Rich Text Document (draft of September 2010)
August
1
IN JULY, my father left to take the waters, and abandoned me, along with Mother and my older brother, to the mercy of the summer days, glowing white and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through the great book of those holidays, in which every page was ablaze with splendour, and had, deep down, a sickly sweet pulp of golden pears.
Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping from her basket the colourful beauty of the sun—glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skins; mysterious black cherries with an aroma that surpassed what would be realised in their taste; and apricots, the core of the long afternoons lying in their golden pulp. And alongside that pure poetry of fruit she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables that called to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish—the raw material of dinner, its flavours still unformed and sterile, dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients, with a wild, fresh from the field aroma.
Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a tenement on the market square, every day of that whole great summer, there passed: the silence of shimmering veins of air; squares of radiance dreaming their fervid dreams on the floor; a barrel organ melody struck from the deepest golden vein of the day; and two or three measures of a refrain played over and over again on a grand piano somewhere, swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements, lost in the fire of the deep day. Her housework done, Adela threw a shadow over the rooms, drawing down the linen blinds. The colours then fell an octave deeper; the parlour filled up with darkness as if plunged into the luminosity of the deep sea—still dimly reflected in mirrors of green—whilst all the torrid heat of the day went on breathing on the blinds, swaying gently to the reveries of the midday hour.
On Saturday afternoons I would go with Mother for a stroll. From the duskiness of the hallway we stepped at once into the sunbath of the day. Passers-by, wading in gold, were squinting in the glare as if their eyes were glued with honey, and their upper lips, drawn back, bared their teeth and gums. And everyone wading through that golden day wore the same grimace in its scorching heat, as if the sun had bestowed upon all of its disciples the same mask, the golden mask of a solar cult. And everyone walking along the streets that day, meeting or passing each other by—young or old, every man, woman and child—hailed one another with that mask as they went, gold paint daubed thickly on their faces. They grinned to each other that bacchanalian grimace, a barbarian mask of pagan worship.
The market square was empty, and yellow in the heat, swept clean by hot breezes like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias, springing up from the emptiness of the yellow square, frothed above it with their shining foliage, bouquets of graciously gesturing green filigrees—like trees on old tapestries. Theatrically twirling their crowns, those trees seemed to be stirring up a gale, so that they might show off by their pompous gesticulations the courtliness of the leafy fans of their silvered abdomens, like noblemen’s fox furs. The old houses, burnished by the winds of many days, were tinged with reflexes of the vast atmosphere, echoes and reminiscences of hues diffused deep within the coloured weather. It seemed as if whole generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers scrubbing the mouldy plaster from old façades) had worn away a fallacious varnish, eliciting more distinctly day by day the houses’ true aspects, a physiognomy of the fortunes and life that formed them from within. The windows went to sleep now, blinded by the radiance of the empty square; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; open hallways were fragrant with coolness and wine.
A group of ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the market square from the fiery broom of the heat, was beleaguering a stretch of a wall, testing it over and over again with throws of buttons and coins, as if the true mystery of the wall, inscribed with hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks, might be divined from the horoscopes of those metal discs. Otherwise, the market square was empty. At any moment, at that vaulted entrance with wine barrels before it, the good Samaritan’s donkey might arrive, led by the bridle in the shade of the swaying acacias, and two attendants carefully lift the stricken man down from its burning saddle, to carry him gently inside and up the cool stairway, to the storey from which the aromas drifted of a Sabbath meal.
We strolled onward, Mother and I, along the two sunlit edges of the market square, casting our crooked shadows over all the houses as if along a keyboard. The paving stones fell steadily by under our weightless, flat footsteps—some pale pink like human skin, others golden or greenish-blue, all of them level, warm and velvety in the sunshine, like sundials, trodden underfoot beyond all recognition, to blessed nothingness.
Finally, at the corner of ulica Stryjska, we stepped under the shadow of the chemist’s shop. An enormous jar of raspberry juice in the chemist’s spacious window symbolised the coolness of the balsams there, by which all afflictions might be assuaged. And a few houses further along, the street could no longer uphold municipal decorum, like a peasant returning to his native village who casts off his smart town attire along the way, slowly turning once more into a rustic vagabond, the closer he gets to home.
The suburban cottages, subsided in the lush and tangled efflorescence of their tiny gardens, were sinking windows and all. Forgotten by the magnificent day, all manner of herbs, flowers and weeds luxuriantly and quietly proliferated, delighting in that pause in which they could dream beyond the margins of time, on the outskirts of an unending day. An enormous sunflower, hoisted aloft on its huge stem and stricken with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning its sad last days of life, stooping under the hypertrophy of its monstrous corpulence. But the naïve suburban campanulas and unsophisticated cotton-print flowerlets stood helplessly by in their starched little pink and white camisoles, with no comprehension of the sunflower’s great tragedy.
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