4th rv a traveler's memoirs- mustache 2

           Mustache

                

                 2.

On the other hand, Tango who looked up to Moon's mustache
until the very day of their farewell was taken to hospital as an emergency case.
First he stayed lying in bed longer than any other new comer. When he got
better enough to sit alone on the chair in his sickroom ,he tried to walk out
in the corridor. Soon after he could stand alone ,he began to walk farther
to the resting room and dance tango alone holding a pillow as a dance partner
in his arms. After a while he  liked to enter in person to Moon's sickroom
with beverages or something nutritious for Moon in his hand for the purpose of
getting friendly with Moon, whose mustache was attractive to him.
 
He got closer to Moon and also more interested in him, He even dangled
after him in the corridor, repeating, as he recited, a pharase of Nietzsche
as follows:

 "........
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe.
Joy deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity.
Wants deep, wants deep eternity."
 
 The two, Mr. Guaga and Tango left the sanatorium in a Autumn day,
one after another, the former happy at his satisfactory recovery,
the latter with his left chest still in illness. With two friends away, 
Moon felt solitary, He had to suffer from aloneness, in no hope of
getting back to 'down there' doing nothing particular but to hang
around the lake in the sanatorium
After the two friends left him, books and music replaced them.
He put literary books he liked near his pillow in bed,one of which was 
'Magic Mountain' by Thomas Mann, It was really fortunate for him
to put it by him. Reading it, he would like to compare himself
with Hanscastrop, the main protagonist of the novel, and Tango 
with an important character named Setembrini ,tall and slender,
bright-spirited and talkative. And especially the mare of Cordova,
whose real name he forgot, was compared with Chauchat in the story
who led Hans into temptation. The mare of Cordova was a tuberculous lady who had stayed there for about three months
before the two was hospitalized. 
When he was reading the book, Chauchat , one of main characters in it 
reminded him of her. It was because the poisonous effect she made
on Hanscastrop. As in the story the protagonist could not muster up
enough strength to resist getting intoxicated by something magic in
Chauchat, so Moon couldn't resist getting fascinated by her.
He did not open the novel without reading the phrase below:
"When Castorp finds the patient who keeps irritating him
by slamming doors in the dining hall, he is surprised at her attractiveness
and, above all, by her slanted eyes, protruding cheek bones,
and the delicate, girlish hand that pats her hair.
As you know, The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence:
a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body .
Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen.
What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months, and
then years, as Hans himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes
his place there. Hans positively revels in his status as one of the "horizontal": 

during her three-month stay, she kept two men by her side,
both of whom were at the same time enchanted with her. Needless to say,
one of the two was Moon. She liked to invite both of them together
to her room. She would take a seat with no mask on her mouth by Moon,
whose status was still positive. He often called at her room,
but whenever he opened the door, he found the other there in her room.
playing guitar for her. who loved a Beatles," I wanna hold your hand'
Moon came to have a blind jealousy of her and his rival whom,
he imagined, she loved more than himself. Then one day in the evening,
she hesitantly said to Moon,
' Hi, Moon, I have to say goodbye to you. I am to leave tomorrow."
And to his surprise, she whispered to him an unexpected suggestion:
"How about making a train trip together with me
toward the east coast?
There my mother lives by the seaside on the north."
"Really, are you sure?" 
"Sure"
"The down train is available that day?"
"Probably no down train available in that day. 
You have to return down the next day".

On the very day of her departure, he by stealth accompanied her
to her destination and was welcomed by an old lady alone waiting
for her daughter. The next day he returned to the sanatorium by train. 
The result was inevitably that his illness in the convalescent stage took
a turn for the worse. Nobody knew but one, a nurse the reason why
Moon getting better little by little suddenly returned much worse.