On the other side was an empty room, and beyond it the bedroom of my parents. Straining my ear, I could hear how my father, on the threshold of sleep, glided in ecstasy over its aerial roads, wholly dedicated to this flight. His melodious and penetrating snoring told the story of his wandering along unknown impasses of sleep.
Thus did the souls slowly enter the aphelion, the sunless side of life, which no living creature has ever seen. They lay like people in the throes of death, rattling terribly and sobbing, while the black eclipse held their spirits in bond. And when at last they passed the black nadir, the deepest Orcus of the soul, when in mortal sweat they had fought their way through its strange promontories, the bellows of their lungs began to swell with a different tune, their inspired snores persisting until dawn.
A dense darkness still oppressed the earth when a different smell, a different color announced the slow approach of dawn. This was the moment when the most sober, sleepless head is visited for a time by the oblivion of sleep. The sick, the very sad, and those whose souls are torn apart have at that time a moment of relief. Who knows the length of time when night lowers the curtain on what is happening in its depth? That short interval is enough, however, to shift the scenery, to liquidate the great enterprise of the night and all its dark fantastic pomp. Ybu wake up frightened, with the feeling of having overslept, and you see on the horizon the bright streak of dawn and the black, solidifying mass of the earth.
MY FATHER JOINS THE FIRE BRIGADE
AT THE BEGINNING of October my mother and I usually returned home from our holiday in the country. The place where we stayed was in a neighboring county, in a wooded valley of the River Slotvinka, which resounded with the murmur of innumerable underground springs. With our ears still filled with the rustle of beech trees and the chirping of birds, we rode in a large old landau, crowned with an enormous hood. We sat underneath it among numerous bundles in a kind of velvet-lined cavernous alcove, looking through the window at the changing landscape, colorful like pictures slowly dealt out from a pack.
At dusk we reached a plateau—the vast, startled crossroads of the country. The sky over it was deep, breathless, and windswept. Here was the farthest tollgate of the country, the last turning, beyond which the landscape of early autumn opened lower down. The frontier too was here, marked by an old, rotting frontier post with a faded inscription on a board that swayed in the wind.
The great wheels of the landau creaked as they sank in the sand, and the chattering spokes fell silent; only the large hood droned dully and flapped darkly in the crosswinds, like an ark that had landed in a desert.
Mother paid the toll, the bar of the turnpike squeaked when lifted, and the landau rolled heavily into the autumn.
We entered the wilted boredom of an enormous plain, an area of faded pale breezes that enveloped dully and lazily the yellow distance. A feeling of forlornness rose from the windswept space.
Like the yellowed pages of an old fable, the landscape became paler and more brittle as if it would disintegrate in an enormous emptiness. In that windy nowhere, in that yellow nirvana, we might have ridden to the limits of time and reality, or remained in it forever, amid the warm, sterile draftiness—an immobile coach on large wheels, stuck in the clouds of a parchment sky; an old illustration; a forgotten woodcut in an old-fashioned, moldy novel—when the coachman suddenly jerked the reins and from the lethargy of the crossroads pulled the landau into a forest.
We entered the thickets of dry fluff, a tobacco-colored wilting. Everything around us was sheltered and tawny like the inside of a box of trabucos. In that cedar semidarkness we passed tree trunks that were dry and odorous like cigars. We drove on and the forest became darker, smelling more aromatically of tobacco, until at last it enclosed us like a dry cello box, resounding faintly to its last tune. The coachman had no matches, so he could not light the lanterns. The horses, breathing heavily, found their way by instinct. The rattling of the spokes became less loud, the wheels began to turn softly in the sweet-smelling needles. My mother fell asleep. Time passed uncounted, making unfamiliar knots and abbreviations in its passage. The darkness was impenetrable; the dry rustle of the forest still resounded over the hood as the ground under the horses' hooves became solid and the carriage turned round and stopped, almost brushing a wall. Holding the door of the landau, my mother blindly felt for the gate to our house. The coachman was already unloading our bundles.
