Who Are You? Read Free

is audible above the whirring of the fan and the sound of his movements.
    He realizes that he'll never be able to kill them all and suddenly becomes exasperated, though not so much by the mosquitoes as by the girl's silence and immobility, and by the way she's taking no notice of him. It always irritates him to see her sitting about reading; that she should go on even when he's in the room seems a deliberate insult. His lordliness affronted by her lack of attention, he makes a wild swipe, simultaneously muttering something like, ‘It's really too much . . .’ which he alters to an accusing: ‘Is it too much to ask you to keep the screens shut ?’ gazing accusingly at her.
    To his wife, there seems no point in answering. She feels that it's utterly futile to try to talk to him. She might as well talk to the wall, for all the possibility of communication between them. She keeps her eyes fixed on her book as though too absorbed in her reading to hear him.
    Into her continued silence, he ejects: ‘ Anopheles! How many times have I told you they're deadly to me ?’ Identifying a mosquito by its trick of standing on its head, legs crossed over its back, as it hovers with wings extended, he crushes it with the paper, adding one more to the innumerable brownish blood smears on the wall.
    ‘That devil's had somebody's blood already!’ He again looks at her accusingly, as if she were to blame. As she's still silent, apparently absorbed in the book, he becomes determined to make her attend to him, demanding indignantly: ‘Do you want me to go down with malaria?’
    ‘No, of course not.’ She sees that she can't put off talking to him any longer, and reluctantly raises her head, confronting his angry face; it looks to her hard, blank and impenetrable as a wall, with two blue glass circles for eyes above the hard, almost brutal mouth.
    What possible contact can she have with the owner of such a face ? It half frightens her. (After all, she's only just eighteen, and he's double her age.) Feeling bewildered and helpless, she wonders why she's been pushed into marrying him.
    'Have you taken your quinine ?' is all she can find to say. She deliberately makes her face blank to hide her apprehension, with the result that she looks almost childish, her badly-cut hair hanging down by her cheeks. Her eyes are slightly inflamed by the glaring sun, and from trying to read in a bad light, and she keeps rubbing them like a little girl who's been crying.
    Her words irritate him almost as much as her pale face, with its faintly bloodshot eyes, the vague, blank expression of which makes him angry because it seems so insulting, as though she were miles away. He too wonders why they are married; why did he ever allow her mother to persuade him into it ? He feels he's been tricked which isn't far from the truth. But none of this is clear in his head; he is only aware of the inflaming of his permanent grievance against life in general, and her in particular. He blames her for everything. She gets on his nerves so much that he moves his hand as if he meant to hit her, deflecting his aim at the last moment and squashing another mosquito instead.
    A clock downstairs strikes ten. He counts the strokes, and is suddenly overcome by the emptiness of the evening. It's still quite early, and there's nothing on earth to do. More aggrieved than ever he stares round the room, and seems to be listening. Not a sound comes from below. The servants have finished their work and retired for the night to their separate quarters. If he wants one of them now he will have to shout and go on shouting for some considerable time. He is left with the noise the frogs are making outside, the mosquitoes, and the exasperating girl. What's the good of a wife who's no sort of companion ? It doesn't occur to him that he's in any way responsible for their marriage. He blames her totally for not appreciating the privilege of being married to him.
    Meanwhile how is he going to pass