The Brilliant Epoch: -I- (II) -III- -IV-
II
MY MOTHER ran up, terrified, to stifle my scream with her arms. She tried to smother it like a fire, to stifle it in the folds of her love. She closed my mouth with her mouth, and screamed along with me.
But I pushed her away, and pointing at a column of fire, a golden beam which stood obliquely in the air, like a splinter, refusing to be dislodged, full of radiance and flecks swirling inside it, I screamed: ‘Tear it out! Pull it out!’
The great painted likeness on the front of the stove took on a sullen appearance; it became flushed throughout with blood; and from the convulsions of those veins and sinews, from that whole anatomy, swollen to splitting point, the distinct crow of a cockrel seemed to escape.
I stood with my arms outspread in inspiration, and with outstretched, elongated fingers, I pointed — I pointed in anger, in fierce earnestness, rigid like a signpost, and trembling with ecstasy.
My hand, unfamiliar and pale, led me on, drew me behind it — a rigid, waxen hand, like great votive hands, like an angelic hand upraised in prayer.
It was toward the end of winter. The days stood in puddles and embers, their palates aflame and peppery. Gleaming knives cut the honeyed pulp of the days into silver slices, prisms of colours all in section, into spicy piquancies. But the clockface of midday gathered up all the splendour of those days onto its thin expanse, and displayed all of their hours, all glowing, and full of fire.
At that hour, The day, unable to contain its glare, peeled away in sheets of silvery tin plate and crunching tinfoil. Layer by layer, it laid bare its core of solid radiance. And as if that were not enough, all the chimneys blew with glistening smoke — and each passing moment burst with a great ascent of angels, a storm of wings imbibed by the sky — rapacious, receptive to ever new outbursts. Its bright battlements exploded with white plumes. Distant fortalices unfolded into quiet fans of accumulated eruptions, under a glistening cannonade of unseen artillery.
The window, filled to the brim with sky, surged with those endless ascents; its curtains overflowed, all in flames, and smoking in the fire, and streamed with golden shadows and shimmering of veins of air. On the carpet there lay an oblique, glowing quadrangle, undulating in its brilliance, and it refused to be torn up from the floor. That column of fire profoundly distressed me. I stood spellbound, my legs astride. And in a voice not my own, I barked alien and hard curses at it.
On the threshold and in the hallway relatives, neighbours and overdressed aunts stood in consternation, alarmed and wringing their hands. They approached on tiptoe, and withdrew. Full of curiosity, they peeked through the doorway. And I screamed.
‘You see!’ I screamed at Mother and my brother. ‘I have always told you that everything is obstructed, immured in boredom and unliberated. And now look! Such an outpour! Such a blossoming of all things! Such bliss...’
And I wept in my joy and helplessness.
‘Get up!’ I cried. ‘Help me, quickly! Must I cope all alone with this flood? Can I contain this deluge? How can I answer on my own the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?’
And when they merely stood there in silence, I cried out in anger: ‘Hurry! Gather bucketfuls of this abundance!’
But no one could help me. They stood powerless; they looked over their shoulders; they drew away behind their neighbours’ backs.
Then I understood what I must do, and I began excitedly to pull out old volumes from cabinets, Father’s hand-written ledgers with their pages falling out; and I threw them onto the floor, under that column of fire that lay in splendour upon the air. No amount of paper brought to me sufficed. My mother and brother continually ran up with new armfuls of old periodicals and newspapers, and threw them onto the ground in piles. I sat amid those papers, my eyes blinded by the glare, full of explosions, rockets and colours. And I drew. I drew in haste, in panic, crosswise and aslant across those printed and handwritten pages. My coloured pencils flew in inspiration over the columns of old, illegible texts. They ran in brilliant scribbles, breakneck zigzags, knotting up into anagrams of visions, rebuses of luminous revelations, coming undone again in blind and empty flashes of lightning, trying to catch the scent of inspiration.
Oh, those luminous drawings, sprouting as if under a stranger’s hand! Oh, those transparent colours and shadows! How often in my dreams, even today after so many years, do I discover them at the bottoms of old drawers — the figures, landscapes and faces! — as glistening and fresh as morning, and still damp with the first dew of the dawn!
Oh, those blues, freezing the breath in a last gasp of terror! Oh, those greens, greener than bewilderment! Oh, those preludes and those chirrupings of colours, only beginning to be sensed, only beginning to have names!
Why, caught up in their very abubdance, did I squander them so, with such incomprehensible recklessnesss? I allowed our neighbours to ransack and plunder those piles of drawings, and they carried away whole bundles of them. Into what houses did they not find their way! Upon what rubbish heaps did they not drift in those days! Adela wallpapered the kitchen with them, which became bright and colourful, as if outside the window snow had fallen in the night.
It was drawing full of cruelty, ambushes and assaults. As I sat taut as a bow, unmoving and on my guard, whilst the papers burned brightly around me in the sunshine, it would only require a drawing, pinned down by my pencil, to make the slightest attempt to escape — and in convulsions of new reflexes and impulses, my hand would pounce furiously, and run wild, cat-like and feral, upon whatever it was that had tried to slip away from under the pencil. Only then would it loosen its grip on the paper, when the remnants, now dead and unmoving, had unfolded, as if in a herbal, their coloured and fantastic anatomy on the pages of my notebook.
