The Last Gentleman

all the tricks. The particles were turning the air blue with their singing and ravening. Let everything be done properly: let one stand at the correct distance from a Velázquez, let the Velázquez be correctly lighted, set the painting and viewer down in a warm dry museum. Now here comes a citizen who has the good fortune to be able to enjoy a cultural facility. There is the painting which has been bought at great expense and exhibited in the museum so that millions can see it. What is wrong with that? Something, said the engineer, shivering and sweating behind a pillar. For the paintings were encrusted with a public secretion. The harder one looked, the more invisible the paintings became. Once again the force of gravity increased so that it was all he could do to keep from sinking to all fours.
    Yet the young man, who was scientifically minded, held himself sufficiently detached to observe the behavior of other visitors. From his vantage point behind the pillar he noticed that the people who came in were both happy and afflicted. They were afflicted in their happiness. They were serene, but their serenity was a perilous thing to see. In they came, smiling, and out they went, their eyes glazed over. The paintings smoked and shriveled in their frames.
    Here came a whole family weaving along, sunk in their happiness, man, woman, teen daughter and son, and child, all handsome as could be. But they were bogging down. When all at once: KeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRASH, first a rusty clank from above like a castle drawbridge, then a cataclysm (it got on the front page of The Times the next morning). As the dust cleared, he made out that it was not so serious, though serious enough. The skylight had fallen down at his feet, frame, glass, wheel, chain, worker, and all. For there he was, the worker, laid out and powdered head to toelike a baker. Some seconds passed before the engineer realized that it was glass that turned him white, glass powdered to sugar. It covered the family too. They stood for an age gazing at each other, turned into pillars of salt; then, when they saw that no one was hurt, they fell into one another’s arms, weeping and laughing. Suddenly everyone remembered the worker. They knelt beside him and bore him up like the mourners of Count Orgaz.The workman, an Italian youth with sloe-black eyes and black mustache who was as slight as Charlie Chaplin in his coveralls, opened his eyes and began stretching up his eyebrows as if he were trying to stay awake. Others came running up. The workman was not bleeding but he could not get his breath. As they held him and he gazed up at them, it was as if he were telling them that he could not remember how to breathe. Then he pulled himself up on the engineer’s arm and air came sucking into his throat, the throat just grudgingly permitting, it.
    It was at this moment that the engineer happened to look under his arm and catch sight of the Velázquez. It was glowing like a jewel! The painter might have just stepped out of his studio and the engineer, passing in the street, had stopped to look through the open door.
    The paintings could be seen.
    6 .
    He had, of course, got everything twisted around. Though he took pride in his “objectivity” and his “evidence,” what evidence there was, was evidence of his own deteriorating condition. If there were any “noxious particles” around, they were, as every psychologist knows, more likely to be found inside his head than in the sky.
    There were other signs that all was not well. The next morning he bought a $1,900 telescope and wiped out his bank account. The afternoon of the same day he broke off his analysis.
    Some weeks earlier the telescope had been set up in the window of an optical store on Columbus Circle. Chunky as a mortar, it had a rough crackled barrel and a heavy nickel mount. The lens cup had been unscrewed and hung by a leather strap, exposing the objective lens, which had a violet cast and glowed in its recess like a great jewel. He inquired inside. As a consequence of the recent discovery of a new optical principle, he was told, it had become possible to do away with the long, mostly empty barrel of old-fashioned telescopes and to fit lenses and prisms together like the lamina of an onion. What the telescope amounted to was a canister jam-packed with the finest optical glasses and quartzes, ground, annealed, rubbed and rouged, tinted and corrected to a ten-thousandth millimeter. It