Dodo
HE CAME to visit us on Saturday afternoons, wearing a dark frock coat and white piqué waistcoat, and a bowler hat which had to be specially made to fit the dimensions of his skull. He came to sit for a quarter of an hour or so over a glass of raspberry squash, brooding with his chin resting on the bone hilt of his walking stick, held between his knees, and pondering the light blue smoke from his cigarette.
Usually, other relatives too would have come to visit, and at such times, as the conversation flowed freely, Dodo would keep a rather low profile. He fell into the passive role of an extra at such lively gatherings, turning his eyes, full of expression under his magnificent brows, from one speaker to the next, not saying a word, and his face slowly grew elongated, his jaw almost coming out of joint — utterly stupefied, unconstrained in his elemental listening.
He spoke only if someone asked him something directly. And he would reply to such questions, in monosyllables, admittedly, as if unwillingly, looking in another direction — and only if those questions did not exceed the scope of certain straightforward and simple, easily resolved matters. Sometimes he managed to keep up a conversation for a few questions more, outside that scope, but this was only due to a stock of seemingly meaningful expressions and gestures to which he was disposed, which in their ambiguity served him well enough in all situations, compensating for what he lacked in the way of articulate speech, sustaining in their lively mimicry a suggestion of percipient empathy. But it was an illusion that was quickly dispelled, and the conversation came off badly, during which his interlocutor would look slowly and pensively away from Dodo, left once more to himself, who fell back into his natural role as an extra, a passive observer in the background of the general conversation.
For how was it possible to continue a conversation with him? For example, if asked whether he had gone along with his mother to the country that day, he would reply in a minor key: ‘I don’t know.’ And this was the sad and embarassing truth, for Dodo’s memory essentially reached no further than the present moment and the most near-to-hand actuality.
Once, long ago when still a child, Dodo was struck by a serious brain sickness, during which he lay unconscious for many months, closer to death than life. And when he finally did recover after all, it transpired that he had been, as it were, withdrawn from circulation, and no longer belonged to the community of rational people. He was given a private education, pro forma as one might say, and in great moderation. They tempered considerably in Dodo’s case the tough and relentless demands made of others — they bridled their harshness and were full of understanding.
A sphere of strange privilege was created around him, a protective circle which kept him isolated — a neutral zone, away from the burdens and requirements of life. Everyone outside that sphere was buffeted by life’s waves, and paddled noisily amid them, anxious and preoccupied, in strange abandon, and had to face up to them. But inside the sphere, all was calm and stillness, a cæsura in the general tumult.
Thus he grew, and the uniqueness of his fate grew alongside him, self-evident and utterly unopposed. He was never given new clothes, only his older brother’s cast-offs. Whereas the lives of his peers were divided into periods and phases, marked out by the borders of events, solemn and symbolic moments — name days, examinations, engagements and promotions — Dodo’s life went by in undifferentiated monotony, unruffled by anything either pleasant or unpleasant. And the future too appeared to be a quite even and uniform road, with no upheavals or surprises.
Had anyone imagined that Dodo protested inwardly against this state of affairs, they would have been mistaken. He accepted it as his natural way of life — ingenuously and unsurprised, in sedate assent and with imperturbable optimism. And he set his affairs in order, arranged his particulars in the confines of that uneventful monotony.
Every day before noon he took a stroll into town; and he always made the same round of three streets, which he tramped along to the end, returning again by the same route. Dressed in his brother’s elegant if outworn suit, holding his walking stick in both hands behind his back, he walked unhurriedly and with great dignity. He might be taken for gentleman out walking for pleasure, making a tour of the town. But that unhurriedness, that lack of aim or direction which his movements often displayed, could lead to compromising situations, for Dodo was given to blatant staring, into shop doorways, at the typists and machinists in workshops, and even at groups of people talking in the street.
His physiognomy grew prematurely aged, and strangely enough, whilst life’s trials and tribulations were halted at the threshold of his life, leaving his empty inviolability and marginal uniqueness untouched, his features took on the shape of those experiences that had passed him by, and imputed some biography that had never happened, but which, really only inscribed in the sphere of possibility, modelled and carved his countenance into the illusory mask of a great tragedian, filled with the sadness and knowledge of all things.
His brows resembled magnificent arches, beneath which his great sad eyes, surrounded by black rings, were plunged into darkness. Two deep furrows of abstract suffering and illusory wisdom were etched at either side of his nose, running down to the corners of his mouth and onward. His lips, small and swollen, were taut with pain, and a coquettish ‘kiss curl’ of long Bourbon beard gave him the appearance of an aged and worldly bon vivant.
