The Blind Owl (6 page)

It was not long before sunset and a fine rain was falling. I began to walk and involuntarily followed the wheel tracks of the hearse. When night came on I lost the tracks but continued to walk on in the profound darkness, slowly and aimlessly, with no conscious thought in my mind, like a man in a dream. I had no idea in what direction I was going. Since she had gone, since I had seen those great eyes amid a mass of coagulated blood, I had felt that I was walking in a profound darkness which had completely enshrouded my life. Those eyes which had been a lantern lighting my way had been extinguished forever and now I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any place.

There was complete silence everywhere. I felt that all mankind had rejected me and I took refuge with inanimate things. I was conscious of a relationship between me and the pulsation of nature, between me and the profound
night which had descended upon my spirit. This silence is a language which we do not understand. My head began to swim, in a kind of intoxication. A sensation of nausea came over me and my legs felt weak. I experienced a sense of infinite weariness. I went into a cemetery beside the road and sat down upon a gravestone. I held my head between my hands and tried to think steadily of the situation I was in.

Suddenly I was brought to myself by the sound of a hollow grating laugh. I turned and saw a figure with its face concealed by a scarf muffled around its neck. It was seated beside me and held under its arm something wrapped in a handkerchief. It turned to me and said,

‘I suppose you want to get into town? Lost your way, eh? Suppose you're wondering what I'm doing in a graveyard at this time of night? No need to be afraid. Dead bodies are my regular business. Grave digging's my trade. Not a bad trade, eh? I know every nook and cranny of this place. Take a case in point—today I went out on a grave-digging job. Found this jar in the ground. Know what it is? It's a flower vase from Rhages, comes from the ancient city of Rey. Yes. That's all right, you can have the jar. Keep it to remember me by.'

I put my hand into my pocket and took out two
krans
and one
abbasi.
The old man, with a hollow laugh which brought out gooseflesh all over my body, said,

‘No, no. That's all right. I know you. Know where you live, too. I've got a hearse standing just near here. Come and I'll drive you home. Yes. It's only two steps away.'

He put the jar into my lap and stood up. He was laughing so violently that his shoulders shook. I picked up the jar and set off in the wake of the stooping figure. By a bend in the road was standing a ramshackle hearse with two gaunt black horses harnessed to it. The old man sprang up with surprising nimbleness and took his place on the driver's seat. I climbed onto the vehicle and stretched myself out in the sunken space where they put the coffins, resting my head against the high ledge so that I should be able to look out as we drove along. I laid the jar on my chest and held it in place with my hand.

The whip whistled through the air; the horses set off, breathing hard. They moved with high, smooth paces. Their hoofs touched the ground gently and silently. The bells around their necks played a strange tune in the damp air. In the gaps between the clouds the stars gazed down at the earth like gleaming eyes emerging from a mass of coagulated blood. A wonderful sense of tranquillity pervaded my whole being. All that I could feel was the jar pressing against my chest with the weight of a dead body. The interlocking trees with their wry, twisted branches seemed in the darkness to be gripping one another by the hand for fear they should slip and crash to the ground. The sides of the road were lined with weird houses of individual geometrical shapes, with forlorn, black windows. The walls of the houses, like glowworms, gave forth a dim, sickly radiance. The trees passed by alarmingly in clumps and in rows
and fled away from us. But it appeared to me that their feet became entangled in vines of morning glory which brought them to the ground. The smell of death, the smell of decomposing flesh, pervaded me, body and soul. It seemed to me that I had always been saturated with the smell of death and had slept all my life in a black coffin while a bent old man whose face I could not see transported me through the mist and the passing shadows.

The hearse stopped. I picked up the jar and sprang to the ground. I was outside the door of my own house. I hurriedly went in and entered my room. I put the jar down on the table, went straight into the closet and brought out from its hiding place the tin box which served me as a safe. I went to the door, intending to give it to the old hearse-driver in lieu of payment, but he had disappeared; there was no sign of him or of his hearse. Frustrated, I went back to my room. I lit the lamp, took the jar out of the handkerchief in which it was wrapped and with my sleeve rubbed away the earth which coated it. It was an ancient vase with a transparent violet glaze which had turned to the colour of a crushed blister-fly. On one side of the belly of the vase was an almond-shaped panel framed in blue flowers of morning glory, and in the panel . . .

