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Authors: Bill Johnston Witold Gombrowicz

BOOK: Bacacay
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Madam!
How is this possible?
Your conduct is incomprehensible; behavior such as yours cannot be countenanced!
Are you insensitive to those shapes, movements, modulations; to that scent?
Do you not grasp that perfection?
In what way are you a woman?
In your place I would know what was expected of me if he should deign even to glance at my small, paltry, indolent woman’s body.
A few days later (this was on a deserted street in the late evening) Lawyer Kraykowski stopped, turned around, and waited with his cane.
It did not behoove me to retreat, and so I walked on, though a faintness overcame me; then he seized me by the arm and shook me, banging his cane against the ground.
“What’s the meaning of these idiotic libels?
What are you after?”
he shouted.
“Why are you trailing around after me?
What is all this?
I’ll take my cane to you!
I’ll break your bones!”
I was unable to speak.
I was happy.
I received it into myself like a communion, and I closed my eyes.
In silence I merely bent over and offered my back.
I waited—and experienced some of those perfect moments known only to one who truly has but a few days ahead of him.
When I straightened up he was walking quickly away, tapping his cane.
My heart full, in a state of grace and beatitude, I returned home through the empty streets.
Too little, I was thinking; too little!
Too little of everything!
More—ever more!
And contrition mingled with gratitude.
Of course!
She had read
my letter as if it were some pitiful claptrap, a stupid joke, and she had shown it to the lawyer.
Instead of helping I had hindered, and all because I was too selfish, too lazy, and gave too little of myself —I wasn’t sufficiently serious and responsible, and I had been unable to inspire understanding.
Madam!
In order to make you aware, to appeal to your conscience, I declare that starting today I shall apply various forms of self-denial (fasts and so on) until it comes about.
You are insolent!
What words can I employ to explain the necessity, the obligation, the bounden duty?
Will it go on much longer?
What could be the meaning of this resistance?
What is the source of this pride?!
And the next day, remembering an important detail, I wrote:
Only “Violette” perfume.
That’s what he likes.
From this moment the lawyer stopped visiting the doctor’s wife.
I agonized; I could not sleep at night.
I am not naïve.
In many matters I have an understanding that no one would suspect in me —I’m well aware, for example, of the impression such a letter might make on a polished, worldly person like the doctor’s wife.
I’m able even at the heights of ecstasy to give a sudden composed smile—but what of it?
Did this make my suffering less intense, or the torments I imposed upon myself less painful?
Was my indignation less fundamental?
My adoration of the lawyer less genuine?
No!
What is fundamental?
Life, health?
And so I swear that with the same sudden composed smile I would give up both life and
health if only she would ...
if only she would comply.
Or perhaps this woman had ethical scruples?
What are foolish ethics in the face of Lawyer Kraykowski?
Just in case, I resolved to reassure her in this respect too!
Madam, you must!
The doctor is a zero, a nobody.
But with her it wasn’t ethics, it was simply pride, or even nonsensical female sulkiness, and a failure to grasp sacred elemental matters.
I walked to and fro beneath her windows—what was going on in there behind those drawn curtains (for she usually rose late), in what phase did she find herself ?
Women are too superficial!
I tried magnetism—“You must, you must,” I repeated over and again, staring at her window.
“Today, this evening, if your husband goes out.”
Then suddenly, all at once, I remembered that the lawyer had wanted to beat me; that since he had not done so at that time, on the street—then perhaps it was for lack of time?
And so I dropped everything and rushed to the courthouse, from which, I knew, he would emerge in a moment.
And, in fact, a few minutes later he came out in the company of two gentlemen, and I went up to him and, in silence, offered him my back.
The astonishment of the two gentlemen hovered over me, but I paid them no heed—the entire world meant nothing to me!
I half-closed my eyes, clasped my arms, and waited trustfully—but no blow fell.
In the end I murmured, stammering into the flagstones of the sidewalk:
“Maybe now?
Always, always, always ...”
“It’s just some idiot,” his voice drifted over me.
“How absentminded
of me!
I quite forgot that I have a meeting!
We’ll speak another time; goodbye, gentlemen.
Here’s a few pennies, my man.
Good afternoon!”
And he hurriedly got into a cab.
Oh, those cabs!
One of the gentlemen reached into his pocket.
I stopped him with a gesture.
“I’m neither a beggar nor an idiot.
I have my dignity; and I accept charity only from Lawyer Kraykowski.”
I conceived a plan of hypnosis, a constant, unwavering pressure with the aid of a thousand little facts, mystical signs that, without penetrating the consciousness, would create a subconscious state of necessity.
On the wall of the building in which she lived I drew in chalk an arrow and a large K.
