Street of Crocodiles, The Read online

  Drumming on their sides, the barrels, buckets, and watercans rose in stacks, the earthenware jars gadded about, the old bowlers and opera hats climbed one on top of another, growing toward the sky in pillars only to collapse at last.

  And all the while their wooden tongues rattled clumsily, while they ground out curses from their wooden mouths, and spread blasphemies of mud over the whole area of the night, until at last these blasphemies achieved their object.

  Summoned by the creaking of utensils, by their fulsome chatter, there arrived the powerful caravans of wind and dominated the night. An enormous, black, moving amphitheater formed high above the city and began to descend in powerful spirals. The darkness exploded in a great stormy gale and raged for three days and three nights. . . .

  "You won'tgo to school today," said my mother in the morning, "there's a gale blowing."

  A delicate veil of resin-scented smoke filled the room. The stove roared and whistled, as if a whole pack of hounds or demons were held captive in it. The large face painted on its protruding belly made colorful grimaces and its cheeks swelled dramatically.

  I ran barefoot to the window. The sky was swept lengthwise by the gusts of wind. Vast and silvery-white, it was cut into lines of energy tensed to breaking point, into awesome furrows like strata of tin and lead. Divided into magnetic fields and trembling with discharges, it was full of concealed electricity. The diagrams of the gale were traced on it which, itself unseen and elusive, loaded the landscape with its power.

  One could not see the gale. One could recognize its effect on the houses, on the roofs under which its fury penetrated. One after the other, the attics seemed to loom larger and to explode in madness when touched by its finger.

  It swept the squares clean, leaving behind it a white emptiness in the streets; it denuded the whole area of the marketplace. Only here and there a lonely man, bent under the force of the wind, could be seen clinging to the corner of a house. The whole Market Square seemed to shine like a bald head under the powerful gusts of wind.

  The gale blew cold and dead colors onto the sky— streaks of green, yellow, and violet—the distant vaults and arcades of its spirals. The roofs loomed black and crooked, apprehensive and expectant. Those under which the wind had already penetrated, rose in inspiration, outgrew the neighboring roofs and prophesied doom under the unkempt sky. Then they fell and expired, unable to hold any longer the powerful breath which then moved farther along and filled the whole space with noise and terror. And yet more houses rose with a scream, in a paroxysm of prediction, and howled disaster.

  The enormous beech trees around the church stood with their arms upraised, like witnesses of terrifying visions, and screamed and screamed.

  Farther along, beyond the roofs of Market Square, I saw the gable ends and the naked walls of suburban houses. They climbed one over the other and grew, paralyzed with fear. The distant, cold, red glare painted them in autumnal colors.

  We did not have our midday meal that day because the fire in the range belched circles of smoke into the kitchen. All the rooms were cold and smelled of wind. About two o'clock in the afternoon a fire broke out in the suburbs and spread rapidly. My mother and Adela began to pack our bedding, fur coats, and valuables.

  Night came. The wind intensified in force and violence, grew immeasurably and filled the whole area. It had now stopped visiting the houses and roofs, and had started to build a many-storied, multilevel spiral over the city, a black maze, growing relentlessly upward. From that maze it shot out along galleries of rooms, raced amid claps of thunder through long corridors and then allowed all those imaginary structures to collapse, spreading out and rising into the formless stratosphere.

  Our rooms trembled gently, the pictures rattled on the walls, the windowpanes shone with the greasy reflection of the lamp. The curtains swelled with the breath of that stormy night. We suddenly remembered that we had not seen Father since the morning. He must have gone out very early to the shop, where the gale had probably surprised him and cut him off from home.

  "He will not have had anything to eat all day," Mother wailed. The senior shop assistant, Theodore, volunteered to venture into the wind-swept night, to take some food to Father. My brother decided to go with him.

  Wrapped in large bearskin coats, they filled their pockets with flatirons and brass pestles, metal ballast to prevent them from being blown away by the gale. The door leading into the night was opened cautiously. No sooner had Theodore and my brother taken one step into the darkness, than they were swallowed up by the night on the very threshold of the house. The wind immediately washed away all traces of their departure. From the window one could not see even the light of the lantern which they had taken.

  Having swallowed them, the wind quietened down for a while. Adela and Mother again tried to light a fire in the kitchen range. All the matches went out and through the opened access-door ashes and soot were blown all over the room. We stood behind the front door of the house and listened. In the lament of the gale one could hear all kinds of voices, questions, calls and cries. We imagined that we could hear Father, lost in the gale, calling for help, or else that it was my brother and Theodore chatting unconcernedly outside the door. The sounds were so deceptive that Adela opened the door at one point and in fact saw Theodore and my brother just emerging, with great effort, from the gale in which they had sunk up to their armpits.

