Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
Cockroaches
IT WAS DURING the period of grey days which ensued when the magnificent colourfulness of my father’s brilliant epoch had ended. They were long weeks of depression, heavy weeks without Sundays or holidays, set against a closed sky and in an impoverished landscape. By then, Father was gone. The upper rooms had been put in order and rented 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 parlour. In the cool half-light of the closed curtains, it stood there as in life, on one leg, in the pose of a Buddhist sage, whilst 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 anything 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 bald patches, and hempen tufts poked out. I bore a secret grudge against Mother for the ease with which she had returned to her daily routine after losing Father. She never did love him, I thought, and since 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. He had not even deserved his authorised, civic death, I thought. Everything had to be bizarre and dubious with him. I resolved to catch Mother unawares with a frank discussion at an opportune moment. Mother had a headache that day (it was a heavy winter day, and a soft down of twilight had been pouring since morning)—she was lying on the sofa, alone in the parlour.
In that seldom visited, sumptuous room, tended by Adela with wax and brushes, order had reigned since the time of Father’s disappearance. The furniture was draped with slip covers, every piece subjected to the strict discipline that Adela inflicted on the 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 but with licentious antics behind their eyes. Those eyes pierced the whole day; they drilled holes in the walls; they twinkled, huddled together, giggling and impish, each in turn fluttering its lashes and holding a finger to its lips. They filled the room with twittering and whispering, strewn like butterflies around the many-armed lamp, and in their varicoloured crowd they rattled in the lustreless, aged keyholes. 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 of secret signs. It irritated me, that jeering collusion, that twinkling talk behind my back. With 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 have wanted to ask you—is it truly he?’ And although I had not as much as glanced at the condor, Mother guessed straight away, and became very 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 wrinkles, disarrayed at first in a moment of panic, began to compose themselves. ‘What lies?’ she asked, fluttering her lashes, her eyes vacant, steeped in deep blue, 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 at the same time grew smaller. 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. I did in fact remember that invasion of cockroaches, that inundation of a black swarm that had filled the nocturnal darkness with spiderlike running. Every chink was full of tremulous bristles; every crevice might suddenly erupt with cockroaches; that black lightning flash might spring up from any chink, flying across the floor in crazy zigzags. Oh, that wild madness of panic, written in a shiny black line on the tablet of the floor. Oh, Father’s terrified screams, leaping from chair to chair with a javelin in his hand. Taking no 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, where the pupils only lay in wait, hidden beneath his lower eyelids, taut as bowstrings, in perpetual suspicion. Suddenly, with a wild shriek, he started up from his seat, flew blindly into a corner of the room, and raised his javelin, at the end of which an enormous, impaled cockroach was desperately wriggling its entanglement of legs. Adela then came to the aid of that quivering wreck, and took the lance from him, along with its impaled trophy, in order 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.
My father no longer possessed that resilient power which protects the healthy from the fascination of loathing. Rather than shutting himself off from the terrible, attractive power of that fascination, my father, ravaged by frenzy, became ever 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 signs of a bad conscience. He took to avoiding us. All day long he would hide away in corners, in wardrobes, or under his comforter. Many a time I saw him looking absent-mindedly at his own hands, examining the consistency of their skin, and his nails, where 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 his fascination racked him terribly. I saw him late one 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 showing through the surface. He lay on all fours, possessed by the fascination of his aversion, which had drawn him far along its convoluted paths. My Father moved with the complicated, many limbed motion of a strange ritual, in which I recognised with horror an imitation of a cockroach ceremony.
From that time onward, we took to avoiding Father. His resemblance to a cockroach became every day more noticeable. My father was turning into a cockroach.
We grew accustomed to it. We saw him more and more infrequently. For whole weeks at a time, he would disappear somewhere on his cockroach paths, and we could no longer distinguish him—he had merged entirely with that eerie black tribe. Who could say whether he was still alive somewhere, in a chink between the floorboards, 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, that Adela found every morning and carried off to the dustbin in disgust, and disposed of?
‘And yet,’ I said, disconcerted, ‘I am certain that this condor is he.’ Mother looked at me from under 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 that he returns home some nights, and sets off again before daybreak.’
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