We entered a large vaulted hallway. It was dark, warm, and quiet like an old empty bakery at dawn, when the oven is cool, or like a Turkish bath late at night, when the forsaken tubs and basins grow cold in the darkness, in a silence measured by the dripping of taps. A cricket was patiently pulling from the darkness the tacking stitches of light, so fine that they could not lighten it at all. We groped around blindly until we found the stairs.
When we reached the creaking landing, my mother said:
"Wake up, Joseph, you are dropping off; only a few more steps to go-"
But, almost unconscious with drowsiness, I clung closer to her and fell completely asleep.
Afterward, I never could learn from my mother how real were the things that I saw that night through my closed eyelids, overwhelmed as I was by tiredness and falling again and again into dull oblivion, and how much of it was the product of my imagination.
A great debate was taking place between my father, my mother, and Adela, the chief protagonist of that scene—a debate, I now realize, of capital importance. The gaps in my memory must be at fault if I cannot reconstruct its sense, also the blind spots of sleep I am now trying to fill with guesswork, supposition, and hypothesis. Inert and unconscious, I swam away again and again while the breezes of the starry night coming from the open windows swept over my closed eyes. The night's breathing was regular and pure; as if uncovered by removing a transparent curtain, the stars appeared at times to look at my sleep. From under my eyelids I saw a room lighted by a candle, its glow casting a pattern of golden lines and curlicues.
It is possible, of course, that the scene took place at some other time. Many things seem to indicate that I had been its witness much later, when, with my mother and the shop assistants, I returned home late one day, after the shop had been closed.
On entering our apartment, my mother exclaimed in amazement and wonder and the shop assistants stopped still, transfixed. In the middle of the room stood a splendid knight clad in brass, a veritable Saint George, looming large in a cuirass of polished golden tinplate, a sonorous armor complete with golden armlets. With astonishment and pleasure I recognized my father's bristling mustache and beard, which could be seen from under the heavy praetorian helmet. The armor was undulating on his breast, its strips of metal heaving like the scales on the abdomen of some huge insect. Looking tall in that armor, Father, in the glare of golden metal resembled the archstrategist of a heavenly host.
"Alas, Adela," my father was saying, "you have never been able to understand matters of a higher order. Over and over again you have frustrated my activities with outbursts of senseless anger. But encased in armor, I am now impervious to the tickling with which you had driven me to despair when I was bedridden and helpless. An impotent rage has now taken hold of your tongue, and the vulgarity and grossness of your language is only matched by its stupidity. Believe me, I am full of sorrow and pity for you. Unable to experience noble flights of fancy, you bear an unconscious grudge against everything that rises above the commonplace."
Adela directed at my father a look of utter contempt and, turning to my mother, said in an angry voice, while shedding tears of irritation:
"He pinches all our raspberry syrup! He has already taken away from the larder all the bottles of syrup we made last summer! He wants to give it all to these good-for-nothing firemen. And, what is more, he is being rude to me!" Adela sobbed.
"Captain of the fire brigade, captain of some crowd of lay-abouts!" she continued, looking at Father with loathing. "The house is full of them. In the morning, when I want to fetch
the rolls, I cannot open the front door. Two of them are lying asleep in the hallway barring it. On the staircase a few more are spread on the steps, asleep in their brass helmets. They force their way into my kitchen; they push in their rabbit faces, lift up two fingers like schoolboys in class, and beg plaintively: 'Sugar, sugar, please . . . ' They snatch the bucket from my hands and run to the pump to get water for me; they dance around me, smile at me, very nearly wag their tails. And all the time they leer at me and odiously lick their lips. If I glance at any one of them, he immediately becomes red in the face like an obscene turkey. And to that horrible lot I am supposed to give our raspberry syrup?"
