...of throat cancer

Cecelia's father rose with an effort from the armchair in which he was sitting listening to the radio and held out his hand to me without speaking, at the same time pointing to his throat as if to warn me that, owing to the disease, he was unable to talk. I recalled the strange whispering, breathing sound that I had heard on the telephone some days before and realised that it had been he who had answered me. I looked at him as he fell back into his old leather armchair that was all blackened and worn, and then as he bent forward and turned down the volume of the radio. He must have been what is generally called a handsome man, with that slightly vulgar kind of handsomeness that is to be found in some over-symmetrical faces. Of that handsomeness there was now nothing left. Disease had ravaged his face, causing it to swell in some places and contract in others, reddening it here and whitening it there. And there was death already, it seemed to me, in his black hair, which lay flat and lifeless and glued down by an unhealthy sweat upon his brow and temples; in the purplish colour of his lips; and above all, in his round eyes, with their expression of intense dismay. These eyes seemed to say things which his mouth, even if it had not been speechless, would have passed over in silence; and they brought to mind, not merely by the dumbness produced by his disease, but, even more, the kind of forced helplessness of one who has been bound and gagged and left, alone and defenceless, to face a deadly peril.

[Boredom, Moravia, A.]