Cleopatra Dismounts

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Diomedes, the funny old fart, left behind a pile of documents, written in his own hand, but he gave me no clear idea what to do with them. “I’m leaving you things I want preserved and copied,” he said. “My eternal rest depends on them.”

With that, he lay down to sleep, for good. Without a word of goodbye! He breathed his last as if it were a matter of indifference.

His life went out like the flame of an exhausted oil lamp. Easier, because there was no guttering, no nervous flicker, no nothing. He gave up the ghost without a murmur. Imperturbably. Like a creature turned to stone. Exactly the way he’d lived, at least for as long as I’d known him. A man of stone, is precisely what he was. You know, I had never even heard the sound of his breathing.

“My eternal rest,” I ask you! Did he want more of the same, in death as in life? Wasn’t he sick of his stone-like state? Always perched there, motionless, immovable, petrified. Day and night, bent over his writing tablet, like he was nailed to the thing, like an old bone drying out in that cell of his, forever shut in, forever silent, doing nothing that amounted to anything, just scratch, scratch, scratch on his wax tablet, scribbling away all hours of the day and night. What did he want more peace for? Hadn’t he had more than his fill of it already?

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