"Oh, yes," said Randolph, stretching his legs, lighting a mentholated cigarette, "do not take it seriously, what you see here: it's only a joke played on myself by myself… it amuses and horrifies… a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven't already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother's womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn't that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more." Smiling, smoothing the back of his hair, he put out the cigarette, and picked up his brush. "Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?" He looked at Joel in an amused way. "Answer me: did she?"
"Did she what?" said Joel, for, as usual, he did not understand: Randolph seemed always to be carrying on in an unfathomable vocabulary secret dialogues with someone unseen. "Randolph," he said, "please don't be mad with me: it's only that you say things in such a funny way."
"Never mind," said Randolph, "all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you." Rising, going to a huge baroque bureau, he dabbed on lemon cologne, combed his polished curls, and, posturing somewhat, studied himself in a mirror; while duplicating him in all essentials, the mirror, full-length and of French vintage, seemed to absorb his color, to pare and change his features: the man in the mirror was not Randolph, but whatever personality imagination desired him to resemble, and he, as if corroborating such a theory, said: "They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point."
A shy rap at the door interrupted. "Randolph," said Amy, "is that boy in there with you?"
"We're busy. Go away, go away…"
"But Randolph," she whined, "don't you think he ought to come and read to his father?"
"I said: go away."
Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all. Still there was one thing he could not do, for there is no known way of making the mind clear-blank, and whatever he obliterated in daytime rose up at night in dreams to sleep beside him with an iron embrace. As for reading to his father, he'd made an odd discovery: Mr Sansom never really listened: a list of prices recited from a Sears Roebuck interested him, Joel had found by experiment, as much as any wild-west story.
"Before it happened," said Randolph, resuming his seat, "before then, Ed was very different… very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for one thing, his owning Pepe, or being, that is, his manager, complicated our relations. Pepe Alvarez, he is the one with the straw hat, and the girl, well, that is Dolores. It is not of course a very accurate picture: so innocent: who could imagine that only two days after it was taken one of us fell down a flight of stairs with a bullet in his back?" Pausing to adjust the drawing board, he stared at Joel, one eye squinting like a watchmaker's. "Careful now, don't speak, I'm doing your lips." Rustling the ribbon-dressed dolls, a breeze came through the windows bringing here in the velvet shade sunshine smells of outside, and Joel wanted to be out there where right now Idabel might be splashing through a field of grass, running with Henry at her heels. The circular composition of Randolph's face lengthened in concentration; he worked silently a great while until at last, and it was as if all that had gone before had indescribably led up to this, he said: "Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject? When one is your age most subtleties go unobserved; even so, I imagine you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now, that I should've had ever the innocence to feel such love; nevertheless, when I was twenty-three…
"It is the girl in the picture, Dolores. And we met in Madrid. But she was not Spanish; at least I do not believe so, though actually I never knew precisely where she came from: her English was quite perfect. As for me, I had been in Europe then two years, living, as it were, and for the most part, in museums: I wonder really whether anyone ever copied so many Masters? There was almost no painting of which I could not do a most engaging facsimile… still, when it came to something of my own, I went quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all.