“I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.”
P. B. Shelley
When I stare at a fixed point upon the wall at length, it sometimes happens that I no longer know who I am, nor where I am. On such occasions I experience my lack of identify from afar, as if for a moment I had become a perfect stranger. That abstract character and my true personality are equally competing for credibility.
In the next moment my identity resurfaces, as in one of those stereoscopic photographs where the two images get sometimes separated in error, and only when the operator readjusts them, restoring superimposition, do they suddenly focus into a three-dimensional illusion. My room is then revealed to my senses with a freshness it did not priorly possess. It is restored to its earlier consistence, while the objects therein fall into place, the way a powdered clod of earth in a bottle of water settles in layers of different elements, clearly defined and differing in color. The elements of my room stratify within their corresponding contours in accordance with the chromatic pattern lingering in my former memory of them.
The sensation of remoteness and solitude during the moments when my quotidian personality dissolves to a state of inconsistency is unlike any other sensation. When lasting longer, it changes to a sort of anxiety, the fear of never being able to find myself again. All that is left of me is an irresolute silhouette far off, against an intensely bright background, rather like objects discerned in a haze.
The terrible question “who am I?” comes alive within me at such times, like an entirely new body grown inside of me with skin and with organs of its own which are completely unknown to me. Answering this question is an urge springing from an awareness deeper and more essential than that of the brain. All things endowed with the capacity to stir within my body do stir in an act of convulsive rebellion more powerful and more elementary than any quotidian occurrence. All things within me are beseeching for an answer.
On some occasions I find my room as I have always known it, as if I closed my eyes and opened them again: each time, nevertheless, the room comes into sharper focus – rather like a landscape seen through a telescope, increasingly better structured as, adjusting the distances, we penetrate all the successive veils of intermediary images.
Finally, I recognize myself and find my old room once again it is a slightly inebriating sensation. The room is extremely condensed in its substance, while I implacably revert to the surface of things: the deeper the trough of that wave of unknowing, the higher its crest; on no other occasion, nor under any other circumstances, does it occur to me more obviously that each and every object does occupy the space it is supposed to occupy by right, and that I am the one I am supposed to be.
My grappling with the unknown is consequently devoid of a name; it endures as a mere regret that its depth has had nothing to offer me. I am only surprised by the fact that such a total lack of significance could be so intimately connected to my intimate substance. Now that I’ve found myself again and seek appropriate expression for my experience, it strikes me as utterly impersonal: a mere exaggeration of my identity, a cancer-like growth nourished by its own substance. A jellyfish tentacle growth out of all proportion exasperatedly probing the waves until finally withdrawing under its jelly dome. During a few palpitating moments of unrest, I have thus pursued all the certainties and uncertainties of my existence, only to revert finally and painfully to my solitude.
Such solitude is purer still and more dramatic than at other times. I sense the remoteness of the world more clearly and more intimately: a melancholy limpid and fragile, like dreams remembered in the dead of the night.
This solitude alone reminds me still, though vaguely, of the mystery and the thrill tinged with sadness of my childhood “crises”.
It is only in this subtle vanishing of identity that I recognize my earlier descents into the accursed spaces, and only during the moments of immediate awareness following my resurfacing does the world appear to me in that unusual atmosphere of fatality and desuetude that would surround me as soon as my trance-like hallucinations had ceased wrestling with me.
The same places in the street, at home, or in the garden would invariably trigger off my “crises”. Whenever I entered their space, I would succumb to the same malaise and the same dizzy spells. Like genuine invisible traps, randomly laid throughout the town, in no way different from the air around them, they would be ferociously lying in wait for me to fall pray to the special atmosphere they contained. If I took just one step, one single step into any such “accursed space”, the crisis would inevitably follow.
One of these spaces lay in the town park, in a small glade at the end of an alley where no one ever walked. An isolated lateral gap in the compact growth of wild rose bushes and dwarf acacias surrounding it revealed the desolate landscape of a deserted field. No place on earth was more forlorn, more dreary. Stillness would descend in heavy layers upon the dusty leaves in the stuffy heat of summer.
From time to time, bugle calls from the barracks would echo through the air. Those vain protracted signals were heart-rendingly sad… in the distance, the sun-heated air was hazily shimmering, like the wreath-like vapor hanging over a boiling liquid.
It was a rank and isolated place, its solitude apparently unending. The heat of the day was more exhausting to my senses in that place, the air I breathed was heavier somehow. The dust-covered bushes were basking in the yellowish glare of the sun in an atmosphere of utter solitude. A bizarre feeling of futility pervaded that glade existing “somewhere in the world”, some place I had myself blundered into quite senselessly, on an equally senseless summer afternoon. An afternoon chaotically stranded in the heat of the sun, among some bushes anchored in space “somewhere in the world”. It was at such moments that I would feel most profoundly and most painfully that I had nothing whatsoever to do in this world, nothing but roaming the parks – roaming dust-covered sun-burnt glades, deserted and rank.
Another accursed place was all the way across the town, between the high and pocked banks of the river I used to bathe in with my playmates.
There was a place where the bank had caved in. Higher up on the bank there was a sunflower oil-press. The husks were dumped in the hollow of the caved-in bank and in time the accumulated mound was so high that the dry husks had formed a slope going from the top of the bank all the way down to the water.
My playmates would descend to the water down this slope, cautiously, holding hands, their feet sinking deep into the rotten carpet.
The high bank walls on both sides of the slope were sheer, their surfaces torn with fantastic irregularities. Rain had carved long, arabesque-like strands of minute yet hideous cracks, like ill-healed scars. They were genuine gashes in the flesh of the clay, wounds horrendously gaping.
Between these walls which I found awe-inspiring I would have to descend onto the river with the others.
From afar, and long before reaching the river bank, my nostrils would be flooded by the odor of rotten husks. It prepared me for the “crisis”, rather like a short period of incubation; it was an unpleasant, yet delicate smell. And so were my crises.
Somewhere inside me, my olfaction would fork, and the effluvia of decay would be channeled to different areas of sensation. The viscous smell of decomposition was separate and quite distinct from the simultaneously perceived fragrance of the husks, pleasant, warm, homely and reminiscent of roasted peanuts.
This fragrance, as soon as I sensed it, would transform me within a matter of seconds, thoroughly pervading all my inner fibers and apparently dissolving them in order to replace them with an airy, uncertain substance. That was the point of no return. A pleasant, inebriating swoon welled up in my breast, to the effect that my steps would hasten to the bank, the venue of my ultimate defeat.
I would race to the water, mindlessly speeding down the mound of husks. The air resisted my descent with a solid razor-sharp density. The foundations of the earth would tumble chaotically in a huge hole whose powers of attraction defied imagination.
My playmates would anxiously watch as I mindlessly streaked down the slope. At the bottom the strand was so narrow that one faltering step would have been enough to precipitate me into the river, in a place where the churning of the water suggested great depths.
I, for my part, was largely unaware of my own doings. Once at the waterside, without breaking my run, I would swerve past the foot of the husk mound and continue to a certain place downstream when there was a hollow in the bank.
A tiny grotto was to be found at the far end of that hollow, a shady cool cave, like a cell dug into the rock. I would enter it and collapse to its floor in a sweat, worn out and shivering from top to toe.
