About
He looks at her as though searching for an emotion he misplaced. Fervor, perhaps. Or affection. He has the appearance of a man who has weathered many internal sandstorms and whose convictions—once sharp and exquisite—have lost their definition. Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It has resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore.
She was less frightened also because life had taken on the quality of a dream, a dream too terrible to be real. It wasn’t possible that she, Scarlett O’Hara, should be in such a predicament, with the danger of death about her every hour, every minute. It wasn’t possible that the quiet tenor of life could have changed so completely in so short a time.
The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.
