The Street of Crocodiles Page 3

  The room was dark and velvety from the royal blue wallpaper with its gold pattern, but even here the echo of the flaming day shimmered brassily on the picture frames, on door knobs and gilded borders, although it came through the filter of the dense greenery of the garden. From her chair against the wall, Aunt Agatha rose to greet us, tall and ample, her round white flesh blotchy with the rust of freckles. We sat down beside them, as on the verge of their lives, rather embarrassed by their defenseless surrender to us, and we drank water with rose syrup, a wonderful drink in which I found the deepest essence of that hot Saturday.

  My aunt was complaining. It was the principal burden of her conversation, the voice of that white and fertile flesh, floating as it were outside the boundaries of her person, held only loosely in the fetters of individual form, and, despite those fetters, ready to multiply, to scatter, branch out, and divide into a family. It was an almost self-propagating fertility, a femininity without rein, morbidly expansive.

  It seemed as if the very whiff of masculinity, the smell of tobacco smoke, or a bachelor's joke, would spark off this feverish feminity and entice it to a lascivious virgin birth. And in fact, all her complaints about her husband or her servants, all her worries about the children were only the caprices of her incompletely satisfied fertility, a logical extension of the rude, angry, lachrymose coquetry with which, to no purpose, she plagued her husband. Uncle Mark, small and hunched, with a face fallow of sex, sat in his gray bankruptcy, reconciled to his fate, in the shadow of a limitless contempt in which he seemed only to relax. His gray eyes reflected the distant glow of the garden, spreading in the window.

  Sometimes he tried with a feeble gesture to raise an objection, to resist, but the wave of self-sufficient femininity hurled aside that unimportant gesture, triumphantly passed him by, and drowned the feeble stirrings of male assertiveness under its broad flood.

  There was something tragic in that immoderate fertility; the misery of a creature fighting on the borders of nothingness and-death, the heroism of womanhood triumphing by fertility over the shortcomings of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. But their offspring showed justification for that panic of maternity, of a passion for childbearing which became exhausted in ill-starred pregnancies, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or face.

  Lucy, the second eldest, now entered the room, her head overdeveloped for her childlike, plump body, her flesh white and delicate. She stretched out to me a small doll-like hand, a hand in bud, and blushed all over her face like a peony. Unhappy because of her blushes, which shamelessly revealed the secrets of menstruation, she closed her eyes and reddened even more deeply under the touch of the most indifferent question, for she saw in each a secret allusion to her most sensitive maidenhood.

  Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair mustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.

  His elegant, expensive clothes bore the imprint of the exotic countries he had visited. His pale flabby face seemed from day to day to lose its outline, to become a white blank wall with a pale network of veins, like lines on an old map occasionally stirred by the fading memories of a stormy and wasted life.

  He was a master of card tricks, he smoked long, noble pipes, and he smelled strangely of distant lands. With his gaze wandering over old memories, he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.

  My eyes followed him nostalgically, and I wished he would notice me and liberate me from the tortures of boredom. And indeed, it seemed as if he gave me a wink before going into an adjoining room and I followed him there, He was sitting on a small low sofa, his crossed knees almost level with his head, which was bald like a billiard ball. It seemed as if it were only his clothes that had been thrown, crumpled and empty, over à chair. His face seemed like the breath of a face—a smudge which an unknown passer-by had left in the air. In his white, blue-enameled hands he was holding a wallet and looking at something in it.

  From the mist of his face, the protruding white of a pale eye emerged with difficulty, enticing me with a wink. I felt an irresistible sympathy for Emil.

  He took me between his knees and, shuffling some photographs in front of my eyes as if they were a pack of cards, he showed me naked women and boys in strange positions. I stood leaning against him looking at those delicate human bodies with distant, unseeing eyes, when all of a sudden the fluid of an obscure excitement with which the air seemed charged, reached me and pierced me with a shiver of uneasiness, a wave of sudden comprehension. But meanwhile that ghost of a smile which had appeared under Emil's soft and beautiful mustache, the seed of desire which had shown in a pulsating vein on his temple, the tenseness which for a moment had kept his features concentrated, all fell away again and his face receded into indifference and became absent and finally faded away altogether.

  Visitation

  1

  Already for some time our town had been sinking into the perpetual grayness of dusk, had become affected at the edges by a rash of shadows, by fluffy mildew, and by moss the dull color of iron.

  Hardly was it freed from the brown smoke and the mists of the morning, than the day turned into a lowering amber afternoon, became for a brief moment transparent, taking the golden color of ale, only to ascend under the multiple fantastic domes of vast, color-filled nights.

  We lived on Market Square, in one of those dark houses with empty blind looks, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.