In the almond-shaped panel was
her
portrait . . . the face of a woman with great black eyes, eyes that were bigger than other people's. They wore a look of reproach, as though they had seen me commit some inexpiable sin of
which I had no knowledge. They were frightening, magic eyes with an expression of anxiety and wonder, of menace and promise. They terrified me and attracted me and an intoxicating, supernatural radiance shone from their depths. Her cheekbones were prominent and her forehead high. Her eyebrows were slender and met in the middle. Her lips were full and half-open. Her hair was dishevelled, and one strand of it clung to her temple.

I took out from the tin box the portrait I had painted of her the night before and compared the two. There was not an atom of difference between my picture and that on the jar. The one might have been the reflection of the other in a mirror. The two were identical and were, it seemed obvious, the work of one man, one ill-fated decorator of pen cases. Perhaps the soul of the vase-painter had taken possession of me when I made my portrait and my hand had followed his guidance. It was impossible to tell the two apart, except that my picture was on paper while the painting on the vase was covered with an ancient transparent glaze which gave it a mysterious air, a strange, supernatural air. In the depths of the eyes burned a spark of the spirit of evil. No, the thing was past belief: both pictures depicted the same great eyes, void of thought, the same reserved yet unconstrained expression of face. It is impossible to imagine the sensations that arose in me. I wished that I could run away from myself. Was such a coincidence conceivable? All the wretchedness of my life rose again before my eyes. Was it not enough
that in the course of my life I should encounter one person with such eyes as these? And now two people were gazing at me from the same eyes,
her
eyes. The thing was beyond endurance. Those eyes to which I had given burial there, by the hill, at the foot of the dead cypress tree, beside the dry riverbed, under the blue flowers of morning glory, amid thick blood, amid maggots and foul creatures which were holding festival around her, while the plant roots were already reaching down to force their way into the pupils and suck forth their juices—those same eyes, brimful of vigorous life, were at that moment gazing at me.

I had not known that I was ill-starred and accursed to such a degree as this. And yet at the same time the sense of guilt that lurked in my mind gave rise to a strange, inexplicable feeling of comfort. I realised that I had an ancient partner in sorrow. Was not that ancient painter who, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago, had decorated the surface of this jar my partner in sorrow? Had he not undergone the same spiritual experiences as I? Until now I had regarded myself as the most ill-starred of created beings. Now I understood for a space that on those hills, in the houses of that ruined city of massive brick, had once lived men whose bones had long since rotted away and the atoms of whose bodies might now perhaps be living another life in the blue flowers of morning glory; and that among those men there had been one, an unlucky painter, an accursed painter, perhaps an unsuccessful decorator of pen-case covers, who had
been a man like me, exactly like me. And now I understood (it was all that I was capable of understanding) that his life also had burned and melted away in the depths of two great black eyes, just as mine had done. The thought gave me consolation.

I set my painting beside that upon the jar and went and kindled the charcoal in my opium brazier. When it was burning well I set the brazier down in front of the two paintings. I drew a few whiffs of the opium pipe and, as the drug began to take effect, gazed steadily at the pictures. I felt that I had to concentrate my thoughts, and the only thing that enabled me to do so and to achieve tranquillity of mind were the ethereal fumes of opium.

I smoked my whole stock of opium, in the hope that the wonder-working drug would resolve the problems that vexed me, draw aside the curtain that hung before the eye of my mind and dispel my accumulation of distant, ashy memories. I attained the spiritual state for which I was waiting and that to a higher degree than I had anticipated. My thoughts acquired the subtlety and grandeur which only opium can confer and I sank into a condition between sleep and coma.

Then I felt as though a heavy weight had been removed from my chest, as though the law of gravity had ceased to exist for me and I soared freely in pursuit of my thoughts, which had grown ample, ingenious and infinitely precise. A profound and ineffable delight took possession of me. I
had been released from the burden of my body. My whole being was sinking into the torpor of vegetable existence. The world in which I found myself was a tranquil world, but one filled with enchanted, exquisite forms and colours. Then the thread of my thoughts snapped asunder and dissolved amid the colours and the shapes. I was immersed in a sea, the waves of which bestowed ethereal caresses upon me. I could hear my heart beating, could feel the throbbing of my arteries. It was a state of existence charged with significance and delight.

