Cosmos (22 page)

Sparrow.

Stick.

Cat.

I reminded myself of them because I was in the process of forgetting them.
They returned to me because they were departing.
Disappearing.
Yes indeed, I had to search within for the sparrow and the stick and the cat, already disappearing, to search for them and sustain them within me!
And I had to force myself to look there again with my thought, into the thicket, beyond the road, by the wall.

The priest began to clamber up from the bench, mumbling excuses, he moved along the table, his cassock crawled onto the room.
He opened the door.
He went out on the porch.

I, without the berg, felt awkward.
I didn’t know, what .
.
.
I thought: I’ll go out too.
To breathe fresh air.

I rose.
I took a few steps toward the door.

I went out.

On the porch—refreshing air.
The moon.
Clouds gathering, brilliant, luminously-craggy, and below a much darker surge of mountains, turned into stone while gushing forth.
And all around a fairy-like spectacle, meadows, carpets, lawns swarming with clusters of trees, processions, garden parties, as if this were a park where pageants, parades, games were taking place, everything drowned at the very bottom of the moon’s glow.

Near the stairs, resting on the handrail, stood the priest.

He stood and he was doing something strange with his mouth.

*Russian for “nothing.”

*From a Polish folk song.

*From a Polish saying.

*Gombrowicz derived the word from the French
manger
and added, as in many other words, the Latin
um
.

chapter 9

I
t will be difficult to continue this story of mine.
I don’t even know if it is a story.
It is difficult to call this a story, this constant .
.
.
clustering and falling apart .
.
.
of elements .
.
.

When I walked out on the porch and saw the priest doing something strange with his mouth I was stunned!
What?
What?
I was even more stunned than if the earth’s crust had cracked and larvae came crawling from underground to the surface.
It’s no joke!
I alone knew the secret of the mouth.
No one besides me had been introduced to the secret affair of Lena’s mouth.
He had no right to know it!
It was mine!
By what right was he sticking his mouth into my secret?!

It soon became clear that he was vomiting.
He was vomiting.
His vomiting, unsightly, wretched, was justified.

He had drunk too much.

Well!
It’s nothing!

He saw me and smiled, mortified.
I wanted to tell him to go lie down and get some sleep, then someone else stepped onto the porch.

Venomie.
She walked past me, walked a few steps away and out onto the meadow, stopped, lifted her hand to her mouth and, by the light of the moon, I saw her vomiting mouth, she was vomiting.

She was vomiting.
Her mouth, as I saw it, had reason to vomit—which is why I looked—since the priest was vomiting, why shouldn’t she be vomiting?
Yes?
Indeed.
Good.
But.
But, but, but, if the priest was vomiting, she should not have been vomiting!
This mouth of hers intensified the priest’s mouth .
.
.
as the hanging of the stick had intensified the hanging of the sparrow———just as the hanging of the cat had intensified the hanging of the stick—as the banging-into had led to the pounding—just as I had intensified the berg with my berg.

Why had their vomiting mouths assailed me?
What did these mouths know about the mouth that I was hiding within me?
Where did the reptile mouth, slithering, come from?
Perhaps it would be best—to leave.
I left.
Not into the house, I went across the meadow, enough was enough, the night was poisoned by the moon drifting across it, dead, the tops of trees were in their glory, and there were innumerable groups, processions, gatherings, murmurings, deliberations, parties—a night truly inducing one to dream.
Never to return, never to return, I would most willingly never return, perhaps take the cart, give the horses the whip, leave forever .
.
.Well, no .
.
.
A splendid night.
In spite of it all, I’m having fun.
A magnificent night.
Yet it was impossible to prolong it, I really am sick.
A magnificent night.
I’m sick, sick, but not all that sick.
The house disappeared behind the hill, I walked on the soft grass alongside the stream, but what about this tree, what kind of a tree is this, what about this tree .
.
.

I stopped.
A stand of trees, and within it one tree was different from the others, that is, actually, it was like the others, but there
must have been a reason why it attracted my attention.
This tree was barely visible within the copse, screened by the others, yet it attracted my attention, what, what was it, a thickness, or a weight, a ballast, I was passing it with the feeling of passing a tree that is “too heavy,” terribly “heavy” .
.
.
I stopped, turned back.

I walked into the copse, now quite sure that something is there.
The copse began with a few scattered birches, and right after that there was a concentration of pines, thicker, darker.
The sensation of walking toward an oppressive “heaviness” did not leave me.

I looked around.

A shoe.

A leg was hanging down from a pine tree.
I thought “a leg,” but I wasn’t sure .
.
.
Another leg.
There was a man .
.
.
hanged .
.
.
I looked, a man .
.
.
legs, shoes, higher up I could make out a head, askew, the rest merged into the tree, into the dark branches .
.
.

I looked around, nothing, silence, calm, I looked again.A hanging man.
The yellow shoe was familiar to me, it reminded me of Ludwik’s shoes.
I pushed the branches away, I saw Ludwik’s jacket, and his face.
Ludwik.

Ludwik.

Ludwik, hanging on a belt.
His own, pulled from his pants.

Ludwik?
Ludwik.
He was hanging.
I took my time getting used to it .
.
.
He was hanging.
I went on getting used to it—he was hanging.
Since he was hanging, it must have happened somehow, and I slowly began to search my mind, try to figure it out, he’s hanged, who had hanged him, did he hang himself, when I saw him just before supper, he was asking me for a razor blade, he was calm, he was his usual self on our walk .
.
.
and yet he was hanging .
.
.
and it happened in the span of just over an hour .
.
.
he was hanging .
.
.
and somehow it must have happened, there must
have been reasons, but I couldn’t think of them, nothing, nothing, and yet a vortex must have formed in a river flowing by it all, about which I knew nothing, an obstruction must have arisen, some associations, interconnections must have formed .
.
.
Ludwik!
Why Ludwik?
Leon more likely, the priest, Venomie maybe, even Lena—but Ludwik!
And yet this FACT was hanging, a hanging fact, a Ludwik-like fact was hanging, hitting one on the head, a fact that was big, heavy, hanging down, something like a bull roaming about on the loose, an enormous fact on a pine tree, and with shoes .
.
.

