A July Night
I BECAME acquainted with summer nights for the first time in the year of my Matura, during the holiday. Our house — through which the breezes, rustles and sparkles of the hot summer days blew all day through the open windows — had taken in a new occupant, a tiny, sulking, puling little thing — my sister’s baby son. He brought to our house a certain return to primitive relations; he set sociological development back to the nomadic and harem atmosphere of matriarchy, in an encampment of bedclothes, nappies and linen, perpetually washed and dried, in the abandon of the female toilet, determined upon abundant denudings of the vegetatively innocent character, in the sour smell of infancy and breasts swollen with milk.
My sister, after her difficult confinement, had retired to a health spa; my brother-in-law appeared only at mealtimes; my parents remained in the shop late into the night. The baby’s wet-nurse, whose expansive womanliness grew ever more multifarious and drew its sanction from her role as 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 house, being moreover the advantage of her replete and luxuriant corporality, distributed in cunning gradation between herself and two servant girls, who spread like a peacock’s tail the whole gamut of self-sufficient femininity in everything they did. Our house replied to the quiet efflorescence and ripening of the garden, full of leafy rustles, silvery glints and shadowy musings, with the aroma of femininity and maternity, rising up over the white washing and blossoming flesh; and when, at a terribly bright hour of morning, all the curtains rose up in terror, at windows open at opposite sides of the room, and all the unbuttoned nappies on the clothes-lines were standing in a gleaming lane — then feathery seeds, flecks and shed petals flowed straight through that white alarum of foulards and linen, and the garden, together with its stream of lights and shades, in a migration of sounds and musings, moved slowly through the room as if at this hour of Pan all barriers and walls had been taken away, and in the outflow of thoughts and feelings a shudder of all-embracing oneness was passing throughout the whole world.
I spent the evenings of that summer in the town cinema. I would leave after the last screening.
From the blackness of the cinema hall, torn by a panic of flying lights and shadows, I stepped into the bright, quiet foyer as if into a hushed inn from the immensity of a stormy night.
After the film’s fantastic chase over rough terrain, after the screen’s excesses, my racing heart grew calm in that bright waiting room, secured by its walls from the onrush of the great, exalted night, in that safe harbour where time had long been standing still, and the light bulbs emitted in vain their barren light, wave after wave, to a rhythm established once and for all by the muffled rumbling of the projector, to which the cashier’s booth gently vibrated.
This foyer, immersed in the tedium of late hours, like railway station waiting rooms long after all the trains have departed, sometimes seemed to be the last background of existence — all that would remain when all events have passed, when the tumult of multiplicity is exhausted. On a great colourful poster, Asta Nielsen staggered now and forever, with the black stigmata of death on her forehead; her mouth was open once and for all in a final scream, her eyes straining superhumanly, and supremely beautiful.
The cashier had long ago gone home. She was surely now 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. She who remained sitting in the booth was undoubtedly only her shell, her illusory phantom, looking into the emptiness of the light with tired, glaringly made-up eyes, absently fluttering her lashes and shaking from them the golden dust of sleepiness that spilled ceaselessly from the electric lamps. Sometimes she would smile wanly at the sergeant of the fire brigade, who stood alone, long ago abandoned by his reality, leaning against the wall and motionless forever in his gleaming helmet, in a barren magnificence of epaulettes, silver braids and medals. The panes of the glass doors leading into the late July night droned from afar to the rhythm of the projector, but the reflection of the electric chandelier blinded their glass, negated the night, and pieced together as best it could the illusion of a safe harbour, unthreatened by the element of the enormous night. The charm of the foyer was to burst after all in the end — the glass doors opened and their red curtain swelled with a breath of the night, which suddenly became all there was.
Do you sense the secret, deep meaning of that adventure, when a delicate and pale 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, swamps and chasms of the endless night; will he disembark on some morning in a safe port? How many decades will that black Odyssey go on?
No one has created yet a topography of a July night. In the geography of the inner cosmos, those maps go unrecorded.
A July night! With what might it be compared — how can it be described? Shall I compare it to the interior of an enormous black rose, overlaying us with a hundredfold dream of its thousand velvety petals? The nocturnal wind blows it apart to the depths of its downiness, and at its fragrant core the gaze of the stars discovers us.