As soon as my head started to clear, I would find myself in the intimate and extremely pleasant interior of the grotto with a spring oozing from the rock and dripping to the pebble floor into a crystal-clear pool; I would lean out above it and watch, without ever tiring of it, the view of the wonderful laces of the green moss on the bottom, the worms clinging to fragments of wood, the odd piece of scrap iron covered in rust and in silt, the animals and the whole variety of things on the bottom of the fantastically beautiful water.
Apart from these two accursed places, the rest of the town faded away into a haze of uniform banality, with interchangeable houses, with exasperatingly immobile trees, with dogs, vacant spaces and dust.
In enclosed spaces, nonetheless, the crises would occur more easily and more frequently, too. For one thing, I could never stand being on my own in an unknown room. If I had to wait, it was only a few seconds before the subtle terrible swoon overcame me. The room itself was making preparation for it: a warm, welcoming intimacy would seep through from the walls, spreading upon the furniture and all the objects. Suddenly the room attained sublimity and I would feel perfectly happy in its space. But that was no more than a further deception on the part of the crisis, one of its subtle, delicate perversions. The moments following my beatitude, everything would fall apart into a jumbled mass. I would stare wide-eyed at everything around me, but the objects were devoid of their habitual meaning: they appeared bathed in a new form of existence.
As if suddenly unpacked from layers of thin transparent paper which had formerly wrapped then, their aspect became ineffably new. They appeared as meant for a whole new set of superior and fantastic purposes which, had I tried to figure out for myself, I would have been but thwarted.
And that was not all: the objects would be taken with a genuine frenzy of freedom. They became independent from one another, yet with an independence that meant not only their mere isolation but also an ecstatic exaltation.
The enthusiasm of existing within a new area would spread to me also: I would become tightly connected to them by invisible anastomoses which made out of me an object in the room just like others, exactly like an organ grafted on life tissue which by means of subtle exchanges of substances becomes integrated into the knew body.
Once during such a crisis, the sun shed upon the wall a minute waterfall of brilliance, like an unreal golden water mottled with light. I could also see an expanse of book shelves with thick leather bound volumes somewhere beyond the window, and these detailed fragments of reality which I perceived from the remoteness of my swoon succeeded in finally making me utterly dizzy and knocking me out flat like a final inhalation of chloroform. It was the most familiar and common place features of objects that troubled me most. Being accustomed to watching them so many times had probably ended up by wearing off their external peel and thus they would appear to me from time to time utterly raw: alive, extremely alive.
The peak of my crisis would unfold in a weightless glide beyond both words, pleasant and of the same time painful. At the sound of footsteps, the room would promptly revert to its former appearance.
Inside its walls I would sense the beginning of a drop in intensity, a minute decrease of its exaltation, almost imperceptible; it was what convinced me that the certainty I inhabited was only separated by a very thin film from the world of uncertainties.
I would find myself in the room I know only too well, sweating profusely, exhausted and overwhelmed with feeling of the uselessness of the things around me. I noticed new details as we happen sometimes to discover some previously ignored peculiarity in some object we’ve been using for years.
A vague memory of the disaster would linger on in the room, rather like the smell of cordite in a space where an explosion occurred. I would stare at the bound volumes in the glass case and discern in their immobility, I don’t know why, a perfidious air of conspiracy and complicity. The objects around me would never desist from a certain air of secrecy, which they ferociously guarded in their stern immobility.
Ordinary words are no longer valid at certain levels of spiritual depth. I am trying to define my crises accurately, and all I can come up with are just images. The magic word that ought to express them would have to resort to the essence of other areas of sensitivity in life, exhaling from them like a new fragrance from a sophisticated combination of perfumes.
In order to come into existence, it would have to enclose something of the stupefaction overwhelming me as I watch a person in reality and then I follow his or her gestures carefully in a mirror; then something also of the unbalance precipitating one down the bottomless chasm of a dream, with hurtling terror careering down the spine in the space of an unforgettable moment; or something of the opaque transparency inhabited by bizarre landscapes in crystal paper weights.
I was envious of the people around me, hermetically sealed in their clothes and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They were imprisoned under overcoats and cloaks, yet nothing from the outside could terrorize or vanquish them, nothing could penetrate their excellent prisons. No partition existed between myself and the world. Everything that surrounded me would invade me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, as if my skin had been punctured all over. The attention, rather a form of distraction, actually, with which I was watching around was no mere act of will. The world would naturally extend within me all of its tentacles; I was living in the world I saw. Nothing could be done once against it.
The “crises” equally belonged to myself and to the places in which they occurred. Some of these places, it’s true, did contain a malevolence “of their own”, but all the others were themselves in a trance long before my arrival. It was the case of certain rooms for instance, where I could feel my crises crystallizing from the melancholy of their immobility and their infinite solitude.
The conviction that objects could be innocuous equated the terror they would sometimes inspire, as a sort of balance between myself and the world (a balance that would nonetheless plunge me even more irremediably into the uniformity of brute matter). The innocuousness of objects resided in a universal lack of forces.
I vaguely sensed that nothing in this world could proceed to the end, nothing could attain perfection. Even the ferocity of objects would dwindle to extinction. Thus, I came to nurture the idea of the imperfection inherent to all manifestations in this world, supernatural ones included.
In an interior monologue which, I believe, never ceased, I would sometimes defy the maleficent forces around me, just like, at other times, I would obsequiously worship them. I would practice strange rites, yet serving a purpose. If, for instance, leaving home, and going different ways, I would always return following the trace of my steps, well, I did this in order to avoid tracing with my steps a circle which enclosed houses and trees. My progress would thus resemble a thread and if, once unreeled, I have not reeled it back by retracing my steps, the objects encompassed by the loop of my walk would have stayed for ever irremediably and deeply connected to me. If, when it was raining, I would avoid touching the stones rained upon, it was in order not to add anything to the action of water and thus interfere with the exercise of its elementary powers.
Fire purified everything. I would always carry in my pocket a box of matches. Whenever I was very sad, I would strike a match and pass my hands through the flame, one first, then the other.
All these things contained a certain melancholy of existence and a certain ordeal otherwise normally structured within the limits of my life as a child.
In time, the crises came to a natural end, yet not without leaving a powerful memory forever engraved within me.
As I entered adolescence I no longer had crises, but that crepuscular state preceding them and the feeling of universal fatality following them endured as a permanent state in a way.
Futility flooded the hollow of the world like a liquid spreading in all directions, while the sky above me, the constantly correct, absurd and indefinite sky, turned the right shadow of despair.
Today I am still wandering in that surrounding futility and under that sky perpetually accursed.
Autumn came with its red sun and its steamed up mornings. The suburban houses huddled in the light were giving off the fresh fragrance of whitewash. There were some faded out days, the sky overcast like grimy linen. The rain would patter infinitely in the deserted park. Heavy sheets of compact rain swept down the alleys with fluttering movements, as in a huge and empty hall. I was squelching through the rain-sodden grass, water streaming in torrents down my hair and my hands.
In the dirty outskirts lanes, as soon as the rain stopped, doors would open and the houses breathed air in. There were humble interiors with coarsely lathed cupboards, with bunches of artificial flowers displayed upon chests of drawers, with gilded plaster of Paris statuettes, with photographs from America. Lives I knew nothing about, lost in the slightly moldy spaces of those low-ceilinged rooms, sublime in their resigned indifference.
