Private Life

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HIS EYELIDS OPENED with an almost imperceptible click, as if they had been sealed shut by earlier contact with tears and smoke, or by the irritated secretions that come from reading too long under a dim light.

As his pupils struggled to make something out, he rubbed his eyelashes. He flicked at them rapidly, using the pinky finger of his right hand much like a comb. All he could see was a vague panorama of limp, watery shadows, the kind of scene a man blinded by daylight might perceive on entering an aquarium. Against this murky background, a long vaporous blade the color of crushed oranges on the piers came increasingly into focus. It was a beam of light stealing through the slats of the shutters only to sour in the dense atmosphere of the room.

It must have been about four-thirty in the afternoon. Frederic de Lloberola, the man with the aching eyelids, had awakened on his own. No one had called him, no sounds had startled him. His nerves had had their fill of sleep. They had sapped to the dregs a colorless, absurd dream, the kind that leaves hardly a trace of its plot when you awaken. The kind you have when nothing is going on in your life.

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