the same, Jorge. Just more adult. It’s the same. I assure you.”
Jorge looks at Moses with the look of a child searching for reassurance and truth. “I don’t believe you, Moses. Thank you, my friend, mi amigo, for trying to make me feel better. Thank you. But I deserve her to be dead.”
Moses pushes the letters back into Jorge’s hands, waves his hand at him and returns to his post at his typewriter. He swats a sparrow off the top of it. But he can’t work.
He wedges himself onto the floor between the cots, pulls out his cooler, draws the hair to the side, and pulls out Lila’s compact. He looks over his shoulder to see if Jorge is looking. He’s not. He’s shuffling the letters, turning them over, looking for clues. Moses sneers and turns back to the compact, puts on his glasses and looks at himself. He looks better and stronger than he did the day before. The bruise from last week’s keeplock has blued and veined, giving him a tough-guy look. His gray skin is now pink with blood. The silver at his temples not as prominent in the cell’s dim light. He places the compact under the bed of hair and selects a soft ball of it, rolls it between his fingers, rubs it along his cheek, stashes it in his pocket.
Lila gathers letters and strides efficiently through the swinging door in the low wall. “Here,” she says. “The keeplock letters for D block, and here are the forward lists.” She hands Moses the stack and list of inmates who have been transferred to other facilities or moved to a different block. He smiles at her. She winces. “Are you OK?” She brings her right hand to her face, “Do you want to go to the infirmary?”
“I’m fine. Hey, why do you think Mann would write a story like that? Aschenbach seems like a good enough guy at the beginning. Why does he make him suffer like that?”
“That’s interesting,” she says, turning to him and putting her hand on her hip. “Wilthauser says you have to resist the desire to bring the author into it. You should look at how the story functions instead. There is a striking connection, though, between the character and Mann himself, you can tell by just reading the footnotes. So I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he does it to punish himself and his own urges.”
Moses hasn’t thought of that. He read the footnotes and now that she mentions it he remembers the connection between Aschenbach and Mann. “I have a preliminary thesis. Would you like to hear it?” he asks.
“Preliminary? Moses, the paper’s due in two days!”
“There was a delay,” he says. He would tell her Collin commandeered his glasses and he couldn’t get started until yesterday, but he’s embarrassed that he was pushed around like a weak old man.
She seals her lips shut and closes her teeth, setting her face in professorial judgement. “OK. Let’s hear it.”
“OK,” Moses turns to her and sets himself up for a little drama. “My thesis is…” He lifts his hand as if to scroll it in the damp air of the mailroom, “Aschenbach Got What He Deserved!”
“Hmm,” Lila says as she flips through the stack of letters.
This worries him terribly. Is that all she’s going to say?
“Why?” she asks.
“What do you mean why?” he grunts. He can feel his face tightening up; his stomach hurts. He shoves his left hand in his pocket and mashes the ball of her hair.
“Why does he deserve what he gets?”
Moses hates admitting it, but it’s a damned good question. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says.
“Well, you should. Wilthauser always says, ‘Tell me something I don’t already know. And then prove it to me.’ So you need to say why he deserves to die in Venice.”
“Well, because he’s a puff and he can’t leave that kid. He stays around too long. Look, let’s face it the guy doesn’t know when it’s time to leave. You’d never want to invite him to a party.”
“Do you think his desire for Tadzio was merely sexual?” Lila asks. She quickly blushes at the word. It stops Moses, too. A word like sexual has never had an opportunity to bare itself in all their discussions about literature. The words have always been sandpaper dry, purposely chaste. “I mean, it’s not just Tadzio that he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to leave Venice. He can’t stand that this will be the last time he sees the place. I think…Well, Professor Wilthauser pointed out to us that isn’t it possible that maybe he’s afraid of death? And he’s holding desperately onto youth through his affection for Tadzio?”
Moses looks at her in awe. This is it! This is what he loves about Lila. About the stories they read. That he gets to have this conversation. “So you’re saying he is afraid of death?” Moses asks.
“Yes. And by holding on too long, he does get what he deserves. You’re right about that, I think.”
Right at this moment Cavanaugh comes in. Interrupting. Ruining. Fat Cavanaugh sidles up to Lila’s worktable and she quickly leaves Moses. Cavanaugh’s pants are busting. He’s fatter than ever. Moses wonders what kind of a woman would have an affair with him. Cavanaugh doesn’t look over at him. He looks concerned with Lila. She hands him a letter and he opens it, reads it and shakes his head. He smiles at her and laughs. He leans down, elbows on the counter, big ass to Moses, and speaks in a voice not at all audible on the other side of the low wall. Lila looks soft and happy. She whispers something back to him. Her body close to his.
Moses doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. Not Lila. He laughs to himself out loud. If Cavanaugh thinks he has a chance with a woman like Lila, he’s got another thing coming. But then he hears Lila giggling. Responding. Giving in to him. “I have a question,” Moses says.
They both turn without letting on that they have been close to one another.
Moses knows this job, even the parts that are hers, but he holds up a letter anyway, waves it and waits for her to walk to him. She looks like she doesn’t trust him, suddenly. She comes swiftly. She is cautious and guarded and stands farther from him than she usually does. “What’s the problem?” she asks courteously.
“Maybe Aschenbach betrayed his true nature and that’s why he got what he deserved.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Do you have a problem with a letter?” she asks tight and full of formality.
“Can’t read if this is a D or a B. Is it Darman or Barman,” he says politely smiling at her.
“Where are your glasses, Moses?” She points to them in his breast pocket. “Put them on.”
“That’s not a good idea. Can you just read it for me?”
“Moses, if you can’t read, put on your glasses.”
“Listen to the lady, Moses,” Cavanaugh says picking food from his teeth as Lila’s workstation holds him up.
“That’s a B, I think,” he says.
“Hey, put ‘em on,” Cavanaugh commands.
“He must be a new inmate,” Moses says, resisting. But he looks at the ground and shamefully takes out his glasses. An arm is missing. She read the Rules and Responsibilities of Glasses Ownership, too, and knows that
