Die ewige Nacht

Night, thick as velvet yet starved of stars, swallows the gas-lit alleyways where Marta—sightless since a bout of scarlet fever in childhood—navigates by ear, by scent, by the tremor of cobblestones beneath her cane. She is a seamstress whose fingertips read silk like braille; her world is a map of textures, of rusted needles and whispering thread. One winter dusk she collides with Paul, a sculptor whose marble dust still clings to his coat like frost. He smells of turpentine and champagne, speaks in the cadence of cafés where absinthe louches into opalescent clouds. To him she is an untouched block of Carrara: something to be shaped, boasted about, then displayed beneath a euphoric spotlight. Yet Marta hears in his laughter the hollow thud of chisel on stone, senses the fracture lines he refuses to acknowledge. She offers him her darkness, believing it a sanctuary from the vertiginous high life of masked balls and morphine-laced nights. Paul, enchanted by the novelty of devotion he never asked for, allows her to guide him through squalid garrets where unpaid rent notices flutter like dying moths. Each time he promises reform, the city answers with a siren song of champagne coupes and cocaine-dusted mirrors. When Marta learns that he has pawned her Braille bible to buy a single orchid for another woman’s décolletage, the last filament of hope snaps. On a fog-veiled Christmas Eve she invites him to the studio, serves hot spiced wine laced with prussic acid, and as the poison coils through their veins she recites the wedding vows he once murmured in jest. They die beneath the half-finished statue of a winged angel whose face remains blank—an eyeless witness to an eternal night of shattered redemption.