A July Night
I BECAME ACQUAINTED with summer nights for the first time in the year of my Matura, during the holidays. Our house, where all day long the breezes, rustles and shimmers of the hot summer days would blow in through the open windows, had taken in a new occupant, a tiny, sulking, puling little thing — my sister’s baby son. In an encampment of bedclothes, nappies and linen, washed and dried perpetually, he brought with him a certain return to primitive relations, setting back sociological development to the nomadic and harem atmosphere of matriarchy, in the incessant dressings and undressings of that poor, vegetative character, amid a sour smell of infancy, and breasts swollen with milk.
My sister, after her difficult confinement, retired to a health spa. My brother-in-law appeared only at mealtimes. My parents kept to the shop until late at night. The baby’s wet-nurse, her expansive womanliness becoming ever more various, taking its sanction from her role of mother-provider, imposed her rule on the house. In the majesty of this eminence, with her broad and weighty being, she impressed the stamp of gynocracy on the whole household, her replete and luxuriant corporality distributed in subtle gradations between herself and two servant girls, who spread like a peacock’s tail, in everything they did, the whole gamut of self-sufficient femininity. To the quiet efflorescence and ripening of the garden, full of leafy rustles, silvery glints and shadowy musings, our house replied with the aroma of femininity and maternity, rising up over the white washing and the blooming flesh, and when at a terribly bright hour of the morning, at windows open at opposite ends of the room, all the curtains rose up in terror, and all the unbuttoned nappies stood up on the clothes-lines in a gleaming lane, then feathery seeds, flecks and shed petals flowed straight through that white alarum of foulards and linen, and the garden. in a migration of sounds and musings, a stream of lights and shades, passed slowly through the room, as if at that hour of Pan all barriers and walls had been taken away, and in an outflow of thoughts and feelings, a shudder of all-embracing oneness was passing through the whole world.
That summer I spent my evenings in the local cinema, staying until the end of the last screening. From the blackness of the cinema hall, torn by that panic of flying lights and shadows, I stepped out into the bright and quiet foyer, as if into a hushed inn from the immensity of a stormy night.
After the screen’s excesses, the film’s fantastic chase over rough terrain, my racing heart began to grow calm in that bright waiting room, its walls securing it from the onrush of the great, exalted night, in that safe harbour where time had long stood still, and where the light bulbs emitted their barren light in vain, wave after wave, to a rhythm irrevocably established by the muffled rumbling of the projector, and to which the cashier’s booth gently vibrated.
This foyer, immersed in the tedium of those late hours, like a railway station waiting room long after all the trains have departed, sometimes seemed to be the last background of existence, all that will remain when every event has passed, when the tumult of multiplicity is exhausted. On a great colourful poster, Asta Nielsen staggered in perpetuity with the black stigmata of death on her forehead, her mouth open now and for ever in a final scream, her eyes straining superhumanly, and supremely beautiful.
The cashier had gone home hours ago. Surely now she would be bustling around the unmade bed in her tiny room, which had been waiting for her, to carry her like a boat between black lagoons of sleep, into imbroglios of dreaming adventures and scandals. The one who sat in the booth was no doubt merely her shell, her illusory phantom, gazing with tired, glaringly made-up eyes into the emptiness of the light, absently fluttering her lashes, shaking the golden dust of sleepiness from them, which spilled ceaselessly from the electric lamps. Sometimes she would smile wanly at the sergeant of the fire brigade, who stood alone, leaning against the wall, abandoned long ago by his reality and motionless for ever in his gleaming helmet and the barren magnificence of his epaulettes, silver braids and medals. The panes of the glass doors which led out into that late July night droned distantly to the rhythm of the projector, but a reflection of the electric chandelier blinded their glass, negated the night, and pieced together as best it could the illusion of a safe harbour, secure from the element of the enormous night. But eventually, the foyer’s spell was to break after all. The glass doors opened, and their red curtain swelled with a breath of the night, which was suddenly all there was.
Do you sense the secret, deep meaning of that adventure, when a pale and delicate graduate goes out all alone through glass doors from a safe harbour into the immensity of a July night? Will he ever wade through those black marshes, those swamps, and the chasms of the endless night? Will he disembark one morning in some safe port? How many decades will that black Odyssey go on?
No one has ever yet draughted a topography of a July night. In the geography of the inner cosmos, those maps go unrecorded.
A July night! What can it be compared to? How can I describe it? Shall I compare it to the interior of an enormous black rose, overlaying us with its hundredfold dream of a thousand velvety petals? The nocturnal wind blows it apart to the depths of its downiness, and the stars’ gaze finds us out at its fragrant core.
Shall I compare it to the black firmament of our closed eyelids, full of wandering flecks, a white poppy seed of stars, rockets and meteors?
Or shall I compare it to a night train, as long as the world, travelling along an endless black tunnel? To walk through a July night is to tear oneself with a struggle from wagon to wagon, between sleepy passengers, among narrow corridors, fusty compartments and crisscrossing draughts.