It was in such houses that I wished I had lived, letting myself imbued by their intimacy, allowing all my reveries and bouts of bitterness to dissolve in their atmosphere like in some strongly corrosive acid.
I would have given anything just to enter such and such a room, treading familiarly and exhaustedly dropping onto the ancient sofa among the chintz cushions. To become possessed in there of a different air, and be myself someone else… Lying on the sofa, to contemplate the street I walked along from inside the house, from behind its curtains (and I would try hard to imagine with utmost accuracy what the street must look like from the sofa through the open door), to suddenly find within me memories I had never lived through, memories far removed from the life I was constantly carrying with me, memories pertaining to the intimacy of the gilded statuettes and the ancient lampshade with blue and violet butterflies.
How right would I have felt within the limits of that cheap indifferent interior that knew nothing about me…
All in front of me, the dirty lane would be spreading its muddy paste. Some houses unfolded like fans, some were white like large blocks of sugar, others small, roof pulled over their eyes, clenching their jaws like prize-fighters. I would run into wagons loaded with hay, or, all of a sudden, into extraordinary things: a man walking in the rain under the burden of a crystal chandelier, whose glassy ornaments tinkled like bells upon his shoulders, while heavy raindrops rolled off all the sparkling facets. What was it, after all, that made the world a grave place?
The withered leaves and flowers in the garden were washed clean by the rain. Autumn would set them ablaze with copper, red and purple pyrotechnics, like flames that flare up one more time before they vanish. At the market, water and mud would run in loose strands out of the enormous mounds of vegetables. The severed stems of beet-roots would suddenly reveal the earth’s dark red blood. Farther aside, submissive, tame potatoes lay in spread-eagled heaps, next to the chopped heads of fluffed up cabbages piled high. The plump, hideous pumpkins towered in an exasperatingly beautiful mound, their taut expanse of rind bursting with the plenitude of the sun imbibed the whole summer long.
The clouds would gather at the center of the sky and then unravel, leaving rarefied spaces between them, like corridors vanishing into infinity, and sometimes huge gaps, exquisitely exposing the disquieting void constantly hanging over the town.
At such times, rain would descend from afar and from a sky unbounded. I liked the altered color of damp wood, and the rusty, rain-sodden railings in front of the manicured and obedient gardens swept by the torrent-mixed wind as if by some immense horse mane.
There were times when I wanted to be a dog, so as to watch that wet world from the slanting perspective of animals, head swiveled round for an upward glance. To walk closer to the ground, my eyes looked into it, tightly connected to the livid color of mud.
That desire which I had harbored for a long time was released in a frenzy that autumn day on the dump…
On that day my steps had carried me to the outskirts of the town, where the cattle market was held in a field.
The rain sodden field lay out before me like an immense puddle of mud. The dung exhaled the acid stench of urine. Above, the sun was setting amidst a tattered canopy of gold and purple. The vast expanse of creamy tepid lay out before me. What else could then have bathed my heart in joy, but that sublimely pure expanse of dirt?
At first I hesitated. The last vestiges of my education were still fighting a futile battle within me, like moribund gladiators. Yet the next moment they sank in a dark, opaque night, as I took complete leave of my senses.
I stepped into the mud with one foot first. The other followed suit. My boots became pleasurably immersed in the sponge sticky dough. Now I was grown out of the mud and one with it, as if sprung from the earth.
It was a sure thing now that the trees themselves were nothing but dried mud emerging from the earth crust. Their color alone was more than ample proof. Still, could it only be the trees? What about houses, what about people? Particularly people. All the people I did not mean, of course, such silly legends as “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” That sounded too vague, too abstract, too immaterial when confronted with the mud field. People and things had sprung from that very dung and urine into which I was plunging a very concrete pair of boots.
In vain had people covered themselves in their white silky skin and clothed themselves with fabrics. In vain, oh but in vain… Deep within them there lay, implacable, imperious and elementary – the mud; the tepid, rich and malodors mud. The boredom and stupidity they crammed into their lives were ample proof as well.
I was myself an erect creature of mud, a missionary it had sent into this world. I was highly aware at such times of its memory stirring up within me, and remembered my nights of feverish dark tossing when my essential mud would brace itself in a futile attempt to break through to the surface. I would close my eyes, and it continued to bubble unintelligibly in obscurity…
The field spread all around, replete with mud… That was my genuine flesh, all clothes peeled off, peeled to the skin, muscles peeled off as well, peeled to the mud.
Its fluid sponginess and its raw odor would welcome me deeply, since I deeply belonged to them. All that separated me from its inert ancestral dirt were some purely accidental appearances, such as, for instance, the few gestures I was able to make, the hair upon my head, a smooth thin mass, or my moist sparkling eyes. That was so little, much too little against the mire’s mighty majesty.
I walked in all directions. My feet sank ankle deep into the mud. It was raining softly, and the sun was setting behind the curtain of bloodshot purulent clouds.
Suddenly I bent down and plunged my hands into the dung. Why not? Indeed, why not? I could have screamed with joy.
The paste was lukewarm and gentile, my hands traveled through it with perfect ease. When I would clench my fist, mud squirted through my fingers in lovely slabs of luscious black.
What had my hands been doing till that moment? Wherewith had they been squandering their time? I trailed them at will each and every way. What had they been until that moment but miserable caged birds, tied with a frightful chain of skin and muscle to my shoulders? Pathetic birds meant for the stupid flight allowed by the odd of courtesy, learned and rehearsed as if it really mattered.
Ever so slowly, they reverted to their savage ancestry and rejoiced in their primeval liberty. Now they were rolling their heads in the mud, gurgling like turtledoves, flapping their wings, ever so happy…
In my joy I started fluttering them above my head, making them fly. Large drops of mud would splash against my face, upon my clothes.
Why ever wipe them off? O, why, indeed? That was only the beginning; no serious consequence accompanied my deed, no shaking of the sky, no tremor of the earth. I immediately brushed a dirt coated hang against my cheek. I was seized with unspeakable joy, I hadn’t had such a good time for ages. I lifted both my hands up to my face, my neck, then rubbed them on my hair.
Suddenly the rain started falling in softer, denser sheets. The sun was still shedding its light upon the field like some immense chandelier at the back of a gray marble hall. Rain fell into the sun light, a golden rain, redolent of washed linen.
The field was deserted. Here and there lay the odd stack of dried corn stalks the cattle had been feeding upon. I picked up one of them and started peeling it with utmost care. I was shivering with the cold and with my hands caked in mud I had a hard time fumbling with the corn leaves. Yet I was absorbed in my work. There was so much to see in dry corn stalks. At the far end of the field I saw a reed-covered shelter. I ran all the way to it and huddled under its eaves. The roof was so low my head rubbed against it. The strip of earth next to the wall was perfectly dry. I lay on the ground. Head propped against a bundle of old sacks and legs crossed, I could now dedicate myself entirely to the minute analysis of the corn stalk.
I was happy for the opportunity to conduct such an exciting research work. The stalk’s indentations and hollows filled me up with enthusiasm. I tore it open with my teeth and came across a soft and sweetish mass inside. That made an excellent coating for a stalk; I only wished that would have certainly made the darkness in them sweeter and easier to bear.
As I was watching the corn-stalk, the silence within me was composedly laughing, as if someone inside me kept blowing soap bubbles.