"Your vulgarity," said my father, "defiles everything it comes into contact with. You have given us a picture of these sons of fire as seen by your profane eyes. As to me, all my sympathy is with that unfortunate tribe of salamanders, those poor, disinherited creatures of fire. The mistake committed by that once-so-splendid tribe was that they devoted themselves to the service of mankind, that they sold themselves to man for a spoonful of miserable broth. They have been repaid by scorn because the stupidity of plebeians is boundless. Now these once-so-sensitive creatures have to live in degradation. Can one wonder that they don't like their dull and coarse fare, cooked by the wife of the beadle of the city school in a communal pot that they have to share with men under arrest? Their palates, the delicate and refined palates of fiery spirits, crave noble and dark balms, aromatic and colorful potions. Therefore, on the festive night when we shall all sit in the great city hall at tables covered with white cloth and when the light of a thousand illuminations will sparkle over the city, each of us will dip his roll of bread in a beaker of raspberry juice and slowly sip that noble liquor. This is the way to fortify the firemen, to regenerate all the energy they squander under the guise of fireworks, rockets, and Bengal fires. My heart is full of fellow feeling for their misery and undeserved abasement. I have accepted from their hands the saber of a captain in the hope that I might lead them from their present degradation to a future pledged to new ideas."
"You are completely transformed, Jacob," said my mother, "you are magnificent! All the same, I hope that you will stay at home tonight. Don't forget that we have not had a chance to talk seriously since my return from the country. And as for the firemen," she added, turning to Adela, "I really think that you are a little prejudiced. Though ne'er-do-wells, they are decent boys. I always look with pleasure at those slim young men in their shapely uniforms; I must say, though, that their belts are drawn in a shade too tightly at the waist. They have a natural elegance, and their eagerness and readiness to serve the ladies at any time is really touching. Whenever I drop my umbrella in the street or stop to tie a bootlace, there is always one of them at hand, ready to help and to please. I daren't disappoint them so I always wait patiently for one of them to appear and to perform the little service that seems to make them so happy. When, having performed his duty, he walks away, he is at once surrounded by a group of his colleagues who discuss the event with him eagerly, while the hero illustrates with gestures what actually happened. If I were you, Adela, I would willingly make use of their gallantry."
"I think that they are nothing but a bunch of loafers," said Theodore, the senior shop assistant. "We don't even let them fight fires anymore because they are as irresponsible as children. It is enough to see how enviously they watch groups of boys throwing buttons against a wall to understand that they have brains like hares. Whenever you look out a window at boys playing in the street, you are sure to see among them one of these large chaps breathlessly running about, almost crazy with pleasure at the boys' game. At the sight of a fire, they jump for joy, clap their hands, and dance like savages. No, one cannot rely on them to put out the fires. Chimney sweeps and city militiamen are the people to use. This would leave fairs and popular festivals to the firemen. For instance, at the so-called storming of the Capitol on a dark morning last autumn, they dressed up as Carthaginians and lay seige, with a devilish noise, at the Basilian Hill, while the people who watched them sang: 'Hannibal, Hannibal ante portas!' Toward the end of autumn, they become lazy and somnolent, fall asleep standing up, and, with the first snows, disappear completely from sight. I have been told by an old stove fitter that when he repairs chimneys, he often finds firemen clinging to the air duct, immobile like pupae and still in their scarlet uniforms and shiny helmets. They sleep upright, drunk with raspberry syrup, filled up with its sticky sweetness arid fire. bu must pull them out by their ears and take them back to their barracks, sleep-drunk and semiconscious, along morning streets whitened by hoarfrost, while street urchins throw stones at them, and they, in return, smile the embarrassed smiles of guilt and bad conscience and sway about like drunkards."
"Be that as it may," said Adela, "they can't have any of my syrup. I did not spend hours at the hot kitchen range making syrup and spoiling my complexion so that these idlers should drink it now."
Instead of answering, my father produced a tin whistle and blew a piercing note. At once, four slim young men rushed into the room and arranged themselves in a row under the wall. The room brightened from the glare of their helmets, and they, dark and sunburnt under their hats, having adopted a military posture, waited for father's orders. At a sign from my father, two of them got hold of a large carboy, full of raspberry syrup, and before Adela could stop them, ran downstairs with their precious loot. The two remaining men gave a smart military salute and followed suit.
