Adventures In Immediate Irreality (8 page)

Chapter Seven

We could find additional melancholy antiques in another
abandoned upstairs room, this one in my grandfather’s house. Its walls were lined
with strange paintings in large gilt wooden frames or smaller pink plush ones. There
were also frames made of tiny seashells assembled with meticulous care. I could gaze
on them for hours. Who had pasted the shells? Who had made the tiny, agile movements
that brought them together? Dead works like these gave instant rebirth to whole
existences lost in the mists of time like images in parallel mirrors sunken in the
greenish depths of dream.

In one corner there was a gramophone—its horn twisted upward and painted in
beautiful pink and yellow stripes like an enormous portion of ice-cream and
roses—and a table strewed with prints including one of Karol 1 and his queen
Elizabeta. These had long since caught my fancy. I thought the artist highly gifted
because he had a good, sure stroke, though I could not understand why he had used a
grayish, faded paint that made the paper look as if it had been soaked in water.

One day I made an amazing discovery: what I had taken for watered-down paint was
nothing other than an accumulation of miniscule letters decipherable only with the
aid of a magnifying glass. There was not a single pencil- or brushstroke; it was a
string of words telling the story of the King and Queen. Now that the
misunderstanding about the paint was cleared up, my admiration for the artist’s
skill was boundless. Indeed, I was embarrassed at having missed the work’s essential
quality the first time round and began to harbor grave doubts as to my ability to
see anything at all. Having contemplated the drawings for years without discerning
the very material from which they were wrought, was I not prey to so great a myopia
as to misapprehend everything around me, misapprehend meanings inscribed in things
perhaps every bit as clearly as the letters that constituted the drawings?

All at once the surfaces of things surrounding me took to shimmering strangely or
turning vaguely opaque like curtains, which when lit from behind go from opaque to
transparent and give a room a sudden depth. But there was nothing to light these
objects from behind, and they remained sealed by their density, which only rarely
dissipated enough to let their true meaning shine through.

The upstairs room had other peculiarities of its own.
The view it gave of the street, for instance. The walls of the house were very thick
and the windows were deeply embedded in them, forming a series of alcoves spacious
enough to stand in. I would settle into one, making believe I was in a tiny glass
chamber, and open the window. The intimacy of the alcove and the pleasure of viewing
the street from so delightful a vantage point gave me the idea of traveling the
world in a carriage of similar proportions with soft pillows to lean back on while
gazing through the windows at new cities and landscapes.

Once, when Father was reminiscing about his childhood, I asked him what his most
fervent secret wish had been and he told me that what he had longed for most of all
was a miraculous carriage that would take him around the world. I knew that as a
child he had slept in one of the upstairs rooms, and I asked him whether he ever
settled into an alcove, opened the window, and looked down into the street. Amazed,
he told me that in fact every evening when he went up to bed he would spend hours in
an alcove, often falling asleep there. His carriage dream most likely came to him in
the same place and under the same conditions as mine came to me.

Beyond bedeviled places teeming with fits and vertigo, therefore, the earth has its
benevolent places, places whose walls are lined with lovely images. The walls of my
alcove would seem to have harbored the dream of a carriage roaming the world, and
whosoever took refuge there was eventually impregnated with it as with so many fumes
of hashish . . .

Above the room there were two garrets, one of which gave access to the roof via a
small window. I often climbed through it and stood on top of the house. The entire
city spread out before me, amorphous and gray, and beyond it the fields, where
miniature toylike trains crossed a fragile bridge. What I wanted most of all was to
feel free of vertigo, as stable as if my feet were planted on the ground; I wanted
to lead my “normal” life on the roof, to move about in the fresh, bracing air of the
heights without fear or awareness of the void. I felt that if I succeeded I would
make my body lighter and more supple and, thus transformed, I would have turned into
a kind of bird-man.

I was convinced that only the fear of falling weighed me down, and the niggling
thought that I was high off the ground ran through me like a pain I wished to pluck
out by the roots. To make everything up there seem natural, I would force myself to
do something banal but precise: read, eat, sleep. For example, I would climb onto
the roof with the cherries and bread my grandfather gave me, dividing each cherry in
four and eating each piece in turn to make my “normal” activity last as long as
possible. Each time I finished one, I would throw the pit into the street, aiming at
a large pot that stood in front of a shop.

