Fillipo Neri (2)

"Did you ever see an amusement park?"

"No, Father."

"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place—under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon—like a big yellow lantern on a pole."

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, " because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."


....


Then a human oppression rose from the priest's worn clothes, and mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp cry of pain and ran in a panic from the house—while the collapsed man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang with a steady, shrill note of laughter.


Outside the wind the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded along the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.

From "Absolution" (1924) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

More to come