Adventures In Immediate Irreality Page 3

  It was a wild, isolated spot, as lonely as could be. The heat of the day felt more enervating there, the air I breathed more dense. The dusty bushes blazed yellow in the sun in an atmosphere of utter solitude. A bizarre feeling of futility hovered over the clearing, which existed “somewhere on earth,” a place where I myself would end up quite by chance on a summer afternoon with no rhyme or reason of its own, an afternoon that had lost its chaotic way in the heat of the sun amidst bushes fixed in space “somewhere on earth.” At that time I felt more deeply and painfully that I had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do but saunter through parks, through dusty clearings burnt by the sun, desolate and wild. But the saunter would turn into a heart-rending experience.

  There was another cursed place at the other end of town on the high, loose banks of the river where my friends and I would go to bathe. At one point the bank had caved in. Just above it there was a factory that made oil from sunflower seeds. The workers would throw the discarded seed husks into the section of the bank that had caved in, and over time, the pile grew so high that it formed a slope of dry husks extending from the top of the bank to the water’s edge.

  My playmates would descend to the water along that slope, cautiously, holding one another by the hand, sinking their feet deep into the carpet of rotten matter. The walls of the high bank on either side of the slope were steep and full of outlandish irregularities—long, fine channels sculpted by the rain, arabesque-like but as hideous as poorly healed scars, veritable tatters of the clay’s flesh, horrible gaping wounds. It was between these walls, which made such an impression on me, that I too climbed down to the water.

  Long before I reached the riverbank, my nostrils would fill with the odor of rotten husks. It would prepare me for the crisis like a brief period of incubation. It was an unpleasant smell, yet sweet. Like the crises.

  Somewhere inside me my olfactory perception would split and the effluvia of putrefaction would reach different destinations: the gelatinous odor of decomposing husks was separate, quite distinct from—yet concomitant with—its pleasant perfume, the warm and homely scent of toasted hazelnuts. The moment I smelled it, the perfume would transform me, circulating throughout my body, dissolving, as it were, my inner fibers and replacing them with a more airy, less uncertain material. From that moment, the end was inevitable. A pleasant, heady feeling would arise in my chest, a dizziness pushing me toward the riverbank, the place of my ultimate defeat.

  I would race down the husk pile to the water at breakneck speed, the air setting up a fierce opposition, cutting into me like a sharp blade, and space collapsing chaotically into an immense hole with an unexpectedly strong force of attraction. My playmates would watch my wildly precipitous descent in horror. The pebble beach below was very narrow, and the slightest misstep would have sent me sprawling into the water, whose surface whirlpools betokened great depths.

  But I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Having reached the water, I would run past the husk pile at the same speed and continue downstream to a hollow in the bank. The hollow formed a small cave, a cool, shaded grotto like a room carved out in the rock. I would go in and fall to the ground, drenched in sweat, dead tired, and trembling from head to toe.

  Having recovered a bit, I would enjoy the grotto’s familiar and enormously pleasant decor. There was a spring bubbling forth from the rock, running along the ground, and forming a pool of perfectly limpid water in the middle of the pebbles. I would never tire of leaning over the pool and gazing at the delightful lace of green moss on the bottom, the worms caught on slivers of wood, the scraps of rusty old ooze-covered metal, the myriad animate and inanimate objects in the fantastically beautiful water.

  Outside those two cursed places, the town sank into a uniform and banal mass of houses easily interchangeable and trees exasperatingly immobile, of dogs, vacant lots, and dust.

  In closed rooms, however, crises took place with greater ease and frequency. I could not tolerate being alone in a strange room. When forced to do so, I would, within a very few minutes, fall into a sweet but terrible swoon. The room itself prepared the way: a warm, welcoming sense of intimacy would filter down from the walls and spread over all the furniture, every object. All at once the room was sublime and I felt happy there. Yet that was nothing but a ruse on the part of the crisis: a subtle, perverse little trick it played. After this moment of bliss things went topsy-turvy and confusion reigned. I would peer around me wide-eyed, but things had lost their usual meaning: they were awash with their new existence. It was as if someone had removed the fine, transparent paper they had been wrapped in till then, and suddenly they looked new beyond words. They seemed destined to be put to new, superior, fantastic uses beyond my power to divine.

