A Second Autumn
AMONG the many scientific works undertaken by my father in his rare moments of calm and inner equilibrium, between the bouts of disaster and catastrophe in which that audacious and boisterous life abounded, closest to his heart were studies in Comparative Meteorology, and particularly in the specific climate of our province, replete with its own singular kind of oddness. It was he, my father himself, who laid the foundations for the scholarly analysis of climatic formations. His ‘An Outline of the General Systematic of Autumn’ explained once and for all the essence of that season, which, in our provincial climate, takes on that protracted, branching and parasitically exuberant form which extends, under the name of ‘Indian summer,’ far into our coloured winters.
What can I say? He was the first to explain the secondary, derivative character of that late formation, being nothing other than a peculiar kind of poisoning of the climate by miasmas of the over-ripe and rancid baroque art crammed together in our museums. Decomposing in boredom and oblivion, too sweet and locked in with no outlet, like old preserves, that museum art over-sugars our climate and is the cause of that beauteous malarial fever, those colourful mirages in which that protracted autumn agonises. For beauty, as my father taught, is a disease; it is the chill of some mysterious infection, a dark announcement of the decomposition rising up from the depths of perfection, to be hailed by perfection, with a sigh of the most profound happiness.
Let a few factual considerations concerning our provincial museum serve in the better understanding of the matter... Its origins go back to the 18th century and are connected to the admirable collector’s enthusiasm of an order of Basilians, who bestowed that parasitic growth upon our town, burdening the municipal budget with an excessive and unproductive expense. Having bought the collections dirt cheap from the impoverished order, the treasury of the Republic magnanimously ruined itself over a number of years by its patronage, worthy of some royal residence. But the subsequent generation of town Fathers, now more practically oriented and not closing their eyes to economic necessities — and after unsuccessful negotiations with the Commission of the Archducal Collections, to whom they tried to sell the museum — closed it down and discharged the board of trustees, having put by a lifetime’s pension for the last custodian. During these negotiations it was ascertained beyond all doubt that the value of the collections had been grossly overestimated by local patriots. The kindly Fathers had, in their praiseworthy fervour, purchased not a few forgeries. The museum did not contain even one picture by a first rate master, but, rather, the whole third and forth rate oeuvre, an entire provincial school known only to specialists — forgotten, blind alleyways of the history of art.
Strangely enough, the kindly monks had military tastes; the greater part of the pictures comprised battle-pieces. A charred, golden gloom darkened on those canvases, festering with age, on which fleets of galleys and caravels and old forgotten armadas mouldered in gulfs without egress, the majesty of long vanished republics rolling across their swollen sails. The barely perceptible outlines of mounted skirmishes loomed from beneath the smoky and darkened varnishings. Across the emptiness of a charred Campania under a dark and tragic sky, swirling cavalcades charged in menacing silence, edged on both sides by accumulations and efflorescences of artillery fire.
On pictures of the Neapolitan school a shady and smoke tinged afternoon grew perpetually aged as if viewed through a dark bottle. The darkened sun in those lost landscapes appeared to wilt before the eyes, as if on the eve of a cosmic disaster. And that is why the smiles and gestures of the golden fishermen’s wives are so trivial, those sellers, with their manneristic grace, of bundles of fishes to wandering comedians. That whole world was condemned long ago, became immemorial long ago. Hence that boundless sweetness of the final gesture which still remains, all alone and only for its own sake, lost and remote, repeated over and over, unchangeable now.
And further still, deep inside that country inhabited by a carefree populace of jesters, harlequins and bird fanciers with their cages, in that country with no earnestness and no reality, little Turkish women patted with their plump hands honey cakes arranged on boards, and two boys wearing Neapolitan hats carried a basket full of cooing pigeons on top of a pole, which bends a little under that warbling, winged burden. And deeper still, at the very edge of the evening, on the last fragment of the earth where a withering tuft of acanthus sways on the dull-golden borderline of nothingness, a game of cards was still being continually played out, a last human resort before the great night which was approaching.
That whole lumber room of old beauty had been subjected to woeful distillation under the pressure of interminable years of monotony.
‘Can you understand,’ my father asked, ‘what the despair of that condemned beauty means, its days and its nights? Over and over again, it rouses itself to illusory auctions; it enacts profitable sales, crowded and raucous exhibitions; it is thrilled by a wild gamble and sells off its stocks in fear of a slump; it scatters them with an extravagant gesture; it squanders its wealth, only to realise upon sobering up that it had all been for nothing, that it had not escaped the closed circle of perfection to which it is condemned, and that it cannot alleviate the ache of its surfeit. No wonder that the impatience, the helplessness of that beauty had in the end to become mirrored in our sky, to flare up radiantly over our horizon, and to deteriorate in those atmospheric juggleries, those enormous and fantastic, cloud-enveloped arrangements which I call our second, our pseudo-autumn. This, our province’s other autumn, is nothing more than an ailing fata Morgana, radiated onto our sky in a magnified projection, from the moribund, incarcerated beauty in our museums. This autumn is a great wandering theatre of mendacious poetry, an enormous, colourful onion peeling away skin after skin in an ever-newer panorama. Never to arrive at any core. As it wilts and curls up, with a rustle, a new and radiant backdrop appears bhind each coulisse, lively and real for a moment before, expiring, it no longer discloses its paper constitution. And all the perspectives are painted, and all the panoramas are cardboard, and only the scent is real, the scent of the withering coulisses, a scent of great wardrobes full of lipstick and incense. And at twilight: that great disorder and tangle of scenery, that confusion of discarded costumes, among which one wanders as if in rustling withered leaves. And there is great mayhem, and everyone pulls at the curtain ropes, and the sky, the great autumnal sky, hangs in shreds of backdrops and is filled with the creaking of pulleys. And that hasty fever, that breathless and belated carnival, that panic of early-dawn ballrooms, and a tower of Babel of masks that cannot find the costumes they belong to.
‘Autumn, autumn, the Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering into its enormous libraries all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle. Oh, those aged mornings, yellow as parchment, sweet with wisdom like late evenings! Those cunningly smiling mornings like shrewd palimpsests, many-layered like old, yellowed books! Oh, the autumnal day, that old jester-librarian clambering up ladders in his slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures! Each landscape is like the entrance to an old romance for him. How magnificently he plays, sending the heroes of old novels on a stroll under that smoky and honey coloured sky, in that cloudy and sad, late sweetness of the light! What new adventures will Don Quixote meet with in Soplicowo? How will Robinson Crusoe’s life turn out after he returns to his native Bolechów?’
On still and sultry evenings, golden with radiance, Father read extracts from his manuscript to us. The ravishing flight of his ideas momentarily allowed him to forget about Adela’s menacing presence.
The warm Moldavan winds came — that enormous, yellow monotone drew in, those sweet, sterile draughts from the South. Autumn did not want to end. The days arose like soap bubbles, more and more beautiful and ethereal, and each one appeared so ennobled, to the furthest extent of its periphery, that every moment of their duration was a miracle, prolonged beyond measure and almost aching.
In the silence of those profound and beautiful days, the fabric of the leaves was imperceptibly altered, until one day the trees stood in a short-lived blaze of quite dematerialised leaves, in weightless loveliness, like an efflorescence of husks, like a deposit of coloured confetti — magnificent peacocks and Phoenixes which had only to shake and flutter to cast off those magnificent, moulted, lighter than tissue-paper and now unnecessary feathers.
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