The Gifted Epoch: -I- (II) -III- -IV-
II
MY MOTHER ran up, terrified, and stifled my scream with her arms, trying to smother it like a fire and 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 and refused to be dislodged, full of radiance and with flecks swirling inside it, I screamed: ‘Tear it out, pull it out!’
The stove, the great coloured daub painted on its front, looked sullen; it was flushed throughout with blood, and from the convulsions of those veins and sinews, that whole anatomy swollen to splitting point, the bright crow of a cockrel seemed to escape.
I stood, my arms outspread in inspiration, and pointed with outstretched, elongated fingers — I pointed in anger, in fierce earnestness, frozen like a signpost and trembling in ecstasy.
My hand led me, unfamiliar and pale, drew me behind it — a rigid, waxen hand, like great votive hands, like an angelic hand upraised in avowal.
It was toward the end of winter. The days stood in puddles and embers; their palate was aflame and peppery. Gleaming knives cut the honeyed pulp of the day into silver slices, into prisms of colours all in section, into spicy piquancies. But the clockface of midday gathered all the splendour of those days onto its thin expanse, and displayed all of their hours, glowing and full of fire.
The day at that hour, unable to contain its glare, peeled away in sheets of silvery tin plate and crunching tinfoil; it bared, layer after layer, its core of solid radiance. And as if that were not enough, the chimneys blew with glistening smoke, and each passing moment burst out with a great ascent of angels, a storm of wings imbibed by a rapacious sky, always receptive to new outbursts. Its bright battlements exploded with white plumes; faraway fortalices unfolded into quiet fans of accumulated eruptions, under a glistening cannonade of unseen artillery.
The sitting room window, full to the brim with sky, surged with those endless ascents, overflowed with its curtains, all in flames and smoking in the fire, which streamed with golden shadows and shimmering of veins of air. On the carpet an oblique, glowing quadrangle lay, undulating with radiance, which could not be torn up from the floor. That column of fire distressed me greatly. I stood spellbound, my legs astride, and in a voice not my own I barked alien and hard curses at it.
On the threshold, in the hallway, stood relatives, neighbours and overdressed aunts, in consternation, alarmed and wringing their hands. They approached on tiptoe and then withdrew; they peeked through the doorway, filled with curiosity. And I screamed.
‘You see!’ I screamed at Mother and my brother. ‘I have always told you, 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 with joy and helplessness.
‘Get up!’ I cried. ‘Help me, quickly! Can I cope with this flood on my own? Can I contain this deluge? How can I alone answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?’
And when they merely stood 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 excitedly began to pull out old volumes from cabinets — Father’s hand-written ledgers, their pages falling out — and threw them on the floor, under that column of fire lying in splendour upon the air. No amount of paper they brought me was enough. My mother and brother continually ran up with new armfuls of old periodicals and newspapers and threw them in piles on the ground. 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, and coming undone again in empty and invisible 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, even today, after so many years, do I discover them in my dreams, at the bottom of old drawers, glistening and as fresh as morning, still bedewed by the dawn — figures, landscapes, faces!
Oh, those blues, freezing the breath in a last gasp of terror; Oh, those greens, greener than bewilderment; Oh, those preludes and chirpings of colours only beginning to be sensed, only beginning to have names..!
Why — caught up in their very abubdance — did I squander them with such incomprehensible flippancy? I allowed our neighbours to ransack and plunder those piles of drawings. They took 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 and they lit and brightened the kitchen, as if, beyond the window, snow had fallen in the night.
It was drawing full of cruelty, ambushes and assaults. As I sat there, taut as a bow, unmoving and on my guard, while the papers burned brightly around me in the sunshine, it would only take a drawing, pinned down by my pencil, to make the slightest movement to escape. Then my hand, in convulsions of new reflexes and impulses, would pounce in fury, cat-like and feral, and run wild, upon whatever thing had tried to slip away from under the pencil. And only then did it loosen its grip on the paper, when the now dead and unmoving remains, as if in a herbal, had unfolded their coloured and fantastic anatomy upon my notebook.
