The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

August 2013

Crambe repetita (30)

2 August 2013, around 5.19.

A chimney at the end of our house was the only one smoking and there was a great fire in the kitchen. Perhaps the servants were roasting an ox. Mr Sindbad couldn’t sleep and was resting his head on the dulcimer, and his strange friend, Joco – we only knew his first name – kept singing one song over and over again in that harsh wine-stained voice of his, like thin ice cracking round a well one winter’s day when there’s roast pig on the spit and you’re chewing a crisp bit of cabbage between your teeth. Like sour wine trickling down an old man’s throat, that’s what Joco’s singing was like, and he had been singing ever since dinner.

—Gyula Krúdy (The Adventures of Sindbad, p. 106)

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