  They came in panting and closed the door with difficulty behind them. For a moment they had to lean against it, so strong was the storming of the wind at the entrance. At last they got the door bolted and the wind continued its chase elsewhere.

  They spoke almost incoherently of the terrible darkness, of the gale. Their fur coats, soaked with wind, now smelled of the open air. They blinked in the light; their eyes, still full of night, spilled darkness at each flutter of the eyelids. They could not reach the shop, they said; they had lost their way and hardly knew how to get back; the city was unrecognizable and all the streets looked as if they had been displaced.

  My mother suspected that they were not telling the truth. In fact we all had the impression that they had perhaps stood under our windows for a few minutes without attempting to go anywhere. Or perhaps the city and the marketplace had ceased to exist, and the gale and the night had surrounded our house with dark stage props and some machinery to imitate the howling, whistling and groaning? Perhaps these enormous and mournful spaces suggested by the wind did not exist, perhaps there were no vast labyrinths, nor spirals, no windowed corridors to form a long, black flute on which the wind played its tunes? We were increasingly inclined to think that the gale was only an invention of the night, a poor representation on a confined stage of the tragic immensity, the cosmic homelessness and loneliness of the wind.

  Our front door now opened time after time to admit visitors wrapped tightly in capes and shawls. A breathless neighbor or friend would slowly shed his outer wrappings and throw out confused and unconnected words which fantastically exaggerated the dangers of the night.

  We all sat together in the brightly lit kitchen. Behind the kitchen range and the black, broad eaves of the chimney, a few steps led to the attic door. On these steps Theodore now sat, listening to the attic shaking in the wind. He heard how, during the pauses between gusts, the bellows of the rafters folded themselves into pleats and the roof hung limply like an enormous lung from which air had escaped; then again how it inhaled, stretched out the rafters, grew like a Gothic vault and resounded like the box of an enormous double bass.

  And then we forgot the gale. Adela started pounding cinnamon in a mortar. Aunt Perasia had come to call. Small, vivacious and very active, with the lace of her black shawl on her head, she began to bustle about the kitchen, helping Adela, who by then had plucked a cockerel. Aunt Perasia put a handful of paper in the grate and lit it. Adela grasped the cockerel by its neck, and held it over the flames to scorch off the remaining feathers. The bird suddenly spread its wings in the fire, crowed once and was bur
ned. At that Aunt Perasia began to shout and curse. Trembling with anger, she shook her fists at Adela and at Mother. I could not understand what it was all about, but she persisted in her anger and became one small bundle of gestures and imprecations. It seemed that in her paroxysm of fury she might disintegrate into separate gestures, that she would divide into a hundred spiders, would spread out over the floor in a black, shimmering net of crazy running cockroaches. Instead, she began suddenly to shrink and dwindle, still shaking and spitting curses. And then she trotted off, hunched and small, into a corner of the kitchen where we stacked the firewood and, cursing and coughing, began feverishly to rummage among the sonorous wood until she found two thin, yellow splinters. She grabbed them with trembling hands, measured them against her legs, then raised herself on them as if they were stilts and began to walk about, clattering on the floor, jumping here and there across the slanting lines of the floorboards, quicker and quicker, until she finished up on a pine bench, whence she climbed on the shelf with the crockery, a tinkling wooden shelf running the whole length of the kitchen wall. She ran along it on her stilts and shrank away into a corner. She became smaller and smaller, black and folded like a wilted, charred sheet of paper, oxidized into a petal of ash, disintegrating into dust and nothingness. We all stood helpless in the face of this display of self-destructive fury. With regret we observed the sad course of the paroxysm and with some relief returned to our occupations when the lamentable process had spent itself.

  Adela clanked the mortar again, pounding cinnamon; Mother returned to her interrupted conversation; and Theodore, listening to the prophecies in the attic, made comical faces, lifting his eyebrows and softly chuckling to himself.

  The Night of the Great Season

  Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.

  We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother's life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-wilted shoot, more tentative than real.

  What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought stunted, empty, useless days—white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.

  There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters.

  Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that large, crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it. Ah, when writing down these tales, revising the stories about my father on the used margins of its text, don't I, too, surrender to the secret hope that they will merge imperceptibly with the yellowing pages of that most splendid, moldering book, that they will sink into the gentle rustle of its pages and become absorbed there?

  The events I am now going to relate happened in that thirteenth, supernumerary, freak month of that year, on those blank pages of the great chronicles of the calendar.

