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IN ONE of those cottages, surrounded by brown-tinged railings and drowning in the lush greenery of its garden, lived my Aunt Agata. Going in to visit her we passed by coloured glass spheres fastened to poles in her garden — pink, green and violet — in which entire illuminated and radiant worlds were conjured, like those ideal and exultant pictures enclosed in the peerless perfection of soap bubbles.
In the dusky hallway — hung with old chromolithographs, devoured by mould and gone blind in their old age — we rediscovered a smell familiar to us. In that dependable old aroma the life of those people was contained in a strangely simple synthesis, an alembic of their race — the category of their blood and the secret of their fortunes imperceptibly sealed within the everyday passing of their own unconnected time. The sagacious old door whose dark sighs ushered those people in and out, a taciturn observer of the comings and goings of the mother, daughters and sons, end p.9 opened silently as if leading only into a wardrobe, and we entered their life. They sat as if beshadowed by their fortunes and they put up no defence — in their first, clumsy gestures they revealed their mystery to us. Were we not, after all, related to them by blood and by fate?
Royal blue hangings patterned in gold made the sitting room dark and velvety, although an echo of the fiery day flickered even here, on the brass-work of the picture frames, on the door handles and along the golden skirting boards, albeit let in through the tangle of the garden’s greenery. Aunt Agata, large and luxuriant, her plump white flesh mottled with a ginger rust of freckles, got up from her seat by the wall. We sat down with them as if on the brink of their fate, a little abashed by the defencelessness with which they had so unreservedly disclosed themselves to us, and we drank water with rose syrup, an astonishing drink in which I seemed to catch the deepest essence of that sweltering Saturday.
My aunt was complaining. This was her accustomed manner of speech, the sound of that white and prolific flesh soaring as if it had already broached the confines of her person, barely, loosely held in convergence in the fetters of her individual form, and even in that convergence it had grown multifarious, ready to split open, to branch out and spill over into the family. It was almost autogenic fecundity, femininity devoid of restraints and morbidly profuse.
It seemed that the mere scent of masculinity, a whiff of tobacco smoke or a bachelor’s joke, might impel that perturbed femininity to licentious parthenogenesis. And all of her complaints, whether to her husband or the servants, and all the concerns she voiced about her children, were in truth only her capricious, discontented and petulant fecundity, a continuance of the terse, angry and tearful coquetry which, to no avail, she inflicted on her husband. Uncle Marek, small and hunched, with a face purged of all gender, sat in his grey bankruptcy, resigned to his fate, in the shadow of that boundless contempt, where he appeared to relax. The faraway glow of the garden, spreading at the window, smouldered in his grey eyes. Occasionally he would attempt to put up some resistance, to suggest terms by some ineffectual motion, but a wave of self-sufficient femininity tossed that meaningless gesture aside; end p.10 it passed triumphantly by him and washed away in its broad torrent his feeble spasms of masculinity.
There was something tragic in that unkempt and immoderate fertility; it was the destitution of a creature fighting on the border of nothingness and death; it was a kind of womanly bravado, triumphing by fertility even over nature’s decrepitude, over the insufficiency of man. But the purpose of that maternal panic was shown in her offspring, that frenzy of childbearing which had worn itself out in the generation of undersized fruits, an ephemeral genus of bloodless and faceless phantoms.
Łucja entered, the middle child, with a head too blooming and adult for her childlike and plump body of white and delicate flesh. She held out her doll-like little hand to me, seemingly just beginning to bud, and her whole face flushed at once, like a peony overflowing with pink plenitude. She closed her eyes, distressed by her blushes which shamelessly gave away the secrets of her menstruation, and she burned even more deeply at the touch of the most nonchalant question, for they each contained a secret allusion to her overdelicate virginity.
Emil, the oldest cousin, with a flaxen moustache and a face from which life seemed to have washed away every feature, was pacing back and forth across the room, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his voluminous trousers.
His stylish and expensive clothes bore the stamp of the exotic countries he had been to. His face, sagging and clouded, seemed to forget itself from one day to the next, to become a bare white sheet, with a pale net of veins in which the waning reminiscences of that stormy and wasted life had become entangled, like lines on a faded map. He was a master of card tricks; he smoked long, noble pipes; he oddly exuded a scent of faraway countries. His gaze wandering over old reminiscences, end p.11 he related strange anecdotes, which at a certain point broke off suddenly, grew muddled and blew away into nothingness. I cast a wistful gaze after him, hoping he might turn his attention to me and deliver me from the torment of my boredom. And it seemed, in effect, that he had winked at me, going out to another room. I hurried after him. He was sitting deep in a little couch, his crossed knees practically at the level of his head, as bald as a billiard ball. It seemed that only his clothes lay there, creased and crumpled, and tossed over the armchair. His face was like a breath of a face, a streak left hanging in the air by some anonymous passer-by. In his pale, blue-enamelled hands he held a wallet, in which he was looking at something.
From the mist of his face the bulging film of a wall-eye struggled to emerge, luring me with a mischievous flutter. I felt an irresistible fondness for him. He took me between his knees and showed me — shuffling photographs with his skilful hands — images of naked women and their lovers in strange positions. As I leant against him, looking with unseeing, distant eyes at those exquisite human bodies, an aura of unclear disquiet which suddenly clouded the air struck me and ran over me in an uneasy shudder, a wave of sudden understanding. But, just then, the haze of a smile outlined under his soft and beautiful moustache, the germ of desire tensing in a pulsating vein on his temple, the exertion holding for a moment his features in concentration — withered away into nothingness, and his face became vacant, forgot itself, and blew away.
end p.12
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