The sun was shining through the rain and far away in the haze the town was smoking like a rubbish dump. Several roofs and church steeples glimmered peculiarly in the wet twilight. I felt so happy I didn’t know what absurd act I should commit for a start: should I analyze the stalk, should I stretch my limbs, or should I gaze at the far away town.
Somewhere past my feet, where the mud started, a little frog suddenly took a few leaps. It drew closer to me at first, but changed its mind and immediately made for the open field. “Farewell, little frog,” I called in its wake, “Farewell!” My heart broke at its untimely departure… “Farewell, my pretty one!…” I started improvising a lengthy valediction addressed to the little frog, and when I was done speaking, cast the corn-stalk at it, on the off-chance I’d hit it…
At length, gazing constantly at the rafters above me, I closed my eyes and, tired out, fell asleep.
A deep slumber took hold of me to the marrow of my bones.
I dreamt I walked in glaring sunshine down the streets of a dust-suffused town with white houses; an oriental town, perhaps. I was walking next to a woman dressed in black, wearing large mourning veils. Strangely enough, the woman had no head. The veils where very neatly arranged where her head should have been, yet in its place was but a gaping hole, an empty sphere resting on her neck.
We were both in a hurry and followed side by side a wagon marked with red crosses containing the corpse of the black lady’s husband.
I was given to understand we were living in wartime. Sure enough, we soon reached station and descended a flight of stairs to an ill-lit basement. A transport of wounded soldiers had just arrived and the nurses were hustling and bustling all over the platform with little baskets of cherries and dough-rings which they distributed to the wounded in the train.
Suddenly, a fat well dressed gentleman with the ribbon of a decoration in his butter hole.
He was wearing an eye-glass and white spats. His bold dome was concealed by a few strands of silvery hair. He had a white Pekinese dog in his arms, its eyes like two agate marbles afloat in oil.
For a few moments he walked up and down the platform as if in search of something. He did find it at last; it was the flower vendor. He chose out of her basket several bunches of red carnations and paid for them with money he took out of an elegant, soft wallet monogrammed in silver.
Then he went back to his seat and through the window I could see he had sat the dog upon the little table behind and he was feeding it, one at a time the red carnations which the animal gulped down with obvious relish…
I was awakened by an awful shudder.
It was raining very hard. The raindrops were pattering down next to me, and I had to huddle myself closer to the wall. The sky had turned black and the town could no longer be seen in the distance.
I was cold and yet my face was burning. I was quite aware of its heat beneath the crust of caked mud. I wanted to stand up and a flash of electricity shot through my legs. They were completely numb and I had to unfold them slowly, one after the other. My socks were cold and wet.
I thought of seeking refuge inside the shelter. But the door turned out to be locked, and for a window the little shed had a boarded up opening. The wind drove the rain hither and thither, and there was no place I could take over from it anymore.
Evening started to fall. In but a few moments, the field sank into darkness. All the way across it, in the direction I had come from, a drinking place turned its lights on.
It took only a minute to get there; I would have liked to slip in, have a drink, sit in the warmth amidst the people and the alcohol fumes. I turned my pockets upside down but found no piece of money. Outside the drinking place, the rain was tumbling down cheerfully through a reeking cloud of smoke and steam exhaling from inside.
I had to take a decision, like going home for instance. Yet how?
In my state of filthiness it was out of the question. Nor was I ready to renounce my filth.
Unutterable anguish descended into my soul – the kind one feels on seeing nothing left to do, nothing left to accomplish.
I started running down the streets in the dark, leaping across puddles, plunging my legs knee-deep in some of them.
Despair rose within me for a moment as if urging me to scream and bang my head against trees. Yet almost immediately, my sorrow contracted to a calm gentle thought. I knew now what I would have to do: since there was nothing left to continue, all I could do was make a clean end of it all. What would I leave behind? A damp and ugly world, in which the rain fell slowly…
I entered the house by the back door. I crept through the rooms avoiding to watch myself in the mirrors. I was searching for something quick and effective to send suddenly hurting down into darkness all that I saw and felt, the way a cartload of rocks tumble down when the rear shutter is removed.
I started rummaging through the drawers in search of some powerful poison. No thought whatsoever occurred to me as I was busy searching; I just had to finish, and the sooner the better. It was like having to finish any other job.
I came across all sorts of objects that were no use to my purpose: buttons, string, colored threads, pamphlets reeking of mothballs. So many things that couldn’t cause a man’s death. That’s what the world has to offer in the most tragic moments: buttons, threads and strings…
At the bottom of one drawer I came across a box of white tablets. It could be poison, just as well as it could be some innocuous medicine. Yet, I reasoned with myself, it would not matter: swallowed in a large quantity they had to be poisoning.
I put one of them on my tongue. A slightly salty vapid taste spread through my mouth I crunched it between my teeth and its powder dried up all my saliva. My mouth became parched.
There were many tablets in the box, over thirty. I went to the water tap outside and slowly, patiently, I embarked upon swallowing them.
With each tablet I would drink a mouthful of water, so it took me a long time to finish the whole box. The last of them would no longer slide down my throat, as if it had swelled.
The court was in utter darkness. I sat down on a step and started to wait. A tremendous rumble did occur in my stomach but apart from that I was feeling all right, and the sound of the rain struck me as intimate beyond description. It seemed to understand my condition and penetrate my deeply in order to restore me.
The court turned into a chamber of sorts and I felt lighter and lighter in it. all things seemed to be making desperate efforts not to drown in obscurity. I suddenly realized that I was sweating profusely. I tucked my hand into my shirt and took it out wet. All around me the void was tempestuously growing. When I flung myself on the bed in the room, I was all drenched in sweat.
It was a handsome head, extraordinarily handsome.
About three times as big as a human head, slowly revolving on an axis of brass piercing it from the crown through the neck.
At first, all I would see was its nape. What kind of matter could that be? It gleamed ever-so faintly like ancient faience with ivory shades. The whole surface was patterned with tiny blue drawing, a kind of geometrically repeated filigrees, like printed linoleum. From a distance they appeared as minute exquisite writing on an ivory sheet; beautiful beyond imagination.
As soon as the head would start gyring on its axis, I was thoroughly taken with vertigo. I knew that in a matter of seconds the face of the skull would appear – the frightening threatening visage.
Actually, it was a well shaped face, with all the normal human features: sunken eyes, very prominent chin, triangular hollows under the cheek bones, like those of a thin man.
It was the skin that was fantastic, though: made up of fine sheets of thin flesh, one next to the other, like the brown gills on the underside of mushrooms.
There were so many sheets and so close together, that if you watched the head through partly closed eye-lids, you wouldn’t notice anything abnormal and the minute network of lines resembled the shaded-in areas of a copper engraving.
Sometimes in summer, watching the chestnut trees from afar, heavy with leaves, they appeared to me like enormous heads implanted upon trunks, their cheeks deeply grooved, like the gills of my head.
When the wind blew through the leaves, those faces would wave like a wheat field.
That head would likewise ripple when the plinth shook.
In order to find out that the face consisted of sheets, it was enough to plunge my finger just a tiny bit into the flesh, the finger would slide in unopposed, as into some moist soft paste. When I took it out, the sheets resumed their former position and no trace was left.
Once, in my childhood, I had witnessed a corpse being disinterred and then interred again.
It belonged to a girl who had died young and was buried in bridal attire.