For a moment it seemed that Adela would throw a fit: her beautiful eyes blazed with rage. But Father did not wait for her outburst. With one leap, he reached the windowsill and spread his arms wide. We rushed after him. The market square, brightly lighted, was crowded. Under our house, eight firemen held fully extended a large sheet of canvas. Father turned round, the plate of his armor flashing in the light; he saluted us silently, then, with arms outspread, bright like a meteor, he leaped into the night sparkling with a thousand lights. The sight was so beautiful that we all began to cheer in delight. Even Adela forgot her grievance and clapped and cheered. Meanwhile, my father jumped onto the ground from the canvas sheet and, having shaken his clanking breastplate into position, went to the head of his detachment, which, two by two, slowly marched in formation past the dark lines of the watching crowd, lights playing on the brass of their helmets.
A SECOND FALL
AMONG THE MANY scientific researches undertaken by my father in rare periods of peace and inner serenity between the blows of disasters and catastrophes in which his adventurous and stormy life abounded, studies of comparative meteorology were nearest to his heart, particularly those of the climate of our province, which had many peculiarities. It was my father who laid the foundations of a skillful analysis of climatic trends. His Outline of General Systematics of the Fall explained once and for all the essence of that season, which in our provincial climate assumed a prolonged, parasitical, and overgrown form known also by the name of Chinese summer, extending far into the depths of our colorful winters. What more can I say? My father was the first to explain the secondary, derivative character of that late season, which is nothing other than the result of our climate having been poisoned by the miasmas exuded by degenerate specimens of baroque art crowded in our museums. That museum art, rotting in boredom and oblivion and shut in without an outlet, ferments like old preserves, oversugars our climate, and is the cause of this beautiful malarial fever, this extraordinary delirium, to which our prolonged fall is so agonizingly prone. For beauty is a disease, as my father maintained; it is the result of a mysterious infection, a dark forerunner of decomposition, which rises from the depth of perfection and is saluted by perfection with signs of the deepest bliss.
A few factual remarks about our provincial museum might be apposite here. Its origins go back to the eighteenth century, and it stems from the admirable collecting zeal of the Order of Saint Basil, whose monks bestowed their treasure on the city, thus burdening its budget with an excessive and unproductive
expense. For a number of years the Treasury of the Republic, having purchased the collection for next to nothing from the impoverished order, ruined itself grandly by artistic patronage, a pursuit worthy of some royal house. But already the next generation of city fathers, more practical and mindful of economic necessities, after fruitless negotiations with the curators of an archducal collection to whom they had tried to sell the museum, closed it down, dismissed its trustees, and granted the last keeper a pension for life. During these negotiations, it has been authoritatively stated by experts, the value of the collection had been greatly exaggerated by local patriots. The kindly Fathers of Saint Basil had, in their praiseworthy enthusiasm, bought more than a few fakes. The museum did not contain even a single painting by a master's hand but owned the whole oeuvre of third- and fourth-rate painters, whole provincial schools, known only to specialist art historians.
A strange thing: the kindly monks had militaristic inclinations, and the majority of the paintings represented battle scenes. A burnt, golden dusk darkened these canvases decayed with age. Fleets of galleons and caravels and old forgotten armadas moldered in enclosed bays, their swelled sails carrying the majestic emblems of remote republics. Under smoky and blackened varnishes, hardly visible outlines of equestrian engagements could be discerned. Across the emptiness of sun-scorched plains under a dark and tragic sky, cavalcades passed in an ominous silence balanced on the left and right by the distant flashes and smoke of artillery.
In paintings of the Neapolitan school a sultry, cloudy afternoon grows old in perpetuity, as if seen through a bottle darkly. A pale sun seems to wilt under one's eyes in those landscapes, forlorn as if on the eve of a cosmic catastrophe. And this is why the ingratiating smiles and gestures of dusky fisherwomen, selling bundles offish to wandering comedians, seem so futile. All that world has been condemned and forgotten a long time ago. Hence the infinite sweetness of the last geatures that alone remain, frozen forever. And deeper still in that country, inhabited by a carefree race of merrymakers, harlequins, and birdmen with cages, in that country without any reality or earnestness, small Turkish girls with fat little hands pat honey cakes lying in rows on wooden boards; two boys in Neapolitan hats carry a basket of noisy pigeons on a pole that sways slightly under the burden of its cooing, feathered load. And still farther in the background, on the very edge of the evening, on the last plot of soil where a wilting bunch of acanthus sways on the border of nothingness, a last game of cards is still being played before the arrival of the already looming darkness.