Word Document (draft of June 2008)
The Cockroaches
THIS WAS during the grey days which ensued after the magnificent colourfulness of my father’s gifted epoch had ended. Those were long weeks of depression, heavy weeks with no Sundays or holidays, set against a closed sky in an impoverished landscape. Father was gone by then. The upper rooms had been put in order and let to some telephonist. Of his entire avian farm there remained to us but a single specimen: the stuffed condor, set on a shelf in the living room. In the cool half-light of the closed curtains it stood, as in life, on one leg, in the pose of a Buddhist sage — while its bitter and dried up ascetic’s face petrified into an expression of utter indifference and abnegation. Its eyes fell out and sawdust spilled from the weeping, tearful sockets. Only the horny Egyptian excrescences on its bare, powerful beak and bald neck, excrescences and protuberances of discoloured blue hues, lent something venerably hieratic to that aged head.
Its feathery habit was now moth-eaten in many places and losing its light, grey feathers, which Adela swept away once a week along with the anonymous dust of the room. Thick sackcloth canvas showed through its balding spots, and hempen tufts poked out. I bore a secret grudge against Mother for the ease with which she had returned to the daily routine after losing Father. She never did love him, I thought, and because Father was not rooted in any woman’s heart, then neither could he become unified with anything real, and he was perpetually reborn on the periphery of life, in half real regions at the edges of reality. Even in his authorised, civic death, he did not deserve it, I thought — everything was destined to be bizarre and dubious with him. I resolved to catch Mother unawares with end p.86 a frank discussion at an opportune moment. Mother had a headache that day (it was a heavy winter day and the soft down of twilight had been pouring down even since morning) and she was lying on the sofa, alone in the living room.
In that seldom visited, sumptuous room, order had reigned since the time of Father’s disappearance, tended by Adela with wax and brushes. The furniture was draped with slip covers; every piece was subjected to the iron discipline which Adela inflicted upon that room. Only a cluster of peacock feathers, standing in a vase on the chest of drawers, refused to be reined in. A playful, dangerous element of elusive revolutionism, they were like a class of riotous schoolgirls, full of devotion in their eyes, licentious antics behind their eyes. Those eyes pierced the whole day and drilled holes in the walls, twinkled, huddled together, each in turn fluttering their lashes, holding a finger to their lips, full of giggling and impishness. They filled the room with twittering and whispering, strewn like butterflies around the many armed lamp, and rattled in the lustreless, aged keyholes in their varicoloured crowd. Even in Mother’s presence, lying on the sofa with her head bound, they could not restrain themselves; they made solicitous eyes, gave signals in silence and spoke in a mute, colourful alphabet full of secret signs. It irritated me, that jeering collusion, that twinkling talk behind my back. My knees pressed against Mother’s sofa, absent-mindedly rubbing the delicate material of her housecoat between my finger and thumb, I said as if in passing, ‘For a long time now, I’ve wanted to ask you — is it truly he?’ And although I had not as much as glanced at the condor, Mother guessed straight away — she became very much abashed and lowered her eyes. I made a point of letting the moment pass, savouring her disconcertedness, and then, totally composed, holding my rising anger in check, I asked: ‘What do you mean by spreading all these rumours and lies about Father?’
But her aspect, disarrayed at first in a moment of panic, regained its composure. ‘What lies?’ end p.87 she asked, fluttering her lashes, her eyes vacant, steeped in deep blue and without whites. ‘I heard them from Adela,’ I said, ‘but I know that they came from you. I want to know the truth.’
Her lips trembled a little; her pupils, avoiding my gaze, wandered into the corners of her eyes. ‘I’m not lying,’ she said, as her lips swelled and grew smaller at the same time. I felt she was coquetting with me, like a woman with a man. ‘It’s true about those cockroaches. You remember it yourself, after all...’ I was perplexed. In fact I did remember that invasion of the cockroaches, that inundation of the black swarm that had filled the nocturnal darkness with spider-like running. Every chink was full of tremulous bristles; every crevice might suddenly erupt with cockroaches; from any crack in the floor, that black lightning flash might spring up, flying across the floor in crazy zigzags. Oh, that wild madness of panic, written on the tablet of the floor in a shiny black line. Oh, Father’s terrified screams, leaping from chair to chair with a javelin in his hand. Not taking food or drink, with fervid flushes in his face and convulsions of disgust ingrained around his mouth, my Father had turned utterly savage. It was clear that no constitution could long endure the strain of that detestation. Terrible repugnance transformed his face into a rigid, tragical mask, in which the pupils were only lying in wait, hidden beneath the lower eyelids, taut as bowstrings, in perpetual suspicion. He suddenly started up from his seat with a wild shriek, flew blindly into a corner of the room, and raised his javelin, at the end of which an enormous, impaled cockroach desperately wriggled its entanglement of legs. Adela then came to the aid of the quivering wreck, and took the lance from him, along with its impaled trophy, to drown it in a bucket. But I could no longer say whether these images had been implanted in me by Adela’s stories, or whether I had witnessed them myself. By then, my father no longer possessed that resilient power which protects the healthy end p.88 from the fascination of Loathing. Instead of shutting himself off from the terrible, attractive power of that fascination, my father, ravaged by frenzy, was more and more deeply embroiled in it. Lamentable consequences were swift to follow. The first, suspicious signs soon took hold, which filled us with sadness and dread. Father’s demeanour was altered. His mania, the euphoria of his agitation died down. In his movements and his mimicry he began to betray the signs of a bad conscience. He took to avoiding us. All day long he hid himself away in corners, in wardrobes or under an eiderdown. Many a time I saw him looking absent-mindedly at his own hands, examining the consistency of their skin, and his nails, on which black smears began to appear, like cockroach cuticles.
In the daytime, he continued to resist with the last of his strength; he fought on; but at night the fascination struck him with powerful racks. I saw him late at night, in the light of a candle set on the floor. My father lay naked on the ground, flyblown with the black smears of a totem, contoured by the lines of his ribs, a fantastic delineation of his anatomy, visible on the surface; he lay on all fours, possessed by the fascination of the aversion that had drawn him far along its convoluted paths. My Father stirred with the complicated, many limbed motion of a strange ritual, in which I recognised with horror an imitation of a cockroach ceremony.
Ever since then, we have been lamenting Father. His resemblance to a cockroach became more distinctly apparent every day — my father was being transformed into a cockroach.
We grew used to it. We saw him more and more infrequently; he disappeared for weeks on end, somewhere on his cockroach paths — we could no longer discern him; he mingled entirely end p.89 with that eerie black tribe. Who could say whether he was still living somewhere in a chink between the floorboards, or whether he ran through the rooms at night, embroiled in cockroach affairs, or whether he was one of those dead insects, lying belly up and bristling with legs, which Adela found every morning and carried away to the dustbin in disgust, and got rid of?
‘And yet,’ I said, disconcerted, ‘I am sure that this condor is he.’ Mother looked out at me from beneath her eyelashes: ‘Don’t torment me, dear; after all, I have already told you that Father goes about the country as a commercial traveller. You know, after all, that he comes home some nights, and sets off again before daybreak.’
> -The Gale- >