Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass Read online

  "To you, Shloma," I said, "I can reveal the secret of these drawings. From the very start I had some doubts whether it was really I who made them. Sometimes they seem to me unintentional plagiarism, something that has been suggested to me or remembered ... As if something outside me had used by inspiration for an unknown purpose. For I must confess to you," I added softly, looking into his eyes. "I have found the great Original . . ."

  "The Original?" he asked, and his face lit up.

  "Yes indeed, look for yourself," I said kneeling in front of a chest of drawers. I first took out from it Adela's silk dress, then a box of her ribbons, and finally her new shoes with high heels. The smell of powder and scent filled the air. I took out some books: in the bottom of the drawer lay the long unseen, precious, beloved script.

  "Shloma," I said trembling with emotion, "look, here it is . . ."

  But he was deep in thought, with one of Adela's shoes in his hand, looking at it mediatively.

  "God did not say anything of the kind," he said, "and yet my conviction is total. I cannot find any arguments to the contrary. These lines are irresistible, amazingly accurate, and final, and like lightning illuminate the very center of things. How can you plead innocence, how can you resist when you yourself have been bribed, outvoted, and betrayed by your most loyal allies. The six days of Creation were divine and bright. But on the seventh day God broke down. On the seventh day he felt an unknown texture under his fingers, and frightened, he withdrew his hands from the world, although his creative fervor might have lasted for many more days and nights. Oh, Joseph, beware the seventh day. ..."

  And lifting up with awe Adela's slim shoe, he spoke as if seduced by the lustrous eloquence of that empty shell of patent leather:

  "Do you understand the horrible cynicism of this symbol on a woman's foot, the provocation of her licentious walk on such elaborate heels? How can I leave you under the sway of that symbol? God forbid that I should do it. ..."

  Saying this, his skillful fingers stuffed Adela's shoes, dress, and beads into his pocket.

  "What are you doing, Shloma?"

  But he was already moving quickly toward the door, limping slightly, his checked trousers flapping round his legs. In the doorway he turned his gray, already indistinct face toward me and lifted his hand in a reassuring gesture. And then he was gone.

  SPRING

  I

  THIS IS THE STORY of a certain spring that was more real, more dazzling and brighter than any other spring, a spring that took its text seriously: an inspired script, written in the festive red of sealing wax and of calendar print, the red of colored pencils and of enthusiasm, the amaranth of happy telegrams from far away . . .

  Each spring begins like this, with stunning horoscopes reaching beyond the expectations of a single season. In each spring there is everything: processions and manifestations, revolutions and barricades. Each brings with it, at a given moment, the hot wind of frenzy, an infinity of sadnesses and delights that seek in vain their equivalents in reality.

  Later on, these exaggerations, culminations, and ecstasies are transformed into blossoming, into the trembling of cool leaves, and are absorbed by the tumultuous rustling of gardens. In this way springs betray their promise; each of them, engrossed in the breathless murmur of flowering parks, forgets its pledges and sheds, one by one, the leaves of its testament.

  But that particular spring had the courage to endure, to keep its promise and bond. After many unsuccessful efforts, it succeeded in acquiring a permanent shape and burst upon the world as the ultimate all-embracing spring.

  Oh that wind of events, that hurricane of happenings: the successful coups d'état, those gradiose, triumphant, highfalutin' days! How I wish that the pace of this story would catch their entrancing, inspired beat, the heroic tone of that epic, the marching rhythm of that springlike "Marseillaise"!

  How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forward or backward, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots.

  II

  During those wild spacious nights that preceded the spring, when the sky was vast, still raw and unscented, and aerial byways led into the starry infinite, my father sometimes took me out to supper in a small garden restaurant hidden between the back walls of the farthest houses of the market square.

  We walked in the damp light of streetlamps hissing in the wind, cutting across the large expanse of the square, forlorn, crushed by the immensity of the sky, lost and disoriented by its empty vastness. My father lifted his face bathed in the scanty light and looked anxiously at the starry grit scattered among the shallows of heavenly eddies. Their irregular and countless agglomerations were not yet ordered into constellations, and no figures emerged from the sterile pools. The sadness of the starlit space lay heavily over the town, the lamps pierced the night below with beams of light, tying them haphazardly into knots. Under these lamps, passers-by stopped in groups of two or three in the circle of light, which for a short moment looked like the glow of a lamp over a dining table, although the night was indifferent and unfriendly, dividing the sky into wild airscapes, exposed to the blows of a homeless wind. Conversations faltered; under the deep shadow of their hats people smiled with their eyes and listened dreamily to the distant hum of the stars.

  The paths in the restaurant garden were covered with gravel. Two standard lamps hissed gently. Gentlemen in black frock coats sat in twos or threes at tables covered with white cloths, looking dully at the polished plates. Sitting thus, they calculated mentally the moves on the great chessboard of the sky, each seeing with his mind's eye the jumping knights and lost pawns of which new constellations immediately took the place.