The silk bodice had been torn to long filthy shreds, and in places scraps of embroidery co-mingled with dirt. The face, nevertheless, appeared untouched, and it had kept its features almost whole. Its color was livid, so that the head seamed to be modeled from cardboard soaked in water.
When the coffin was taken out, someone brushed their hand against the dead woman’s face. Then, all of us who were watching had a terrible shock: what we had taken for a well preserved face was nothing but a thick layer of rottenness, about two fingers deep. The rottenness had replaced the flesh beneath the skin with such accuracy that all forms were kept intact in the face. The skeleton was empty underneath.
The head in my dream was like that too, the only difference being that instead of rottenness it was covered in sheets of flesh. Yet my finger could reach to the bone between them.
The head, though hideous, was a safe refuge against air.
Why ever against air? In the room, the air was in perpetual movement, vicious, heavy, fluid, attempting to congeal itself into repulsive dark stalactites.
It was in that air that the head made its appearance for the very first time, and all around itself a void emerged, like a constantly growing aura.
I was so pleased and glad of its appearance that I was moved to laughter. And yet how could I laugh lying in bed, at night and in the dark?
I started loving that head avidly. It was the most precious, most intimate thing in my possession. It came from the world of the dark whence only a delicate buzz was wafted to me, like some continuous simmering within my skull. What else could be found there? I opened my eyes wide and vainly peered into obscurity. Apart from the ivory head, there was nothing else I could see.
I wondered with a certain shade of fear whether that head was not to become in my life the center of all my preoccupations, finally replacing them all, one by one, until I would be left with just the darkness and itself. At such times, life seemed to acquire a precise and true meaning. For the moment, it had grown into the air like a full fruit reaching maturity.
The head was my rest and my bliss, my personal bliss. Perhaps if it had belonged to the entire world, a terrible disaster would have followed. One single moment of absolute happiness could have resulted in freezing the world for eternity.
It was against the head that the air’s sticky flow was constantly fighting, yet with diminishing strength.
At times, next to it, my father would appear, but vaguely, indistinctly, like a shape of whitish steam. I knew he would lay his hand on my forehead; it was a cold hand.
I was trying to explain the struggle between the head and the air, as I felt my father unbuttoning my shirt and slipping the thermometer into my armpit, like a thin lizard of glass.
Around the head an annoying movement would start, like a fluttering flag.
Impossible to stop, the flag would flutter on.
I remembered that day when at tea time, on the floor above, where the Webers lived, Paul had let his hand hang next to his chair, and Edda, from the bed, slightly lifting the tip of her shoe had started teasing his palm in jest. In time, that gesture had acquired an uncommon virulence. Whenever I remembered it, the shoe would start frantically digging into Paul’s hand until a small wound appeared, than a hole in the flesh. The shoe would not cease for a moment from its unnerving routine: it would constantly drill into the pierced hand, then the whole arm, the whole body…
That’s how the flag’s movement started inside the room. It threatened to pierce everything, to devour me, perhaps…
I gave a desperate scream, all drenched in sweat.
“How much?” asked a voice from the dark.
“39,” came my father’s reply, and he left while I was falling prey to ever-growing storms.
Convalescence announced itself one morning as an extreme fragility of light. This light seeped into my bedroom through a sheet of frosted glass on the ceiling. The volume of the room underwent a weird loss of density. The clarity of things was weighing less, and no matter how deep I would breathe, an ample void persisted in my chest, as the disappearance of an important quantity of myself.
Between the warm sheets, crumbs rolled under my calves. My foot was probing for the iron bedstead and the iron would pierce it with a knife blade of ice.
I tired getting out of bed. Everything was as I had imagined: the air was too thin to uphold me. I waded in it with loose steps as if crossing a stream of warm vapor.
I sat down on a chair, under the ceiling window. All around me light was banishing the accuracy of things as if washing them repeatedly in order to dull their gloss.
The bed, in its corner, lay in a pool of darkness. How ever had I managed in such obscurity to discern every grain on the wall during my fever?
I slowly started to dress; my clothes were also weighing less than I expected. They hanged on my body like sheets of blotting paper and gave off the odor of lye from the iron.
Immersed in waters of decreasing density, I walked out in the street. At once the sun induced in me a dizzy spell. Large spots of yellow and green radiance partly covered both houses and people. The street itself appeared to me weak and yet fresh, as if recovering itself from the fever of some serious illness.
The carriage horses, ashen and skeletal, ambled abnormally. They either took exceedingly slow steps, heavy and staggering, or they would burst into a gallop snorting through flared nostrils in order not to collapse with fatigue right there on the tarmac.
The long corridor of houses was slightly swaying in the breeze. From afar the strong odor of autumn wafted across. “A beautiful autumn day!” I said to myself. “A splendid autumn day!…”
I walked at a very slow pace past the dust-covered houses. In the stationer’s window I saw a mechanical toy in a flurry of motion.
It was a small red and blue clown clashing two minute cymbals of brass against each other. It was safely locked up in this room of his own, in the window, amidst books, balls and inkpots and struck his cymbals absently, yet gaily.
My eyes filled up with tears of tenderness. It was so pure, so cool, so beautiful in that shop-window nook!
Indeed, an ideal place in this world to stand quietly playing the cymbals, neatly clad in colorful things.
Here was something, after all that fever, finally simple and clear. In the shop-window, the light of autumn was more intimate and pleasant as it fell. It would have been so good had I replaced that tiny cheerful clown! Among the books and balls, surrounded by clean objects, neatly displayed upon a sheet of dark blue paper. Bang! Bang! Bang! It’s so good, it’s ever so good in the window. Bang! Bang! Bang! Red, green, blue; balls, books, paints. Bang! Bang! Bang! What a beautiful autumn day!…
Yet ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, the clown’s motion lost of its impetus. The cymbals would no longer clash for a start, then the clown suddenly stopped, arms frozen in mid air.
I realized with a feeling akin to terror that the clown had ceased from its game. Something within me went painfully rigid. A lovely gay moment had frozen in mid air.
I left the shop window on haste and started walking to the little public garden in the center of the town.
The chestnut trees had shed their withered leaves. The old wooden kiosk was closed and lots of broken benches were piled up helter-skelter before it.
I eased myself into a hollow of darkness in such a way that I found myself almost flat on my back, eyes trained on the sky. Through the branches, the sun would cast down a fragmented light full of crystals.
I remained thus for a while, with my eyes lost in the height, feeling weakened, unutterably weakened.
Suddenly, a sturdy lad sat next to me, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, his neck red and strong, his hands large and dirty. For a few moments he scratched his head with loud mumbling; from time to time he would drive his hand through his hair as if to understand better.
I coughed meaningfully and engaged him in conversation: “What are you reading,” I queried, as I lay flat on the bench, my eyes in the tree branches.
The boy shoved the book into my hands, as into the hands of a blind man. It was a long story in verse about outlaws, a sticky book full of fat stains and grimes; it was obvious it had been passed around a lot. As I was watching it, he got up to his feet and stood before me, powerful, sure of himself, sleeves rolled up, naked neck.
Something as pleasant and tranquil as clashing cymbals in a window shop.
“And… doesn’t reading give you a headache?…” I asked as I returned the book to him.
He appeared not to understand.
“Why give me a headache? I never have headaches,” he said as he sat back on the bench to read on.
There exists therefore a class of things in this world of which, fatally, I would never be part: indifferent, mechanical clowns and sturdy lads who never have headaches. All around me through the trees, in the sunshine, a quick ample current was streaming, full of life and purity. I was fated to abide in its shallow forever, saturated with darkness and swoons.