  The mornings were strangely refreshing and tart. From the quietened and cooler flow of time, from the completely new smell in the air, from the different consistency of the light, one could recognize that one had entered a new series of days, a new era of the Lord's Year.

  Voices trembled under these new skies resonantly and lightly, as in a new and still-empty house which smells of varnish and paint, of things begun and not yet used. With a strange emotion one tried out new echoes, one bit into them with curiosity as, on a cool and sober morning on the eve of a journey, one bites into a fresh, still warm currant loaf.

  My father was again sitting at the back of his shop, in a small, low room divided like a beehive into many cells of file boxes from which endless layers of paper, letters and invoices overflowed. From the rustle of sheets, from the ceaseless turning over of pages, arose the squared empty existence of that room; the constant moving of files of innumerable letters with business headings created in the stuffy air an apotheosis, a bird's eye mirage of an industrial city, bristling with smoky chimneys, surrounded by a row of medals, and with a clasp formed from the curves and flourishes of a proud "& Co."

  There my father would sit, as if in an aviary, on a high stool; and the lofts of filing cabinets rustled with piles of paper and all the pigeonholes filled with the twitter of figures.

  The depth of the large shop became, from day to day, darker and richer, with stocks of cloth, serge, velvet, and cord. On the somber shelves, those granaries and silos, the cool, felted fabrics matured and yielded interest. The powerful capital of autumn multiplied and mellowed. It grew and ripened and spread, ever wider, until the shelves resembled the rows of some great amphitheater. It was augmented daily by new loads of goods brought in crates and bales in the cool of the morning on the broad, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters who exuded an aura of autumn freshness mixed with vodka. The shop assistants unpacked these new supplies and filled with their rich, drapery colors, as with putty, all the holes and cracks of the tall cupboards. They ran the gamut of all the autumn shades and went up and down through the octaves of color. Beginning at the bottom, they tried shyly and plaintively the contralto semitones, passed on to the washed-out grays of distance, to tapestry blues and, going upward in ever broader chords, reached deep, royal blues, the indigo of distant forests and the plush of rustling parks, in order to enter, through the ochers, reds, tans, and sepiàs, the whispering shadows of wilting gardens, and to reach finally the dark smell of fungi, the waft of mold in the depth of autumn nights and the dull accompaniment of the darkest basses.

  My father walked along these arsenals of autumn goods and calmed and soothed the rising force of these masses of cloth, the power of the Season. He wanted to keep intact for as long as possible those reserves of stored color. He was afraid to break into that iron fund of autumn, to change it into cash. Yet, at the same time, he knew and felt that soon an autumn wind would come, a devastating wind which would blow through the cupboards; that they would give way; that nothing would check the flood, and that the streams of color would engulf the whole city.

  The time of the Great Season was approaching. The streets were getting busy. At six in the evening the city became feverish, the houses stood flushed, and people walked about made up in bright colors, illuminated by some interior fire, their eyes shining with a festive fever, beautiful yet evil.

  In the side streets, in quiet backwaters fleeing into the night, the city was empty. Only children were out under the balconies of the small squares, playing breathlessly, noisily, and nonsensically. They put small balloons to their lips and filled them with air, in order to transform themselves into red and crowing cockerels, colored autumnal masks, fantastic and absurd. It seemed that thus swollen and crowing, they would begin to float in the air in long colored chains and fly over,the city like migrating birds—fantastic flotillas of tissue paper and autumn weather. Or else they pushed one another on small clattering carts, which played tunes with their little rattling wheels, axles and shafts. Filled with their happy cries the carts rolled down the street to the broadly spreading, evening
-yellow river where they disintegrated into a jumble of disks, pegs, and sticks.

  And while the children's games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city's flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads. Their faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight. Then a black, rotting bark began to cover everything in large putrid scabs of darkness. And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in that silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together into the enormous silvery infinite. Then suddenly night came—a vast night, growing vaster from the pressure of great gusts of wind. In its multiple labyrinths nests of brightness were hewn: the shops—large colored lanterns—filled with goods and the bustle of customers. Through the bright glass of these lanterns the noisy and strangely ceremonial rites of autumn shopping could be observed.

  The great, undulating autumn night, with the shadows rising in it and the winds broadening it, hid in its folds pockets of brightness, the motley wares of street traders —chocolates, biscuits, exotic sweets. Their kiosks and barrows, made from empty boxes, papered with advertisements, full of soap, of gay trash, of gilded nothings, of tinfoil, trumpets, wafers and colored mints, were stations of lightheartedness, outposts of gaiety, scattered on the hangings of the enormous, labyrinthine, wind-shaken night.