It was only to be expected that his privileged uniqueness would be tracked down, its scent caught rapaciously through the malice of the human race — waiting in readiness to pounce, ever hungry for prey.
And so it was, more and more often, that he gained companions during his morning walks; and it was part of the conditions of his privileged uniqueness that these were companions of a special kind, not in friendship or shared interests, but in a highly problematic and discreditable sense. They were in the main considerably younger generations, eagerly seeking genuine dignity and seriousness, and the conversations they conducted had a special, cheerful and humorous tone about them, pleasant and refreshing — it is hard to deny — to Dodo’s ears.
As he walked in this way, taller by a head than that cheerful and capricious band, he resembled a Peripatetic philosopher surrounded by his pupils; and his face, from behind a mask of seriousness and sadness, broke into a frivolous smile, quite at odds with the prevailing tragicalness of that physiognomy.
Now Dodo returned home late from his morning walks, his mop of hair ruffled and his clothes slightly disarrayed — but revived, and given to engaging in cheerful controversy with Karol, his poor cousin, who was being looked after by Aunt Retycja. Otherwise at home, as if in some small honour of those meetings, Dodo maintained complete discretion on the topic.
Once or twice in that monotonous life there arose calamities of outstanding scale, beyond the mire of everyday events.
Once, having set out in the morning, he failed to return for dinner. Neither did he return for supper, nor for dinner the following day. Aunt Retycja was close to despair. But he finally turned up that evening, a little crumpled, his bowler hat crushed and sitting crookedly — but well enough otherwise, and in easy spirits.
It was difficult to reconstruct the story of that escapade, about which Dodo maintained complete silence. Probably, wide eyed on his walk, he had stumbled into the unknown outskirts of the town — perhaps his young Peripatetics had put him up to it, keen to introduce Dodo to new and unknown life circumstances.
Perhaps that was one of those days on which Dodo gave leave of his poor, overloaded memory, and forgot his address and even his name — information that, at other times at least, he knew.
We never did learn any further details of that adventure.
When Dodo’s older brother had gone abroad, the family had shrunk to three or four persons. Aside from Uncle Hieronimus and Aunt Retycja, there was also Karol, performing the key role of housekeeper in Aunt and Uncle’s large household.
Uncle Hieronimus had not come out of his room in many years. From the time when Providence had kindly taken from his hand the helm of that wrecked ship stuck in the mire of life, he had led the life of a pensioner, on the narraw patch of ground allotted to him, between the hallway and his dark bedchamber.
In a long dressing gown that reached to the ground, he sat deep inside his bedchamber; and he sprouted with a growth of hair, which grew ever more fantastic by the day. A long, pepper-coloured beard (turning practically white toward the tips of its long locks) flowed around his face; it reached half way up his cheeks, leaving free only a hawk nose and two eyes, their whites revolving in the shadow of his bushy brows.
In the dark bedchamber, in the narrow prison to which he was condemned, he was free to pace up and down like a predatory cat, before a glass door that led to the parlour. Two enormous oak beds stood there, Aunt and Uncle’s nocturnal nesting ground, and a great, delerious tapestry covered the entire back wall, amorphous of form in those dark depths. When one’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, there loomed into view, between bamboo plants and palms, an enormous lion, as powerful and gloomy as a prophet and as majestic as a patriarch.
The lion and Uncle Hieronimus, sitting back to back, were aware of and hated one another. Never exchanging looks, each threatened the other with bared fangs and an ominous, growling word. Occasionally, the lion rose up on its forepaws in annoyance, stretched its neck, its mane bristling, and sent its menacing roar all around the clouded horizon.
Or else Uncle Hieronimus rose above it with a prophetic tirade, his face shaped menacingly by the great words that swelled him, his beard undulating in his inspiration. Then the lion narrowed its eyes achingly and turned its head away, slowly curling up under the power of the word of God.
That lion and that Jerome filled Aunt and Uncle’s dark bedchamber with their eternal quarrel.
Uncle Hieronimus and Dodo lived in that cramped apartment despite each other, in two different dimensions, which crossed, but never quite danced a tango. If they ever met, then each would gaze far past the other, like animals of two different, distant kinds that don’t quite notice each other, incable of fixing the strange image flying past through their consciousness, where no sense can be made of it.
They never spoke.
When they sat down to table, Aunt Retycja, sitting between her husband and her son, constituted the border of two worlds, an isthmus between two oceans of madness.
