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 now in the municipal park, and a springtime promenade pushes along its avenues. They circle and return, pass one another by and then reunite, in continually recurring, symmetrical arabesques. The young people wear their new springtime hats and nonchalantly hold their gloves in their hands. Between the tree-trunks and hedgerows the dresses of the girls on the neighbouring avenues shine. 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 they occasionally settle on the benches as if the empty ceremony has exhausted them — they settle that entire great rose of gauze and batiste, which splits, 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 silenced and turn pale, struck 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 rapidly fills with pink varnish, a glistening lacquer which suddenly makes everything highly coloured and illuminated. But already in those colours there is some too deep azure, some too glaring and now suspect beauty. For a moment yet, the thicket of the park, twiggy and bare, sparcely covered with young greenery, aslo shines throughout with the pink hour of twilight, subdued by the balsam of coolness, saturated by the unutterable sadness of things forever and fatally beautiful.
Then the whole park suddenly comes to a halt, like an enormous, taciturn orchestra, solemn and poised, waiting under the conductor’s upraised baton until the music within it ripens and rises; and suddenly a theatrical twilight falls over that enormous, potential and eager symphony, rapid and colourful as if under the influence of the notes swelling vehemently in all the instruments, and the young green voice of a golden oriole breaks through somewhere above, sewn into the thicket, and in the solitude and lateness it suddenly becomes ceremonial all around, like an evening forest.
A barely perceptible breeze drifts through the treetops, from which the bird cherry is strewn in a shuddering, dry deposit — unspeakable and bitter. That bitter aroma courses on high, beneath the darkening sky, and streams with the 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 waits night after night in the harbour, keeping its lanterns unlit.)
And then some strange strength and inspiration takes hold of those circling couples, those young men and girls continually rejoining in regular combinations. Each man becomes a Don Juan, fine looking and compelling; he loses his temper, proud and victorious, and attains in that look a devastating power which girlish hearts are terrified of. And the eyes of the girls deepen — inside them some deep garden with branching avenues opens up, dark and rustling labyrinths of parks. Their pupils distend with festive brightness, open without resistance and admit those conquerors into the lanes of their dark gardens, running wildly along their footpaths, manifoldly and symmetrically, like the stanzas of canzoni, to meet and rediscover one another as if in a poignant verse, on pink squares, 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 and the ever more dense and rustling eventide thickets, where they become lost and confused among intricate coulisses, velvet door curtains and quiet alcoves. And who knows it when they creep through the coolness of those gloomier gardens, into quite forgotten, unfamiliar and secluded places, into some other, darker rustle of trees, drifting in a mournful pall where the darkness dissolves and degenerates, where the silence decomposes in the course of years of silence, and ferments fantastically as in old, forgotten wine barrels?
Stumbling thus, fumbling in the black plush of those parks, they finally congregate on a lonely glade under the last crimson of sunset, beside a pond which has been overgrown since time immemorial with a covering of black slime, on a crumbling balustrade somewhere on the outskirts of time, at 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 their costumes of long bygone ages they sob endlessly over the muslin train of some dress, and — clambering toward unattainable oaths, entering on steps of remembrance — they arrive at summits and borders beyond which there is now only death and the numbness of nameless pleasure.
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