The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

her? Was it her looks that had made me fall in love with her, or was it her aversion to me or her general behaviour or the deep affection I had felt for her mother since my early childhood, or was it all of these things combined? I simply do not know. One thing I do know: my wife, the bitch, the sorceress, had poured into my soul some poison which not only made me want her but made every single atom in my body desire the atoms of hers and shriek aloud its desire. I yearned to be with her on some lost island where there would be nobody but us two. I wished that an earthquake, a great storm or a thunderbolt from the sky might blast all the rabble-humanity that was there breathing, bustling and enjoying life on the far side of the wall of my room and that only she and I might remain.
    But even then would she not have preferred any other living creature—an Indian serpent, a dragon—to me? I longed to spend one night with her and to die together with her, locked in her arms. I felt that this would be the sublime culmination of my existence.
    While I wasted away in agony the bitch for her part seemed to derive an exquisite pleasure from torturing me. In the end I abandoned all the activities and interests that I had and remained confined to my room like a living corpse. No one knew the secret which existed between us. Even my old nurse, who was a witness of my slow death, used toreproach me—on account of the bitch! Behind my back, around me, I heard people whispering, ‘How can that poor woman put up with that crazy husband of hers?’ And they were right, for my abasement had gone beyond all conceivable limits.
    I wasted away from day to day. When I looked at myself in the mirror my cheeks were crimson like the meat that hangs outside butchers’ shops. My body was glowing with heat and the expression of my eyes was languid and depressed.
    I was pleased with the change in my appearance. I had seen the dust of death sprinkled over my eyes, I had seen that I must go.
    At last they sent word to the doctor, the rabble doctor, the family doctor who, in his own words, had ‘brought us all up’. He came into the room in an embroidered turban and with a beard three handsbreadths long. It was his boast that he had in his time given my grandfather drugs to restore his virility, administered grey powders to me and forced cassia down the throat of my aunt. He sat down by my bedside and, after feeling my pulse and inspecting my tongue, gave his professional advice: I was to go onto a diet of ass’s milk and barley water and to have my room fumigated twice a day with mastic and arsenic. He also gave my nurse a number of lengthy prescriptions consisting of herbal extracts and weird and wonderful oils—hyssop, olive oil, extract of liquorice, camphor, maidenhair, camomile oil, oil of bay, linseed, fir-tree nuts and such-like trash.
    My condition grew worse. Only my old grey-haired nurse, who was
her
nurse also, attended me, bringing me my medicine or sitting beside my bed, dabbing cold water on my forehead. She would talk about the time when the bitch and I were children. For example, she told me how my wife from early childhood had a habit of biting the nails of her left hand and would sometimes gnaw them to the quick. Sometimes she would tell me stories and then I would feel that my life had reversed its course and I had become a child again, for the stories were intimately associated with my memories of those days. I remember quite plainly that when I was very little and my wife and I used to sleep together in the one cradle, a big double cradle, my nurse used to tell the same stories. Some things in these stories which then used to strike me as far-fetched now seem perfectly natural and credible to me.
    My morbid condition had created within me a new world, a strange indistinct world of shapes and colours and desires of which a healthy person could have no conception. In these circumstances the crowding