LYING IN BED, waiting for the storm to strike, I was struck again by the astonishing discovery that there really is no fool like an old fool, and by the more astonishing discovery that I had become one — not so much because I was willing to sell without making a profit, but because I had bought something that I couldn’t even sell at a loss. How had this happened? After all the hours I had spent in my workroom examining my life, how had I ended up as the fool in the story? I had meant to become something else. I think I had meant to become a happy man. I know I had meant to make Albertine a happy woman, had meant to make us a happy couple, but I had staked our happiness on this hotel on this island. For me, living here alone with her, apart from a world that displeased me, was enough to make me a happy man, but her becoming a happy woman depended on our making a success of the hotel, and for her living apart from the world was not a happy state, just an unwelcome consequence of the location of the hotel. I had trapped her here, and now I had no way to get her out. I couldn’t even imagine anyone who would buy this damned hotel from us, at whatever price, because I could think of only one person in the world fool enough to buy it, and he was already living in it.
[to be continued]
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