3
IN ONE of those cottages, surrounded by brown fencing and drowning in the lush greenery of its garden, lived 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 complete, illuminated and radiant worlds were conjured, like those ideal and exultant pictures enclosed within the matchless 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 lives of those people were held in a strangely simple synthesis, an alembic of their race, the category of their blood and the secret of their fate imperceptibly sealed into the everyday passing of their own unconnected time. The wise old door, whose dark sighs ushered those people in and out, a taciturn witness to the comings and goings of the mother, daughters and sons, opened as silently as if it led 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. For were we not related to them, by blood and by fate?
Their parlour was made dark and velvety by its royal blue upholstery, patterned in gold; but 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 trickling in through the entanglement of the garden’s greenery. Aunt Agata, huge and luxuriant, her plump white flesh mottled with a ginger rust of freckles, got up from her seat by the wall, and we sat down with them as if on the brink of their fate, a little abashed by that defencelessness with which they had so unreservedly disclosed themselves to us. And we drank water with rose syrup, an astonishing drink in which I almost caught the deepest essence of that sweltering Saturday.
My aunt was complaining. That was her accustomed mode of speech, the sound of that white and copious flesh soaring as if it had already breached the confines of her person—barely, loosely held in convergence in the fetters of her individual form—and multifarious even in that convergence, ready to split open, to branch out and spill over into the family. It was almost autogenic fecundity, unrestrained and morbidly profuse femininity.
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, all of 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 that she inflicted—to no avail—on her husband. Uncle Marek, small and hunched, his 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 by some ineffectual motion to put up resistance, to suggest terms—but a wave of self-sufficient femininity tossed that meaningless gesture aside. It passed by him triumphantly, and washed away in its broad surge the feeble spasms of his masculinity.
There was something tragic in that slovenly and uncompromising fecundity. 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 her offspring exhibited the purpose of that maternal panic, that frenzy of childbearing that had worn itself out in the generation of undersized fruits, an ephemeral genus of bloodless and faceless phantoms.
Łucja entered, the middle child, her head grown too large and adult for her childlike and plump body of white and delicate flesh. She held out to me her doll-like little hand, 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 spoke shamelessly of 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 all expression, 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, turning deathly pale behind a faint net of veins, in which the waning reminiscences of that stormy and wasted life seemed to have 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, he related strange anecdotes, which broke off suddenly, grew muddled, and blew into nothingness. I cast a wistful glance his way, 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 as if only his clothes lay there, creased and crumpled, tossed over the armchair. His face was like a breath of a face, a streak left hanging in the air by some anonymous bypasser. 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 shuffling photographs with his skilful hands he showed me images of naked women and their lovers in strange positions. Whilst I was leaning against him, looking with unseeing, distant eyes at those exquisite human bodies, I was struck by an aura of vague disquiet which suddenly clouded the air, which ran over me in a shudder of unease, a wave of unclear comprehension. But at the same time, the haze of a smile that was drawn under his soft and beautiful moustache, the germ of desire that tensed in a pulsating vein on his temple, the exertion holding for just a moment his features in concentration—withered into nothingness, and his face became vacant, forgot itself, and blew away.
> -A Visitation- >