  This gave endless possibilities for mistakes. For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find yourself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the gray light of dawn.

  Full of large wardrobes, vast sofas, faded mirrors, and cheap artificial palms, our apartment sank deeper and deeper into a state of neglect owing to the indolence of my mother, who spent most of her time in the shop, and the carelessness of slim-legged Adela, who, without anyone to supervise her, spent her days in front of a mirror, endlessly making up and leaving everywhere tufts of combed-out hair, brushes, odd slippers, and discarded corsets.

  No one ever knew exactly how many rooms we had in our apartment, because no one ever remembered how many of them were let to strangers. Often one would by chance open the door to one of these forgotten rooms and find it empty; the lodger had moved out a long time ago. In the drawers, untouched for months, one would make unexpected discoveries.

  In the downstairs rooms lived the shop assistants and sometimes during the night we were awakened by their nightmares. In winter it would be still deep night when Father went down to these cold and dark rooms, the light of his candle scattering flocks of shadows so that they fled sideways along the floor and up the walls; his task to wake the snoring men from their stone-hard sleep.

  In the light of the candle, which Father left with them, they unwound themselves lazily from the dirty bedding, then, sitting on the edge of their beds, stuck out their bare and ugly feet and, with socks in their hands, abandoned themselves for a moment to the delights of yawning—a yawning crossing the borders of sensuous pleasure, leading to a painful cramp of the palate, almost to nausea.

  In the corners, large cockroaches sat immobile, hideously enlarged by their own shadows which the burning candle imposed on them and which remained attached to their flat, headless bodies when they suddenly ran off with weird, spiderlike movements.

  At that time, my father's health began to fail. Even in the first weeks of this early winter, he would spend whole days in bed, surrounded by bottles of medicine and boxes of pills, and ledgers brought up to him from the shop. The bitter smell of illness settled like a rug in the room and the arabes
ques on the wallpaper loomed darker.

  In the evenings, when Mother returned from the shop, Father was often excited and inclined to argue.

  As he reproached her for inaccuracies in the accounts his cheeks became flushed and he became almost insane with anger. I remember more than once waking in the middle of the night to see him in his nightshirt, running in his bare feet up and down the leather sofa to demonstrate his irritation to my baffled mother.

  On other days he was calm and composed, completely absorbed in the account books, lost in a maze of complicated calculations.

  I can still see him in the light of the smoking lamp, crouched among his pillows under the large carved headboard of the bed, swaying backward and forward in silent meditation, his head making an enormous shadow on the wall.

  From time to time, he raised his eyes from the ledgers as if to come up for air, opened his mouth, smacked his lips with distaste as if his tongue were dry and bitter, and looked around helplessly, as if searching for something.

  It then sometimes happened that he quietly got out of bed and ran to the corner of the room where an intimate instrument hung on the wall. It was a kind of hourglass-

  shaped water jar marked in ounces and filled with a dark fluid. My father attached himself to it with a long rubber hose as if with a gnarled, aching navel cord, and thus connected with the miserable apparatus, he became tense with concentration, his eyes darkened, and an expression of suffering, or perhaps of forbidden pleasure, spread over his pale face.

  Then again came days of quiet, concentrated work, interrupted by lonely monologues. While he sat there in the light of the lamp among the pillows of the large bed, and the room grew enormous as the shadows above the lampshade merged with the deep city night beyond the windows, he felt, without looking, how the pullulating jungle of wallpaper, filled with whispers, lisping and hissing, closed in around him. He heard, without looking, a conspiracy of knowingly winking hidden eyes, of alert ears opening up among the flowers on the wall, of dark, smiling mouths.

  He then pretended to become even more engrossed in his work, adding and calculating, trying not to betray the anger which rose in him and overcoming the temptation to throw himself blindly forward with a sudden shout to grab fistfuls of those curly arabesques, or of those sheaves of eyes and ears which swarmed out from the night and grew and multiplied, sprouting, with ever-new ghostlike shoots and branches, from the womb of darkness. And he calmed down only when, in the morning with the ebb of night, the wallpaper wilted, shed its leaves and petals and thinned down autumnally, letting in the distant dawn.

  Then, among the twittering of wallpaper birds in the yellow wintry dawn, he would fall, for a few hours, into a heavy black sleep.

  For days, even for weeks, while he seemed to be engrossed in the complicated current accounts—his thoughts had been secretly plumbing the depths of his own entrails. He would hold his breath and listen. And when his gaze returned, pale and troubled, from that labyrinth, he calmed it with a smile. He did not wish to believe those assumptions and suggestions which oppressed him, and rejected them as absurd.