I stretched my legs on the bench and, leaning against a tree, found a very comfortable position. What did, after all, prevent me from being strong and indifferent? From feeling within me the flow of a vigorous fresh sap, like the one running through the thousands of branches and leaves of the trees, to stand upright and meaningless in the sunshine, erect, sober, with a sure well-defined life, locked up within me as inside a trap…
To this end, I was perhaps supposed, first of all, to try breathing more deeply and more regularly: I was a bad breather, my chest was always either too full or too empty. Consequently, I started breathing the air confidently. A few minutes later I was feeling better. A diluted wave of perfection, yet one – I felt growing stronger each moment, started rolling through my veins. The noise of the street remotely reminded me of the town, still the town was now turning around me ever so slowly, like a gramophone record. I had become something like for instance the center and the axis of the world. It was essential for me not to lose my balance.
Once, at a circus, in the morning, when the artists were rehearsing, I witnessed a scene which now came back to my mind… An amateur in the audience, a mere spectator with no training at all, climbed up without faltering, with a great deal of courage, the pyramid of tables and chairs which one minute before the circus acrobat had climbed. We all admired the precision with which he was scaling the perilous construction and the euphoria of having managed to overcome the first obstacles inebriated the amateur with a sort of science of equilibrium, utterly devoid of awareness, which made him get a hold of exactly the right place, to stretch his leg accurately and find in it the minimum weight with which to approach a new level of height. Excited and beyond himself with the assurance of his gestures, he was at the top in a matter of seconds. There, nevertheless, something entirely difficult happened to him: in the twinkling of an eye he realized the frailty of his support as well as his extraordinary presumption. Through chattering teeth he asked in a faint voice for a ladder, and repeatedly urged those on the ground to hold it firmly and steadily. The enterprising amateur climbed down rung by rung taking infinite precautions, sweating profusely from his crown to his soles, both amazed and annoyed with his idea of climbing up.
My present position in the garden was at the top of that rickety pyramid. I could strongly perceive any strong sap circulating within me, still I had to do my utmost in order not to tumble down from the height of my admirable certitude.
It occurred to me that in that state I ought to go and see Edda, calm, sure of myself, full of light; I hadn’t been there for quite a while. I wanted once in my life to appear before someone complete and immovable.
Silent and superb as a tree. That was it – as a tree. I expanded my chest with air, and stretching now fully on my back, greeted warmly the branches above me with a kindred greeting. There was something stern and yet simple in a tree, something wonderfully akin to my new forces. I caressed the trunk as if patting a friend on the shoulder. “Hello tree, my old friend!” The more I watched the infinitely spread crown of the branches, the better I perceived my own flesh branching off within me and the quick outside air starting to run through its gaps. Blood would rise within veins majestically and rich in sap, abubble with the boil of simple life.
I stood to my feet. For a moment my knees buckled hesitantly as if in that unique moment of uncertainty they wanted to compare the whole of my force with the whole of my weakness. Taking along steps I strode out for Edda’s house.
The heavy wooden door that gave on to the terrace was closed. Its immobility confused me slightly. My thoughts deserted me, all to the very last.
I grasped the door knob and turned it. “Be of good courage,” I told to myself, but broke off for correction. “Courage? Only shy people need courage in order to do something; normal ones, the strong ones, have neither courage nor cowardice, they simply open doors, like this…”
The cool darkness of the first room enveloped me with an air rich in tranquillity and joy, as if it had been long waiting for me.
This time the bead curtain falling together behind me made a weird clicking sound, which gave me the feeling I was all alone, in an empty house, at the edge of the world. Could that possibly be the sensation of extreme equilibrium, at the top of the pyramid of chairs?
I knocked violently on Edda’s door.
She told me to come in, somewhat alarmed.
Why did I walk so slowly?
“Walk slowly?” It appeared only too natural that the presence of someone like me, or more exactly a tree, ought to be felt from afar.
Yet the room was stirred by no wonder, no fervor, not the slightest emotion.
For a few seconds my thoughts did precede me ideally, with great perception and sobriety of gestures. I could see myself advancing with extreme confidence, and extremely aloof, sitting down at Edda’s feet upon the bed she was lying in. My true person, nonetheless, was left behind those noble projections like a useless and broken down trailer.
Edda asked me to sit down, and sit down I did on a chair, a great distance away from the bed.
The grandfather clock was ticking between us with an unnerving, highly sonorous tick-tock. It was uncanny: the tick-tock would swell like the tide, ebbing away towards Edda till I could almost hear it no more, and then rolling back towards me in a great surge, with such violence that my eardrums threatened to burst.
“Edda,” I commended speaking, breaking the silence, “allow me to tell you something extremely simple…”
Edda did not reply.
“Edda, do you know what I am?”
“What, then?”
“A tree, Edda, a tree…”
The whole of this short conversation occurred, of course, strictly inside me, and not one word was actually uttered.
Edda sat up in bed gathering her knees in front of herself and covering them with her dressing-gown. Then she clasped her hands behind her head, and started watching me with great interest. I would have gladly given anything, for her to find another point in the room to stare at.
I suddenly noticed upon a bracket a large bunch of flowers in a vase. That saved me.
Why had I not seen them before? I had been constantly looking in their direction from the moment I entered. In order to make sure of their presence there, I looked in another direction for a moment, then turned to them once again. There they were at their place, immobile, large, red… then how come I hadn’t seen them? I started having doubts about my tree confidence. An object had appeared in the room where it had not been one moment before. Was my vision clear at all times, I wondered. Perhaps my body still contained residues of helplessness and darkness drifting through my new luminosity like clouds against a bright sky, obscuring my vision whenever they traversed the humor of my eyes, like the clouds in the sky suddenly obscure the sun, casting part of the landscape in shadow.
“How beautiful those flowers are,” I told Edda.
“What flowers?”
“The ones over there, on the bracket…”
“What flowers do you mean?”
“The beautiful red dahlias, of course…”
“What dahlias?”
“What do you mean, … what dahlias?”
I got to my feet and ran to the bracket. Flung over a pile of books, a red scarf hung limply. The moment I touched it and made sure it was a scarf indeed, something faltered deep within me, like the courage of the amateur equilibrist at the top of the pyramid, oscillating between acrobatics and dilettantism. Obviously, I had reached the extreme height in my turn.
The problem had been reduced to the simple matter of retracing my steps and sitting down on the chair. And what was I supposed to do or say next?
For a few moments I considered the matter in such stupefaction that I found it impossible to make the slightest move. Like the high velocity making a fly-wheel appear immobile, my profoundly desperate hesitation made me as rigid as a statue. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock echoed loudly, fixing me in position with minute nails of sound. It was only with great difficulty that I pried myself loose from the immobility.
Edda was sitting up in bed like before, watching me with the same calm bewilderment as before; one might say a malevolent power, extremely perfidious, was imparting to things their most common aspect, in order to get me totally confused. Now that was what I was fighting against, that was what implacably resisted me: the common aspect of things.
In such an exact world, all initiative became superfluous, if not downright impossible. What caused my blood to rush to my head was that Edda could not be any different, nothing else but a woman with neatly combed hair, with violet-blue eyes, with a ghost of a smile on her lips. What could I ever do against such relentless exactitude? How was I supposed, for instance, to make her understand that I was a tree? Was it possible to convey through the air in shapeless immaterial words, a crown with branches and leaves, superb and enormous, as I felt it within me. How was I to manage such things?