I won’t enumerate all my intrigues, some more adroit than others; she was enwrapped in a web of strange occurrences.
A shop assistant in a fashion boutique referred seemingly by mistake to “her husband, the lawyer.”
The concierge, encountered on the steps, said that Judge Krajewski had asked if the umbrella had been returned.
Krajewski-Kraykowski, judge-lawyer: Caution was needed; dripping water wears away a boulder.
It was unclear how on earth she could have returned from the city with the lawyer’s fragrance on her dress—his invigorating scent of violet soap and eau de cologne.
Or for example such an incident: Late at night the telephone rings—she’s awoken from her sleep, she hurries to pick up and she hears a stranger’s voice saying peremptorily: “At once!”—and nothing more.
Or a slip of paper stuck in her door with nothing on it but a line of poetry: “Hush, my child, and don’t you
kray.
”
But I was gradually losing hope.
The lawyer had stopped visiting her; it seemed that all my efforts had come to nothing.
I could
already foresee the moment of final capitulation, and I was afraid: I felt I would be unable to reconcile myself to this.
The affront to the lawyer in this regard was something I could not bear, even if he himself were untroubled by it.
For me it would be the ultimate outrage, an injury and a disgrace.
Ultimate—yes, ultimate, that is the right word.
Unable to believe it, I nevertheless trembled before the inevitable end that was approaching.
And indeed ...
but there is after all such a thing as mercy!
And oh, how artful they were—and incidentally, I’m angry at the lawyer for keeping it secret—did he not know that I was suffering?
Was it by chance?
Oh no, it wasn’t chance, it was the heart!
I was on my way home one evening, walking along the Aleje, when something prompted me to step into the park.
I really should have gone to bed early that night, because the next morning at dawn I was going to attach a little gilt plate to the lawyer’s door with the inscription LAWYER KRAYKOWSKI; but something prompted me to enter the park.
I did so—and right at the far end, beyond the pond, I saw ...
ah!
ah!
I saw her large hat and his bowler.
Oh, the naughty so-and-sos, the rascals, the little rogues!
So while I’d been tiring myself out, they had been meeting here in secret from me—and so cleverly!
They must have made use of taxicabs!—They turned into a side path and sat on a bench.
I hid in the bushes.
I expected nothing, I was thinking about nothing—there was nothing I wanted to know; I just crouched behind a bush and quickly counted leaves, without a second thought, as if I weren’t there at all.
And suddenly—the lawyer embraced her, held her close and whispered:
“Here—nature ...
Do you hear?
The nightingale.
Now, quickly —while it’s singing ....
To its music, to the rhythm of its song ...
if you please!”
And then ...
oh, it was cosmic, I couldn’t stand it any longer—as if all the forces of the world had gathered within me in a great frenzy, as if a terrible pile, an electrical pile, the pile of the vertebral column, or the pile of a funeral pyre, had given me a mighty jolt—I jumped up and began shouting at the top of my voice, across the whole park:
“Lawyer Kraykowski gave her ...!
Lawyer Kraykowski gave her ...!
Lawyer Kraykowski gave her ...!”
The alarm was raised.
Someone was running, someone was fleeing, people suddenly appeared from every direction; and I was seized once, twice, three times, I was knocked off my feet and I danced like never before, with foam on my lips, in twitches and convulsions—a bacchic dance.
I don’t recall what happened next.
I woke up in the hospital.
My health is deteriorating.
My recent experiences have exhausted me.
Lawyer Kraykowski is leaving tomorrow in secret from me (though I know about it) to a small mountain village in the eastern Carpathians.
He wants to disappear in the mountains for a few weeks and he thinks that maybe I’ll forget.
I’ll follow him!
Yes, I’ll follow him!
Everywhere I shall follow that guiding star of mine!
But it’s unclear whether I’ll return alive from the journey; these emotions are too strong.
I may die suddenly on the street, by the fence, and in such a case—a card must be written—they should send my body to Lawyer Kraykowski.
The Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki
1
I was born and raised in a most respectable home.
It is with great emotion that I run toward you, my childhood!
I see my father, a handsome man of lofty stature, with a face in which everything—gaze, features, and gray-tinged hair—all combined into the very image of perfect noble breeding.
I see you too, mother, in spotless black, with no other adornment than a pair of antique diamond earrings.
And I see myself, a small, solemn, thoughtful lad, and I feel like weeping at those shattered hopes.
Perhaps the only imperfection in our family life was the fact that my father hated my mother.
Actually, “hate” is the wrong word; rather, he could not abide her, though why—I was never able to say; and this was the beginning of the mystery whose vapors led me in my adult years to moral ruination.
For what am I today?
