Get Bone from Butcher
Get Bone from Butcher
In the depths of his starvation, the protagonist resorts to a degrading ruse to obtain food. He goes to one of the meat bazaars beneath the Town Hall and, descending the steps, calls up the archway with a threatening backward gesture as if talking to a dog. He boldly addresses the first butcher he meets, asking for a bone for his dog, insisting it need only be something for the animal to carry in its mouth. The butcher gives him a bone with a morsel of meat still on it, and the protagonist hides it under his coat, thanking the man so heartily that the butcher looks at him in amazement.
The Futile Attempt to Eat
Retreating into a dark passage near the forges, where there is no light and no one about, the protagonist begins to gnaw at the bone. The meat has no taste; a rank smell of blood oozes from it, and he vomits almost immediately. He tries again, forcing himself to keep the food down, but vomits once more. In a frenzy, he bites angrily into the meat, tears off a morsel, and gulps it down by sheer strength of will, yet it is of no use. As soon as the fragments become warm in his stomach, they come up again. He clenches his hands in fury, bursts into tears from sheer helplessness, and gnaws away like one possessed, crying so that the bone gets wet and dirty with his tears, vomiting, cursing, and groaning again, crying as if his heart would break, and vomiting anew.
The Rage Against Heaven
In his utter desperation, the protagonist turns his fury against God. He consigns all the powers that be to the lowermost torture in the loudest voice, shrieking and menacing with his fists towards Heaven. He yells God's name hoarsely, bending his fingers like claws with ill-suppressed fury. He declares that if God existed, he would curse Him so that Heaven would quiver with the fire of hell. He renounces all divine works and pomps, vowing to execrate his thought if it dwells on God again and to tear out his lips if they ever utter His name. He bids God farewell for all time and eternity, then falls silent, trembling with excitement and exhaustion, still whispering oaths and abusive epithets, hiccoughing after the violent crying fit, broken down and apathetic after his frenzied outburst.
Aftermath and Despair
After perhaps an hour of standing in the dark passage, hiccoughing and whispering, the protagonist hears voices and slinks away, dragging himself along the walls of the houses back into the lighted streets. His brain begins to work in a peculiar direction, fixating on the disgrace of the old booths in the marketplace, but this is a fleeting distraction. He is trembling over his whole body, hiccoughing violently after his cry, and feels that there is not much life left in him, that he is singing his last verse. It is almost a matter of indifference to him; he wends his way down to the wharf, farther and farther away from his room, willing to lay himself down flat in the street to die. His sufferings have rendered him more and more callous, and even the throbbing pain in his sore foot, which he had injured earlier, causes him no particular distress.