The moment I came down I would run and see how many points I had scored. There were
always three or four pits in the pot, but I was terribly disappointed by the fact
that I could only find three or four more in the vicinity. I had thus eaten very few
cherries, yet I thought I had spent hours on the roof. When I checked the time on
the green porcelain dial of the clock in Grandfather’s room, I saw that in fact only
a few minutes had passed since I had gone upstairs. I concluded that time grew more
concentrated the higher it “went on.” There was nothing I could do to draw it out
and stay longer. Each time I came down, I had to admit I had spent less time on the
roof than I had imagined, and that reinforced the strange sensation of being
indefinite and incomplete that I had on the ground. Down here time was looser than
in reality; it contained less matter than in the heights and hence took part in the
fragility of things, which seemed so concentrated around me yet at the same time so
unstable, ready at any moment to shed their meanings and temporary outlines and
appear in the exact form of their existence . . .

After Grandfather’s death the upstairs fell apart piece
by piece, object by object. He died in the tiny, humid room facing the courtyard,
having chosen it to shelter his old age and unwilling to abandon it but for the
final journey. It was there I went to see him every day as death approached; it was
there I attended the last rites, at which he himself said the prayers, his voice
trembling but completely emotionless, after putting on a new white shirt to make
them more solemn; and it was there, several days later, that I saw him on a tinplate
table waiting to be laid out.

Grandfather had a brother who was several years younger than he and his spitting
image: they both had the same perfect sphere for a head, the same shiny white mane,
the same lively, penetrating eyes, the same beard with hair as sparse as a foam full
of holes. Now this great-uncle of mine requested the honor of washing the deceased
and, old and infirm that he was, took to the task with great gusto. Trembling from
head to toe, he carried buckets of water from the courtyard pump to the kitchen for
heating. When the water was hot, he took it into the room and began washing the
corpse with detergent dipped in straw. Rubbing away, he choked back his tears and,
as if Grandfather could hear what he was saying, talked to him in a whisper
punctuated by bitter sighs: “So this is what I’ve come to. This is what old age
brings. You are dead, and here I am washing you. Woe is me! To think I’ve lived to
see so sad a sight . . .” And after wiping his cheeks and wet beard with his coat
sleeve, he resumed his task with even greater vigor.

So alike were the two brothers—the one dead, the other rubbing—that they
made a hallucinatory picture. The men from the cemetery, who usually saw to the
washing of the corpse and collected tips from every member in the family for their
pains, stood in a corner smoking, spitting all over the floor, and looking on
scornfully at this intruder who was usurping their vocation. When after an hour or
so Grandfather had completed the task, the corpse lay face down on the table.

“Are you done?” one of the men asked, cracking his fingers nervously. He was a little
man with a red goatee and a malicious look about him.

“I am,” the brother of the deceased answered. “Now let’s get his clothes on.”

“Aha! So you’re done,” the little man said, his voice dripping with irony. “Is that
what you call done? Is that any way to put a man in the ground? Filthy like
that?”

The old man stood there amazed, a batch of straw in his hand, looking around the room
in a mute plea for one or another of us to come to his defense. He was certain he
had done a good job and did not deserve the insult.

“And now let me show you why you shouldn’t do what you’ve got no business doing,” the
man said cockily and, snatching the straw out of the old man’s hand, he stalked over
to the table, inserted it into the dead man’s anus with a sure twist, and came out
with a large piece of excrement.

“Now you see you don’t know how to wash a corpse?” he said. “You’d have buried him
with that filth inside him!”

Grandfather’s brother gave a violent shudder and burst into tears.

The funeral took place on a sultry summer day. There can be nothing so sad or solemn
as a funeral in the heat of the day and the rays of the sun, when the vapor makes
people and things appear a bit larger than life, as if under a magnifying glass.
What else can people do on such a day but bury their dead?

In the torpid, searing air their every move seemed to have been made hundreds of
years before—the same as then, the same as always. The grave sucked the dead
man into its dark, damp cold, which doubtless imbued him with supreme happiness.
Then lumps of earth fell heavy on the coffin and the tired, sweaty men in dusty
coats went on living the only lives they knew.

Chapter Eight

Several days after Grandfather’s funeral Paul Weber was
married. Though a bit tired at the wedding, he kept smiling a sad, forced smile
containing the seeds of devotion. His bare, red neck twisted and turned in the wing
collar, his trousers seemed longer and tighter than usual, and the tails of his
frock coat dangled like a clown’s. All the absurd gravity of the ceremony was
concentrated in his person. I represented a more secret, intimate absurdity: I was
the little clown nobody sees.

The bride was waiting in an armchair on a dais in the back of the room. Her face was
covered with a white veil, and it was not until she came back from the canopy and
lifted it that I saw the face for the first time.

The tables for the guests stretched in a series of white patches along the courtyard;
all the town’s vagabonds had gathered at the gate; the sky was an indecisive hue of
clay yellow; the pale maids of honor in dresses of blue and pink silk were handing
out small sweets wrapped in silver: it was a wedding. The musicians scraped away at
a sad old waltz, which occasionally swelled and grew and seemed to be coming to life
but then lost the momentum of its melody and grew thinner and thinner until in the
end all that remained was the metallic thread of the single flute.