Shall I compare it to the black firmament of our closed eyelids, full of wandering flecks, the white poppy seed of its stars, rockets and meteors?
Or might 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 the 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, unceasingly shaping something from chaos, and immediately discarding every shape! Black timber heaping up caves, vaults and niches around the sleepy wanderer! It accompanies the solitary wanderer like an intrusive busybody, confining him to the range of its phantasms, tireless in its ingenuity, jabbering, fantasising — hallucinating before him the astral distances, white Milky Ways, labyrinths of endless colosseums and forums. The night air, that black Proteus playfully forming velvety congealments, strands of jasmine scent, cascades of ozone, stillnesses, suddenly airless, growing into infinity like black bubbles, monstrous grapes of darkness swollen 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; for a moment, a bottomless dome opens up with a starry sigh, soon to lead me between narrow walls, passages and recesses once more. In those airless bays, in those inlets of darkness, snatches of conversations hang in the air, left by nocturnal wanderers, fragments of inscriptions on posters, lost cadences of laughter, strands of whispers which 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; I cannot tell whether my legs are still moving, or whether I have long been sitting down in this hotel room of the night. But here I feel a velvety hot kiss, lost in the expanse 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 some long, hopeless plait of conversation from the darkness. 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. At another time I am arrested for a moment by the conspiratorial look from a black, squinting eye, and a great bony hand with prominent nodules pushes through the night on the crutch of a walking stick, tightened around its hilt of deer’s horn (often in such walking sticks, long thin swords are hidden).
At last, at the end of the town, the night gives up its frolics — it 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 us its starlit eternity. The firmament grows into infinity; the constellations are burning in their magnificence, in their immemorial positions, drawing magical figures in the sky as if they wanted to herald something, to proclaim something ultimate by their dreadful silence. The croaking of frogs, a silvery astral hubbub, flows from the twinkling of those faraway worlds. The July heavens sow an inaudible poppy seed of meteors, quietly suffusing the universe.
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 through it 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 had been turning up late for supper; he would return late at night. Many a time, awakening 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 upon him, not all at once, overpowering his large body gradually. He was still humming something; he panted; he sighed heavily; he wrestled with some burden which was crushing his chest. At one point he suddenly burst out with quiet, dry sobbing. Alarmed, I asked in the darkness: ‘What’s the matter, Karol?’ But he was already wandering further along his arduous, sleepy road, carefully 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; in its dark solids, joints loosened, 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 masses deep within the night lay still, still unliberated, still dead.
The chink of the doorway to the adjacent room shone in a 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, whistled up on all sides by demons of the night, who congested the darkness outside the window, enticed by that warm spark of life which 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 as my father, hanging at the breast of sleep, let himself be carried in ecstasy into its soaring trails, his whole being devoted to that distant flight. His melodious and faraway snoring was relating the history of that wandering over the unknown and rough terrain of sleep.
Thus 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, while the dead weight of a black eclipse oppressed their spirit. And when at last they had passed the black Nadir, the very deepest Orcus of the soul, and when, bathed in mortal sweat, they had fought their way through its astonishing promontories, then their bellows of lungs began to swell once more, with another melody, rising toward daybreak on their inspired snoring.
Muffled, thick darkness bore down on the earth; its masses lay slaughtered like lifeless black cattle with their tongues thrust out, pouring saliva from their helpless snouts. But some other fragrance, some other shade of the darkness proclaimed the distant approach of the dawn. The darkness swelled with the envenomed ferments of the new day; its fantastic cake rose, grew into a crazy shape and overflowed all channels and kneading-troughs; it fermented hastily in panic lest the dawn catch it unawares in that licentious fecundity and nail down for centuries 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 comes when sleepy stupor rises for an instant to its most sober, sleepless head. The sick, the very sad and the bewildered then experience a moment of relief. Who knows how long that instant lasts, during which the night draws its curtain over what goes on 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 feeling that you may have forgotten something, and, in fact, you can see on the horizon the bright streak of daybreak and the black, consolidating immensity of the earth.