I approached the bed and leaned against its wooden rail. A confidence of sorts shot through my hands, as if the knot of my anxiety had suddenly dropped into them.
Well, and what now? Between Edda and myself vertiginously rose the same transparent air, impalpable and apparently devoid of consistency, storing nevertheless all my forces that amounted to nothing. Tens of pounds of hesitations, whole hours’ worth of silences, flesh and blood disturbances and vertigos, all of them could enter that miserable space without any appearances belying the dark color and the cloudy matter it contained. In the world, distances were not simply those we saw with our eyes, exiguous and permeable, but others, invisible ones, populated by monsters and moments of shyness, by fantastic projects and unsuspected gestures, which, had they, for one moment, but materialized their inherent tendencies, they would have transformed the aspect of the world in a terrible cataclysm, in an extraordinary chaos, full of dire misfortunes and ecstatic beatitudes.
All that moment, as I was watching Edda, the materialization of my thoughts would perhaps have resulted indeed in the simple gesture that rushed through my head; to lift the paperweight off the table (I was watching it from the corner of my eye, it was a noble medieval helm pressing the papers down) and fling it at Edda, and, as an immediate consequence, a formidable fountain of blood gushing out of her chest, as vigorous as the flow of a tap, filling the room ever so slowly with blood until I would have felt at first my feet squelching about in that warm sticky liquid, then my knees, and then – like in American thrillers where one the of heroes is sentenced to stay in a hermetically sealed room where the water is constantly rising – to feel the blood suddenly reaching my mouth, its salty pleasant taste drowning me…
I started working my mouth in spite of myself and swallowing hard.
“Are you hungry?” Edda asked.
“Oh, no, not at all… I’m not hungry, I was just thinking of something, something absurd… absolutely absurd.”
“Please do tell me about it. since you came in, you haven’t uttered one word, and neither have I asked you anything… now I am waiting as you well may see.”
“Now, look Edda,” I started, “it’s something essentially simple… actually, it is extremely simple… forgive me for telling you, but I…”
I meant to go on “I am a tree,” yet that sentence had turned out to have no value at all anymore, since I had developed a craving for blood. It lay faded out and withered on the bottom of my soul, and I even found it surprising that it had ever had any importance at all.
I started all over.
“Well, Edda, it’s like this, I was feeling ill, I was weak and depressed. Your presence always does me good, it is enough just to see you…does this make you angry?”
“Not at all…,” she replied and started to laugh.
Now I really felt like doing something absurd, something gory and vicious. I hurriedly picked up my hat. “Now I’m off.” In a moment I was at the bottom of the stairs.
It was obvious now: the world had a common aspect of its own, in the midst of which I had dropped like an error, I could never become a tree, nor could I ever kill anyone, nor would blood gush out in torrents. All things and all people were locked up in their sad and small obligation of being exact, nothing else but exact. In vain could I have believed there were dahlias in a vase when a scarf would lie there. The world did not posses in the least the ability to transform itself, it was so pathetically locked up in its exactitude that it could ill afford to mistake scarves for flowers…
For the first time I could feel my head powerfully squeezed inside the skeleton of my cranium. Such terrible, agonizing captivity…
That autumn Edda got ill and died. All the previous days, all my aimless walks, all my endeavors and tormenting questions had merged in the pain and confusion of one single week, as in those solutions wherein the mixture of several substances suddenly concentrates the violence of a strong poison.
Upstairs, silence decreased in pitch by one more tone. Paul had managed to find, in some wardrobe or other, and old overcoat and a threadbare tie knotted like a string round his neck. His complexion had the livid hue of a thin veil draped by the sleepless nights over his face.
“All night long she was in pain,” he told me. “Yesterday I asked the doctor again, for his opinion, and he told me everything, the whole truth. It’s like an explosion has occurred in her kidneys, a genuine explosion.”
Paul was speaking at a fast pace, yet with long breaks as if he wanted to allow time between words for some acute pain within him to simmer down to its essence.
In the downstairs office a cave-like darkness had descended: old Weber, his head sunken in a ledger, deluded himself into being busy…
Every morning the doctor would come, and walking silently from room to room, take the three Webers with him. I would follow them, while talking with Ozy. It was long since we had played our imaginary game together, and that would have made a wonderful occasion to take it up again.
It would have been so good to talk about Edda’s sickness as if nothing had actually happened.
Climbing the stairs I was considering the amazing possibility of a game directed by Ozy in which the doctor and Paul Weber and the old man would also take part. For once, the humpback would actually direct an imaginary non-existent scene. When we got upstairs I felt like screaming: “Now it’s enough, it’s over, it’s been very well acted indeed, Paul had a truly impressive mask, old Weber was obviously suffering, but it’s enough for now, please, Ozy, do tell them you cancel the rest…”
Yet everything had been too thoroughly arranged to stop at the top of the stairs…
While the doctor entered Edda’s room, old Weber, Ozy and myself would wait next door.
It was perhaps for the first time in his life that old Weber tried to keep a great surge of emotion under control. His head resting against the back of the armchair, he would vaguely and absently look out of the window as if knowing nothing and expecting nothing. As an afterthought, like great actors tending to play their part to perfection by adding some original detail, he left his armchair and went to have a closer look at a painting on the wall. Yet like the great actor who, giving too much depth to his voice for the tragic tirade transforms it into a ridiculous howling worthy of the gallery’s catcalls, old Weber, trying to act his part with too much calm indeed, miscalculated the effect: While standing and watching the painting, hands clasped behind his back, his fingers were drumming a discomfited tattoo against a chair…
Paul took my hand:
“Edda wants to see you, follow me quietly.”
Upon the bed spread with white sheets, Edda was lying, her head towards the window. Her hair was spread upon the pillows, a lighter shade of blond and finer still than before: the subtleties of sickness. In the room, a sort of white decomposition of things was reigning with an awful amount of light; Edda’s face was fading to inconsistency into it.
She turned her head suddenly:
So it was true…I mean, at that moment, something so unexplainable, so clear, and so surprising occurred within me, that it could have easily been a truth coming from the outside… Edda’s head resembled entirely the ivory head visiting me during my nights of fever. It was such a bewildering realization that I almost believed I had invented that very moment the exact form of the old faience head, with the composition velocity of dreams, that make up a whole episode the moment we hear the report of a gun.
I was now sure that something violent and evil would soon happen to Edda. Perhaps that thing, too, had been subsequently fabricated by my imagination; as far as Edda was concerned, I’m totally unable to separate between my true self and her former existence.
She attempted to look into my eyes, but her eyelids dropped with fatigue. Her parted hair revealed her forehead, as yellow as a block of wax. Once again, I was hermetically locked in Edda’s presence, in what she represented now and in my nights of delirium. During none of my walks, none of my encounters was I ever truly thinking of anyone else but myself. I found it impossible to conceive of any one’s inner pain or mere existence. The persons I would see around myself were equally decorative, ephemeral and concrete as any other objects, like houses or trees. It was only when confronted with Edda, that, for the first time, I could feel that my questions were prone to escape and, resonating other levels of depth and in another existence, return to me in enigmatic, unsettling echoes.
