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A TANGLED clump of grasses, tassels, weeds and thistles blazes in the fire of afternoon. A garden’s afternoon doze resounds with a swarm of flies. A golden stubble field screams in the sunshine like russet locusts; crickets cry out in the torrential rainfall of fire; seedpods quietly explode, like grasshoppers. end p.6
While over by a fence a sheepskin of grass rises up into a rounded hummock-mound, as if the garden has turned over onto its other side in its sleep and its broad peasant shoulders are breathing the silence of the earth. August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance has grown gigantic on those broad shoulders of the garden, in silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. Those bulging rag dolls of burdocks abound there like widely scattered hags half devoured by their own crazy skirts. The garden is giving away for free there its cheapest pellets of wild lilac, stinking soap, thick, plantain gruel, a wild aqua vitae of mint and all the worst of August’s rubbish. But, on the other side of the fence, beyond that summer lair where a stupidity of idiotic weeds grows, there is a rubbish heap wildly overgrown with musk thistle. No one knows that August is holding its great pagan orgy right there this year. On that rubbish heap, leaning against the fence and overgrown with wild lilac, stands the bed of Tłuja, the idiot girl. That is what we all called her. Atop that heap of debris and waste, old pots, shoes, rubble and dirt, stands her green painted bed, supported by two old bricks in place of a missing leg.
The air above that rubble — run wild in the heat and shot through with lightning flashes of glistening, sun-maddened horseflies — crackles as if with the shaking of invisible rattle-boxes, rising to a frenzy.
Tłuja is squatting deep inside her yellow blankets and rags. Her huge head bristles with her shock of black hair. Her face is as contractile as the bellows of an accordion. A grimace of anguish occasionally folds that accordion up into a thousand transverse pleats, but bewilderment soon stretches them back again, smoothes out the folds and bares her chinks end p.7 of tiny eyes and the moist gums and yellowed teeth behind her snout-like, fleshy lips. Hours pass, full of heat and boredom, while Tłuja babbles in an undertone, dozes, grumbles quietly, and coughs. A dense swarm of flies covers the slumberer. But all at once that entire heap of dirty rags, tatters and shreds begins to move as if brought to life by the scratching of a litter of newborn rats inside it. The flies awaken, startled, and rise up in a great resounding swarm, full of furious buzzing, flashes and flickers. And as the rags fall to the ground and scatter like startled rats over the rubbish heap, the nucleus extricates itself from them and slowly unwinds: the core of the rubbish heap is unpeeled; the half-naked and sombre idiot slowly pulls herself up and stands looking like a pagan goddess on stunted, puerile legs; and from her throat, swollen by a surge of fury, from her face, reddening and darkening with rage — where arabesques of distended veins effloresce like a barbarian painting — she lets out a shriek, a horse, animal shriek torn from every bronchus and pipe in that half-beast, half-goddess breast. The thistles scream, charred by the sun, the burdocks swell and parade their shameless flesh and the weeds drool their shiny poison, while the idiot, hoarse with shrieking, in convulsions of wild impatience, strikes with her fleshy bosom the trunk of an elder tree, which creaks quietly at the insistence of that licentious lust, exhorted by that whole beggar-woman chorus to degenerate, pagan fecundity.
Tłuja’s mother hired herself out to housewives, to scrub their floors. She was a small woman, as yellow as saffron, and it was with saffron that she seasoned the floors, pine tables, benches and banisters she cleaned in poor people’s quarters. Once, Adela took me to that old Maryśka’s house. It was early in the morning and we entered a blue-washed little room with trodden down clay pugging between the floorboards, end p.8 where the early sunshine fell glaringly yellow in the silence of a morning measured out by the strident clanging of a rustic clock on the wall. Stupid Maryśka lay in a crate of straw, as pale as a wafer and as still as a glove from which the hand has been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her repose, the silence prattled — the yellow, glaring and malevolent silence soliloquised, disputed, and proclaimed its maniacal monologue in a loud and vulgar manner. Maryśka’s time — the time locked up in her soul — flowed out of her and ran riot about the room, frighteningly real, noisy, knocking and infernal, rising up in the glaring silence of the morning like bad flour from the loud, grinding-mill clock — friable flour, the stupid flour of the insane.
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