From the bottom of my heart I desired to surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion. If only oblivion were attainable, if it could last forever, if my eyes as they closed could gently transcend sleep and dissolve into nonbeing and I should lose consciousness of my existence for all time to come, if it were possible for my being to dissolve in one drop of ink, in one bar of music, in one ray of coloured light, and then these waves and forms were to grow and grow to such infinite size that in the end they faded and disappeared—then I should have attained my desire.

Gradually a sensation of numbness took hold of me. It resembled a kind of agreeable weariness. I had the impression that a continuous succession of subtle waves was emanating from my body. Then I felt as though the course of my life had been reversed. One by one past experiences, past states of mind and obliterated, lost memories of childhood recurred to me. Not only did I see these things but I took
part in the bustle of bygone activity, was wholly immersed in it. With each moment that passed I grew smaller and more like a child. Then suddenly my mind became blank and dark and it seemed to me that I was suspended from a slender hook in the shaft of a dark well. Then I broke free of the hook and dropped through space. No obstacle interrupted my fall. I was falling into an infinite abyss in an everlasting night. After that a long series of forgotten scenes flashed one after another before my eyes. I experienced a moment of utter oblivion. When I came to myself, I found myself in a small room and in a peculiar posture which struck me as strange and at the same time natural to me.

WHEN I AWOKE IN A NEW WORLD EVERYTHING THAT I
found there was perfectly familiar and near to me, so much so that I felt more at home in it than in my previous surroundings and manner of life, which, so it seemed to me, had been only the reflection of my real life. It was a different world but one in such perfect harmony with me that I felt as though I had returned to my natural surroundings. I had been born again in a world which was ancient but which at the same time was closer and more natural to me than the other.

It was still twilight. An oil lamp was burning on a shelf. There was a bed unrolled
*
in the corner of the room, but I was awake. My body felt burning hot. There were bloodstains on my cloak and scarf and my hands were covered with blood. But in spite of fever and giddiness I experienced
a peculiar animation and restlessness which were stronger than any thought I might have had of removing the traces of blood, more powerful than the thought that the police would come and arrest me. In any case I had been expecting for some time to be arrested and had made up my mind, should they come, to gulp down a glass of the poisoned wine which I kept on the top shelf. The source of my excitement was the need to write, which I felt as a kind of obligation imposed on me. I hoped by this means to expel the demon which had long been lacerating my vitals, to vent onto paper the horrors of my mind. Finally, after some hesitation, I drew the oil lamp towards me and began as follows:

IT WAS ALWAYS MY OPINION THAT THE BEST COURSE
A man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake. But now, since that which should not have happened has happened, I cannot help myself. Who knows? Perhaps in the course of the next few moments, perhaps in an hour's time, a band of drunken policemen will come to arrest me. I have not the least desire to save my carcass, and in any case it would be quite impossible for me to deny the crime, even supposing that I could remove the bloodstains. But before I fall into their hands I shall swallow a glass from the bottle of wine, my heirloom, which I keep on the top shelf.

I wish now to squeeze out every drop of juice from my life as from a cluster of grapes and to pour the juice—the wine, rather—drop by drop, like water of Karbala,
*
down the
parched throat of my shadow. All that I hope to do is to record on paper before I go the torments which have slowly wasted me away like gangrene or cancer here in my little room. This is the best means I have of bringing order and regularity into my thoughts. Is it my intention to draw up a last will and testament? By no means. I have no property for the State to devour, I have no faith for the Devil to take. Moreover, what is there on the face of the earth that could have the slightest value for me? What life I had I have allowed to slip away—I permitted it, I even wanted it, to go—and after I have gone what do I care what happens? It is all the same to me whether anyone reads the scraps of paper I leave behind or whether they remain unread forever and a day. The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent than ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands. . . . It is my wish, when I have poured the juice—rather, the bitter wine—of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, ‘This is my life'.