It was a murderous hunt, a fight to the death. Who could distinguish in that commotion of enraged snarling, that entanglement of squealing and terror, the attacker from the attacked? Two or three times, my hand would make as if to jump — only to run its quarry down somewhere on the fourth or fifth page following. It would often scream in pain and terror, in the jaws and pincers of those monsters writhing under my scalpel.
Hour by hour, ever more crowding visions surged forth, huddled together and congested, until one day all the roads and footpaths were flooded, streaming with processions. And the whole country branched with migrations, swarmed with heaving cortèges, endless pilgrimages of beasts.
Those colourful processions flowed as they had in Noah’s day — those rivers of hair and manes, those undulating backs and tails, those heads nodding endlessly to the rhythm of their treading.
My room was a border and a toll gate. There they drew to a halt and huddled together, bleating imploringly. They turned about and pawed the ground, nervously and wildly — hunchbacked and horned beings, all sewn into their costumes and zoological suits of armour. And, alarmed at themselves, startled by their own masquerade, they looked with nervous and bewildered eyes through the openings in their shaggy hides, and lowed dolefully as if gagged behind their masks.
Were they waiting for me to name them? To solve their riddle, which I didn’t understand? Were they asking me their names, so that they might enter into them, and fill them with their being? Strange monsters arrived, creature-questions, creature-propositions. I had to scream, and drive them away with my hands.
They backed away, lowering their heads and scowling, and became lost among one other. Then they returned, breaking off into nameless chaos, a lumber room of forms. How many straight or hunched backs passed under my hand then? How many heads did it pass over with a velvety caress?
I understood then why animals have horns. That incomprehensibility, which could not be contained within their life, was a wild and obsessive caprice, ill-judged and blind obstinacy — some idée fixe, grown beyond the borders of their being, high over their heads, suddenly raised up into the light, and solidified into palpable and hard matter. There it assumed a wild, incalculable and incredible shape, twisted into a fantastic arabesque, invisible to their eyes, but dreadful nonetheless — into the unfamiliar numeral under whose menace they lived. I grasped why those animals were disposed to ill-judged and wild panic, to startled frenzy. Herded into their madness, they could not disentangle themselves from the knot of those horns, and so, lowering their heads, they looked out sadly and wildly from between them, as if searching for a pathway through their branches. Those horned animals were remote from liberation, and in their sadness and resignation they bore on their heads the stigmata of their error.
But even further from the light there were cats. Their perfection was alarming. Wrapped up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. For a moment, they sank far into themselves, to the bottom of their being; then they froze in their soft fur, and grew menacingly and ceremonially serious, their eyes growing as round as moons, soaking up the view into their fiery craters. But a moment later, cast out to the edge, to the surface, they yawned in their nihility, disappointed and without illusions.
In their lives full of self-contained grace there was no room for any alternative. Bored stiff, wrapped up in spleen in the prisons of their perfection, with no egress, they complained with their wrinkled lips, full of aimless cruelty in their squat, striped faces. Whilst down below, martens, polecats and foxes sped furtively past — thieves among animals, creatures with a guilty conscience. They had arrived at their place in existence by a ruse, an intrigue, a trick in the face of the Creator’s plan — and, hunted down in hatred, threatened, and constantly on their guard, anxious about their situation, they zealously loved their stolen existence, hidden in burrows, ready at any time to be torn to pieces in its defence.
At last they all went away, and silence came to sojourn in my room. I began to draw once more, submerged in my fragments, exuding brilliance. The window was open, and on a cornice, ring-doves and turtle doves trembled in the spring breeze. Tilting their heads, they showed the round and glassy eyes in their profiles, as if terrified and ready to take flight. And the days, when they drew to a close, grew soft, opal and luminous, and even pearl-like, full of hazy sweetness.
The Easter holidays arrived, and my parents left to spend the week with my married sister. I was left to my own devices in the apartment, ravaged by my inspirations. Every day, Adela brought me breakfast and dinner. And when she lingered at the threshold, festively attired and exuding the springtime from her tulles and foulards, I didn’t even notice she was there.
Gentle breezes blew in through the open window, filling the room with a reflex of distant landscapes. Those blown colours of the bright distances hung for a moment in the air, but soon dispersed, and blew apart into blue shade, into tenderness and emotion. The flood of images was somewhat calmed. The outpouring of visions grew gentle and was quieted.
I sat on the ground. Around me on the floor lay crayons and buttons of paint, divine colours, azures panting with freshness, and greens errant to the limit of bewilderment.
And when I picked up a red crayon, fanfares of happy red came into the bright world, and all the balconies flowed with the waving of red banners, and the houses were arranged along the street into a triumphal lane. Cortèges of municipal firemen in raspberry uniforms paraded on bright, happy roads, and gentlemen doffed cherry coloured bowler hats. A cherry sweetness, the cherry twittering of goldfinches filled the air, all lavender and gentle glints.
And when I reached for the blue paint, the gleams of a cobalt spring ran along the streets, through all the windows, which opened one by one, their panes ringing, all azure, full of blue fire. The curtains rose up as if standing to attention, and a light and joyful draught blew along that lane, among the waving muslins and oleanders on the empty balconies, as if in the far distance, at the far end of that long and bright avenue, someone had appeared and was drawing near — radiant, the news of his arrival already abroad, a premonition heralded by flights of swallows, by trails of phosphorescence spreading mile after mile.
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