Uncle Hieronimus ate restlessly, his long beard falling into his plate. Whenever the kitchen door creaked, he half got up from his chair and clutched at his soup bowl, ready, in case some stranger should enter the apartment, to escape to the bedchamber with his serving. Then Aunt Retycja calmed him: ‘Don’t worry. There’s no one there. It’s only the housemaid.’ And Dodo would cast a look of anger and indignation at the cowering figure, and, his eyeballs shining, mutter to himself: ‘Bloody fool...’.
Before Uncle Hieronimus had received absolution from the too convoluted complications of his life, and was granted permission to retreat into his lonely refugium in the bedchamber, he had been man of a completely different sort. Those who had known him in his youth claimed that his irrepressible temperament had known neither restraint, consideration nor scruple. With satisfaction, he would inform the terminally ill about the death that awaited them. He seized upon visits of condolence, in order to subject to harsh criticism the life of the deceased, to the dismay of the grieving family, leaving everyone in tears and inconsolable. To people who concealed some unpleasant and sensitive personal matter, he offered loud and sneering reproach. But one particular night, he returned home from a business trip utterly changed, numb with fear — and tried to hide under the bed. A few days later, the news spread among the family that Uncle Hieronimus had abdicated his dubious and risky interests, in which he was now out of his depth; he had abdicated them definitively, all along the line. And he began a new life, a life subject to a stern and strict principle, albeit one that was incomprehensible to us.
On Sunday afternoons, we would all go to visit Aunt Retycja for a small family tea. Uncle Hieronimus would not recognise us. Sitting in the bedchamber, from behind the glass door, he cast wild and terrified looks on the gathering. Sometimes, however, he emerged unexpectedly from his retreat, in his long dressing gown that reached to the ground, his beard waving around his face. And making movements with his hands, he said: ‘And now I beg you all, who are here assembled, to split up and disperse in secret, quietly and without being seen...’ Then he added in a quiet voice, threatening us mysteriously with his finger: ‘They’re all saying it now — Dee-da.’
My aunt gently pushed him back into the bedchamber; but he turned ominously around in the doorway, and repeated, raising his finger: ‘Dee-da.’
Dodo did not grasp this all at once, but slowly — a few moments of silence and consternation passed before the situation became clear in his mind. Then turning his eyes from one of us to another, as if reassuring himself that something amusing had indeed happened, he burst into a smile. He laughed loudly and with satisfaction. He shook his head in pity, and repeated, still laughing: ‘Bloody fool...’
Night fell over Aunt Retycja’s house. The milked cows rubbed against a fence in the darkness. The wenches were already asleep in the kitchen. Bubbles of nocturnal ozone flowed from the garden, and burst in the open windows. Aunt Retycja slept deep in her king-sized bed, whilst on the other bed, Uncle Hieronimus sat among his pillows like an owl. His eyes shone in the darkness, and his beard flowed over his drawn-up knees.
He slowly got up from the bed, stealing up to Aunt Retycja on tiptoe. He stood over her sleeping figure, lurking like a cat ready to pounce, his eyebrows and moustache bristling. The lion on the wall briefly yawned, and turned its head away. My aunt awoke, and was horrified by that starry-eyed and snorting head.
‘Off to bed with you now,’ she said, driving Uncle away like a hen, with movements of her hands.
He stepped back, pensive and snorting, his head twitching nervously.
Dodo lay in the other room, unable to sleep. The sleep-centre in his ailing brain did not function properly. He rolled over; he tossed and turned.
The mattress creaked, and Dodo gave a heavy sigh. He panted. Helpless, he propped himself up on his pillows.
Dodo’s unlived life was a troubled one, tormented by despair and pacing like a caged cat. Someone was growing old in that halfwit’s body, without experiences. Someone was growing toward death without a crumb of content in him.
He suddenly let out a frightful sob in the darkness.
Aunt Retycja got up from her bed and went to him: ‘Dodo, what’s wrong? Are you in pain?’
Dodo turned his head in amazement. ‘Who?’ he asked.
‘Why are you crying?’ my aunt asked.
‘It’s not me. It’s him...’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The one behind the walls...’
‘But... who is that?’
Dodo dismissed this resignedly: ‘Eh...’ And he turned over onto his other side.
Aunt Retycja returned on tiptoe to her bed. As she passed, Uncle Hieronimus shook his finger at her: ‘They’re all saying it now — Dee-da...’
> -Edzio- >