Who was Edda? What was Edda? For the first time I could see myself from the outside, because Edda’s presence questioned the meaning of my life. At the moment of her death, this question shook me with added profusion and urgency, her death was my death, and in whatever I’ve been doing ever since, in all I’ve been experiencing, the immobility of my future death casts a cold and obscure projection, as the one I saw with Edda.
On the morning of that day I got up heavy and stiff-limbed, irritated by someone’s presence next to my bed.
It was my father who had been waiting quietly for me to wake up. When I opened my eyes, he took a few steps through the room, brought me a white basin and a jug of water to wash my hands.
With a painful convulsion that clenched my heart, I was hit by the meaning of it all.
“Wash your hands,” my father told me, “Edda is dead.”
It was drizzling outside, and it didn’t stop for three days.
On the day of her burial the mud was more aggressive and dirtier than ever before. The wind drove sheets of pouring rain against the rooftop and windows. All night long a window stayed lit on the Weber’s floor, in the room where the candles were burning.
In old Weber’s office everything was upset and removed in order to make room for the coffin to pass; the mud entered the rooms triumphantly and insinuatingly, like a hydra with innumerable protoplasmic extensions; I could see it only too well, spreading upon the walls, creeping up people, climbing the stairs and attempting to scale the coffin.
The wooden floor in the office downstairs was revealed from under the oilcloth that used to cover it, and was removed at the time; long furrows of dirt were exposed, like the black furrows sunken in Samuel Weber’s face.
Around his gumshoes, the mud ascended slowly but tenaciously, seeping surely through his skin all the way up to his heart, dirty, heavy, sticky. It was the mud and nothing but mud, the floor and nothing but the floor, the candles and nothing but candles. “My funeral will be nothing but a succession of objects,” Edda had once told me.
Something far away within me was still throbbing, as if attempting to proof the existence of some truth superior to mud, something different from it. In vain… my identity had long since attained authenticity, and now, quite natural, all it did was to check itself: in the world there was nothing but mud. What I took for pain within me was nothing but mud. What I took for pain within me was nothing but its feeble fermentation, a protoplasmic extension shaped into words and reasoning.
The raindrops fell into Paul like into a bottomless vessel; his clothes were streaming, his hands were steaming, hanging heavily and causing his back to stoop. His tears would stream down his cheeks in long dirty rivulets, like water down window panes.
Slowly, balanced upon shoulders, the coffin passed Samuel Weber’s shop, the old ledgers and the tens of bottles of ink and medicine that had surfaced when the office was tidied up. The funeral was a mere succession of objects…
Some further details occurred this side of life: at the cemetery, when they took out of the coffin the body wrapped in white sheets, the sheets were bearing the mark of a large blood stain.
It was the last and the least important detail preceding the cemetery subsoil, warm, moldy, full of jelly-soft bodies, yellow… festering…
When again and again I think of these few things in a vain attempt to have them coalesce into something I might call my personality; when remembering them, old Weber’s office suddenly becomes the room in which I am breathing mildew and the stale odor of ledgers – in that very moment – only to vanish immediately and be replaced by a room in reality indefinitely posing the same problem concerning the way people spend their lives using, for instance, rooms, or feeling within them something like a strange body growing fern-like limbs and dispersing like smoke, suddenly, a particular odor, like the profoundly enigmatic odor of mildew; when events and people unfold and refold fan-like within me; when my hand attempts to write down this strange and uncomprehended simplicity, it is then that I have the impression, just for a moment, like one sentenced to death who realizes for one second, unlike everyone around him, that death is awaiting for him (and would like his throes to be different from all other throes in the world, succeeding in setting him free), that out of all this a new fact will emerge, warm and authentic, to sum me up clearly like a name and resound within me like a unique tone, unheard before, the very tone of the meaning of my life…
To what end, if not this particular one, does that fluid persist within me, so intimate and yet so very hostile, so near and nonetheless rebellious to its capture, that changes at will into a vision of Edda, into Paul Weber’s drooping shoulders, or into the excessively accurate detail of the water tap in a hotel corridor?
Why does the memory of Edda’s last days come back clearly now? Why, for the sake of asking this question in a different sense (and the question can grow chaotically to thousands of different senses, like in that childhood game in which we would fold an ink-stained sheet of paper and press hard in order to cause the ink to spread, as widely as possible, revealing on unfolding the paper the most fantastic and unexpected contortions of a bizarre drawing) why, therefore, asking in a different sense, does this particular memory come back to me and not another one?
With each uncomprehended yet accurate memory, I have to realize once again, like the excruciating pang of a sick person overshadowing his petty momentary discomforts such as the wrong position of his pillows or the bitterness of some medicine – like an excruciating pang, therefore, enveloping and integrating all my other incertitudes and anxieties I have to admit that, puny and meaningless as it appears, each memory is nevertheless unique, in the most indigent sense, and it occurred linearly in my life, in one way only, singularly exact, with no possibility of modification and without the slightest deviation from its own precision.
“That’s what your life was like, precisely that,” it seems to say, and this sentence engulfs the immense nostalgia of this world locked up in its hermetic lights and colors out of which no life is allowed to extract anything but the aspect of exact banality.
It engulfs the melancholy of being unique and limited in a unique and pathetically arid world.
Sometimes at night I wake up from a terrible nightmare; it is the most uncomplicated and yet most frightening dream.
I dream I am deeply asleep in the bed where I went to sleep in the evening. The interior is the same and it is approximately the same hour of the night; if, for instance, the nightmare starts at midnight it places me with exactitude in the particular kind of darkness and silence reigning at that particular time. In my dream I can see and feel the position I’m in, I know in which bed and in which room I am sleeping, my dream slips like a thin tender skin upon my real position and my sleep at that particular moment. In this regard it could be said I am awake: I am awake, but I sleep and I dream my own waking. I am dreaming my own sleep at that time.
And suddenly I feel my stomach hanging lower, getting heavier and tending to pull me down after it.
I want to wake up, but sleep hangs heavily upon my eyelids and my hands. I dream I am tossing about, swinging my arms, but sleep is stronger than me, and a moment of wrestling with it, it clings to me all the heavier and more tenaciously. At that point I start screaming, I want to withstand sleep, I want someone to wake me up, I slap my own face violently, I am afraid my sleep will sink me too deeply, whence I will never be able to resurface, I beg for somebody’s help, anybody’s, I cry out for someone to shake me…
Finally, my last scream, the loudest of them all, does wake me up. I suddenly find myself in my own real room which is identical to the room in my dream, in the very position in which I was dreaming I lay, at the exact time I suspected I tossed in my nightmare.
What I now see around myself differs only slightly from what I was seeing one second before, but it has a certain air of authenticity, suffusing all things, myself included, like a sudden drop in temperature in winter abruptly magnifying all sonorities…
What does my sense of reality consist of?
I’m once again surrounded by the life I’m going to live till my next dream. Current memories and pains weigh me down and I’m trying to resist them, not to fall in their sleep whence I will perhaps never return.
Now I am thrashing about in reality, I cry out, I beg to be woken to another life, to my genuine life. It is certainly day, I know where I am, I know I’m alive, yet something is missing from all these, just like in my terrible nightmare.
I thrash about, I cry out, I wrestle. Who will wake me up?
All around myself exact reality pulls me lower and lower trying to sink me.
Who will wake me up?
It was always like this, always, always.
English version by Florin BICAN
