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. He it was, 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 adopts that protracted, branching and parasitically exuberant form, which under the name of ‘Indian summer’ extends far into the depths of our coloured winters.
What more is there to 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 inside our museums. Decomposing in boredom and oblivion, too sweet, 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 us, is a disease — it is the chill of a mysterious infection, a dark announcement of the decomposition rising up from the depths of perfection, and hailed by perfection with a sigh of the most profound happiness.
A few factual considerations concerning our provincial museum may serve in the better understanding of the matter... Its origins go back to the 18th century, and are connected to the admirable collector’s zeal of an order of Basilians, who bestowed on our town that parasitic growth, burdening the municipal budget with an unwarranted and unproductive expense. Having bought the collections dirt cheap from the impoverished order, the treasury of the Republic then magnanimously ruined itself over a number of years by its patronage, worthy of some royal residence. But the subsequent generation of town Fathers, more practically oriented now, and not closing their eyes to economic necessities, 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 those 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, a whole third and forth rate œuvre, a whole 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 over those canvases festering with age, on which fleets of galleys and caravels, old forgotten armadas, mouldered in gulfs without egress, the majesty of long vanished republics rolling across their swelling sails. The barely perceptible outlines of mounted skirmishes loomed from under 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. A darkened sun appeared to wilt before the eyes in those lost landscapes, like on the eve of a cosmic disaster. And that is why the smiles and gestures of the golden fishwives were 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 the boundless sweetness of that final, still remaining gesture — all alone, and for its own sake alone, lost and remote, repeated over and over again, 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, small 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 at the top of a pole, which bent slightly under its warbling, winged burden. And deeper still, at the very edge of the evening, on a last fragment of land, where a withering tuft of acanthus swayed on the dull-golden borderline of nothingness — a game of cards was still being played out, a last human resort before the great night that was approaching.
That whole lumber room of old beauty was subjected to mournful 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 was all for nothing, that it has not escaped the closed circle of perfection that it is condemned to, 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 that I call our second, our pseudo-autumn. This the other autumn of our province, is nothing more than an ailing fata Morgana, radiating in a magnified projection upon our sky from the moribund, incarcerated beauty in our museums. That autumn is a great wandering theatre of mendacious poetry, an enormous, colourful onion peeling away skin after skin in an ever new panorama — never to arrive at any core. And as it wilts and curls up, rustling, then behind each coulisse a new and radiant backdrop appears, 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, all lipstick and incense. And at twilight there comes that great disorder, that tangle of scenery, all that confusion of discarded costumes among which one wanders as if through 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, with that hasty fever, that breathless, 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, as 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 his ladders in a slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures! Each landscape is for him like an entrance to an old romance. How magnificently he plays, sending the heroes of old novels on strolls under that smoky and honey-coloured sky, in that cloudy and sad, late sweetness of the light. And 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 didn’t want to end. The days rose up like soap bubbles, ever 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 blaze of quite dematerialised leaves, in weightless loveliness, like an efflorescence of husks, a deposit of coloured confetti — magnificent peacocks and Phoenixes that had only to shake and flutter in order to cast off those magnificent, moulted, lighter than tissue-paper, and now unnecessary feathers.