An upstart—or better, a moral bankrupt.
What do I do, for example?
When I kiss a
lady’s hand I lick it moistly, after which I quickly take out my handkerchief: “Oh, pardon me,” I say, and wipe it with the handkerchief.
I noticed early on that my father avoided my mother’s touch like the plague.
More, even—he avoided her eyes, and when he spoke to her he would most often look to the side or study his fingernails.
There was nothing sadder in its way than that lowered gaze of my father’s.
Sometimes, on the other hand, he would look askance at her with an expression of boundless disgust.
For me it was incomprehensible, since I felt no aversion whatsoever toward my mother; quite the opposite, though she had put on considerable weight and was spreading in every direction, I liked to cuddle up to her and lay my little head on her lap.
But in such conditions how is it possible to explain the fact of my existence, how I had come to be?
I must have been created, as it were, by force, with gritted teeth, in contravention of natural impulses; in a word, I suspect that for some time, in the interest of marital duty, my father suppressed his repugnance (for he placed the honor of his manhood above all else) and that the fruit of this heroism was myself—a little child.
After this superhuman and in all probability one-time exertion, my father’s revulsion flared up with elemental power.
I once heard him shouting at my mother as he cracked his fingers: “You’re losing your hair!
Before long you’ll be as bald as a coot!
A bald woman; do you understand what that means to me—a bald woman!
A bald spot on a woman ...
a wig ...
no, I can’t take it!”
And he added more calmly, in a quiet voice laden with suffering: “Oh, how awful you are.
You have no idea how awful you are.
Besides, the bald spot is just a detail, the nose too; one detail or other can be awful, that can happen in the Aryan race too.
But you’re awful through and through; you’re imbued with hideousness from head to toe; you’re hideousness itself ....
If there were at least one part of you free from the element of hideousness I’d at least have a starting point, some base, and I swear I’d concentrate upon it all the feelings I vowed to you at the altar.
Oh dear Lord.”
For me this was beyond comprehension.
How was my mother’s bald spot worse than my father’s bald spot?
And my mother’s teeth were even better; there was one white eye-tooth with a gold filling ...
And why for her part was my mother not disgusted by my father, but quite the opposite, she liked to caress him—in the presence of guests, for it was only then that my father would not shudder.
My mother was replete with majesty.
To this day I can see her, sponsoring a charitable raffle, or at a dinner party, or leading the servants in an evening meditation in her private chapel.
My mother’s piety was unparalleled; it was not so much ardent as voracious—a voracity for fasting, prayer, and good works.
At the appointed hour we would appear, myself, the valet, the cook, the chambermaid and the concierge, in the pall of the black-lined chapel.
After prayers had been said the lesson began.
“Sin!
Hideousness!”
my mother would declare forcefully, and her chin would sway and tremble like the yolk of an egg.
Perhaps I am not speaking with the respect owed to those dear shades?
Life has taught me this language, the language of mystery....
But let us not get ahead of events.
Occasionally my mother would summon me, the cook, the valet, and the maid at an unusual time.
“Pray, you poor child, for
the soul of that monster your father; all of you, pray for the soul of your master, sold to the devil!”
On some occasions, we would sing litanies till four or five in the morning under her direction, until the door opened and my father appeared in a tailcoat or a tuxedo, with an expression of supreme distaste on his face.
“On your knees!”
my mother would exclaim, swinging and undulating toward him, her outstretched finger pointing at the image of Christ.
“Off with you, to bed, to sleep!”
my father would order the servants imperiously.
“These are my servants!”
my mother would reply, and my father would leave hurriedly, to the accompaniment of our supplicatory lamentations before the altar.
What did this mean, and why would my mother speak of his “filthy deeds?”
Why was she disgusted by my father’s deeds since my father was disgusted by my mother?
A child’s innocent mind is lost in such secrets.
“He’s a libertine!”
my mother would say.
“Remember, all of you—don’t stand for it!
Whoever does not cry in outrage at the sight of sin should tie a millstone round their neck.
One cannot feel enough disgust, contempt, and hate.
He took a vow, and now he’s disgusted?
By hell’s fires!
He’s disgusted by me—but I’m disgusted by him too!
The Day of Judgment will come!
In the next world we shall see which of us is better.
A nose!
—A spirit!
A spirit has no nose, nor bald spot, and zealous faith opens the gates of future heavenly delights.
There will come a time when your father will be writhing in torments and will implore me as I sit at the right hand of Jehovah, that is, I mean, of the Lord God, to give him my moistened finger to lick.
We’ll see then if he will be disgusted!”—In fact, my father was also devout and regularly went to church, but never to our chapel at home.