  But there was more: the objects were seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom, and the independence they declared of one another went far beyond simple isolation to exultation, ecstasy. Their enthusiasm for living in a new light encompassed me as well: I felt powerful bonds linking me to them, invisible networks making me every bit as much of an object, a part of the room, as they were, the way an organ grafted onto a living organism goes through subtle physical metamorphoses until it becomes one with the body once foreign to it.

  Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass. And in the end these true-to-life details, perceived from the distance of my swoon, stupefied and stunned me like a last gulp of chloroform. It was what was most humdrum and familiar in the objects that disturbed me most. The habit of being seen so many times must have worn out their thin skins, and they sometimes looked flayed and bloody to me—and alive, ineffably alive.

  The climax of the crisis would occur when I began floating above the world, a condition at once pleasant and painful. At the first sound of footsteps the room reverted to its original state: things fell back into place, and I noted an ever so slight, all but imperceptible reduction in its exaltation, which gave me to believe that the certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only the flimsiest of membranes.

  I would awake in my old familiar room, bathed in sweat, exhausted, and fully aware of the futility of the things surrounding me but observing new details in them, as we sometimes discover a novel feature in something we have used every day for years. The room retained a vague memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of sulfur after an explosion. Gazing at the bound books behind the bookshelf glass, I somehow took their immobility for a perfidious sign of furtiveness and complicity: the objects around me never gave up the secretive attitude fiercely guarded by their impassivity.

  Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of the soul. Here I am, trying to give an exact description of my crises, and all I can come up with are images. The magic word that might convey their essence would have to borrow from the essences of other aspects of life, distill a new scent from a judicious combination of them. It would have to contain something of the stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following his gestures in a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my dreams and the subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal chord, or of the transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I have known.

  I envied the people around me who are hermetically sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They may live out their lives as prisoners of their overcoats, but nothing external can terrorize or overcome them, nothing can penetrate their marv
elous prisons. I had nothing to separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was nothing for it.

  The crises belonged as much to the places where they occurred as to me. True, some places had their own “personal” evil, but even those that did not were in a trance long before I appeared. In some rooms, for example, I felt the crises to be the crystallization of the melancholy caused by their immobility and boundless solitude.

  However, the conviction that objects could be inoffensive—which arose as a kind of truce between me and the world (a truce that plunged me even more hopelessly into the uniformity of brute matter)—came to pass off a terror equal to the terror the objects themselves at times imposed upon me: their inoffensiveness came from a universal lack of strength. I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world can come to fruition, that it is impossible to accomplish anything. Even the ferocity of objects runs its course. It was thus that the idea of the imperfection of all phenomena in the world, natural or supernatural, took shape in me.

  In an internal dialogue that I believe never ceased I would defy the evil powers around me one day and flatter them basely the next. I would indulge in certain odd rites, though not without motivation.

  Whenever I went out and took different streets, I would retrace my steps on the way home. I did so to avoid making a circle in which trees and houses would be inscribed. In this respect, my walks were like a thread which, once unwound, I needed to rewind along the same route, and had I not done so the objects caught in the loop would have forever been closely attached to me.

  Whenever it rained, I would be careful not to touch the stones in the path of the streams of water. I did so to add nothing to the water’s activity and to enable it to exercise its elemental powers unimpeded.

  Fire purifies all. I always had a box of matches in my pocket, and when I felt particularly sad I would light a match and pass my hands through the flame, first one, then the other.

  All this bespoke a melancholy of existence, a kind of normally organized torture in the course of my life as a child. In time the crises disappeared by themselves, though not without leaving behind a powerful memory. And although they were gone by the time I reached adolescence, the crepuscular state preceding them and the deep sense of the futility of the world coming after became, so to speak, my natural state.

  Futility filled the hollows of the world like a liquid spreading in all directions, and the sky above me—eternally correct, absurd, and obscure—turned its own color of despair. Surrounded by that futility and beneath that sky, I wander eternally cursed to this day.

  Chapter Two

  The doctor I consulted about my crises pronounced a strange word: “paludism.” I was amazed that my secret and intimate afflictions could have a name, and a name so bizarre to boot. The doctor prescribed quinine—another cause for amazement. I could not comprehend how an illness, it, could be cured with quinine taken by a person, me. But what disturbed me most was the doctor himself. Long after he examined me, he continued to exist and bustle about my memory with those minute, automatic gestures I could not stop him from making.

  He was a short man with an egg-shaped head, the pointed end of the egg lengthening into a black beard continually in motion. His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures, and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his r’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something mouse-like about him, and the confirmation of said conviction proved so strange and touched on facts so central to my childhood that I believe the incident worthy of recounting.

