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-
XVI
MUSIC IS PLAYED every evening in the municipal park now, and a springtime promenade pushes along its avenues. They circle and return, pass one another by and reunite, in continually recurring, symmetrical arabesques. The young people are wearing their new springtime hats and holding their gloves nonchalantly in their hands. The dresses of girls on neighbouring avenues shine between the tree-trunks and hedgerows. Those girls walk in pairs, with a swing in their hips, puffed up with a froth of eye-trim feathers and ships’ wheels. They wear that pink and white expansion like swans, those bells full of flourishing muslin. And occasionally, as if the empty ceremony has exhausted them, they sit on the benches — they settle that entire great rose of gauze and batiste, which bursts, overflowing with petals. And then their legs are bared, produced first one and then the other, and crossed, interlocked into a white profile full of compelling suggestiveness. And young strollers passing them by are struck dumn and turn pale, dazzled by the exactness of the argument, deeply persuaded and vanquished.
A moment passes before true twilight, and the colours of the world grow beautiful. All the colours enter in buskins. They become ceremonial, eager and sad. The park quickly fills with a pink varnish, a glistening lacquer that suddenly lends bright colours and illumination to everything. But in those colours there is already some too deep azure, some too glaring and now suspect beauty. For one last moment, the thicket of the park, sparsely sprinkled with young greenery, twiggy and bare, glows pellucidly throughout with the pink hour of twilight, subdued by the balsam of coolness, saturated by the unutterable sadness of things eternally and fatally beautiful.
And then the whole park suddenly becomes like an enormous, silent orchestra, solemn and poised, waiting under the conductor’s upraised baton for the music within it to ripen and rise up. And suddenly over that enormous, potential and eager symphony, a theatrical twilight falls, rapid and colourful, as if under the influence of the notes swelling vehemently in all the instruments. And somewhere up above, sewn into the thicket, the young green voice of a golden oriole breaks through. And suddenly all around there is the ceremonial lateness and sadness of an evening forest.
A barely perceptible breeze drifts through the treetops, from which is strewn a shuddering, dry deposit of cherry blossom, unspeakable and bitter. That bitter aroma courses on high, beneath the darkening sky, and is streamed with a boundless sigh of death, into which the first stars let fall their tears, like lilac petals plucked from that pale and violet night. (Ah, I know: her father is a ship’s doctor, and her mother was a quadroon. It is for her that the dark little riverboat with wheels on its sides is waiting night after night in the harbour, its lanterns kept unlit.)
And then in those circling couples, those young men and those girls continually rejoining in regular combinations, some strange strength and inspiration takes hold. Each man becomes a Don Juan, fine looking and compelling. Proud and victorious, he loses his temper, and he attains in that look a devastating power that girlish hearts are terrified of. And the girls’ eyes deepen. Some deep garden opens up inside them, with branching avenues, dark and rustling park labyrinths. Their pupils distend with festive brightness, opening without resistance to allow those conquerors into the lanes of their dark gardens, running wildly along their footpaths, with the repetitions and symmetries of the strophes of canzoni, to meet and rediscover one another as if in a poignant verse — on pink squares, or around circular flower beds, or beside fountains burning with the very late fire of sunset — only to separate again and scatter among the black bushes of the park, its ever denser and more loudly rustling eventide thickets, where they become lost and confused among intricate coulisses, velvet door curtains and quiet alcoves. And no one knows it when they creep through the coolness of those gloomier gardens into quite forgotten, unfamiliar and secluded places, into some other, darker rustling of the trees, drifting like a funeral pall, where the darkness dissolves and degenerates, where the silence decomposes in the course of years of silence, and ferments fantastically, like in old, forgotten wine barrels.
Stumbling in this way, gropingly in the black plush of those parks, finally they congregate on a lonely glade, under the last crimson of sunset, beside a pond that has been overgrown with a covering of black slime since time immemorial, on a crumbling balustrade somewhere on the outskirts of time, by the rear wicket gate of the world. They find themselves returned to some long bygone life, in a remote pre-existence, incorporated into a mysterious time. In the costumes of long bygone ages, they sob endlessly over the muslin train of someone’s dress, and clambering toward unattainable oaths, entering on the steps of remembrance, they arrive at summits and borders beyond which there is now only death, and the numbness of nameless pleasure.
> -XVII- >