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 DAY toward the end of April, on a warm and grey morning, people were out taking strolls, all of them gazing at the ground in front of them, always at the square metre of moist earth before them, completely unaware that to either side the trees of the park were stealing past, branching out blackly, and splitting in various 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, blissfully feeble, and 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 cast over that grey day. And it sank into the depths, into the snaking underground roots, into a blind pulsation of worms and caterpillars, into 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 they slouched on the park benches, a sheet of newspaper on their knees, its text streaming out into the great grey mindlessness of the day. And 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 grey scattershot, that dimmed the air. They went about drowsily beneath that leaden hailstorm, and conversed in sign language in that plentiful downpour; or else they acquiesced, and were silent.
But when, at around eleven o-clock, at some point in space, the sun broke like a pale shoot through the great bulging body of the clouds — then all the buds lit up at once, in great numbers in the branching baskets of the trees, and the grey veil of twittering was carefully lifted like a pale-golden net from the face of the day, which opened its eyes. And it was spring.
Then, in a single instant, the avenue of the park, empty only a moment ago, was suddenly strewn with people hurrying in different directions, as if this were the crossing place of all the streets of the town; and it blossomed with womens’ dresses. Some 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 the birds, they belonged to that avenue and that hour — without knowing it, they were extras in that scene, in spring’s theatre, as if only just now come to life on the avenue, alongside those delicate shadows of twigs and tiny leaves that proliferated before the eyes, against the dark-golden background of the moist gravel, and a few golden, fervid and probing pulses ran by, and, overtaken by shadow, suddenly faded and sank like open-work filigrees into the sand as the sun moved into the pensiveness of the clouds.
But for a moment they flood the avenue in their breezy hurriedness, and that anonymous smell of the avenue seems 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 the 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 red blotches and pimples are concealed — healthy, springtime eczemas of hot blood. Ah, that whole park is barefacedly pimpled, and all the trees break out into buds of pimples, which burst with twittering.
Then the avenue is deserted once more, and the wire spokes of a baby’s perambulator on slender wheels quietly chime along the vaulted walkway. In the little varnished carriage, submerged in a foulard bed of the starched and fluffed up eye-trim feathers of owls, sleeping as if in a bouquet of flowers, is something even more delicate. The girl who pushes the buggy slowly along bends over it once in a while — leaning on the rear wheels, the tyres squeaking on their axles — and tenderly she blows that bouquet of tulle around, that rocking basket blooming with white freshness down to its sweet and lulled to sleep core, through which, like a fairytale, a dream is wandering, while the carriage passes by streaks of shadow, a stream of lights and shades.
Later, at noon, that budding viridarium is still intertwined with light and darkness, and the twitter of little birds is incessantly sprinkled 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 quite deserted, and the scent of the restaurant slowly wafts from the park pavilion, through the silence of the afternoon.
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