid in the mornings I could expect to meet them on the coast road where they rambled along absorbed in palaver and walking arm in arm! It was simply grotesque!
    â€œSteinn,” I said, “show me a little more consideration, at least while the guests in the hotel are watching, and don’t sit down to chat