Often, in his
perfect elegance, he would say with that aristocratic narrowing of his eyes: “Believe me, my dear, it’s a faux pas on your part, and when I see you before the altar with that nose and those ears and lips of yours—I’m convinced that Christ himself feels ill at ease.
I don’t deny your natural right to piety,” he added, “quite the contrary—from the religious point of view a neophyte is a beautiful thing; but there’s no getting away from it!
Nature cannot be won over by pleading; and remember the French saying:
“Dieu pardonnera, les hommes oublieront, mais le nez restera.”
In the meantime I was growing up.
Sometimes my father would take me on his knee and, at length, anxiously inspect my countenance.
“The nose so far is mine,” I would hear him whisper.
“Thank the Lord!
But here in the eyes and the ears ...
the poor child!”—and his noble features would fill with pain.
“He’s going to suffer terribly when he grows to awareness; I wouldn’t be surprised if at that point something happens within him along the lines of an inner massacre.”—What awareness was he speaking of, and what massacre?
And in general—what ought to be the coloration of a rat born of a black male and a white female?
Ought it to be mottled?
Or was it also possible, when the opposing hues were of exactly equal strength, that such a union could produce a rat without hue, without color ...
but again I see that with my impatient digressions I am getting ahead of things.
2
In school I was diligent, a model student, yet I did not enjoy universal popularity.
I remember the first time I stood before the principal, willing, earnest, filled with resolve, with the eagerness
that always characterized me, and the principal took me benevolently by the chin.
I thought that the better I worked, the more I would earn the approval of my teachers and schoolmates.
But my good intentions shattered against the impassable wall of a mystery.
What mystery?
Bah!
I did not know, and in fact I still do not—I only felt I was encircled on all sides by a mystery that was alien and hostile, yet charming, and which I was unable to penetrate.
For is it not charming and mysterious, that little rhyme—“One, two, three, every Jew’s a flea, all the Poles are orioles, you are it, not me”—with which my schoolmates and I would count each other out on the playground?
I sensed that it was charming—I recited it with relish and deep feeling—but why it was charming, that I was unable to comprehend, and it even seemed to me that I was completely unnecessary, that I ought to stand to the side and merely watch.
I compensated with assiduity and good behavior, but my assiduity and good behavior earned me the antipathy not only of the students but also, and this was stranger and more unjust, of the teachers too.
I also remember:
Who are you?
A little Pole.
What’s your sign?
The eagle bold.
And I remember my late lamented teacher of history and Polish literature—a quiet, rather torpid old man who never raised his voice.—“Gentlemen,” he would say, coughing into a great silk kerchief or cleaning his ear with a finger—“What other nation was the Christ of nations?
The bulwark of Christianity?
Which other had Prince Joseph Poniatowski?
As concerns the number of
geniuses, especially precursors, we have as many of them as the whole of Europe combined.”
And without a moment’s notice he would begin: “Dante?”—“I know, sir!”—I would jump up right away—“Krasiński!”—“Molière?”—“Fredro!”—“Newton?—“Copernicus!”—“Beethoven?”—“Chopin!”—“Bach?”—“Moniuszko!”
—“You can see for yourselves, gentlemen,” he would conclude.
“Our language is a hundred times richer than French, which is supposedly the most perfect tongue.
What does the Frenchman have?
Petit, petiot, très petit at the most.
But what riches we have: small, little, titchy, tiny, teeny, teeny-weeny, teensy-weensy, and so on.”
Despite the fact that I answered the best and the fastest, he didn’t like me.
Why not?
That I did not know, though he once said, coughing, in an odd, knowing, and confidential tone: “The Poles, gentlemen, were always lazy, for laziness is inseparably associated with great ability.
Poles are able but lazy rogues.
The Poles are a strangely likable nation.”
From that moment my enthusiasm for learning was somewhat dampened, but this too failed to win me the favor of my pedagogue, even though in general he had a weakness for lazy rascals.
At times he would close one eye, and then the whole class would prick up their ears.
“Hm?”
he would say.
“Springtime, eh?
It goes through your bones, draws you out into the meadows and the woods.
The Pole was always, as they say, a good-for-nothing and a wild one.
He wouldn’t stay in one place, not a bit of it ...
that’s why the women of Sweden, Denmark, France, and Germany are so fond of us, but we prefer our own Polish women, for their good looks are famous the world over.”
This speech and others like it had such an effect on me that I fell in love—with a young lady who
used to do her homework on the same bench as me in the Łazienki Park.
For a long time I had no idea how to begin, and when I finally asked: “Will you permit me, miss?
...”—she didn’t even respond.
The next day, however, I consulted with my pals, got a grip on myself, and pinched her, upon which she narrowed her eyes and started giggling ...

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