Rich Text Document (draft of October 2008)
Uncle Karol
ONE SATURDAY afternoon, my uncle Karol, a grass widower, was making ready to hike to a holiday resort an hour or so from town, to visit his wife and children who were holidaying there.
The apartment had not been cleaned since his wife’s departure; no one had even made the bed. Karol came home late at night, battered and ravaged by the nocturnal carousals through which those sweltering and empty days dragged him. The crumpled, cool bedclothes, flung wildly around, were a kind of blissful harbour to him then, an island of refuge onto which he fell with the last of his strength, like a castaway tossed by a tempestuous sea for many days and nights.
He collapsed gropingly in the darkness, somewhere amid whitish clouds, the strands and layers of cool feathers, and he slept there in an indeterminate direction, upside down, his head at the foot of the bed, driven by the darkness into the downy pulp of the bedclothes as if he wanted to penetrate them in his sleep, to wander throughout those heaps of eiderdowns, enormous and growing in the night. He fought in his sleep with those bedclothes like a swimmer against the tide; he kneaded and churned them with his body, like an enormous kneading-trough of dough he had fallen into, and he awoke in the grey dawn, breathless and bathed in sweat, cast out to the fringes of that pile of bedding he had failed to overpower by his strenuous nocturnal wrestling. And so, cast halfway end p.58 out of the depths of sleep, he hung for a moment oblivious on the verge of night-time, grasping lungfuls of air, while the bedclothes grew around him, swelled, and set, and covered him once more with a layer of heavy white dough.
Thus he slept until late morning, while the pillows settled down into a great flat, white plain, over which his serene dream wandered. Along those white highways, he slowly returned to himself, to the day and to consciousness, and finally he opened his eyes, like a sleeping passenger as his train pulls into the station.
A mellow duskiness and the sediment of many days of solitude and silence held sway in the room, although the window was effervescing with its morning swarm of flies, and the curtains were glowing brightly. Karol yawned the remains of the previous day out of his body, out of the depths of his bodily cavities. His yawning seized him as convulsively as if it wanted to turn him inside-out. Thus he shook off that sand, those burdens — the undigested leftovers of a bygone day.
Having eased himself in this way, and freer now, he entered his expenses in a notebook — he listed the figures, added them up, and dreamed. Then he lay a for long time unmoving, his bulging and moist, glassy eyes the colour of water. In the room’s watery half-light, lit by a reflection of the sweltering day beyond the curtains, his eyes mirrored like tiny looking-glasses all the gleaming objects — the white smears of sunshine in the chinks of the window, the golden rectangle of the curtains — and, like drops of water, replicated the whole room, the silence of its mats and empty chairs.
Meanwhile, the day beyond the curtains resounded ever more fierily with the buzzing of flies crazed by the sun. The window could not contain that white fire, and the curtains languished in bright waves.
Then he dragged himself out of his bedclothes and sat for a while longer on the bed, groaning involuntarily. His thirty-or-so years old body end p.59 had begun to succumb to corpulence. In that constitution, distended with fat, worn out by sexual abuses yet still surging with fertile juices, his future fortunes now slowly appeared to ripen in that silence.
As he sat there, in mindless vegetative astonishment, all transmuted into circulation, respiration and a pulsation of juices deep inside his body — perspiring and covered in various places with hair — some unknown, unformulated future grew, looming like a monstrous excrescence and sprouting fantastically into an unknown dimension. He had no dread of it, for he had begun to identify himself with that inscrutability and enormity which must be, and, without resistance, in strange compliance, he grew along with it, numbed by calm terror and foreseeing his future in those colossal efflorescences, those fantastic accruals ripening before his inner gaze. Then one of his eyes cautiously revolved toward the outside world, as if straying into another reality.
Then, from those mindless delusions, those lost distances, he returned to himself again and to the moment; he saw his feet on the carpet, as plump and delicate as a woman’s, and he slowly unhooked the gold cufflinks from the cuffs of his day shirt. Then he went into the kitchen, and he found there a little bucket of water in a shaded corner, the circle of a quiet, vigilant mirror which was waiting for him, the only living and sentient being in that empty apartment. He poured the water into a basin and tested its mellow and inchoate, sweet wetness on his skin.
He dressed carefully and lingeringly, not hurrying, inserting pauses between his separate movements.
The empty and neglected apartment did not acknowledge him; the furniture and walls watched his movements with taciturn criticism.
Entering their silence, he felt like an intruder in that undersea, sunken kingdom, where some other, unconnected time flowed. end p.60
Opening his own drawers he felt like a thief, and he went about instinctively on tiptoe, afraid to awaken the severe and raucous echo waiting touchily for the least excuse to explode.
And when at last, going quietly from wardrobe to wardrobe, he had found, piece by piece, everything he needed, when he had finished dressing, with an air of abstraction, amid that furniture which tolerated him in silence, and he was finally ready, about to leave with his hat in hand, he felt disconcerted that even now, at the last moment, he could find no word that might dissolve that hostile silence, and he made his way slowly to the door, his head bowed in resignation — while someone else — deep inside the mirror — was unhurriedly leaving in the opposite direction, someone whose back was turned forever — through an empty enfilade of rooms that did not exist.