  Musicians on the rostrum dipped their mustaches in mugs of bitter beer and sat around idly, deep in thought. Their violins and nobly shaped cellos lay neglected under the voiceless downpour of the stars. From time to time one of them would reach for his instrument and try it, tuning it plaintively to harmonize with his discreet coughing. Then he would put it aside as if it were not yet ready, not yet measuring up to the night, which flowed along unheeding. And then, as the knives and forks began to clank softly above the white tablecloths, the violins would rise alone, now suddenly mature although tentative and unsure just a short while before; slim and narrow-waisted, they eloquently proceeded with their task, took up again the lost human cause, and pleaded before the indifferent tribunal of stars, now set in a sky on which the shapes of the instruments floated like water signs or fragments of keys, unfinished lyres or swans, an imitatory, thoughtless starry commentary on the margin of music.

  The town photographer, who had for some time been casting meaningful glances at us from a neighboring table, joined us at last and sat down, putting his mug of beer on the table. He smiled equivocally, fought with his own thoughts, snapped his fingers, losing again and again some elusive point. We had felt for some time that our improvised restaurant encampment under the auspices of distant stars was doomed to collapse miserably, unequal to the ever increasing demands of the night. What could we set against these bottomless wastes? The night simply canceled our human undertaking, even though it was supported by the sound of the violins, and moved into the gap, shifting its constellations to their rightful positions.

  We looked at the disintegrating camp of tables, the battlefield of half-folded tablecloths and crumpled napkins, across which the night trod in triumph, luminous and immense. We got up as well, and our thoughts, forestalling our bodies, followed the movements of starry carts on their great and shiny paths.r />
  And so we walked off under the stars, anticipating with half-closed eyes the ever more splendid illuminations. Ah, the cynicism of such a triumphant night! Having taken possession of the whole sky, it now played dominoes in space, lazily and without calculation, indifferently losing or winning millions. Then, bored, it traced on the battlefield of overturned tiles transparent squiggles, smiling faces, the same smile in a thousand copies, which a moment later rose toward the stars, already eternal, and dispersed into starry indifference.

  On our way home we stopped at a pastry shop to get cakes. No sooner had we entered the white, icing sugar room than the night suddenly tensed up and became watchful lest we should escape. It waited for us patiently, outside the door, showing the unmoving stars through the window panes of the shop while we were inside selecting our cakes with great deliberation.

  It was then that I saw Bianca for the first time. She stood sideways in front of the counter with her governess; she was slim and linear in a white dress as if she had just left the zodiac. She did not turn her head but stood with the perfect poise of a young girl, eating a cream bun. I could not see her clearly, for the zigzags of starry lines still lingered under my eyelids. It was the first time that our still confused horoscopes had crossed, met, and dissolved in indifference. We did not anticipate our fate from that early aspect of the stars, and we left the shop casually, making the glass-fronted door rattle.

  The photographer, my father and I walked home in a roundabout way, through distant suburbs. The few houses there were small, and eventually houses disappeared altogether. We entered a climate of gentle warm spring; the silvery reflection of a young, violet moon just risen crept on the muddy path. That pre-spring night antedated itself, feverishly anticipating its later phases. The air, a short while before seasoned with the usual tartness of the time of year, became sweetly insipid, filled with the smell of rain, of damp loam, and of the first snowdrops that bloomed spectrally in the white, magic light. And it was strange that under that benevolent moon frogs' spawn did not spread on the silvery mud, that the night did not resound with a thousand gossiping mouths on those graveled river banks saturated with shiny drops of sweet water. And one had to imagine the croaking of frogs in the night, which was filled with the murmur of subterranean springs, so that—after a moment of stillness—the moon might continue on its way and climb higher in the sky, spreading wide its whiteness, ever more luminous, more magical and transcendental.

  We walked thus under the waxing moon. My father and the photographer half-carried me between them, for I was stumbling with tiredness and hardly able to walk. Our steps crunched in the moist sand. It had been a long time since I had slept while walking, and under my eyelids I now saw the whole phosphorescence of the sky, full of luminous signs, of signals and starry phenomena. At last we reached an open field. My father laid me down on a coat spread on the ground. With closed eyes I saw the sun, the moon, and eleven stars aligned in the sky and parading before me.

  "Bravo, Joseph!" my father exclaimed and clapped his hands in praise. I committed an unconscious plagiarism of another Joseph and the circumstances were not the same, but no one held it against me. My father, Jacob, shook his head and smacked his lips, and the photographer stood his tripod on the sand, pulled out his camera like a concertina, and hid himself entirely in the folds of its black cloth: he was photographing the strange phenomenon, a shining horoscope in the sky, while I, my head swimming in brightness, lay blinded on the ground and limply held up my dream to exposure.

  III

  The days became long, light, and spacious—maybe too spacious for their content, which was still poor and tenuous. They were days with an allowance for growth, days pale with boredom and impatience and full of waiting. A light, bright breeze cut their emptiness, yet untroubled by the exhalations of the bare and sunny gardens; it blew the streets clean, and they looked long and festively swept, as if waiting for someone's announced but uncertain arrival. The sun headed for the equinoctial position, then braked and almost reached the point at which it would seem to stand immobile, keeping an ideal balance and throwing out streams of fire, wave after wave, onto the empty and receptive earth.