It was a murderous hunt, a fight to the death. Who could distinguish in it the attacker from the attacked, in that commotion of enraged snarling, that entanglement of squealing and terror! 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. Often, it would scream in pain and terror, in the clutches, in the claws of those monsters writhing under my scalpel.
Hour by hour, ever more crowding visions surged forth, huddled together and formed traffic-jams, until one day all the roads and footpaths were flooded, and streamed with processions, and an entire country branched out with migrations, streamed with heaving cortèges, endless pilgrimages of beasts and animals.
Those coloured 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. They drew to a halt there, and huddled, 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 did not understand? Were they asking me their names, so that they might enter into them and fill them with their being? Strange monstrosities arrived, creature-questions, creature-propositions, and I had to scream and drive them away with my hands.
They backed away, lowering their heads and scowling, and were lost among each another — they returned, coming apart into nameless chaos, into a lumber room of forms. How many straight or hunched backs passed under my hand then; how many heads moved under it and its 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 unbelievable 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, lowering their heads, they looked sadly and wildly out from between them as if searching for a pathway through their branches. Those horned animals were remote from liberation, and in 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. Locked up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. They sank for a moment into the depths of themselves, to the bottom of their being, then they froze in their soft fur and grew menacingly and ceremonially serious, while their eyes grew as round as moons, soaking up the view into their fiery craters. But a moment later, cast out to the edge, to their surface, they yawned in their nihility, disappointed and without illusions.
In their life full of self-contained grace, there was no room for any alternative. And bored in that prison of perfection with no egress, wrapped up in spleen, they complained with wrinkled lips, full of aimless cruelty in their squat, striped faces. Down below, martens, polecats and foxes sped past furtively, 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, constantly on their guard and constantly anxious about their situation, they loved zealously their stolen existence hidden in burrows, ready to be torn to pieces in its defence.
Finally everyone left, and silence came to sojourn in my room. I began once more to draw, submerged in my fragments, exuding brilliance. The window was open, and on the cornice, ring-doves and turtle doves trembled in the spring breeze. Tilting their heads, they showed their round and glassy eyes in profile, as if terrified and full of flight. The days they grew soft, opal and luminous as they drew to a close, perhaps even pearl-like, full of hazy sweetness.
The Easter holidays arrived, and my parents left to spend a 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, exuding the spring from her tulles and foulards, I did not even notice she was there.
Gentle breezes blew in through the open window, filling the room with a reflection of distant landscapes. These blown colours of the bright distances hung in the air for a moment, but were soon dispersed; they blew apart into the blue shade, into tenderness and emotion. The flood of images was somewhat calmed; the outpouring of visions grew gentle and quietened.
I sat on the ground. Around me on the floor lay crayons and buttons of paint, divine colours, azures panting with freshness, greens gone astray, to the limit of bewilderment. And when I took a red crayon into my hand, fanfares of happy red came into the bright world, and all the balconies flowed with the waving of red banners, and the houses settled into a triumphal lane along the street. Cortèges of municipal firemen in raspberry uniforms paraded on the bright, happy roads, and gentlemen bowed with cherry coloured bowler hats. A cherry sweetness, the cherry twittering of goldfinches, filled the air, full of lavender and gentle glints.
And when I reached for the blue paint the gleam of a cobalt spring ran along the streets and through all the windows — the panes, ringing, opened one after the other, full of azure and blue fire — the curtains rose up as if standing to attention, and a joyful and light draught blew along that lane, among the waving muslins and oleanders on the empty balconies, as if, very far away, at the other end of that long and bright avenue, someone had appeared and was drawing near, radiant, preceded by a rumour, by a premonition, heralded by flights of swallows, by miles after miles of luminous calls to arms.
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