It was a terribly long day, too long for a wedding. I was the only one at the far end
of the courtyard near the hotel stables. I observed the proceedings from afar,
standing on a mound and surrounded by chickens as they pecked for grains among the
blades of grass and the strains of the sad waltz from the courtyard intermingling
with the fresh smell of wet hay from the stables. From my post I could see Paul
talking to Ozy. He must have told him a joke or some such thing, because the invalid
began to laugh and, turning purple, all but choked under the bulging dickey of his
starched shirt.

Night finally came. The few trees in the courtyard sank into darkness, scooping a
mysterious, invisible park out of the gloom. The bride was still standing next to
Paul on the dais of the dimly lit hall, cocking her head in his direction whenever
he whispered something to her and yielding her soft arm to his fingers, which
caressed it along the white gloves.

Several cakes were brought out. The most impressive was a monumental castle complete
with pink-frosting ramparts and buttresses. The sugar florets topping it all gave
off a dull, oily glow. Each time a knife pierced a rose, it crunched under the
blade, breaking into dozens of tiny splinters like glass. The old ladies made a
majestic promenade of their velvet dresses and the jewels on their breasts and
fingers, advancing slowly and solemnly like walking altars. Little by little the
room clouded over and everything I saw looked fuzzier and more and more absurd . . .
I fell asleep looking down at my burning red hands.

The room in which I woke up smelled of acrid smoke. A mirror opposite the window
reflected the dawn as a perfect square of blue silk. I was lying on an unmade bed
strewn with pillows. There was a dim noise in my ears like the whoosh in a shell,
and wisps of smoke still floated through the air. When I tried to sit up, my hand
slipped into one of the bed’s wooden sculptures, some of which seemed made for my
fingers, while others stuck out from the bed, growing in the pale light of the room
and burrowing into endless crenels, holes, and jagged patches of mildew. In a few
moments the room filled with all sorts of curlicues, which, though incorporeal, I
had to push through to make my way to the door. My head still throbbed with the
whoosh, which all the caves in the air now seemed to take up. The white light in the
corridor gave my cheeks a bracing wash and roused me once and for all. I ran across
a man in a long nightgown, who gave me a nasty scowl as if to reproach me for being
dressed so early in the morning.

There was no one else present. The tables had remained in the courtyard, their
spruce boards now exposed. The dawn was sullen and cold. The wind blew the colored
chocolate wrappers through the deserted yard. How had Paul’s bride held her head?
Had she leaned it on his shoulder? Some waxworks had female figures with a device
that enabled them to bend their heads to one side and close their eyes.

The streets of the town had lost all semblance of reason. The chill had got under my
coat: I was cold and sleepy. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the wind placing
its colder cheek against mine and from inside my eyelids it felt like a mask, the
mask of my face, whose inside was as dark and cold as the back of an actual metal
mask. Which house along my way was due to explode? Which lamppost was about to twist
like a rubber truncheon into a grimace directed at me? Nowhere in the world, under
no circumstances, did anything ever happen.

When I got to the marketplace, I found men unloading
meat for the butcher shops, their arms laden with sides of red and purple beasts
glistening with blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses. The air was redolent
with flesh and urine. The butchers hung each beast head down, the black, globular
eyes fixed on the ground. They were lined up along the porcelain-white walls like
scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and delicate material. They had the
watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky limpidity of gelatin. The gaping
stomachs were edged with the lace of muscles and the weighty necklaces of beads of
fat. The butchers stuck their red hands in and extracted the precious innards —
round, broad, rubbery gobbets of hot flesh—which they spread out on a table. The
fresh meat had the velvety sheen of a monstrous, hypertrophic rose.

The dawn had turned a steel blue; the brisk morning sang a deep organ stop. The
carthorses observed the humans with their ever tearful eyes; a mare let loose a hot
stream of urine onto the cobblestones. The sky made deep, dark inroads into the now
foamy, now pellucid bog, and everything became distant, desolate. It was morning.
The men were unloading the meat; the wind was piercing my clothes; I was trembling
with cold and lack of sleep. What sort of world did I inhabit?

I raced through the streets like a madman. The sun had appeared, already red, at the
edge of the woods, but darkness still reigned in the streets lined with buildings,
and only at intersections did the glistening light burst through as through doors
ajar along a deserted corridor.

I passed the Webers’ house. The heavy upper-story shutters were closed; everything
looked abandoned and sad: the wedding was over.