  A continuous draft blew through the whole breadth of the horizon, creating avenues and lanes. It calmed itself while blowing and stopped at last, breathless, enormous and glassy as if wishing to enclose in its all-embracing mirror the ideal picture of the city, a Fata Morgana magnified in the depth of its luminous concavity. Then the world stood motionless for a while, holding its breath, blinded, wanting to enter whole into that illusory picture, into that provisional eternity that opened up before it. But the enticing offer passed, the wind broke its mirror, and Time took us into his possession once again.

  The Easter holidays came, long and opaque. Free from school, we young scholars wandered about the town without aim or necessity, not knowing how to make use of our empty, undefined leisure. Undefined ourselves, we expected something from Time, which was unable to provide a definition and wasted itself in a thousand subterfuges.

  In front of the café, tables were already put out on the pavement. Ladies sat at them in brightly colored dresses, and in small gulps they swallowed the breezes as if they were ice cream. Their skirts rustled, the wind worried them from below like a small angry dog. The ladies became flushed, their faces burned from the dry wind, and their lips were parched. This was still an interval with its customary boredom, while the world moved slowly and tremulously toward some boundary.

  In those days we all ate like wolves. Dried out by the wind, we rushed home to eat in dull silence enormous chunks of bread and butter, or else we would buy on street corners large cracknels smelling of freshness, or we would sit in a row without a single thought in our heads in the vast vaulted porch of a house in the market square. Through the low arcades we could see the white and clean expanse of the square. Empty, strong-smelling wine barrels stood under the walls of the hall. We sat on a long bench, on which colored peasants' kerchiefs were displayed on market days, and we thumped the planks with our heels in listlessness and boredom.

  Suddenly Rudolph, his mouth still full of cracknel, produced from his pocket a stamp album and spread it before me.

  IV

  I realized in a flash why that spring had until then been so empty and dull. Not knowing why, it had been introverted and silent—retreating, melting into space, into an empty azure without meaning or definition—a questioning empty shell for the admission of an unknown content. Hence that blue (as if just awakened) neutrality, that great and indifferent readiness for everything. That spring was holding itself ready: deserted and roomy, it was simply awaiting a revelation. Who could foresee that this would emerge—ready, fully armed, and dazzling—from Rudolph's stamp album?

  In it were strange abbreviations and formulae, recipes for civilizations, handy amulets that allowed one to hold his thumb and finger between the essence of climates and provinces. These were bank drafts on empires and republics, on archipelagoes and continents. Emperors and usurpers, conquerors and dictators could not possess anything greater. I suddenly anticipated the sweetness of domination over lands and peoples, the thorn of that frustration that can only be healed by power. With Alexander of Macedonia, I wanted to conquer the whole world and not a square inch of ground less.

  V

  Ignorant, eager, full of chafing desire, I took the march-past of creation, the parade of countries, shining processions I could see only at intervals, between crimson eclipses, caused by the rush of blood from my heart beating in time with the universal march of all the races. Rudolph paraded before my eyes those battalions and regiments; he took the salute fully absorbed and diligent. He, the owner of the album, degraded himself voluntarily to the role of an aide, reported to me solemnly, somewhat disoriented by his equivocal part. At last, very excited in a rush of fierce generosity, he pinned on me, like a medal, a pink Tasmania, glowing like May, and a Hyderabad swarming with a gypsy babble of entangled lettering.


  VI

  It is then that the revelation took place: the vision of the fiery beauty of the world suddenly appeared, the secret message of good tidings, the special announcement of the limitless possibilities of being. Bright, fierce, and breathtaking horizons opened wide, the world trembled and shook in its joints, leaning dangerously, threatening to break out from its rules and habits.

  What attraction, dear reader, has a postage stamp for you? What do you make of the profile of Emperor Franz Joseph with his bald patch crowned by a laurel crown? Is it a symbol of ordinariness, or is it the ultimate within the bounds of possibility, the guarantee of unpassable frontiers within which the world is enclosed once and for all?

  At that time, the world was totally encompassed by Franz Joseph I.

  On all the horizons there loomed this omnipresent and inevitable profile, shutting the world off, like a prison. And just when we had given up hope and bitterly resigned ourselves inwardly to the uniformity of the world—the powerful guarantor of whose narrow immutability was Franz Joseph 1—then suddenly Oh God, unaware of the importance of it, you opened before me that stamp album, you allowed me to cast a look on its glimmering colors, on the pages that shed their treasures, one after another, ever more glaring and more frightening. . . . Who will hold it against me that I stood blinded, weak with emotion, and that tears flowed from my eyes? What a dazzling relativism, what a Copernican deed, what flux of all categories and concepts! Oh God, so there were uncounted varieties of existence, so your world was indeed vast and infinite! This was more than I had ever imagined in my boldest dreams. So my early anticipation that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, continued to nag at me and insist that the world was immeasurable in its variety had been proven right at last!