Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: (XIII) -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XIII
ONE PARTICULAR DAY toward the end of April, it was a warm and grey morning — people were out taking strolls, gazing at the ground in front of them, always at that square metre of moist earth before them, utterly unaware that the trees of the park were stealing past on either side, branching out blackly, bursting in numerous places into sweet, festering wounds.
Entangled in the black, branchlike net of the trees, the sultry grey sky bore down on the shoulders of those people, as crookedly gathered up and ill-proportionately huge and heavy as an eiderdown. The people clambered out from beneath it on their hands and knees, like May bugs in that warm moisture, sniffing the sweet clay with their receptive antennae. The world lay muted. Somewhere above, somewhere beyond and far away, it unwound, it grew, and blissfully feeble, it flowed. At times, it relaxed, and mistily remembered something. It branched out with the trees; it bulged in a thick, glistening net, woven from the twittering of the birds and thrown over that grey day. It sank into the depths, into the snaking underground roots, into a blind pulsation of worms and caterpillars, a muffled obfuscation of humus and clay.
And the people hunkered down under that ill-proportioned magnitude, deafened and without a thought in their heads. They squatted with their heads in their hands, or slouched on the park benches, a sheet of newspaper on their knees, its text streaming out into the great grey mindlessness of the day. They hung awkwardly in the same positions as yesterday, and salivated involuntarily.
Perhaps they were stunned by those numerous rattle-boxes of twittering, or those indefatigable poppy heads sprinkling their grey scattershot, dimming the air. They went about drowsily beneath that leaden hailstorm. In that plentiful downpour, they conversed in sign language — or they acquiesced, and were silent.
But at around eleven o-clock, when somewhere, at some point in space, the sun’s pale shoot broke through the great bulging body of the clouds — then all the buds in the branching baskets of the trees suddenly lit up at once, and like a pale-gold net, the grey veil of twittering was carefully lifted from the face of the day, which opened its eyes.
And it was spring.
And in a single instant, the avenue of the park, empty only a moment ago, was suddenly propagated with people hurrying in different directions, as if this were the crossing place of all the streets of the town. It blossomed with womens’ dresses. A few of those swift and shapely girls were hurrying to work, to shops and offices, others to rendezvous, but for a few moments, as they passed through the basket-work of the avenue, panting for breath in the moisture of florists’ shops and the sprinkled trills of birds, they belonged to that avenue and that hour. Without realisng it, they were extras in that scene in the theatre of spring, as if only just now come to life on that avenue, along with those delicate shadows of twigs and tiny leaves which proliferatied before one’s eyes against a dark-gold background of moist gravel. And a few golden, fervid and probing pulses ran past, and suddenly faded, overtaken by shadow, sinking into the sand like those open-work filigrees, as the sun moved into the pensiveness of the clouds.
But for a moment, in their breezy hurriedness, they flooded the avenue, and that anonymous smell of the avenue seemed to flow from the rustle of their underskirts. Ah, those freshly starched and aired little camisoles, taken for a walk beneath the lattice-work shadow of a springtime walkway, little camisoles with damp blotches under the armpits, drying in the violet breezes of the distance. Ah, those rhythmical young legs, hot with movement in rasping new silk stockings, beneath which are concealed red blotches and pimples — healthy, springtime eczemas of hot blood. Ah, that whole park is barefacedly pimpled, and all the trees break out with buds of pimples, which burst with twittering.
Then the avenue is deserted once more, and along the vaulted walkway the wire spokes of a baby’s perambulator on slender wheels quietly chime. In its little varnished carriage, sleeping as if in a bouquet of flowers, is something even more delicate, submerged in a foulard bed of the starched and fluffed up eye-trim feathers of owls. The girl who slowly pushes the buggy along every once in a while bends over it, leaning on the rear wheels, their tyres squeaking on their axles, and tenderly blows that bouquet of tulle around, that rocking basket blooming with white freshness, down to its sweet and lulled to sleep core, through which a dream wanders like a fairytale, as the carriage passes by streaks of shadow, that stream of lights and shades.
Later, at noon, that budding viridarium is still intertwined with light and dark, and the twitter of little birds is sprinkled incessantly through the delicate mesh of that net, sprinkled like pearls from one branch to the next, through the wire cage of the day. But the women passing by on the verge of the walkway are tired now, their hair worked loose by their migraines, and their faces are worn out by the spring. And later still, the avenue is almost completely deserted, and through the silence of the afternoon, the scent of the restaurant slowly wafts from the park pavilion.
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