w- 1 mustache 1

1. Mustache

                        

                      1.

Long ago once in his twenties Moon had a mustache. It was when he was spending  four years or so under medical treatment in a sanatorium. Reflecting on the life in     isolation at that time, he often felt as if he had been to an exotic wonderland,which  was not likely to be in the world.There in the evening before going to bed he looked out to cherry flowers in full blossom and the next day he awoke to find the flowers all gone. Again in the evening he went to bed seeing the cherry flowers in full bloom   and the next morning he was sad to find them all the flowers he saw the previous    night gone away. Strangely enough, to him the time of four years he spent there was like a strange dream in which he experienced it four times for consecutive nights. Whenever he looked back upon it, he was reminded of   Rip Van Winkle, the hero of the fiction written by Washington Irving, the book said, who climbs the Catskill Mountains and there  sleeps as many as 40 years, as if he were taking a nap.

 The sanatorium hides itself at the thick-forested hill side, so the winter was relatively cold. More than anything else, most patients suffering from the irregular fluctuation of their body temperature were sensitive to the weather in fear of getting cold, which possibly caused the horrible cough. However, After sunset when it was snowy or thickly cloudy, the corridor of the old wood structure began to liven up, with the electric light on, assuming a picturesque look against the dark woods outside.

As for his mustache, it first came to grow by itself, as he did not shave while he was lying unmoved in bed in fear of blood-spitting again. Then one day abruptly he wanted to have the hairs under the nose unshaved. He thought if he had a mustache resembling that of Nietzsche, how nice it would be! Under such a simple curiosity he left the hairs on his upper lip. This was the very beginning. With it as a momentum, he had a mustache in the sanatorium. He was lucky to know that while he was trimming up his mustache he could forget the unbearable sufferings of breathing itself. He absorbed in embellishing it every morning before the mirror, which strangely enough stopped coughing.

At that time he had no other hope but to breathe in with ease. When he awoke up, the first thing to do for his daily life was to check by himself how the sound of his breathing was. It was very important whether or not the sound of it got better than yesterday. And you can imagine the next things which he did carefully one by one. That is to say, when he awoke in the morning, he began to cough several times slightly, still in bed, for the purpose of pulling up to the throat the phlegm which was amassed the last night in the upper part of both chests and spits it all out into the phlegm bottle.

After confirming that there was no blood stain mixed in it, he could go out to the washroom, having a fit of coughing.  If there was found a trace oft blood in phlegm, which could be a sign of lung hemorrhage, he lay again in bed, with a thermometer put beneath the tongue, in fear of expected coughing up blood. In this sense, it was not just for purpose of washing up that every morning he went there. More than that, it was to inform others of his being well, with no problem through the last night. 

On the one hand, more importantly, his mustache made him look dignified to two men patients in particular in the ward: one who was called Mr.Guago, deaf-half mute, and the other who was called Tango dancer, tall and slender. Both of them entered to hospital almost the same time. A week or so after the two patients passed over their serious condition, they began to step out of the sick room, first to the corridor in front of the door of his room and next to the resting room farther at the end of it, as most newcomers did that way. Anyway when the two newcomers came to meet him, they paid their respects to him, with their eyes fixed on his upper lip. The former was more polite, in the obedient manner, to him due to his mustache.

Then in a month or so, Mr.Guago suddenly turned his humble behavior from respect into disdain, even making fun of him before several patients in the lounge of the ward. What made his attitude toward Moon abruptly turn. There might be a proper reason for it.

One day, he happened to be in the bathroom together with Moon. While the two sat side by side, naked, on the bathroom floor, the latter suggested to the former that he should wash off the dirt on his back. Rubbing his back softly, Mr.Guaga got disappointed at his skinny body. Then this was also the moment his mustache lost its authoritative power to make him be polite before Moon.

Next he began to measure by his hand Moon's wrist, ankle and neck one after another smoothly. After that, he was sure that Moon was nothing and he himself was superior to Moon and since the moment on, treated him as if he were his Sancho in the novel of Don Quixote. For example, he liked to strut through the long corridor to the resting hall grasping him with one hand by the coat collar around his back neck with a purpose: to show to the  women patients that he was physically superior to Moon. In such a method as he liked to pride himself by comparing him with the other.