Some time ago a dentist was going to extract my tooth, but he couldn’t get hold of it with his pliers, I don’t know why they kept slipping off .
.
.
it was the same with this heavily hanging fact, I couldn’t get hold of it, it kept slipping away, I was helpless, I had no access to it, sure, it happened somehow, since it happened .
.
.
I carefully looked around in all directions.
I calmed down.
Probably because I finally understood .
.
.

Ludwik.

Sparrow.

Indeed, I was looking at this hanging man just as I had looked in those bushes at the sparrow.

And pam, pam, pam, pam!
One, two, three, four!
The hanged sparrow, the hanging stick, the strangled-hanged cat, Ludwik hanged.
How neatly it fit together!
What consistency!
A stupid corpse was becoming a logical corpse—though the logic was both heavy-handed .
.
.
and too much my own .
.
.
personal .
.
.
so .
.
.
separate .
.
.
private.

I had nothing left but to think.
I thought.
In spite of everything I strained to turn it into a readable story and—I thought—what if he were the one who had hanged the sparrow?
He drew the arrows,
hanged the stick, indulged in these pranks .
.
.
some kind of mania, the mania of hanging that led him here, to hang himself .
.
.
what a maniac!
I remembered Leon telling me when we sat on the tree stump, in all honesty: that he, Leon, had nothing to do with it.
So was it Ludwik?
Mania, obsession, lunacy .
.
.

But there was another possibility, also along the lines of normal logic—that he was the victim of blackmail, revenge perhaps, someone persecuting him, someone surrounding him with those signs, suggesting the idea of hanging .
.
.
but who then?
Someone at home?
Roly-Poly?
Leon?
Lena?
Katasia?

Yet another possibility, also “normal”: perhaps he didn’t hang himself?
Perhaps someone murdered him?
Perhaps he was strangled, then hanged?
Someone who was amusing himself by hanging odds and ends, a maniac, a lunatic, was finally seized by the desire to hang something heavier than a small stick .
.
.Who?
Leon?
Katasia?
But Katasia had stayed back there .
.
.
So what?
She
could have
come here unbeknownst to anyone, for a thousand reasons, by a thousand means, why not, it could have happened, there were unlimited possibilities of associations and combinations .
.
.
And Fuks?
Couldn’t
Fuks have caught the contagion of hanging, made it his own .
.
.
and .
.
.
and .
.
.
He could have.
Yet he was with us the whole time.
So what?
If it turned out that it was he—an interval in time could be found, anything can be found in a bottomless cauldron of evolving events!
And the priest?
Millions and millions of threads could connect his fingers with this hanging man .
.
.

They could .
.
.
And what about the mountain men?
Where are the mountain men who brought us here?
I smiled in the moonlight at the docile thought of the mind’s helplessness in the face of overwhelming, confounding, entangling reality .
.
.
No combination is impossible .
.
.
Any combination is possible .
.
.

Yes, but the threads of connections were fragile .
.
.
fragile .
.
.
and here was this hanging person, a brutal corpse!
And its hanging brutality, pam, pam, pam, pam, was skillfully uniting with pam, pam, pam, pam, sparrow—stick—cat, it was like a, b, c, d, like one, two, three, four!
What skill!
What zeal for logic, and yet a subterranean one!
Clear evidence, hitting one in the eye, yet subterranean.

But this subterranean logic, hitting one in the eye, pam, pam, pam, pam, would dissolve and evanesce, as if in a fog (I thought), if one were to submit it to the discipline of ordinary logic.
I had discussed it with Fuks so many times!
Can one speak about a logical connection between a sparrow and a stick, united by the barely visible arrow on the ceiling in our room—so indistinct that we had discovered it by pure chance—so indistinct that we actually had to complete it, to finish drawing it in our imagination?
Discovering the arrow, reaching the stick—it was like finding a needle in a haystack!
Who could have—Ludwik or anyone else—constructed a net of such evanescent signs?

And what was the connection of the sparrow and the stick with the cat, since
I myself
had hanged the cat?
Pam pam, pam, sparrow, stick, cat, three hangings?
True, three, but the third had originated from me, the third rhyme I had set up myself.

Chimera.
A delusion.
Yes!—yet the hanging man hung pam, pam, pam, pam, a, b, c, d, one, two, three, four!
I wanted to come closer and possibly touch him, but I stepped back a bit.
Even this slight movement frightened me, as if moving in the presence of a corpse were something ill-advised and undesirable.
The ghastliness of my situation—because it was indeed ghastly—lay in the fact that I was here in relation to him exactly in the same way as back there, in relation to the sparrow.
Bushes and bushes.
A hanging
man and a hanging bird.
I looked around .
.
.
What a scene!
Mountains thrusting themselves lifelessly into the smooth sheet of the sky, arrayed for the greater part with centaurs, swans, ships, lions with luminous manes, and down below a Scheherezade of meadows and bouquets enmeshed in trembling whiteness, oh, a dead globe, shining with a borrowed light—and this secondary, weakened radiance, nocturnal, was both defiling and poisonous, like a sickness.
And the constellations of stars were unreal, invented, imposed, an obsession of the luminous skies!