A July night! The mysterious fluid of dusk, the vital, vigilant and mobile matter of darkness, incessantly shaping things from chaos, and immediately discarding every shape! Black timber, heaping up caves, vaults and niches around the sleepy wanderer! It accompanies the solitary traveller like an intrusive busybody, confining him to the range of its phantasms, indefatigable in its ingenuity, jabbering and fantasising, and hallucinating before him astral distances — white Milky Ways, labyrinths of unending colosseums and forums. The night air! — that black Proteus, playfully forming velvety congealments, strands of jasmine scent and cascades of ozone, suddenly airless wildernesses growing into infinity like black bubbles, monstrous grapes of darkness, bloated with dark juice. I push my way among those narrow recesses, bowing my head under those low overhanging arches and vaults, and here the ceiling suddenly comes to an end, and for a moment, with a starry sigh, a fathomless dome opens up, soon to lead me once more between narrow walls, passages and recesses. In those airless bays, those inlets of darkness, snatches of conversations hang in the air, left by nocturnal wanderers, fragments of inscriptions on posters, lost cadences of laughter, and strands of whispers that the night’s breeze has failed to disperse. Sometimes the night encloses me like a narrow room with no exit. Sleepiness takes hold of me, and I cannot tell whether my legs are still moving, or whether I have long been sitting in this hotel room of the night. But here, I feel a hot, velvety kiss, lost in space by scented lips. Blinds are opened, and with a high step, I cross over a window sill, and I wander onward under the parabolas of the falling stars. Two wanderers emerge from the labyrinth of the night. They are gossiping together, drawing out from the darkness some long, hopeless plait of conversation. One carries an umbrella, and its tip knocks monotonously on the pavement (such umbrallas are carried as protection against the rainfall of stars and meteors). They dawdle as if they are drunk, their great heads in bulbous bowler hats. Another time, I am arrested for a moment by a conspiratorial look from a black, squinting eye, and a great bony hand with prominent nodules pushes through the night on a walking stick, like a crutch, tightened around its hilt of deer’s horn (often in such walking sticks, long, thin swords are concealed).
At last, at the end of the town, the night abandons its frolics, lifts its veil, and bares its serious and eternal face. No longer does it wall us up in a delusive labyrinth of hallucinations and illusions. It opens before me its starlit eternity. The firmament grows into infinity; the constellations burn in their magnificence, in their immemorial positions, drawing magical figures in the sky, as if they want to herald something, to proclaim by their dreadful silence some ultimate thing. The croaking of frogs, a silvery astral hubbub, flows from the twinkling of those faraway worlds, and the July heavens sow their inaudible poppy seed of meteors, which dwindle quietly into eternity.
At some hour of the night — the constellations were dreaming their eternal dream in the sky — I found myself on my own street again. A star stood at its exit, exuding an unfamiliar fragrance. When I opened the front door of our house a draught blew in as if through a dark corridor. The dining room was still brightly lit: four candles smoked in a bronze candelabrum. My brother-in-law had not yet returned home. Since the time of my sister’s departure, he would turn up late for supper, late at night. Many a time, waking from sleep, I saw him undressing with a dull and pensive gaze. Then, stripped naked, he extinguished the light, and lay for a long time on the cool bed, not sleeping. A restless half-sleep descended on him — not all at once, but overpowering his large body by degrees. He was still humming something; he panted, sighed heavily, and wrestled with some burden that was crushing his chest. At times, he would suddenly burst out into quiet, dry sobbing. Alarmed, I spoke into the darkness: ‘Karol, what’s wrong?’ But he was already wandering further along his arduous, sleepy road, diligently scaling some steep mountainside of snoring.
Through the open window the night breathed in slow pulses. In its great, unformed mass a cool, aromatic aura overflowed its brim. In its dark solids, valves loosened, and narrow rivulets of water leaked out. The dead matter of the darkness sought liberation in the inspired ascents of the scent of jasmine, but the immeasurable massifs deep within the night lay still — still unliberated, still dead.
The chink of the doorway to the adjacent room was a shining, golden filament, as resounding and delicate as the dream of the baby who sulked there in his cradle. A chirrup of caresses came from there, an idyll between mother and child of first love, of the sufferings and piques of lovers, urged from all sides by the demons of the night, who congested the darkness outside the window, enticed by the warm spark of life that glowed there.
On the other side, an empty and dark room connected with my room, and beyond that, my parents’ bedroom. Straining to listen, I heard how my father, hanging at the breast of sleep, let himself be carried in ecstasy along its soaring trails, his whole being devoted to that distant flight. His melodious and faraway snoring related the history of that wandering, over some unknown and rough terrain of sleep.
In this way those souls slowly entered their dark aphelion, the sunless side of life, whose shapes no one alive has ever glimpsed. They lay like the dying, wheezing terribly and weeping, as the dead weight of a black eclipse bore down on their spirits. And when at last they had passed the black Nadir, the very deepest Orcus of the soul, when, bathed in mortal sweat, they had fought their way through its astonishing promontories, then the bellows of their lungs began to swell once more, with another melody, growing with their inspired snoring toward daybreak.
Muffled, thick darkness bore down on the land; its massifs lay devastated, like slaughtered black cattle with their tongues thrust out, pouring saliva from their helpless snouts. But some other fragrance, some other shade of darkness proclaimed the distant approach of the dawn. The darkness swelled with the envenomed ferments of a new day; its fantastic cake rose, grew into a crazy shape, and overflowed all channels and kneading-troughs, fermented hastily, in panic, lest the dawn catch it unawares in that licentious fecundity, and nail down for the ages those ebulliences of the sick, those monstrous children of autogeny grown out of the bread buckets of the night, like demons bathing in pairs in children’s baths. A moment came when their sleepy stupor briefly rose to its most sober, sleepless head. The sick, the very sad and the bewildered then experienced a moment of relief. Who knows how long that moment lasts, when the night draws its curtain over everything that happens deep inside it. But that short entr’acte will suffice for a scene change, for the removal of the enormous aparatus, the liquidation of the great enterprise of the night, and all of its dark, fantastic pomp. You awaken, struck by the feeling that something has come too late, and in fact you can see the bright streak of daybreak on the horizon, and the black, consolidating immensity of the Earth.