  Not far from our house there was a shop that sold sewing machines. I spent hours there every day. The owner was a young man by the name of Eugen who had just completed his military service and hoped to earn a living from the shop. He had a sister, Clara, who was a year younger than he. They lived together on the outskirts of town and spent all day in the shop, having neither friends nor relatives.

  It was a rented room and had never served as a place of business. The walls had not been repainted and were covered with garlands of violets and faded rectangles where pictures had once hung. A bronze lamp, also left from before, hung from the middle of the ceiling. It had a dark-red majolica lampshade decorated along the rim with green porcelain acanthus leaves in relief. It was highly ornamented, old and old-fashioned, but imposing. It looked something like a gravestone or a retired general wearing his former uniform in a parade.

  The sewing machines stood in three rows separated by broad aisles running to the back of the room. Every morning Eugen took pains to wet the floor with water using an old tin he had made holes in. He deftly coaxed the dribble that emerged into clever spirals and figure eights and occasionally signed his name or wrote out the date. The paint on the wall clearly called for such finesse.

  At the far end of the room a wooden screen separated the shop proper from another, smaller area, the entrance to which was covered by a green portière. Eugen and Clara spent much of their time in this back room and always had lunch there so as not to leave the shop unmanned. They called it “the green room,” and I once heard Eugen say, “It really is like the room where actors await their entrances. When you go out into the shop and spend a half hour selling a sewing machine, are you not playacting?” Then, using a more learned inflection, he added, “Life as a whole is pure theater.”

  Behind the portière Eugen would play the violin. He laid the music out on the table, then bent over it, patiently deciphering the staves of complicated notes as if trying to unravel a skein of knotty thread into one long, slender strand, the thread of the melody. A small petroleum lamp on a trunk would burn all afternoon, filling the room with a dull light and throwing the violinist’s distorted shadow on the wall.

  I went there so often as to become part of the furniture, so to speak, a kind of extension of the old oil-cloth sofa I would sit on, motionless, heeded by and bothering no one. I went because Clara would make her afternoon toilet in the back room. She kept her wardrobe in a small armoire and looked at herself in a broken mirror that she leaned against the lamp on the trunk. The mirror was so old that the polish had completely worn off in places and actual objects showed here and there through the back of the mirror, merging with the reflected images as in a double exposure.

  Sometimes she took off nearly all her clothes and rubbed cologne into her armpits, lifting her arms with no embarrassment, or between her breasts, sticking her hands between her shift and her body. The shift was short, and when she leaned over I had a full view of her shapely legs tightly encased in their black stockings. She looked very much like a half-naked woman I had seen on a pornographic postcard that the park pretzel vendor had shown me. She aroused the same vague swoon as the obscene picture, a kind of vacuum in the chest and a fierce pang of desire in the groin.

  I always sat in the same place—behind Eugen on the back-room sofa — waiting for Clara to complete her toilet, because then, on her way into the shop, she would have to pass between her brother and me in a space so narrow that her calves could not help rubbing against my knees. I looked forward to that moment every day with the same impatience and the same torment. It depended on a
ny number of trivial circumstances that I observed with a combination of exasperation and acute sensitivity. All that had to happen was that Eugen should feel thirsty or tire of playing or that a customer should come into the shop and he would abandon his place, thereby leaving Clara room to pass without touching me.

  Every afternoon as I approached the door of the shop, my long, quivering antennae would come out and test the air for the sound of the violin. The moment I heard Eugen playing, I breathed a sigh of relief. I would enter slowly and shout out my name from the threshold so he would not think I was a customer and interrupt his piece. If he paused so much as a second, it might check the flow and magic of the melody and induce him to put down the violin for good that afternoon. But this was not the only unfavorable adventure possible. All kinds of things could go wrong in the back room . . .

  As long as Clara was still at her toilet, I kept an ear out for the faintest of noises, an eye out for the slightest of movements. Eugen might give a cough, for instance, and, swallowing a bit of saliva, announce that he was off to the café for a pastry. A trifle like that, a single cough, could herald the monstrous calamity of a wasted afternoon. Indeed, the whole day would have gone to waste, and that night in bed, instead of turning over leisurely in my mind (and pausing over each detail to “see” and savor it as it deserved) the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stocking, instead of delving, molding, and caressing the thought, I would toss and turn feverishly in the bedclothes, unable to sleep and impatiently awaiting daybreak.