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-
XXVII
I DID NOT have the courage to circle around the villa and reach the other side. I would surely have been observed. Why then, despite this, do I have the feeling that I have been there once before, very long ago? Do we not in fact all know in advance the landscapes we will chance upon in our lifetime? Can anything entirely new happen to us, which in our deepest reserves we have not long foreseen? I know that sometime, at some late hour, I will be standing on the threshold of those gardens, hand in hand with Bianka. We will enter those forgotten recesses where envenomed parks are shut in between the old walls, those artificial paradises of Poe*, full of cowbane, poppy seed and opiatic bindweed, burning under the dark grey sky of very old frescoes. We will rouse a white marble statue, sleeping with empty eyes in that marginal world beyond the outskirts of the withered afternoon. We will startle its only beloved, a red vampire bat asleep on its lap with folded wings. It will fly away soundlessly, soft, fluid, and undulating in a flimsy, bodiless and bright red shred without skeleton or substance; it will whirl, flutter here and there, and melt away without trace in the necrotic air. Through a little wicket gate we will encroach upon a totally empty glade. The vegetation there will be charred like tobacco, like a prarie in a late Indian summer. Perhaps it will be in the state of New Orleans or Louisiana — countries are mere pretexts, after all. We will sit on the stone casing of a square pond, and Bianka will dip her white fingers into the warm water full of yellow leaves, not raising her eyes. On the other side a slim black figure will be sitting, completely veiled. I will ask about her in a whisper, and Bianka will shake her head and say quietly: ‘Don’t be afraid. She isn’t listening. It’s my dead mother, who lives here.’ Then she will tell me the sweetest, quietest and saddest things. There will be no consolation now. Dusk will be falling...
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Notes
* … those artificial paradises of Poe: At first glance this appears to be a misattribution to Edgar Allen Poe of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paridis Artificiels. (The matter is hardly made clearer in the light of Baudelaire’s affinity with Poe — Baudelaire being Poe’s renowned translator.) However, if Schulz did indeed have in mind a story by Poe, it is surely ‘The Domain of Arnheim,’ typically for Poe a tall-tale thinly veiled as a journalistic piece, which considers in a mystical way the ‘artificial style’ of landscape gardening. It is intriguing to speculate that this story might have caught Schulz’s attention (or been brought to it) as it contains such Gnostic overtones as in the following:
Let us imagine, for example, a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness — whose united beauty, magnificence, and strangeness, shall convey the idea of care, or culture, or superintendence, on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity — then the sentiment of interest is preserved, while the art intervolved is made to assume the air of an intermediate or secondary nature — a nature which is not God, nor an emanation from God, but which still is nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God. [RETURN]
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