  In daytime, these were more like arguments and persuasions; long monotonous reasonings, conducted half-aloud and with humorous interludes of teasing and banter. But at night these voices rose with greater passion. The demands were made more clearly and more loudly, and we heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders.

  Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father's groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath.

  I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, but at the sight of this man stricken by God's fire, sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot behind a windmill of arms, a screen of desperate wrigglings over which there towered his voice, grown unfamiliar and hard, I understood the divine anger of saintly men.

  It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose.

  I heard my father's voice during the intermissions in these prophetic tirades. I heard the windows shake from the powerful growl of the swollen lips, mixed with the explosions of entreaties, laments, and threats uttered by Father.

  Sometimes the voices quietened down and grumbled softly, like the nightly chatter of wind in a chimney, then again they exploded with a large, tumultuous noise, in a storm of sobs mixed with curses. Suddenly the window opened with a dark yawn and a sheet of darkness wafted across the room.

  In a flash of lightning I could see my father, his nightshirt unbuttoned, as, cursing terribly, he emptied with a masterful gesture the contents of the chamberpot into the darkness below.

  2

  My father was slowly fading, wilting before our eyes.

  Hunched among the enormous pillows, his gray hair standing wildly on end, he talked to himself in undertones, engrossed in some complicated private business. It seemed as if his personality had split into a number of opposing and quarreling selves; he argued loudly with himself, persuading forcibly and passionately, pleading and begging; then again he seemed to be presiding over a meeting of many interested parties whose views he tried to reconcile with a great show of energy and conviction. But every time these noisy meetings, during which tempers would rise violently, dissolved into curses, execrations, maledictions, and insults.

  Then came a period of appeasement, of an interior calm, a blessed serenity of spirit. Again the great ledgers were spread on the bed, on the table, on the floor, and an almost monastic calm reigned in the light of the lamp, over the white bedding, over my father's gray, bowed head.

  But when Mother returned late at night from the shop, Father became animated, called her and showed her with great pride the wonderful colored decals with which he had laboriously adorned the pages of the main ledger.

  About that time we noticed that Father began to shrink from day to day, like a nut drying inside the shell.

  This shrinking was not accompanied by any loss of strength. On the contrary: there seemed to be an improvement in his general state of health, in his humor, and in his mobility.

  Now he often laughed loudly and gaily; sometimes he was almost overcome with laughter; at others, he would knock on the side of the bed and answer himself: "Come in," in various tones, for hours on end. From time to time, he scrambled down from the bed, climbed on top of the wardrobe, and, crouching under the ceiling, sorted out old dust-covered odds and ends.

  Sometimes he put two chairs back to back and taking his weight on them, swung his legs backward and forward, looking with shining eyes for an expression of admiration and encouragement in our faces. It seemed as if he had become completely reconciled with God. Sometimes at night, the face of the bearded Demiurge would appear at the bedroom window, bathed in the dark purple glare of Bengal fire, but it only looked for a moment benevolently on my sleeping father whose melodious snoring seemed to wander far into the unknown regions of the world of sleep.

  During the long twilight afternoons of this winter, my father would spend hours rummaging in corners full of old junk, as if he were feverishly searching for something.

  And sometimes at dinnertime, when we had all taken our places at the table, Father would be missing. On such occasions, Mother had to call "Jacob!" over and over again and knock her spoon against the table before he emerged from inside a wardrobe, covered with dust and cobwebs, his ey
es vacant, his mind on some complicated matter known only to himself which absorbed him completely.

  Occasionally he climbed on a pelmet and froze into immobility, a counterpart to the large stuffed vulture which hung on the wall opposite. In this crouching pose, with misty eyes and a sly smile on his lips, he remained for long periods without moving, except to flap his arms like wings and crow like a cock whenever anybody entered the room.

  We ceased to pay attention to these oddities in which Father became daily more and more involved. Almost completely rid of bodily needs, not taking any nourishment for weeks, he plunged deeper every day into some strange and complex affairs that were beyond our understanding. To all our persuasions and our entreaties, he answered in fragments of his interior monologue, which nothing from the outside could disturb. Constantly absorbed, morbidly excited, with flushes on his dry cheeks he did not notice us or even hear us any more.

  We became used to his harmless presence, to his soft babbling, and that childlike self-absorbed twittering, which sounded as if they came from the margin of our own time. During that period he used to disappear for many days into some distant corner of the house and it was difficult to locate him.

  Gradually these disappearances ceased to make any impression on us, we became used to them and when, after many days, Father reappeared a few inches shorter and much thinner, we did not stop to think about it. We did not count him as one of us any more, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community.